The national popular vote is national popular insanity
Earlier this year Colorado’s Democratic legislature approved, and their Democratic governor signed, a “National Popular Vote” measure. Essentially, it commits Colorado (my home state) to an interstate pact, which comes into effect once enough states jump on board to total 270 electoral votes, consigning each state’s electoral franchise to whomever wins the popular vote nationally, regardless of whom the majority of the state’s citizens vote for, rendering the current system entirely irrelevant.
Shortly thereafter, Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., propelled the issue to national prominence by doing away with the subterfuge and embracing the Electoral College’s outright abolition.
Probably not. But purely tactical motivations aside, the drive does fit a pattern of liberal disdain
The Electoral College has taken its place as the latest institution toward which the Left has turned its wrathful gaze.
Earlier this year Colorado’s Democratic legislature approved, and their Democratic governor signed, a “National Popular Vote” measure. Essentially, it commits Colorado (my home state) to an interstate pact, which comes into effect once enough states jump on board to total 270 electoral votes, consigning each state’s electoral franchise to whomever wins the popular vote nationally, regardless of whom the majority of the state’s citizens vote for, rendering the current system entirely irrelevant.
Shortly thereafter, Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., propelled the issue to national prominence by doing away with the subterfuge and embracing the Electoral College’s outright abolition.
Abandonment of the Electoral College in favor of the
popular vote has become a cause du jour among the Left, ostensibly for
reasons of democratic purity. To be fair, Democrats eponymously maintain
a rather fanatical affection for untrammeled suffrage (though, as
others have pointed out, the popular vote would seldom, if ever,
actually result in a president elected by a majority, but rather by a
plurality of voters). In any case, one suspects a more strictly
political catalyst: Would the Democrats' enthusiasm for the popular vote
be as strong had the 2016 election turned out differently?
The institution that perhaps most frustrates liberal designs is the state. Accordingly, the principle of federalism has been under assault in one form or another for about a century. The erosion of the 10th Amendment to virtual irrelevance and the federal pre-emption of the majority of both tax dollars and governing duties has steadily atrophied the states in favor of centralization. The Electoral College remains one of the final bulwarks reminding us that states are, well, independent states, and not mere provinces or subdivisions of the federal government.
It’s an important distinction, one which makes the founders' efforts all the more impressive. The system for electing the president that was eventually agreed upon — each state receiving a number of electoral votes equaling their two senators and however many representatives their population grants them — is sheer constitutional genius, placing each state on initially equal footing while not entirely disenfranchising the major population centers.
Absent the Electoral College, smaller states (basically all but New York, California, Texas, and Florida, which together make up about a third of the nation’s population) lose pretty much any sway they might have over a presidential contest. Enabling the states to elect the union’s chief executive, via the Electoral College, serves as a check on political dominance by the unbridled popular whim of major urban concentrations. The despotic excesses of the French Revolution convinced the architects of the American republic that even democracy needed restraint.
There is yet hope. A growing number in Colorado recognize the political and systemic danger of diluting their vote in the national popular pool. Rose Pugliese, the impressive and talented Mesa County commissioner, and the mayor of the Town of Monument, Don Wilson, are spearheading an effort to put the question to Colorado’s voters on next year’s ballot, as to the wisdom of ceding the state’s electoral votes to the national plurality.
It is, yes, somewhat ironic that democratic action is required to protect a check on absolutist democracy; but the startling momentum Pugliese’s effort is generating indicates that people might just still retain a sense of the uniqueness and inspired brilliance of the system their founders vouchsafed them.
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