I'm for the Popular Election of Presidents

A couple of presidential candidates (Warren, Buttigieg) have said they're in favor of eliminating the Electoral College. I agree, though it's not technically necessary to eliminate it from the Constitution if enough states pass National Popular Vote (NPV) bills.

Angus Johnston made a good case for its elimination on Twitter today, so I thought I would quote him at length. He started out responding to the point you often hear on this topic: that if the Electoral College goes, candidates will never campaign in small states (which was Mississippi, in the particular case he responded to).

If you eliminated the Electoral College, candidates would devote resources to places where you could shift significant numbers of persuadable or mobilizable voters. That's not just big dense cities. Under the EC, no presidential candidate from either party has any incentive to do GOTV organizing in the deep south. Under a NPV they would. So yes, they'd campaign in Mississippi.

One thing about people who like to talk about how the EC is good: They tend not to have given much thought to the workings of the EC. Or elections. Or math.

Oversimplifying slightly, under NPV each candidate's calculus for allocating resources would be, "Where can I shift or mobilize the most votes for the least money?"

Under the EC, your incentive is to pound the few close states over and over, whatever the cost, because they're all that matters. Under a popular vote, you scramble for votes wherever you can find them, because a vote is a vote wherever you get it.

Under the EC, any presidential candidate who devotes resources to Mississippi is posturing. It's symbolism. Under NPV, of course you'd devote resources to Mississippi, because they have voters there.

Mississippi voters would get more attention from presidential candidates in NPV than they do under the EC. There is no "irony" in a candidate calling for eliminating the EC in Mississippi. Period. The EC gives all the state's presidential votes to the GOP, no matter how much organizing the state's (overwhelmingly black) Democrats do internally.

A few thought experiments...

First: If one candidate for president spent all their resources in New York and California, where 18% of the population lives, what do you think the other candidate would do? Try to match them in those states? Or spend their time trying to win over the other 82%?

Second: If candidates for president would only campaign in the densest, most vote-rich cities under NPV, why do candidates for governor of New York spend so much time campaigning upstate now? Big cities are expensive media markets. You don't win New York State if you don't go to Elmira and Utica.

The idea that presidential candidates would only devote money and resources to a few huge cities under a popular vote is contradicted by the most cursory look at any big-state gubernatorial or senate election ever. It's just obviously false.

When you have to win a majority of votes, you go looking for votes wherever you can find them, which means building up campaign infrastructure everywhere and spreading your resources around.

One last thought: The core argument for the EC is that it's better for a presidential race to be won by the candidate who has the support of a minority of the population, but only where that minority is demographically appealing to the person making the argument.

The argument for the EC is "I like majority rule, but not if THOSE PEOPLE constitute the majority." Who "those people" are changes in different iterations of the argument, but the structure of the argument remains the same.

There are legitimate mechanisms for protecting minority rights in a democracy—civil rights, civil liberties, even supermajority safeguards. But none of those mechanisms involve handing governing power to an electoral minority because the majority is repulsive to you.

The people of the Bronx don't have a lot of power or influence or money, but I've never seen an EC defender arguing that the Bronx should be made a state and given EC votes and seats in the senate. Why not? Because the EC isn't about protecting minority rights as a principle. It's not about blunting the power of majorities generally over minorities generally. It's about entrenching the power of specific minorities over specific majorities.

You want to protect minorities against the power of the majority? Me too. But your defenses of the EC aren't that. They're arguments for giving minorities—minorities you find convivial—power OVER electoral majorities.

And if you're a member of such an electoral minority, I can see why you'd like that system. But I don't see why you'd expect me to like it, or expect it to indefinitely maintain the support of the electoral majority it's designed explicitly to disenfranchise.

And yes, candidates would devote more resources under a popular vote system to non-swing small states than they do now. They'd buy radio and TV ads. They'd send out mailers. And that's not all.

In a state like Wyoming, the candidates would send money to the state parties, to be used to supplement their already-existing vote work. Volunteers door-knocking for local candidates would have more resources, since the presidential candidates would invest in their campaigns.

No, presidential candidates wouldn't visit Wyoming much. BECAUSE THERE AREN'T A LOT OF PEOPLE THERE. They wouldn't visit the Bronx much, either. But that's okay. That's how democracy works.

And that ties in with this part from a recent post by Doug Muder at the Daily Sift (written post-Christchurch), which makes the point that folks on the Right don't

openly [say] that democracy is bad, but the notion that gerrymandering, the Electoral College, purging legal voters from voter lists, and various forms of voter suppression are undemocratic carries very little weight with them. The myth that undocumented immigrants vote in large numbers, which circulates despite an almost total lack of evidence, persists as a stand-in for an unspoken underlying concern: that immigrants become citizens and vote legally.... All of this makes sense if you believe that democracy is only legitimate as a way for a People to govern itself, and becomes illegitimate when a system designed for a People becomes corrupted by the votes of invaders.

You have to read the whole Daily Sift post to know that Muder is using "a People" in the sense that the White Nationalist mass murderer in Christchurch would mean it: white people, a white nation. Anyone who doesn't fit the definition is ipso facto an invader, and "legality" and even citizenship are only technicalites. That's what we've come to.

(Bold added by me.)

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Later the same day, Dave Roberts posted this:

I wish conservatives would just come out and say that maintaining white Christian culture is more important to them than democracy. We could quit having all these silly proxy arguments (see: electoral college). "The Midwest is not going to sit back and let California and New York tell it what to do." What does that mean, exactly, but "rural whites are not going to let urban blacks tell them what to do"?

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And even later, Doug Muder at the Weekly Sift had some thoughts on the EC, which showed the argument for the EC always ends up coming down to something like this:

rural white voters deserve a weightier vote because they are more sensible than urban people of color, who might get hoodwinked into electing socialists.