June 8, 2006
The Old Electoral College Try Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:15 PM EST Regarding the Electoral College, I agree with John Steele Gordon that it’s not going anywhere. As is true of a related and far greater injustice, the assignment of two Senate seats to each state regardless of population, changing the rules would require federal and state lawmakers to vote against their own interest for the sake of nothing more than fairness. That isn’t going to happen. To read my 2001 discussion of this issue, which still remains largely valid, click here.
One point that could use clarification is that while abolishing or modifying the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, the states remain free to appoint electors as their legislatures see fit. One scheme that has been making the rounds lately is for the dozen or so largest states to agree to allot all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote. [Note: I wrote this before reading Josh’s entry of 10:10 a.m. today on this subject.] Supposedly this would have the effect of always giving the election to the popular-vote winner.
It’s a clever idea, but there are a number of objections: (1) Losers could always claim that votes were suppressed or counted improperly, which would presumably release them from the agreement (some people still claim that the 2004 election was stolen, for example); (2) there would be no way to enforce the deal, and thus nothing to prevent a state from changing its mind on the eve of a close election or even afterwards, or for a subsequent legislature to simply decide that it was a bad idea; (3) it’s unclear what to do when there is a non-trivial third-party candidate; and, perhaps most important, (4) would New York’s legislature really have given the state’s electoral votes to George Bush in 2004 because a bunch of rednecks voted for him? Or in 2000, would Texas’s legislature have given its votes to Al Gore, thus swinging the election, to satisfy a bunch of bluenecks? In either case, how could they face the voters afterwards? In elections won by a comfortable margin, the compact would be unnecessary, and in close elections, it would just be one more thing for people to go to court about. (I suspect it would also exacerbate the “faithless elector” problem, since an elector voting contrary to instructions could say, “But I was just obeying the people of my state!”)
Another problem: You can’t have a meaningful nationwide popular vote without imposing nationwide standards. Otherwise there’s nothing to prevent a state from being lenient towards repeat voters, fake ballots, biased officials, and the like. Under the present system, in most states there’s no need to steal a presidential election because it’s clear in advance which candidate will win, and piling up extra popular votes doesn’t gain you any extra electoral votes. But suppose there’s a de facto national popular vote, and it’s a squeaker, and reports start circulating of illegal aliens voting by the thousand in big cities, or of dead folks flocking to the polls in rural outposts. What then? Or by the same token, what if there were lines around the block that discouraged people from voting, or excessive and picayune challenges or red tape that created delays and scared voters off? What political true believer would feel compelled to respect the results of a vote with so many irregularities? Not to mention the differing standards for things like postal voting, suffrage for convicts, and regulations governing ballots and computer software. The Electoral College does not eliminate these problems, but at least it confines them to one state at a time and erases their effect in most places. With a nationwide popular vote, every local irregularity would become a national problem.
A better idea would be to have a separate electoral race in each congressional district, as Maine and Nebraska now do, with the statewide winner receiving a bonus of two electors. This solves all the objections mentioned above except (2), which applies to any system including the current one. It eliminates the winner-take-all feature, though it could still result in a popular-vote winner losing the election, if you consider that a problem. The difficulty, of course, as with all such schemes, would lie in getting states to agree to it.
June 8, 2006
Where Old Campaign Commercials Live On Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon is absolutely right about political campaign advertisements: They can be clever and entertaining, and, like most every other kind of television ad, they can be puerile and irritating. Still, on balance I enjoy watching them. But then, politics has always been my favorite spectator sport. (Apologies to my father, who has always viewed baseball as America’s civil religion, and Shea Stadium as his favorite synagogue.)
For those who share my strange love of political Americana, there’s a great website http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us that stores dozens of historical presidential campaign ads, dating back to 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower (very) reluctantly hired a Madison Avenue firm to pitch his political wares to the American electorate.
They’re all there; LBJ’s famous 1964 “daisy girl” commercial (and the somewhat less famous spot showing a young girl licking an ice cream cone, as the voice-over bemoans Barry Goldwater’s desire to poison American youth with radioactive fallout from nuclear testing); George Wallace’s scarcely concealed racist screed in 1968, which used crime and busing as substitutes for real-life black people; Ronald Reagan’s masterful 1984 “morning in America” ad, with its beautiful cinematography and soft-spoken narration; and even the recent lineup of ads from the 2004 contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry.
The only problem with the site is that it appears (I could be wrong, I haven’t yet done a comprehensive check) to use only ads that emanated directly from the candidates’ campaigns. This means that independent-expenditure groups, who put out some of the most vicious but also some of the most historically significant ads, are excluded from the lot. Hence, no Willie Horton. And no Swift Boats.
Still, it’s a great website. Go find your inner-political junkie.
June 8, 2006
The Electoral College Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:10 AM EST A propos of the electoral college, I think Mr. Gordon is correct in claiming that it is here to stay—at least, that is, on a constitutional basis. But if opponents of the system are unlikely to amend the Constitution anytime soon, there is an interesting movement afoot to bypass the electoral college by other means.
The Constitution provides that states determine for themselves how to divvy up their electoral votes. Most states operate on a winner-takes-all basis, though a few states allocate electors by congressional district or in some other proportional fashion. A new organization drive, National Popular Vote, is hoping to convince state legislatures to pass identical statutes providing that their electoral votes be awarded to the winner of the national popular vote.
In other words, the idea is that, if Candidate X won New York State by a 20-point margin but lost the national popular vote to Candidate Y by even the slimmest of margins, New York State would award all of its electoral votes to Candidate Y.
The proposed legislation, which totals just 888 words, would not take effect until enough states ratified it to constitute a majority of the electoral college. Thus no single state legislature would be sticking its neck on the line in the event that only a handful of states agreed to the compact.
It’s an intriguing idea—one that surely appeals to liberals and conservatives alike. The compact provides for majority rule but also avoids wholesale constitutional revisionism; it bypasses a serious glitch in our democratic system while gesturing toward respect for our longstanding institutions.
On May 30 the California State Assembly passed the compact, and several other legislatures are likely to consider the proposal in the coming months (visit http://www.nationalpopularvote.com for details). Proponents still have a long road to travel. I doubt the issue will be settled by 2008. But 2012? Maybe.
June 7, 2006
States Up for Grabs, and the Electoral College Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:45 PM EST I agree with Mr. Zeitz that for political junkies, living in a swing state makes for more electoral excitement. But in the modern era there is a great big downside to doing so: TV ads. The good people of Ohio in 2004 probably had to sit through 10—maybe 50—times as many ads for Bush and Kerry as we denizens of the certain-to-go-for-Kerry state of New York. Political ads, like any other type, can be imaginative, witty, and persuasive (or dumb, tasteless, and offensive), but after you’ve sat through the same ad, no matter how good, for the hundredth time, all you want to do is scream.
As for the Electoral College, there are arguments on both sides. Certainly the direct election of Presidents is more “democratic.” But there can be too much democracy (the election of judges, an artifact of “Jacksonian democracy,” is a case in point). And the Electoral College has, in a few extremely close elections, produced outcomes where the winner of the popular vote nonetheless loses in the Electoral College, most recently in 2000. This can make it difficult for the winner to govern effectively.
But the Electoral College can also provide a mandate the winner would otherwise lack. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Bill Clinton came nowhere near a majority of the popular vote in their first elections, but each won handily in the Electoral College.
Further, the college forces the parties to look at the race on a state-by-state basis, which is not a bad idea in what is, after all, a federal republic. Had just 4,000 voters in tiny New Hampshire, with a mere four electoral votes, switched from Bush to Gore, Gore would have won the Electoral College vote as well as the popular vote. With no Electoral College, candidates would just fly between New York and Los Angeles, the country’s media centers, and not even remember where New Hampshire is, let alone what it’s voters’ concerns are.
The best and most thoughtful analysis of the place and utility of the Electoral College I know of is Reform and Continuity: The Electoral College, the Convention, and the Party System, by the late Alexander Bickel. It is both powerfully argued and mercifully brief. But any discussion of the Electoral College is strictly an academic exercise. It is going nowhere any time soon. Why? Do the math.
There are 538 electoral votes. Since the country has a population of nearly 300 million, that’s 557,000 people per electoral vote.
But those 538 votes are distributed by state, with each state having as many electoral votes as it has senators and representatives (Washington, D.C., has 3 votes as well). Thus California, with a population of 35 million, has 55 electoral votes. South Dakota, with a population of 770,000, has 3. That means there are 636,000 Californians per electoral vote, but only 256,000 South Dakotans.
In other words, voters in small states have disproportionate clout in the Electoral College, and there are more small states than big ones. In fact, about 25 states have considerably more power in the college than their populations would indicate, and only about 12 have much less power than their populations would seemingly entitle them to.
To any arguments that this just isn’t “fair,” the small states would respond that the big states get quite enough political attention paid to them, thank you very much, and this just helps even things up. Since the Founding Fathers were quite capable of doing the math themselves, I imagine this was deliberate, although I don’t know what Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention have to say on the subject.
Abolishing the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, and that would require the agreement of 38 states, the majority of which would lose power by agreeing. Therefore they won’t.
June 7, 2006
On Close Elections Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s post yesterday covers a lot of ground. What I enjoyed most was his recounting of the 1884 election debacle in which James G. Blaine, the “continental liar from the state of Maine,” narrowly lost New York State, and, by extension, the Presidency, because one of his supporters uttered some intemperate anti-Catholic remarks that incensed Irish-American and German-American voters.
In recent years we’ve grown so accustomed to having a sharply divided polity that we run the risk of forgetting how rare razor-thin electoral margins have been in American history. Even so, the existence of swing states is nothing new. Back in the nineteenth century, New York—rather than Florida or Ohio—often found itself in the enviable position of being the coveted, up-for-grabs electoral prize.
Such was the case in 1844, when the Whigs nominated Henry Clay for the Presidency. It was the once-and-future Kentucky senator’s third bid for the White House.
Clay was locked in a tight race with the Democrat James K. Polk, who ultimately won the popular vote by 1.4 percent. As we all know, however, presidential elections are not won by popular votes alone. What cost Clay the big prize was New York State. He lost New York (and its 36 electors) by a mere 5,100 votes, and thus lost in the electoral college by a count of 170 to 105.
Critically, James Birney, the candidate of the anti-slavery Liberty Party, won more than 15,000 votes in New York. Though it remains a matter of counterfactual speculation, many historians believe that had Birney not been in the race, the bulk of his votes would have gone to Clay, the architect of the Missouri Compromise, rather than to Polk, a slaveholding Tennessean with clear designs for southward expansion.
What such a result would have borne out is even more hopelessly a matter of counterfactualism. No Polk, no Mexican-American War? No Mexican-American War, no Texas? No California?
Mr. Gordon and I disagree about a lot of things, and we may very well disagree about the merits of the electoral college system (we’ve never discussed it, so I’m not sure). But we’re both New Yorkers, and I suspect we agree on one thing if on nothing else: Elections were a lot more fun when the Empire State was up for grabs.
June 5, 2006
Issuing a Sherman Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:30 PM EST On June 5, 1884, 122 years ago today, General William Tecumseh Sherman, in flatly refusing to seek the Republican nomination for president, made one of the most famous and atypical statements in American political history: “If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve.”
Such an unequivocal political statement has been known ever since as a “Sherman,” and they are rare indeed. Every politician above the rank of assistant sewer commissioner dreams in his heart of hearts of winning the White House and frames a response to any questions on the subject as a “non-denial denial”: “I have no immediate plans . . .” “I’m very happy in my present job . . .” etc. Today, of course, there are legal reasons having to do with fundraising as well as tactical ones not to formally announce a run for the White House, and even people who obviously are aiming for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue avoid saying they are running. Senator Hillary Clinton, running this year for reelection to the Senate, will avoid saying she is running for the White House several hundred times before November at the least.
The election of 1884 contributed several other enduring words and phrases during the course of a nasty and very close campaign. Senator James G. Blaine (“the continental liar from the state of Maine”) won the Republican nomination while Grover Cleveland, governor of New York, was the Democratic candidate. Blaine still had the “Mulligan letters”, letters found in 1876 by a Boston bookkeeper named Mulligan that showed Blaine to have been on the take while he was speaker of the House to deal with. Many Republicans, known as “Mugwumps,” refused to support him.
And the Republicans were delighted to find out that the strait-laced bachelor Cleveland had fathered a child out of wedlock. “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!” they cried. The Democrats countered with an honest admission of an “illicit liaison” and their own ditty: “Hurrah for Grover, hurrah for the kid! We voted for Cleveland and glad we did!”
The election was a squeaker that was in all likelihood determined by yet another famous American political phrase. In the last week of the campaign a group of Protestant clergymen, led by the Rev. Samuel Burchard, called on Blaine and pledged their support, damning the disloyalty of the Mugwumps. Burchard stated that “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.”
The newspapers didn’t notice the slur on the Catholic Church, but a Democrat in the audience certainly did, and he made sure that New York City’s large Irish population noticed it too. As a result, Cleveland carried New York State by a whisker: 1,047 votes out of 1,167,003 cast, winning the state’s 36 electoral votes. He won the election with 219 electoral votes to Blaine’s 182.
June 1, 2006
Join the Discussion—About This Blog or Any Article Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 03:30 PM EST You may have noticed that for the last couple of weeks there has been a line at the end of each blog post and article on AmericanHeritage com that says “Discuss this post,” or “Discuss this article.” We’ve been trying out a major new addition to the site, making it possible for any user to launch or join a discussion about anything on the site—or anything else. Now we’re ready to announce it and invite you in.
All you need to do is register for the site, which is free. Then click on that link at the end of this or any item, or go to the discussions homepage at www.americanheritage.com/discussions to find or create discussion topics.
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