The electoral latch

For the bulk of the 1980s and early 90s, there was a concept known as “the Electoral Lock.”  Because of California and Texas, it argued, and because of the GOP hold on the South and West generally, the Republican party had an inherent advantage conveyed by the Electoral College; no matter how narrow the margin of the popular vote, the states where they could presume victory were sufficient to get over 270 and win the race.  Indeed, in 1992, Carville and Begala merely claimed that they had picked the electoral lock, not smashed it – and rightly so, given that the winner-take-all and first-past-the-post system used most everywhere allowed a commanding electoral college victory with only 43% of the popular vote.

This was the first huge problem with the Electoral College, although nobody seemed to grasp it at the time.  Bill Clinton won fair and square, under the existing rules and system, and he certainly had a stronger claim than the candidates behind him with fewer votes – but because he was under 50%, the GOP promptly decided he was not legitimately President, and embarked on the scorched-earth approach that takes us down the road to…well, to where we are now.  Eight years later, everything went shit-shaped, but the Democrats’ outrage was limited to the shenanigans in Florida.  Once that was resolved, there was still the inconvenient fact that more people had voted for Al Gore than George W. Bush, and Dubya was President only by a quirk of the math – but the Democrats never gave that much of a push, and the attacks on September 11 pretty much swept the whole thing under the rug for all but the most bong-watered granola-shavers.

Now, the polls are getting down to the nut-cutting, and the GOP is back on the Rove plan: keep proclaiming you’re winning until people believe it.  The state-by-state polling suggests something different, and when matched against national polling showing a tighter margin, it’s paved the way for many a pundit to suggest that Obama could win re-election in the electoral college but not gain a majority of the popular vote.

And if you think the GOP would let that go as easily as the Democrats did in 2001, you’re fucking high. But even if it elects Obama, and they do everything in their power to dislodge or cripple him, they won’t campaign to scrap the Electoral College.

Because the electoral college really does skew the board in favor of one kind of state: narrowly-balanced medium-large ones.  California, Texas, New York: off the board.  Pennsylvania, Illinois, Georgia: slightly more competitive but not terribly so. Ohio, Florida, and now Virginia? Well, that’s another story.  Those states get to be the pivot point because they can between them shift about 60 electoral college votes, between a fifth and a quarter of everything you need to win the whole shooting match. If Obama has California, Illinois and New York on lock, that’s 94 right there, or 35% of the way to victory without ever spending a minute or a nickel in those three states.  Similarly, if the GOP can count on Texas, Oklahoma and the old SEC states (other than Florida) that’s a whopping 118, or 43% of the way there.  Get those states plus the Ohio-Florida-Virginia axis, and that makes 178, and you’re two-thirds home while only making an effort in three states.  Hell, those GOP lock states gained 5 votes on redistricting in 2010, so that’s a 10-vote swing – as much as winning Wisconsin or Minnesota, without lifting a finger.

This is why the GOP won’t argue to get rid of the electoral college.  They’ll argue to get rid of Obama, but they’re not about to give away a system that lets them gain 2/3 of the votes to win the White House by merely waving a rebel flag and campaigning in three states.  There may not be an electoral lock anymore, but there’s an electoral latch, and the Republican party has everything to gain by making sure it’s intact.

It rather makes you ask why we even need the electoral college – why not just use, you know, the popular vote?  Well, the biggest reason is that right now there’s really no such thing as a national popular vote (barring perhaps Dancing With The Stars or the like).  What we have are a bunch of aggregated state and local elections, which in may ways prevent bigger problems: how do you administer an election from the federal level? Imagine Florida in 2000. Now apply it to every single polling place where it might be possible to swing a hundred votes.  Imagine a bunch of teatards trying to shake down voters here and there, and suddenly the numbers look a lot more fungible.  The Electoral College has the effect of abstracting away the effects of tens of thousands of locally-administered elections, and for all its limitations does simplify things inasmuch as it makes tampering with any one local election pointless.

But it also sets up a very difficult problem: inasmuch as the white vote in the South is probably going to go at least 75% for Mitt Romney, it creates a real non-zero chance that Obama can win the electoral college and the non-Southern popular vote, but lose the national popular vote off the back of wildly disproportionate balloting in the old Confederacy.  And thus does the Civil Cold War grind on.

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