The above map shows the number of general election campaign events held in each state during the 2016 presidential race. To qualify as an "event," at least one of the four top-of-the-ticket candidates--Trump, Pence, Clinton, Kaine--had to speak. The count started on the day following the conclusion of the nominating conventions of the respective parties. Here are some high-level observations:
- Twenty-four states were not visited by either campaign.
- Seven more were visited once. (Almost all of these one-time events were in some sense artificial, like a rally in an airplane hangar during a refueling stop. The Illinois event was held in a large park on the east bank of the Mississippi River, directly across from Davenport, Iowa, the third largest city in Iowa--it could more meaningfully be counted as the 22nd Iowa stop than the only one in Illinois.)
- The 31 states that were visited never or once include four of the five largest--California, Texas, New York, and Illinois--and are home to well over half the country's population.
- More than half the events were in just four states--Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
- Six states--adding Virginia and Michigan to the above four--received more than two-thirds of all visits.
I hope it's obvious that these observations tend to rebut things we hear from supporters of the Electoral College. We are told, for example, that but for the College a few big states would get all the attention. I doubt that's true, since it seems the same logic would require gubernatorial candidates in, say, Minnesota, never to leave the Twin Cities metro area, though in fact they crisscross the entire state. If a vote is a vote is a vote is a vote, it makes sense to seek them everywhere, including in geographic areas where you know your opponent is preferred by most residents.
But suppose it were true. Why should Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida get all the attention instead of California, Texas, New York, and Illinois? Please explain why it's better that these states should be ignored and not those ones. [Cue Jeopardy! theme song.]
In my experience, devotees of the College also have some fanciful notions about small states and "the real Americans" who live in them--as opposed, I guess, to the imposters residing in Boston, Brooklyn, and the Bay Area. I'm not sure why a discussion of the Electoral College should so quickly elicit opinions about the virtues of small-town and rural Americans. Maybe it's because the Electoral College, like the US Senate, overweighs their ballots and the idea is that that's okay, because they're better Americans than Californians and New Yorkers. I don't know. Take a look at the map again. It's pretty clear that it isn't wildly divergent state populations that cause campaigns to target certain states and ignore others. For the list of ignored states includes plenty of small ones--Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, both Dakotas, Arkansas, others. They are all ignored equally along with California, New York, and Texas. Meanwhile, New Hampshire and Iowa get all the attention they want and probably more.
So this is obviously the "swing-state" phenomenon, a notable byproduct of the Electoral College. We don't have national elections to choose the president. The all-or-nothing allocation of electoral votes gives all the power to people who live in a few evenly divided states. By "all the power" I mean all the power. I have sometimes pointed out that in Wyoming about 230,000 voters determined the outcome of 3 electoral votes, while in California more than 13 million voters determined the outcome of 55 electoral votes. If you do the arithmetic, it works out that in California there are around 240,000 ballots cast per electoral vote awarded, compared to fewer than 80,000 in Wyoming, and, according to some of us, that's a gob of spit on the principle of one-person, one-vote. Actually, though, it's a lot worse than that. Actually, the voters in both states are almost completely powerless. If you are a Republican in California or a Democrat in Wyoming, it is impossible for your ballot to help your preferred candidate win a single electoral vote, and of course it's electoral votes that determine who becomes president. If you are a California Democrat or a Wyoming Republican, the situation is hardly better, since your ballot is just one among a superfluity. I'm sure this point is understood pretty well in California, where it happens that election law permits you to mail in your ballot as late as Election Day. On the morning after the 2016 election, many people therefore were in the position of knowing that "the national election for president" had been close, that their ballot had not yet been counted--and that it wouldn't matter in the least if it never got counted, because it was just a useless extra vote for Clinton.
The effort to measure the distance between one-person, one-vote and the distortions wrought by the Electoral College resides at the intersection of political science and probability & statistics. The calculation is very math-y, lots of variables, some of which are independent but many related to each other in varying degrees. A quite technical discussion of the topic may be perused here. The opening sentences of the article's abstract give the flavor:
In an election, voting power--the probability that a single vote is decisive--is affected by the rule for aggregating votes into a single outcome. Voting power is important for studying political representation, fairness and strategy, and has been much discussed in political science. Although power indexes are often considered as mathematical definitions, they ultimately depend on statistical models of voting.
As readers of FiveThirtyEight Blog will know, the result of the calculation is usually referred to as "the voter power index," which for presidential elections is "the relative likelihood that an individual voter in a state will determine the Electoral College winner." The techie-ness of the lingo may tend to obscure the fact that what we're talking about is the relative weight of an individual ballot, depending upon the state in which it's cast. In the 2016 election, FiveThirtyEight gauged the voter power range to run from 4.8 down to under 0.1. So, top to bottom, the relative power is different by a factor of more than 50--and about half the states are below 0.1.
The above map is just a visual representation of the result of some complicated calculations. The campaigns and their strategists know what they're doing. The votes of people living in around half the states don't matter at all. Ignore them. Concentrate all your efforts on the voters living in a handful of states who have all the power. It's surprising to me that so many people are okay with this, and even rise to defend it, especially considering that a straightforward remedy is at hand. I suspect my cynicism is inadequate for the times and that purely partisan considerations account for the controversy. In any event, the National Popular Vote movement is a needed electoral reform.
Comments