Of the 9 presidential elections in my lifetime, the Democrat candidate has won the popular all but twice, yet a Republican has been president for just over half of my life.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the very first door I ever knocked on for any campaign was in 2008 when my dad took 14 year old me with him to canvass for Obama and the guy who answered just said “my vote doesn’t count because of the electoral college” and how it’s fucking insane that he didn’t include a plank in his campaign to revive the Bayh-Celler amendment or something like it. He wouldn’t have even had to run on “the republicans stole the 2000 election” he could’ve just framed it as “hey nobody likes this thing anyway”
Yes-- without denying the logistical difficulties of a Constitutional amendment it would be very easy for politicians to include this as a basic reform (part of a basic reform package) that they talk about to raise public demand for change. However I suspect campaign consultants would tell them there's no electoral upside.
I feel like that’s why 2008 stands out as such a missed opportunity for me is it was the last time (maybe ever) that the numbers in congress would make an amendment at least feasible and you could convince me that it would’ve helped Dems downballot in 2010 if they made an issue of ratification in state houses. To your point about consultants though I feel like that’s the problem we run into with any of the reforms you mention is as badly as we need all of them opening up space for diversity in the party system necessitates the diminishing of the Dems’ institutional power and if you’re the Lis Smiths of the world you don’t want that.
Good Lord. THANK YOU, Hamilton. I'll be 45 in a few weeks. When I first learned, like really learned, about the Electoral College in high school civics, I was immediately disillusioned, to the point of disgust, with our "democracy." Yet, when I attempted to question it in class, everyone, including the teacher, acted like I was utterly illogical. I decided not to register or participate in the vote as a protest. Lots could be critiqued about whether that was right or wrong, especially in terms of participation in state or local races & initiatives, but I held my ground until 2012 (only to have my point proven in the very next cycle). No matter what I said from 1997-2012, though, I got treated like some ill-informed, not-properly-valuing-my-rights idiot. In 2016 & 2020, I worked very hard to rally my fellow voters, but always w/ the caveat that our stupid, stupid fucking system requires a ludicrously Herculean effort to overcome the "trap door." I'm sharing your piece with everyone I know because, as you said, THIS is the thing we should be outraged about.
I used to run across the same kind of bullshit when I brought it up too. The way I made my point was this. When I'm voting for the president of the United States I'm not voting for how my state is going to vote for the president of the United States. Individual states don't have the right to undermine my vote. The only way the EC could be conditionally utilized would be for it to be considerably bigger, and for the votes to be apportioned according to voting percentages in the state. So a state with 10 votes that gets a 60/40 result in an election gives six of their EC votes to one candidate, and 4 to the other. I believe two states already do that. I can't remember which ones they are. But even that doesn't fix the problem. One person one vote is what we have to fight for.
Coming at this from a different angle, a really good start would be for Democrats to fix their fucking primary process. Unlike the Republican primaries which are pretty much straightforward, it's Democrats ironically that have their primary set up in a similar electoral college way as our general elections do. And fucking dragging out the primaries for months and months. With different groups of states being in different heats. If everyone could vote all at the same time like they do in the general election, Elizabeth Warren would have been on the primary ballot in California which I believe was in the penultimate heat in the last election. As it stood, the earlier heats drummed her out. I understand Republican supporting a set up like this, but this is 100% on Democrats. That is, how we run our primary elections. So fix that. And at least create a model and precedent For changing the bigger electoral college problem.
Were Taco Bell not recently embroiled in an industrial relations fracas involving a staff party that got a little out of hand? Well, if we're using the qualification of "getting a little out of hand", the Electoral College and Taco Bell are very much in the same basket. :-)
While I agree the EC is outdated and should be relegated to the dustbin of history- I am conflicted as to an alternative method, while still making flyover country relevant to the process of electing a president. It feels like the answer is the NPVIC, but again as you mentioned, that's a hack/bastardization of the EC.
In a recent commentary of my own, I was led to analyse that now familiar passage of the Constitution, on which so much is being written at the moment (https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/mr-trump-is-appealing) and, reading the actual 14th sec. 3 for the first time, I hesitated at reading the word "elector".
"Elector?" asked I myself. "As in 'of Hannover'? Or does that mean 'anyone on the electoral roll'?" mused I. The penny, it did eventually drop.
"No, it means 'elector as in a member of the electoral college'," and, with that, my perusal of the 14th, it did continue. Till about 3 words later, when I stopped and recoiled: "Well, why shouldn't it mean 'member of the electorate'? Surely anyone who mounts a rebellion against the State is best disenfranchised for all time?" Even Lear banished Kent.
Your democracy provides that those who duly qualify to be on the electoral role in the first place (with plenty of provisos to ensure a good number who don't) may (but need not, otherwise than in Australia, Egypt and Belgium) vote for their favoured candidate in order to ... lend inspiration to members of a closed committee, that they might decide unrestrained in whose favour your vote will ultimately be cast.
I can only say, I'm very glad it isn't my, but your, democracy.
Re the Electoral College, let’s NOT “relegate it to the status of atrocities that we passively accept, like homelessness or Taco Bell.” Or Citizens United.
DO let’s call out, constantly -- never stop, those pundits and experts and interviewers whose audience needs this information. And a spine.
1) I suspect systematic electoral fraud in California, whose popular vote accumulates many days after election day and can account for these so-called come-from-behind popular "majorities". The electoral college prevents a large corrupt state from determining the outcome nationally, like the compartments of a ship prevent individual leaks from inundating and sinking the whole ship.
2) the Senate was already democratized, if state-wide popular voting is more democratic that state legislature voting. Hamilton's argument against the smaller, and more rural states denounces them for voting Republican without admitting how urban overpopulation creates Democratic machine-politics, where soon non-citizens may vote and produce mass numbers to be manipulated.
I was referring to the democratization within the states by the 17th Amendment. Of course the Senate protects smaller states from larger unlike the House, where small states hardly matter. It was the compromise necessary to bring us all together under one hybrid (monarchical-republican-democracy) government.
The compromise was made when the difference between the small states and the large states wasn't nearly as pronounced. Now the small population states are vastly overrepresented. According to a thing I just looked up Virginia had 13 times the population of Delaware. Now California has 68 times the population of Wyoming but Wyoming has just as many Senators. The Senate is inherehently anti-democratic no matter how the Senators are elected
Since the creation of the national security administrative state, however, the unelected executive bureaucracy has assumed more and more legislative powers through regulations, as well as more and more judicial authority through its administrative courts. This is the real anti-democratic government which abolition of the electoral college will never change.
The "United" States was never a good idea. Especially when nearly half the country was forced at gunpoint by Grant and Sherman. We will become all one thing or the other. Or both, separately.
Of the 9 presidential elections in my lifetime, the Democrat candidate has won the popular all but twice, yet a Republican has been president for just over half of my life.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the very first door I ever knocked on for any campaign was in 2008 when my dad took 14 year old me with him to canvass for Obama and the guy who answered just said “my vote doesn’t count because of the electoral college” and how it’s fucking insane that he didn’t include a plank in his campaign to revive the Bayh-Celler amendment or something like it. He wouldn’t have even had to run on “the republicans stole the 2000 election” he could’ve just framed it as “hey nobody likes this thing anyway”
Yes-- without denying the logistical difficulties of a Constitutional amendment it would be very easy for politicians to include this as a basic reform (part of a basic reform package) that they talk about to raise public demand for change. However I suspect campaign consultants would tell them there's no electoral upside.
I feel like that’s why 2008 stands out as such a missed opportunity for me is it was the last time (maybe ever) that the numbers in congress would make an amendment at least feasible and you could convince me that it would’ve helped Dems downballot in 2010 if they made an issue of ratification in state houses. To your point about consultants though I feel like that’s the problem we run into with any of the reforms you mention is as badly as we need all of them opening up space for diversity in the party system necessitates the diminishing of the Dems’ institutional power and if you’re the Lis Smiths of the world you don’t want that.
Good Lord. THANK YOU, Hamilton. I'll be 45 in a few weeks. When I first learned, like really learned, about the Electoral College in high school civics, I was immediately disillusioned, to the point of disgust, with our "democracy." Yet, when I attempted to question it in class, everyone, including the teacher, acted like I was utterly illogical. I decided not to register or participate in the vote as a protest. Lots could be critiqued about whether that was right or wrong, especially in terms of participation in state or local races & initiatives, but I held my ground until 2012 (only to have my point proven in the very next cycle). No matter what I said from 1997-2012, though, I got treated like some ill-informed, not-properly-valuing-my-rights idiot. In 2016 & 2020, I worked very hard to rally my fellow voters, but always w/ the caveat that our stupid, stupid fucking system requires a ludicrously Herculean effort to overcome the "trap door." I'm sharing your piece with everyone I know because, as you said, THIS is the thing we should be outraged about.
I used to run across the same kind of bullshit when I brought it up too. The way I made my point was this. When I'm voting for the president of the United States I'm not voting for how my state is going to vote for the president of the United States. Individual states don't have the right to undermine my vote. The only way the EC could be conditionally utilized would be for it to be considerably bigger, and for the votes to be apportioned according to voting percentages in the state. So a state with 10 votes that gets a 60/40 result in an election gives six of their EC votes to one candidate, and 4 to the other. I believe two states already do that. I can't remember which ones they are. But even that doesn't fix the problem. One person one vote is what we have to fight for.
Coming at this from a different angle, a really good start would be for Democrats to fix their fucking primary process. Unlike the Republican primaries which are pretty much straightforward, it's Democrats ironically that have their primary set up in a similar electoral college way as our general elections do. And fucking dragging out the primaries for months and months. With different groups of states being in different heats. If everyone could vote all at the same time like they do in the general election, Elizabeth Warren would have been on the primary ballot in California which I believe was in the penultimate heat in the last election. As it stood, the earlier heats drummed her out. I understand Republican supporting a set up like this, but this is 100% on Democrats. That is, how we run our primary elections. So fix that. And at least create a model and precedent For changing the bigger electoral college problem.
Good overall, but throwing Taco Bell in with the electoral college is just plain wrong
seconded
Were Taco Bell not recently embroiled in an industrial relations fracas involving a staff party that got a little out of hand? Well, if we're using the qualification of "getting a little out of hand", the Electoral College and Taco Bell are very much in the same basket. :-)
#6: Nuke the filibuster
Yes although if you abolish the Senate you get that as a package deal.
While I agree the EC is outdated and should be relegated to the dustbin of history- I am conflicted as to an alternative method, while still making flyover country relevant to the process of electing a president. It feels like the answer is the NPVIC, but again as you mentioned, that's a hack/bastardization of the EC.
Hamilton, where is the most labor-friendly outlet to pre-order your book from? xo
Bookshop.org is a site that orders from independent bookstores--
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-hammer-power-inequality-and-the-struggle-for-the-soul-of-labor-hamilton-nolan/20152543
Maybe we don't need representative democracy anymore. Let's run the government with direct popular votes. Could it be worse than what we've got?
In a recent commentary of my own, I was led to analyse that now familiar passage of the Constitution, on which so much is being written at the moment (https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/mr-trump-is-appealing) and, reading the actual 14th sec. 3 for the first time, I hesitated at reading the word "elector".
"Elector?" asked I myself. "As in 'of Hannover'? Or does that mean 'anyone on the electoral roll'?" mused I. The penny, it did eventually drop.
"No, it means 'elector as in a member of the electoral college'," and, with that, my perusal of the 14th, it did continue. Till about 3 words later, when I stopped and recoiled: "Well, why shouldn't it mean 'member of the electorate'? Surely anyone who mounts a rebellion against the State is best disenfranchised for all time?" Even Lear banished Kent.
Your democracy provides that those who duly qualify to be on the electoral role in the first place (with plenty of provisos to ensure a good number who don't) may (but need not, otherwise than in Australia, Egypt and Belgium) vote for their favoured candidate in order to ... lend inspiration to members of a closed committee, that they might decide unrestrained in whose favour your vote will ultimately be cast.
I can only say, I'm very glad it isn't my, but your, democracy.
Bring on the new Constitutional Convention. Let's fix it all.
Re the Electoral College, let’s NOT “relegate it to the status of atrocities that we passively accept, like homelessness or Taco Bell.” Or Citizens United.
DO let’s call out, constantly -- never stop, those pundits and experts and interviewers whose audience needs this information. And a spine.
It's easier to imagine the end of student debt than the end of the electoral college.
1) I suspect systematic electoral fraud in California, whose popular vote accumulates many days after election day and can account for these so-called come-from-behind popular "majorities". The electoral college prevents a large corrupt state from determining the outcome nationally, like the compartments of a ship prevent individual leaks from inundating and sinking the whole ship.
2) the Senate was already democratized, if state-wide popular voting is more democratic that state legislature voting. Hamilton's argument against the smaller, and more rural states denounces them for voting Republican without admitting how urban overpopulation creates Democratic machine-politics, where soon non-citizens may vote and produce mass numbers to be manipulated.
California has like 30 million people and gets 2 Senators. Wyoming has like 12 people and also gets 2 Senators. The Senate has not been democratized
I was referring to the democratization within the states by the 17th Amendment. Of course the Senate protects smaller states from larger unlike the House, where small states hardly matter. It was the compromise necessary to bring us all together under one hybrid (monarchical-republican-democracy) government.
The compromise was made when the difference between the small states and the large states wasn't nearly as pronounced. Now the small population states are vastly overrepresented. According to a thing I just looked up Virginia had 13 times the population of Delaware. Now California has 68 times the population of Wyoming but Wyoming has just as many Senators. The Senate is inherehently anti-democratic no matter how the Senators are elected
Since the creation of the national security administrative state, however, the unelected executive bureaucracy has assumed more and more legislative powers through regulations, as well as more and more judicial authority through its administrative courts. This is the real anti-democratic government which abolition of the electoral college will never change.
The "United" States was never a good idea. Especially when nearly half the country was forced at gunpoint by Grant and Sherman. We will become all one thing or the other. Or both, separately.