Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[MumblesBadly]

How is that real talk?

The Dems have been whining about the electoral college for the past 19 years, ever since Al Gore lost.

People demanding a popular vote aren't understanding that this country is a co-op of 50 state governments, and not just a federal government with states acting as localities.

All of this moral outrage about electoral colleges is simply a matter of strategy. The Dems realize that they have the popular vote for the moment thanks to big population centers going mostly their way, so they are twisting and turning to justify why the electoral college should be abandoned.

If it were reversed and a popular vote would hurt them, then we'd be hearing "omg omg what about the small states" from them instead.

The funniest arguments I hear are those that Hillary actually "won" because she got more popular votes, totally ignoring that Trump's entire campaign strategy was based upon the electoral college, and he would have campaigned differently if it was about popular votes. It's like a baseball team stating that they actually won a game because they got more hits than their opponent, even if they ended up with fewer runs.

What AOC and other anti-electoral-college Dems ignore is the fact that campaigning is difficult, and the small population areas WOULD be ignored, because it simply wouldn't be cost effective to win their votes.

Oh, and states are free to change to a Congressional district method, as is used in Maine and Nebraska, where the entire state isn't winner-take-all. But that should be up to each individual state. I wouldn't be totally opposed to such a system, though, as at least that would still place an importance upon winning rural districts.

When the Electoral College was established, the difference in population levels among the states wasn’t so extreme as today. At the time of the first census in 1790, the most populous state (Virginia) had a population that was only about 12 times the size of the least populous state (Delaware). Per the latest Federal Reserve population data on Wikipedia (2015), the most populous state (California, 39.145m) has about 67 times the number of residents as the least populous state (Wyoming, 0.596m).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List...cal_population

Based on their respective populations and Electoral College electors, Wyoming’s 3 electors each effectively represent about 200,000 people, while California’s 55 electors each represent over 700,000 people, more than 3 1/2 times that for Wyoming. This is an egregiously imbalanced ratio of representation across such disparately populated states.

Adding to that dramatic change in relative state populations, a large majority of the smaller states are much more rural *and* conservative. This gives the Republicans a huge built-in lead in the Electoral College, requiring the Democrats to overperform in the remaining states-by-state contests for president just to breakeven with the GOP.

So, how could this unexpected-by-the-Founders representative imbalance be addressed in a way that preserves the partial sovereignty of the states within our federal government system *and* make the presidential race more reflective of the greater difference in populations among states? Easy! Just eliminate adding the number of senators each state has in determining their number of electors.

https://www.archives.gov/federal-reg...llocation.html

That way, the effective representation by the electors for the smaller population states would be more comparable to that of the most populous states. For example, the single elector for Wyoming would represent the entire population of that state, about 596,000, while the 53 electors for California would each effectively represent about 738,000 people, much more on par with Wyoming. Such a change in the effective population representation of each elector would be much closer to the circumstances the Founders faced when the Electoral College was formed than what we currently have.