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Majority of Americans continue to favor moving away from Electoral College
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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I think what they're speaking to is how such a change may alter the course of a presidential campaign. As it stands, there's this notion that a candidate has to try and have broad appeal; they need to spread their campaign out a bit in order to "capture" the electoral votes of a state.
Sans the electoral college, I see presidential campaigns becoming even more polarized and exclusionary. The Democrat campaign will become the "big city loop." Continually visit Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, NYC, and Miami. Maybe they slide in a few secondary metros if it's convenient. The candidate won't have to worry about any non-urban messaging, and if they're particularly incendiary could even preach "dumping those hicks in the sticks."
Conversely, the Republican campaign (not even considering the existing insanity) becomes "everywhere else." They can push the message of "big city Democrats want to destroy you" even more convincingly.
Such an outcome strengthens the "not my president" sentiment (on either side), and just further aggravates partisanship. I'm not saying eliminating the electoral college is a change that could never be made, but I definitely think this is a bad time. It will feel like exclusion and alienation and in politics perception is reality.
For the obvious follow-on question "when is a good time," I don't have a pat answer and I can't even speculate if that will be in 4, or 12, or even 20 years. But it needs to be a time when there's far less immediate friction between the two leading parties, or it's just going to be another wedge opening the divide.
That's currently not the case: in most states, the vote isn't close, so we know before the campaign even begins how most states will vote. There's no reason for Republicans to appeal to Kansans, because Kansas will vote R no matter what. Likewise, there's no point for Democrats to appeal to Kansans because it won't do them any good.
There's a word in politics for a candidate who wins in big cities, and nowhere else: "loser".
Check the demographics. Get a list of the 20 biggest cities in the US and add them up. You'll see that's only about 30% of the vote. So even if you somehow managed to get everyone in the big cities to vote for you, including children under 18, felons, and people on student visas, that still wouldn't be enough to determine the election.
Just in passing, there are more Republicans in the California sticks than the total population of several other states. If the president were elected by popular vote, candidates could no more ignore those voters than California gubernatorial candidates can, today.
Well, our campaigns are ridiculously antiquated with the campaign season being kicked off in....Iowa? And silly photo-ops of them eating county fair food and so on, as if that is somehow representative of America in the past several decades.
Sorry, most people are not farmers, and it's absurd to pretend as if that is "middle America".
It would make far more sense to kick things off on the coasts. Where all the people are.