All right.
Let's get into some perfect audience questions for the week, very election relevant.
The first one is David.
Can you explain, is the Electoral College good or bad?
Because I hear different people saying different things.
Well, it should come as no.
As no surprise that different people have different opinions about the Electoral College.
But in order to answer the question, is the Electoral College good or bad, you have to
first understand what the point of the Electoral College is.
And number two, what one considers good or bad may depend on where they sit politically.
So let's kind of build up our understanding of this in the United States.
If a hundred million people vote 55 million vote for one candidate, 45 million vote for
another candidate, it is not guaranteed that the one with the 55 million votes won.
Why is that?
Because we don't have a national popular vote.
We have an electoral college system where each state is worth a certain number of votes
or points, as they were the first to get to 270 points or electoral votes wins.
So you could win some states by crazy, huge popular vote margins, win the popular vote,
but only have 265 electoral votes.
A different candidate could have fewer total votes, but win enough electoral votes to win.
And in fact, that is what happened in the year 2000 with George W. Bush and Al Gore.
And it is what happened in did it happen in 2004?
It obviously happened recently with Donald Trump in in 2016.
So what we see is that the Electoral College gives disproportionately more or less power
to certain states in deciding the outcome of the election.
And by virtue of doing that, the voters in those states have relatively more or less
power in total because a vote in California is not equally likely to decide the outcome,
as is a vote in, for example, Pennsylvania or Florida.
Good.
Why do we have this system?
Initially, the idea of the Electoral College was, listen, if candidates if we have a national
popular vote, candidates will spend all their time in the most populated areas and California
and New York will decide the election.
That's where candidates will go and they will ignore the small and rural states.
Well, all you've really done with the Electoral College system is change that around.
So that now the states that decide the election are a handful of so-called battleground states,
including but not limited to Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Arizona,
etc..
So in particular in 2020 when.
Listen, I don't need the candidate coming to where I am.
We have enough media.
We have enough Internet where I can make a completely informed decision.
I don't care if the candidate never goes on the campaign trail at all.
Quite frankly, if I can understand policy differences and sort of understand who who
the candidates are.
So I do believe that the Electoral College is outdated first and foremost.
I do believe the Electoral College has created the opposite of the problem they wanted to
solve by basically making it so candidates are ignoring the very populated areas.
But most importantly, when you say is it good or bad, would I go to is whether the Electoral
College better reflects the will of the people than a national popular vote.
And the answer is no.
More than two million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump in 2016.
Now, you could say, well, if it was a national popular vote, the election would have been
run differently, run a differently than as a candidate.
Fine.
But way more people wanted Hillary.
And yet Donald Trump is president.
And fundamentally, the Electoral College system is one of the many systems that gives a structural
advantage to Republicans.
It is Republicans who have benefited from having their candidate win despite losing
the popular vote multiple times now.
It is Republicans who benefit from the sort of baseline reality that conservatives are
more likely to live in rural areas than are liberals merely because of preferences.
And our system disproportionately gives power to rural states when it comes to the Electoral
College.
And importantly, in the Senate, the Senate is another way in which our government is
stacked against the left.
Each state gets two senators.
The highest population states tend to be blue leaning states, left leaning states.
And so you have a situation.
I'm thinking back to the election where something like the senators represent.
Only 17 percent of the population have half of the votes in the Senate.
That's crazy.
The Senate is fundamentally undemocratic.
So to step back, I do believe the Electoral College is a negative influence on the will
of the people being expressed in who becomes president of the United States.
I do believe that it should be changed.
And when you look at some of the data, the 10 least populated states plus D.C. have a
population that's three percent of the country and they have almost seven percent of the
electors.
They are more than do X overrepresented.
And we can slice and dice it in other ways to give these kind of notable examples.
But I believe the Electoral College has to go.
I think it is a bad influence on the United States system of picking presidents.
If you disagree with me, let me know.
I would love to hear
from you.