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Originally Posted by Buccaneer
You mean like the Nobel committee awarding the peace prize based on ballot box?  |
I get what they were going for there - 'if we give him the prize, he'll spend the next 4-8 years working to try and live up to it' - but...the Nobel Peace Prize really shouldn't be aspirational. That was goofy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Buccaneer
Sack, Bush43 said he could squeeze a million votes from Texas if that mattered. I think with the 4 big states already solid colors, the other states should be more important. It's unfortunate that CA-NY-IL alone can get a candidate almost 40% of the way there nowadays.
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You're kinda proving my point, though, Bucc. Right now, there IS no reason for a Republican candidate to spend much time in the GOP's "firewall" states. Aside from Georgia and Arizona, and the ever-present prospect of a purple Texas (which may never happen), most of those "firewall" states are pretty reliably double-digit states for a Republican. That includes, as I said, most of the Midwest, much of the Mountain West, and most of the South.
As far as the lament that three states get somebody almost 40% of the way to 270...population centers matter, and they'd matter either in the system we've got, or a popular vote system.
If you want to blunt the impact of population centers on Presidential elections (and I'm not sure why you would other than to grant rural areas much more disproportionate influence than they currently enjoy), what you do is keep the Electoral College but distribute Electoral Votes one per Congressional district.
And then you'd probably see the Democrats spend a half-century or more in the political wilderness as they tried to broaden their reach beyond urban populations; whether that's a bug or a feature is probably up to one's personal politics.