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11/30/00
10:25 a.m. By John Hood, president
of the John Locke Foundation |
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Still, few critics of the Electoral College, other than the Hon. Rodham of New York, assert that abolishing it is feasible. They admit that smaller states who benefit disproportionately from the system will never go along with a constitutional amendment. What many talking heads are touting is a seemingly reasonable alternative: Reforming how states assign their votes. The U.S. Constitution is silent on this point. States are not required to award all their votes to the statewide winner. Indeed, two states currently apportion their votes by 1) awarding two to the statewide winner and 2) awarding the remaining votes by the popular vote in each congressional district. There is no legal reason why other states couldn't follow suit. However, I wonder how many political "experts" who tout this approach have actually examined its likely ramifications. Awarding most electoral votes by congressional district has a number of fascinating implications related to gerrymandering, media markets, and campaign strategy. And based on a preliminary analysis performed by my research staff, such a system — if employed in the 2000 election — might also have produced an outcome very different from what Electoral College critics have in mind. There are several reasons why it is admittedly difficult to predict the result of such a system. One is that the current congressional map has existed since 1990, so the only two past presidential elections where the impact can be determined with confidence are 1992 and 1996, both won by Bill Clinton. Secondly, presidential votes by congressional district are, unlike those by state and county, hard to come by. The Almanac of American Politics provides the data for 1992 and 1996, but no one to my knowledge has attempted to compute the results for Nov. 7 (you have to go down to the precinct level, and sometimes even lower, to reconstruct the results in many districts). Still, we can make some educated guesses. We can look back at the past two elections and try to spot trends. We can look at whether a Republican or Democrat won a congressional seat convincingly as a useful, albeit hardly definitive, indicator. And we can simply use the popular-vote margin in each state to gauge the likely proportions of electoral votes and make sure that our projections aren't going too wildly off the mark. First the history. Bill Clinton won 43 percent of the popular vote in the 1992 election and 49 percent in 1996. His margins in the Electoral College, however, were much larger. He won 370 to President George Bush's 168 in 1992 and 379 to Bob Dole's 159 in 1996. What if we had had a congressional-district system in place in every state? Clinton's margin would have shrunk moderately, to 324-214 in 1992 and 345-193 in 1996. This is what reformers would predict. Winner-take-all tends to exaggerate the winner's margin. A district-based system would, it is alleged, more accurately reflect narrow wins in the popular vote, particularly in populous states with many congressional seats to apportion. By that logic, many observers, transfixed by the Florida mess, assume that a district-based system would have helped Al Gore this year by awarding him at least close to half the electoral votes in the Sunshine State, thus putting him over the top. But they are forgetting George W. Bush's narrow losses in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other states. It turns out that when you look state-by-state at the likely outcome of a reformed Electoral College, you get some surprising results. What my research staff did was to use each state's congressional results and Bush-Gore split from the Nov. 7 election, along with historical patterns in district voting, to project how the new system would change the electoral map. By our count, Al Gore clearly would gain votes not only in Florida (which we project would have gone 14-11 for Bush) but also in other large states Bush won such as Texas (18-14), Ohio (13-8), North Carolina (9-5), Georgia (10-3), Virginia (9-4), Indiana (8-4), and Missouri (7-4). But Bush makes big gains, too. The biggest prize is California, where Bush got trounced statewide but, based on district voting patterns, might well have pilfered 20 of the state's 54 electoral votes. We also project sizable Bush pickups in New York (with a 22-11 split for Gore), Pennsylvania (13-10), Illinois (12-10), Michigan (12-6), New Jersey (10-5), Wisconsin (7-4), Minnesota (7-3), and Maryland (7-3). Overall, our model of a reformed Electoral College yields a 280-258 Bush victory — somewhat higher than the margin he actually won (counting Florida). Nor am I convinced that our approach truly captures all of the benefits that Republicans might receive from such a system. In the state I know best, North Carolina, 14 electoral votes went to Bush. The model we constructed would award the state to Bush by a 9-5 margin based on how many Democrats are in the congressional delegation (5 of 12) and Gore's popular vote statewide (43 percent). But I know with certainty that in at least two districts now held by Democrats, Bush beat Gore. These are districts drawn to make moderate Democratic incumbents relatively safe, but they tend to vote Republican in national races. Other southern districts would likely show similar proclivities, if we had the data, while admittedly some northeastern and midwestern districts with moderate Republican congressmen might well vote more consistently Democratic than our model would predict. The point here is that a reformed Electoral College based largely on congressional districts would not greatly reduce the advantage that smaller states enjoy from the system, nor would it have the effect that big-state Democrats would probably like. They have only themselves to blame. Race-based gerrymandering is a major factor. By packing blacks and, increasingly, Hispanics in districts designed to increase the diversity of Congress, the redistricting maps of the 1990s made other districts more congenial to Republicans. Virtually all observers agree that Gore's last-minute surge and his wins in battleground states are due mainly to better-than-expected turnout among minority voters. The race-baiting worked. But in a district-based system, such a strategy wouldn't work as well. Higher turnout in majority-minority districts already predisposed to a Democrat would help win him the two statewide electoral votes, but that's all. I'm quite sure that smart Democratic strategists have already looked at these patterns and know that reforming the Electoral College might not really be in their interest. Black politicians are also far ahead of the liberal intelligentsia on this issue. Rep. John Conyers (D., Michigan), for example, recently told Investor's Business Daily that the current system gives minorities "a little more opportunity to exert a strength that would affect the outcome." In the 1970s, he and civil-rights groups helped squash an attempt to abolish the college. Guessing at how Bush and Gore might have fared under a different system makes the unrealistic assumption, of course, that the campaign would have unfolded similarly. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bush would have had a strong incentive to maximize his vote in Texas, while Gore probably would have worried less about Tennessee and Arkansas. Both men would have targeted their efforts more closely to a few dozen districts across the country that are truly competitive at the congressional level, and thus probably competitive at the top of the ticket, too. Minority turnout would have been less of a priority for Democrats, while Republicans would have put more emphasis on winning marginal suburban districts in the south and midwest. So maybe it's unfair to Gore to suggest that a district-based electoral system would have helped Bush more. If you think about it, that would be like changing the rules of an election after it's already been held. |
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urning on a rhetorical
dime after a surprising Nov. 7 outcome, many liberal political scientists
and pundits across the country are weighing in on that pesky Electoral
College. They argue that it is outdated, or anti-democratic, or subversive
of the popular will. They talk about previous presidents elected without
a popular-vote plurality — the hapless Benjamin Harrison being the
favored example — who turned out to be ineffective one-termers.
