Comments of a partisan nature such as "the party I didn't vote for is terrible, blah blah blah" will be deleted and could result in a ban. Even though we occasionally feature political quizzes, JetPunk is not meant to be a political discussion site. We are committed to non-partisan and non-toxic quizzery.
I'm not sure why they do this, but I think it's something each state chose to do, and there are two which, I think, split their electoral college votes based on who wins each district.
Then again, the American electoral system has always seem unnecesarily complicated to me.
The 2nd congressional district of Maine went for Trump, while the 2 statewide electoral votes and 1st district went for Biden. In Nebraska the 2nd congressional district went for Biden, while the 2 statewide electoral votes plus the 1st and 3rd district went for Trump.
Some states have considered and are considering proposals to pledge all their delegates to the candidate that wins the national popular vote, which is a nice idea, but it won't work unless all the most populous states agree to do it. If, say, New York alone pledges its 29 votes to the popular vote winner and the Republican wins the popular vote, the election is over. But if New York alone pledges its 29 votes to the winner and the Democrat wins the popular vote, New York's decision makes no practical difference because its electoral votes always go to the Democrats anyway, so the election is still very much up for grabs. You'd really need swing states (like the ones in this quiz) to endorse this idea to make it viable.
There's a chance that it'll happen, but it might take a while. For example, Pennsylvania (my state!) was probably THE battleground state in this year's election, and there's a bill for the plan under consideration here. I'm not sure if it'll pass because both legislative houses are Republican-controlled now and Republicans tend to favor the Electoral College (which is a fact, not a partisan opinion, for the record), but I still think it's not completely out-of-reach, especially if one of the chambers goes blue in the future. It seems that Ohio and Texas, 2 populous and somewhat swingy states, are also considering it. Given some of the challenges ahead, I don't expect it to come to fruition by the time of the next election, but hopefully in the next decade.
If Texas shifts to a solidly blue state, the Electoral College will be done away with. Republicans will realize they won't win without the 30-something votes Texas will supply (the current number will change once census figures are tallied) and will realize that there are millions of Republican voters in solidly blue states such as New York, California, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, and Maryland.
The Texas flip to blue is a possibility, but I have to imagine there would be a compensation coming from the Rust Belt. If Texas goes blue and the Democrats are empowered to implement their more ambitious social policies, I think we're likely to see several of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and especially Ohio and Florida drift towards "solid red" states.
This. Politics in the United States shift as time goes on. For example 40 years ago we had West Virginia as a solid Democrat state and every state was feasibly up for grabs. As the Southwest (Arizona, Texas, Nevada, etc.) goes blue, the Midwest (Iowa, Ohio, etc.) are going far more Republican. Ohio, Iowa, and even Florida have become relatively safe Republican states, in the same way Nevada is practically safe Democrat. Only time will tell.
Retiree: Florida has been a swing state for decades so if it went blue one year that would not really be considered a "flip." But even so, unlike much of the rest of the country, Florida has actually been trending more and more Republican the last several years.
Because the states themselves are controlled by political parties that can predict the outcome. Let's say you're the Democratic party of California. If change the assignment of electoral votes to be proportional, then you are giving the Republicans ~20 electoral votes, making it much easier for them to win the national tally. But let's say parties shift and Republicans take over California. They will now also have an incentive to keep the current distribution. So any party that controls a state will do its best to shut out the opposing party.
One possible exception might be Georgia, where Republicans control the state but lost the presidential election due to demographic shifts. If Republicans are afraid they will consistently lose Georgia in the future, they may pass a law to switch to proportional electoral vote assignment. That way they can retain some of those votes even after Democrats are a majority in the state, as long as they can hold one of the state houses.
By speaking of "seats," you're conflating different systems. While the number of electoral college votes for each state is the total of its Congressional seats, the presidential and legislative elections are separate. As such, there are no seats in the vote for president.
Every state can choose how they want to do it. Originally, it was more proportionally split for most states, but quickly moved to winner take all. James Madison (father of the constitution) absolutely hated winner take all.
Some states have pushed recently to move to awarding like Nebraska and Maine do (statewide winner takes 2 seats corresponding to senators, the rest go based on congressional district). That might seem more logical, but we tend to see that pushed only in states where the party pushing that approach consistently loses the presidential election statewide, yet has enough control on the state legislature that they've gerrymandered the districts. Wisconsin, for example - often goes "blue", yet heavily gerrymandered so that republicans would be virtually guaranteed at least half the electoral votes regardless of how well their candidate did.
States that reliably go to the same party as that which controls the state legislature and their redistricting process? They never propose splitting their electoral votes.
If that were the case, the party in control of the Statehouse would redistrict all Congressional districts to favor them. We already have gerrymandering but if each state went to this system, we would have much more extreme gerrymandering (this is all assuming that the states don't have some sort of law saying that the districts can't be drawn to favor one party over the another).
Still weird that in 2020, the US hasn't changed the way they vote. Popular vote is the way it should work. If you are a Republican in California you might as well not vote, as you know the Democrates will win. And on top of this, in the Senate where the two Republican representatives of Wyoming (population 570,000) get the same votes as the two Democratic representatives of California (population 39.5 million). I guess this is why the US is considered a Flawed Democracy, and not a Full Democracy..
or maybe that's why the US isn't a democracy but a republic. I don't suppose there would be any convincing you about why the electoral college is useful for the very reason that we aren't a democracy
Yeah, I don't know why people can't grasp this. It's like saying "Patrick Mahomes isn't a football player. He's a quarterback." The latter is just a specific type of the former.
It's a very common logical error that comes up all the time on JetPunk. The most famous example is, "tomato isn't a fruit, it's a vegetable". But I've also seen "a mosquito isn't an animal, it's an insect", and many more. Is there a name for this fallacy? It seems to be widespread among the population.
To be fair to @esb219, I think what they were saying is that the United States was never intended to be a direct democracy. In fact, until the 17th Amendment, people didn't even directly vote for U.S. Senators, who were instead chosen by state legislatures. The founders wanted some level of indirection. They didn't want people to, for example, be able to vote themselves money from the state coffers.
Democracy is better approached as an "extent-to-which," rather than a "yes-or-no" question. Every society has democratic and counter-democratic forces. The ongoing struggles between them determine the levels and types of influence exerted by broad publics over governments and, by extension, states.
It is just a kind of "never change a running system" thing. Most of the modern states were reborn in the last century from collapsing states and thus seeked for constitutions which are more resilient. The USA never got this "chance" to get reborn. But as for every empire in history, this is only a question of when and not of if...
I couldn't agree more. One interesting and nice side-effect of New Zealand changing its electoral system in 1996 from the British winner-takes-all to the German proportional system is that suddenly every vote in every part of the country matters. Previously parties ignored the safe red and blue areas, and focussed their advertising blitzes on the close seats that always decided each election. Now with the national vote total being all that matters to calculate national seats total, advertising is spread evenly and sanely across the country. By the way I worked for 4 weeks as a paid electoral official at the latest NZ national elections, in October 2020, managing an advance voting place for two weeks beforehand, then for two weeks afterward at headquarters looking for dual voters (illegal casters of a second vote). Great to discover how our system is so bullet-proof and resilient against fraud.
This is exactly right. Voter engagement and participation should be priority #1. As it stands now, a Republican voter in New York and a Democratic voter in Mississippi have no reason to vote in the presidential election, and the presidential candidates feel no need to tailor their messages to Massachusetts or Oklahoma. It's all about 12 states, and everyone else is marginalized. Whatever system we have in place should encourage rather than discourage participation.
Agreed. Randall Monroe (the xkcd guy) came out with a great cartoon map a few days ago that perhaps sums up the American electoral system better than any political analyst can. If you hover over the map, you can see that he points out that California has more Trump voters than Texas, Texas has more Biden voters than New York, etc. People often talk about how abolishing the Electoral College would favor the Democrats... and admittedly it might to a certain extent since Democrats tend to win the popular vote. However, it also ensures that all people, both Democrats and Republicans, have their voices heard. I imagine if the EC was abolished, neither party would be able to rely on solidly blue/red states, and both would have to align their platforms more toward the will of the people. Also, as jmellor mentioned it would probably motivate people to turn out more, which our democracy sorely needs.
I find arguments for abolishing (or preserving) the Electoral College to be self-serving. Pretty much everyone who wants to get rid of it is a Democrat. And everyone who wants to keep it is a Republican. No doubt if the situation were reversed, it would be the Republicans calling for abolition and the Democrats muttering something about state's rights.
It's very similar to how Democrats were all about the sacred rights of the filibuster until they were in the majority and then the filibuster was undemocratic, etc...
Not that the Republicans are any better. The only unifying principle of both parties is their naked efforts to gain power, employing any arguments they think will stick.
One thing that I do worry about is "ratchet" effects. This is when one party gains a majority and then uses that majority to change the rules of the game, thus ensuring perpetual dominance.
This is how Viktor Orbán made Hungary essentially a single-party state, while not doing anything illegal.
It's also why issues such as gerrymandering and court packing are so terrifying. It could eventually lead to a situation where one party controls everything, and there is almost no way for them to be legally voted out of power. My personal belief is this: "be wary of changing long established customs".
With respect Quizmaster, I doubt abolishing the EC would turn America into a one-party state, or even a state where Democrats are significantly more powerful. For one, the Senate would still exist, and the Senate essentially gives more power to small states which tend to lean Republican. Additionally, parties change. We saw this election that Republicans have made serious inroads with blue-collar and Hispanic voters. If Republicans are too unpopular to win a majority of the vote, they'll just have to change their messaging to be more in line with what Americans want, which would, if anything, improve democracy.
And, at the end of the day, America isn't Hungary. Hungary suddenly became a democracy 30 years ago, while America's been a mostly stable republic gradually transitioning toward more democracy for over 2 centuries. As flawed as American democracy is, it would be incredibly difficult to take it down.
Court-packing is a different matter. That's blatantly political and really doesn't do anything to improve American democracy or help the public. Getting rid of the EC, or at least making the EC a proportional system, DOES improve American democracy in my opinion.
(For the record, I'm trying to keep this non-partisan as possible, but if you think my comments need to be deleted, I understand).
I agree that the EC is not an ideal system if we were starting from scratch. But if only one party is advocating for changing a long-established custom, skepticism is warranted. If Republicans stood to gain by abolishing the EC, then no doubt they would be all for it, and Democrats would be against it. Both parties are cynical, and their arguments are worth very little. In any case, it doesn't really matter since it's in the Constitution, and there's no way 3/4 of states would ratify an amendment.
Yeah, that's fair. Personally, I think my dislike for the EC outweighs my concerns about the potential political consequences of it. Still, I hope that, if it happens in the future, it's a bipartisan measure made to strengthen American democracy instead of a political maneuver (although in the current environment, there's no way this is going to happen).
I don't think the US would ever get to be a one-party system. The House and Senate still exist and there are still some areas that lean liberal and others that lean conservative. There are also a lot of moderates who would vote for either party, if the parties could move more central. If we didn't have the EC, the campaigns would take place all over the country for president, and candidates would have to appeal to more than just the die-hard party followers in certain states since every vote would count. Right-leaning moderates in California are a lot different from ultra-conservatives in Alabama, likewise left-leaning moderates in Texas are different from ultra-liberals in New York. Getting rid of the EC would hopefully move the US back to the point where the parties would actually have to work together.
Whether an argument is self-serving doesn't affect the validity of the argument itself though. I'm liberal and I'm for abolishing the EC, but I really believe in my heart that voter engagement should always be priority #1. Some things are more important than partisanship. And as I mentioned somewhere else here, the compensation that the Senate provides to smaller states is more than enough to level the playing field. That argument might be self-serving, but it's also true.
To Mr Quizmaster: I don't get a vote in the US elections, so I don't think that my belief that the president should be decided by whoever gets most votes is "self-serving". It's just that it's plain ridiculous that any candidate in any election that gets the second-highest number of votes can be declared the winner. It's doubly ridiculous that this applies to just a single election, that of the most important position in the land.
Currently we only have one functioning party in the United States anyway so one-party rule is strongly preferable. I'd be staunchly against such a thing if we had two functioning parties with differing ideologies and approaches to governance, etc; but we clearly do not. Those that don't know this haven't been paying attention. But in any case the EC should still be abolished. One party being so terrible that they can't win a majority of votes in the country ever is a great reason for that party to reform and change policy. It's a terrible reason to hold on to outdated un-democratic systems so that they can still steal power without doing anything to change. This was true in 1984 when Ronald Reagan carried 49 out of 50 states and my younger self was happy to see him do it, and it remains true today. There are some people out there who make good faith arguments divorced from politics, even if you're too cynical to realize those when you see them.
That is exactly why the Founding Fathers did it that way. The states with a tiny population will at least have an equal chance in the senate to get bills passed. Do you want 3 or 4 states to decide the presidential election every four years ? I bet if the republicans were the majority in population, you would be in favor of the electoral college.
The Senate vote has nothing to do with the presidential vote. Wyoming's 600,000 residents have as much representation in the Senate as California's 40 million residents. That's kind of insane, but it's also the protection for smaller states to which you're referring. The practical effect of this now is that the Republican "majority" in the Senate has represented a minority of American citizens for quite some time, because if you add North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Nebraska, and Idaho together, you get seven million people represented by ten Republican senators. If you take New Jersey alone, you get nine million people represented by two Democratic senators. That's plenty of protection for smaller states. Extending this logic to the presidency makes no sense, because the president is the same for everyone in the Union, so every vote should count the same.
One false argument is always that large, traditionally Democrat, cities would always decide the Presidency without the EC. This is mathematically impossible of course but people forget that. The roots of the EC are racist- it was set up, in part, to appease slave owning states who had large populations of non-voting Blacks. The racist roots alone, aside from all of the other issues, are reason to abolish the EC.
I disagree with the idea that racist or otherwise problematic origins are a reason to ditch a system or institution. If that system or institution is *still* racist or otherwise problematic then that's a different story, but a LOT of very good things in our lives have horrible origins. Leaving those things behind because of the distaste in our mouths would cause a lot of harm that cannot be justified by an air of morality. Birth control was an invention of eugenics after all. Are you going to argue we should get rid of that? (I'm not saying I think the electoral college is good, by the way, just that this would be a bad reason to abolish it.)
It would take more than 3 or 4 states to determine an election if by popular vote. Just for argument's sake, say all residents of the US were registered voters. (I know they aren't, but the percentage of residents in any given state are about the same as any other.) Plus there was 100% voter turnout. OK, that's approximately 330,000,000 votes cast for president, so it takes 165,000,001 votes to win. Here are the breakdowns of the top states by population (rounded):
CA- 39.5 million
TX- 29.0 million
FL- 21.5 million
NY- 19.5 million
PA- 12.8 million
IL- 12.7 million
OH-11.7 million
GA- 10.6 million
NC- 10.4 million
So as you can see, it would take the top 9 states and almost 3/4 of NC all voting 100% for the same candidate to control the election. I'm not suggesting doing away with the EC but those who advocate keeping it needs a better argument than the usual "CA & NY would outvote the rest of the states. And in these top 10 states, one is solid red, 3 solid blue and the others mixed.
"Do you want 3 or 4 states to decide the presidential election every four years ?"But that's how it works now. Every Presidential race comes down to a small handful of 3-5 swing states.
This year nobody cared about either Dakota, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Indiana, New England, New Jersey, New York, the entire west coast, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, Utah, Tennessee, West Virginia, Kentucky, Kansas, Delaware, Missouri, Maryland, Virginia, Hawaii, Alaska, Colorado, South Carolina, DC, or Wyoming. All of these states were safe for one party. Iowa, Ohio, Texas, North Carolina, and Florida were semi-competitive. Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Georgia are what ended up deciding the election. That is maybe 11 of the 51 entities that have electoral votes that really mattered. In reality, in was more like 8 that decided the election. I would say that having nine states that have about 51% of the population pick the winner would represent what a majority of Americans want. The Dakotas, Kansas, and Wyoming might have a lot of land, but cows and corn can't vote. LA might not have a lot of land, but people can vote.
It's true that candidates only seem to care about the swing states, but that's because those are the states where people are still undecided. It's not like Californians and Texans get their votes nullified, or that those votes *cannot* make a difference— it's that everyone knows how it's going to turn out so there's no need to campaign there. More states could absolutely change the election if they wanted to. A majority of Californians can vote Republican whenever they want. Any state that isn't a swing state has the ability to become one. And the reason the swing states have a chance to make a difference anyways is directly because the safe states voted the way they did.
The Electoral College doesn't give everyone equally powerful votes. 1 Electoral vote in California represents 732,000 people while in Wyoming It represents roughly every 167,000 people. Meaning that in theory, A Wyominger's vote is more than 4x more powerful than a Californian's vote. Furthermore, as Yellowjacket said, the Electoral College concentrates the campaigning into swing states, so a vote from a state like Massachusetts may not seem so powerful to the voter, which is further displayed by the consistently lower turnout in non-swing states.
I think that we should do strictly popular vote with ranked choice voting, but I acknowledge that there are negatives to that too and though the Electoral College is stiffly opposed by most Americans, 30 % in support is enough to derail any legislation.
Few years ago I applied the electoral system of my country (Spain) to the 2016 US election. And with that system (D'Hondt mehtod) there was a tie between Clinton and Trump, so I think it was in Texas or California Johnson would have gotten a couple electors that would decide the outcome. So what would have been the most democratic? Having a winner with 3 milllion less of votes of other one? Having all the decision power of someone with barely 3% of votes? Having a winner with 48% of votes but less of 50% of states? I don't know (if I knew, I'd made a method with my name!!!)
I think the comments on this site are markedly more civil than elsewhere on the internet. There is definitely some level of partisan bickering, but the overall vibe is a lot more measured and respectful than the usual fare, *and* people here tend to know what they're talking about, or at least have enough of an understanding of issues to make the conversation fruitful.
Imagine this: voting for national political leadership hasn't been done in a couple thousand years. Your citizens are spread out across 1,500 miles of mostly wilderness, with no road to connect the southernmost major cities with the capital in the north. Plastics don't exist. Ships go down all the time in November storms.
Would you really propose that 1 million paper ballots be sent to be counted (by hand) in some nationally central location? Wouldn't it be easier to just send one person who can vote on behalf of the winner of your region's vote?
In our modern world, direct democracy is far more practical. When this stuff was invented, not so much. To all the places with wonderful voting systems that don't have any flaws or flawed outcomes: you're welcome.
A bit of pedantary, but the quiz is on "States That FLIPPED For Joe Biden", not "States that SHIFTED To Joe Biden". A shift is actually the realtive change in percentage margins for a particular candidate. A flip, on the other hand, is an electorate chaging from one party to another. I hope that you could change this title to reflect accurate vocabulary
If Trump won a state in 2016 and Biden won it in 2020, that state shifted its allegiance from one party to the other in that time. "Shift" is appropriate.
Then again, the American electoral system has always seem unnecesarily complicated to me.
One possible exception might be Georgia, where Republicans control the state but lost the presidential election due to demographic shifts. If Republicans are afraid they will consistently lose Georgia in the future, they may pass a law to switch to proportional electoral vote assignment. That way they can retain some of those votes even after Democrats are a majority in the state, as long as they can hold one of the state houses.
Some states have pushed recently to move to awarding like Nebraska and Maine do (statewide winner takes 2 seats corresponding to senators, the rest go based on congressional district). That might seem more logical, but we tend to see that pushed only in states where the party pushing that approach consistently loses the presidential election statewide, yet has enough control on the state legislature that they've gerrymandered the districts. Wisconsin, for example - often goes "blue", yet heavily gerrymandered so that republicans would be virtually guaranteed at least half the electoral votes regardless of how well their candidate did.
To be fair to @esb219, I think what they were saying is that the United States was never intended to be a direct democracy. In fact, until the 17th Amendment, people didn't even directly vote for U.S. Senators, who were instead chosen by state legislatures. The founders wanted some level of indirection. They didn't want people to, for example, be able to vote themselves money from the state coffers.
It's very similar to how Democrats were all about the sacred rights of the filibuster until they were in the majority and then the filibuster was undemocratic, etc...
Not that the Republicans are any better. The only unifying principle of both parties is their naked efforts to gain power, employing any arguments they think will stick.
This is how Viktor Orbán made Hungary essentially a single-party state, while not doing anything illegal.
It's also why issues such as gerrymandering and court packing are so terrifying. It could eventually lead to a situation where one party controls everything, and there is almost no way for them to be legally voted out of power. My personal belief is this: "be wary of changing long established customs".
And, at the end of the day, America isn't Hungary. Hungary suddenly became a democracy 30 years ago, while America's been a mostly stable republic gradually transitioning toward more democracy for over 2 centuries. As flawed as American democracy is, it would be incredibly difficult to take it down.
(For the record, I'm trying to keep this non-partisan as possible, but if you think my comments need to be deleted, I understand).
CA- 39.5 million
TX- 29.0 million
FL- 21.5 million
NY- 19.5 million
PA- 12.8 million
IL- 12.7 million
OH-11.7 million
GA- 10.6 million
NC- 10.4 million
So as you can see, it would take the top 9 states and almost 3/4 of NC all voting 100% for the same candidate to control the election. I'm not suggesting doing away with the EC but those who advocate keeping it needs a better argument than the usual "CA & NY would outvote the rest of the states. And in these top 10 states, one is solid red, 3 solid blue and the others mixed.
It's true that candidates only seem to care about the swing states, but that's because those are the states where people are still undecided. It's not like Californians and Texans get their votes nullified, or that those votes *cannot* make a difference— it's that everyone knows how it's going to turn out so there's no need to campaign there. More states could absolutely change the election if they wanted to. A majority of Californians can vote Republican whenever they want. Any state that isn't a swing state has the ability to become one. And the reason the swing states have a chance to make a difference anyways is directly because the safe states voted the way they did.
I think that we should do strictly popular vote with ranked choice voting, but I acknowledge that there are negatives to that too and though the Electoral College is stiffly opposed by most Americans, 30 % in support is enough to derail any legislation.
Would you really propose that 1 million paper ballots be sent to be counted (by hand) in some nationally central location? Wouldn't it be easier to just send one person who can vote on behalf of the winner of your region's vote?
In our modern world, direct democracy is far more practical. When this stuff was invented, not so much. To all the places with wonderful voting systems that don't have any flaws or flawed outcomes: you're welcome.