Elie Mystal: A Modest but Serious Proposal for How to Save the GOP From Trump

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A Modest but Serious Proposal for How to Save the GOP From Trump
The push to dump the Electoral College is often framed as a Democratic concern, but it might actually help the Republican Party more.

ELIE MYSTAL


(The Nation) A new PEW Research survey shows that 65 percent of Americans favor doing away with the Electoral College and moving toward a popular vote for president of the United States. That’s the highest approval rating for a national popular vote since 2000, when PEW began tracking the issue. Only 33 percent want to keep the Electoral College.

The poll, naturally, makes me think: “What the hell is wrong with the 33 percent?” Why is basic democracy so scary to so many people?

The obvious answer to that question is “because Republicans.” The GOP candidate for president has lost seven of the last eight elections, as determined by the national popular vote, including the last four in a row. The party will almost surely lose the popular vote again in 2024. The Republican Party, as currently constituted, cannot win in a democracy, and that is so well understood that antidemocratic strategies are now baked into the party’s DNA. The Electoral College protects minority rule—and, because of the unequal distribution of people of color throughout the United States, it functionally protects white minority rule. Republicans don’t need a degree in political science to intuit that the majority doesn’t like them.

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There are clearly people who believe that the Electoral College is “good” for reasons other than raw partisan politics. The arguments these people use to defend the Electoral College are legion, but most of them are based on a core misconception: that the Electoral College gives power to small, low-population states. Without it, voters in those states and the issues they care about will be ignored in favor of the concerns of New Yorkers and Californians, and city dwellers over rural communities.

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But there’s an even more important flaw with the Electoral College than its purported focus on low-population states—and that’s the fact that it doesn’t even do what it claims to set out to do: The system doesn’t shift additional political power to smaller states; it shifts political power to “battleground” states. Florida is the third-most-populous state in the country; Pennsylvania is the fifth; Ohio is the seventh; Georgia is the eighth. Nearly all the states that get any attention from presidential campaigns in the lead-up to the general election (including Arizona and Wisconsin) rank in the top 25 for population. .............(more)

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/dump-electoral-college-to-save-gop/