Scholarly Gays: Do you think we will ever get rid of the Electoral College

Also for this current 24 elections predict Kamala will win because she will take Pennsylvania and Michigan, with all other states voting how the did in 2020. Yes I realize Penn and Mich. went back blue in 2020 but I’d like to present a scenario.

Suppose all states vote how they did in 2020 with the exception being Wisconsin going red which presents an electoral tie. What happens?

[quote]Suppose all states vote how they did in 2020 with the exception being Wisconsin going red which presents an electoral tie. What happens?

It goes to the House to decide. Which makes the outcome of the Congressional election extremely important.

R2 Fuck then we are screwed. The republicans currently have the house. In all honesty I think Kamala may flip Georgia back to us. I just don’t think she will win all 3 Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Not within the next 30 years, I don't think. There are only two ways to do it: Officially and De Facto (i believe there's a troll in here with that handle; I mean the literal term)

Officially: Requires a Constitutional Amendment to abolish the EC. Passage would require two-thirds Yes (abolish it) votes in both House and Senate. That's an extremely tough road for the Yes (abolish) vote in the Senate, where every state gets 2 senators and it's a perpetual struggle to get even 50% of them to be Democrats. Not gonna happen, not in my lifetime.

De Facto: There's the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which most Blue states have joined already, which is an agreement by which the participating states agree that their electors will vote for the winner of the national popular vote regardless of how their state voted. This, too, is a long road to get to 270 electoral votes. The NPVIC stands now at 209 Electoral Votes committed to this agreement, and another 50 Electoral Votes pending (a few states such as Virginia, on track to join the compact). That's 259 right there. Just 11 to go. If populations change in some purple states and those states' voters push the state legislature to join the NPVIC, then the total reaches 270+ and we're there. Not officially, there's still a formal Electoral College, but once that critical number of EVs is reached within the NPVIC, never again will the winner of the national popular vote be denied the US presidency. This could actually happen within the next 30 years.

No, there would never be another Republican administration again - and it would be much easier for Democrats to run without having to play to the college. The GOP would rather have a civil war than abolish the electoral college.

I don’t know why we can’t just argue that each states has 2 senators and that’s over representation enough.

R6, because since when has a political party with outsized power chosen to relinquish some of it because "that's more fair"?

The GOP is hanging onto every lever that they can, as demographics slowly fail them.

No, never.

It takes three quarters of the states and congress to amend the Constitution and the number of small states (three to five Electoral Votes) alone would never vote for it. Why would they undermine what little leverage they have?

Doubtful because one side or the other benefits from it most the time, however it is possible at some point there might be a constitutional convention. There was a huge push by conservatives a few years ago to have one where they can completely rewrite the constitution, they mainly wanted it to get rid of abortion.

Why would a Rep elector cast his or her vote for a losing Dem candidate no matter the compact? There is no way the states could enforce it.

A better option is to increase the size of the House. There's no Constitutional mandate on how big it can be, and the whole point of having a bicameral legislature is to give equal representation to the large and small states. It's been set as 435 over over a century at this point. That worked with a country with 48 states and fewer than 100 million citizens, but it's less viable in a country that's over three times as populous. I've always felt that they should benchmark the least populous state (so, Wyoming) and then base the number of districts per state on multiples of that. So using that, California would go from 52 members to 64. It would also shift power back towards urban areas.

Not in my lifetime. I've dreamed for years of the US going to a parliamentary system, but it's not gonna happen. Spreads the power around and TPTB won't have it.

Oh, well.

A just option, my liege at R11.

Parliamentary systems have their own drawbacks. Coalition governments need to be assembled to have a majority, or else back to the elections they go. How often does England have a new Prime Minister?

How will future electricians learn their trade?

[quote]How often does England have a new Prime Minister?

In my lifetime, the US has had 8 presidents (Carter, Reagan, HW Bush, Clinton, W Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden) with the potential of a ninth .

The UK has had 11 prime ministers (Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer), but of those, only 7 (Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron, May, Johnson, and Starmer) became PM by a general election, and May never had a majority after she called the snap election in 2017. And frankly, I'm not sure we should even count Truss, given how that turned out.

So I think it's a a draw in the grand scheme of things.

[quote]Coalition governments need to be assembled to have a majority

R14? You say that like it's a bad thing.

It’s not impossible that more states will adopt the system used in Maine and Nebraska, which allow for split electoral college votes. This would likely help Democrats more than Republicans but could also increase the prominence of third-party candidates and piss off both major parties.

Expanding the House would be a great idea, it sucks that these areas with a minuscule amount of people in them are proportionately overrepresented under our current structure.

No. In order to do that we would need the square states to sign on, and the square states benefit most from the electoral college.