65% of U.S. adults say the way the president is elected should be changed so that the winner of the popular vote nationwide wins the presidency.
They will never allow that because it’ll kill the entire republican party lol
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Won’t be good for Democrats either. System is rigged for two parties and two parties only.
This would not really change the two party system. All it would mean is that you genuinely need a majority of votes and not the majority of a weird convoluted combo of states.
It would destroy the party system. Suddenly there’s a progressive democrat party and the freedumb caucus becomes it’s own thing.
I’m game for that.
We could start by reconsidering the Reapportionment Act of 1929…
This would help so much. Not only would greatly increasing the number of representatives lead to fairer representation - it would decrease lobbyist power in the House (harder to buy a critical number of members when there are so many representatives).
By “the electoral college” most people seem to mean that each state has influence disproportionate to its population, because every state gets two electors regardless of size. Ignoring that that is independent of the electoral college, disproportionate power isn’t where most of the problem arises. The problem is that most states do not allocate their electors proportionally to how their citizens voted. Almost all states give all electors to the majority winner in the state. It’s not required to do it that way, and Maine and Nebraska allocate at least some of their electors based on the proportion of the vote.
If states allocated their electors solely based on the proportion of votes in the state, that would achieve what a national popular vote would achieve and more. For example, Trump won despite losing the poplar vote, but if states had instead allocated their electors proportionally to voters within the state, Trump would have lost.
Why do this instead of a national popular vote? First-past-the-post voting systems result in two party systems with a lot of conflict. Ranked choice systems elect representatives that are more agreeable to everyone. A national popular vote entrenches a bad system, making it harder to ever get a rank choice system.
More importantly from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s much harder to get a national popular vote implemented. To work, almost all of the states would need to get on board, but there’s no individual-level incentive for citizens of a state to agree to it. Why would the majority of citizens of Montana agree to send their electors to the national popular vote winner when it’s likely not the person they voted for? How are you going to convince them to join? The majority of people there won’t want that, so they won’t pass the law.
If states allocate based on proportion, individuals won’t be concerned that their votes will ever support a candidate they don’t like. It also doesn’t matter whether other states hop on board. Maine and Nebraska are proof of this. They changed their allocation schemes without regard for any other state. At the individual level, the choice is easy; no one wants their vote to go toward a candidate they don’t like, and the current system AND the national popular vote system both do that. If you think about your own views, are you in a state that the majority of the time the majority of people vote for a candidate you don’t like? Wouldn’t you rather have your state allocate proportionally? Are you in a place where the majority of the time your state goes the way you do? Are you happy that your neighbors’ opinions are suppressed? It’s pretty easy to get on board at an individual level, so that makes it easy to pass within a state.
People should give up on national popular vote and focus on getting their state to switch to proportional allocation. If you really want progress, target some key states: Florida, Ohio, Texas, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois.
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a viable path to getting a national popular vote. Essentially if enough states agree to send all of their electoral votes to the popular candidate then the popular vote winning candidate will win the election. The compact will only go into effect once enough states agree that would make a majority. Right now there are states with 206 electoral votes that have agreed and only 65 more electoral votes would be needed.
I do feel like your proposition is harder to convince people to enact. Right now my state has finally changed to be for a party I support I don’t want to support legislation that will mean some of those electoral college votes will go to the other party, it would be more fair on the state level but not nationally. Sure I’d be okay with it if other states that vote for the other party did the same thing. It becomes this standoff where people want the other side to move first. That’s my favorite part about NPVIC is that it does away with the messy middle ground.
Instead of tilting at the windmill that is removing the EC how about we do something much easier and simpler and simply expand the House of Representatives? Not only would this add votes to the EC and make the Presidential Elections more representative it would also, you know, make the HoR more Representative! For extra fun it would also diminish the returns of gerrymandering since there would be so many more districts.
All we need is a change to the Re-Apportionment Act of 1929. There is no good reason that the size of the HoR is fixed at 435. None.
That’s a long way around to get to fair representation. It amounts to a distraction from the real issue.
We can achieve that now through fairness in redistricting.
We can achieve that now through fairness in redistricting.
No you can’t.
Your way doesn’t return the ratio of EC votes between the HoR and the Senate to what it should be. It keeps it stuck in 1929 and every year that goes by makes it worse.
Your way doesn’t scale the number of total EC votes as our population grows.
Your way ALSO doesn’t return the ratio of Citizens to Representatives to anything resembling sanity. Ratios of nearly 800,000 to 1, and growing, are irrational and break Democracy.
You could redistrict the ever loving hell out of the other 49 States but Wyoming would keep it’s 3 EC votes and its outsized vote for President. It would keep it’s outsized influence in the HoR and it would keep it’s ranking as #1 in the Citizen to Representative Ratio.
So much of what everyone hates about our Federal Government today is DIRECTLY tied to a vastly undersized HoR. The body is simply too small to adequately represent a population of over 300,000,000 people.
There are only so many ways to divide 435 seats while still guaranteeing at least 1 seat per state.
In 1929, each representative represented about 283k Americans. Now each representative represent about 762k Americans. That’s almost a 300% increase. This means each American’s voice is only about 1/3rd as powerful as it was in 1929. To have as much political power as they did in 1929, we’d need about 1200 Representatives.
And yet, having more representatives fundamentally reduces the power of each as well. Your vote is fundamentally worth less as the population increases. Something you’re just gonna have to come to terms with.
I’m ok with my vote meaning more or less as long as it’s the same vote everyone else gets…that’s not the case with the current system.
First we need a federal initiative/ referendum system. Because the existing politicians will never vote to limit their own power.
After we have this, we can start with initiatives that set maximum ages, fix the voting systems. Fix Roe. Dismantle the terrible stranglehold the two party system has on getting anything done.
Do all the things that are popular but politicians will never do.
Direct democracy has shown to be a pretty bad idea. It’s useful here and there for certain things like referenda, but to use it for everything? Fuck that, no way. People are fucking dumb and are already constantly voting against their interests.
I mean just look at Brexit. And that would be just the tip of the iceberg if we ran our entire country that way.
A two party system where each side does whatever it takes to stay in positions of power has shown to be a pretty bad idea as well.
What else do we have to work with?
The two party system is a direct result of first past the post voting system. Ranked choice would go a long way toward fixing things.
Parliamentary system would work too. They often have 5+ viable parties.
Unfortunately the elected representatives don’t care what the majority of citizens want.
Hell, a good chunk of the citizens vote for people that don’t support their lives or values. It’s fucked top to bottom.
Whatever else, I’m sure we can all agree that the current performative, pro-forma electoral college meetings are not what was intended by the framers.
Republicans would never win a nationwide election again. They’d actually have to come up with policies people want. Not gonna happen anytime soon.
Americans, lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
If the president was chosen by popular vote, I think you could make a reasonable case that the last Republican president would have been George H.W. Bush in 1988. George W. Bush did win the popular vote against John Kerry in 2004, but he lost it to Al Gore in 2000 so it’s debatable whether or not he would have beaten an incumbent Gore in 2004 I think.
And now you see why the Republicans are so against it. They can’t win in a straight vote.
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
Introduced in 2006, as of August 2023 it has been adopted by sixteen states and the District of Columbia. These jurisdictions have 205 electoral votes, which is 38% of the Electoral College and 76% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.
The electoral college is good because it stops mob rule from taking over America and doing tyrannies against the minority of wealthy entrepreneurs.
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They told me in high school that the electoral college was still necessary because counting the popular vote was too hard…
No. It’s because states that have huge populations would choose the president with basically zero say from most others. Technically a non representative government.
You solve the ‘problem’ of ‘tyranny of the majority’ by having a strong constitution and good rights and protections for minorities, not by switching to the indisputably worse option of ‘tyranny of the minority’. Because that causes the exact same problem, but for even more people instead.
Two things I’d love to see. Eliminating the electoral college and then getting rid of superdelegates. Two fundamentally anti-democratic concepts.
Well superdelegates aren’t exactly something the government can legislate away because they’re just an internal thing of the DNC.
Abolish parties.
Abolish parties.
Ranked-choice voting.
Two things I’d love to see.
Don’t forget “ranked-choice voting”.
Well of course they do, the electoral college was made specifically so that states with the most population aren’t the ones solely determining the outcome. If you got rid of the EC, the elections would come down to California, Florida, New York, and Texas.
Which ironically, given how Florida and Texas lean, would not “kill the Republican party” as some are claiming here.
The last republican to win the popular vote was Bush in 04. It would force them to actually care about what the people need instead of just threatening everyone else
You say that it would help Republicans, but the last two times the electoral college went against the popular vote they gave the presidency to Republicans.
Five presidents have been elected despite losing the popular vote. Four of those were Republicans: Hayes, Harrison, Bush, Trump. John Quincy Adams was the first, just as the Republican party came into existence, although he wasn’t a member. He joined it later.
I’m not saying it would either help them or hurt them. I think many people totally ignore that fact that if the election rules and law were changed in the United States, then campaign strategies would change too. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have enough resources and power to able to adapt.
I agree with that. Republicans have shown themselves to be remarkably adept at making people stupid enough to fall for their authoritarian bullshit.
