Glenn K. Beaton: Dems shooting themselves in foot with Electoral College compact
The Aspen Beat
February 24, 2019
Dems are still smarting from losing the 2016 presidential election by losing the Electoral College.
So they have an idea. Apart from the dubious constitutionality of their idea, it's a bad one which can only help the GOP.
First some background. The Constitution says the president is elected by the Electoral College. The College comprises 538 voters who are allocated as follows: Each state gets two, corresponding to its two senators, plus a number equal to its number of House representatives, plus the District of Columbia gets three.
The effect is that the College voters are spread among the states and D.C. roughly in proportion to population. And so you might think that the College voting would be proportional to the popular vote.
Nope. The kicker is that in nearly all states it's winner-take-all. If the candidates split the popular vote in a state by, say 51 percent to 49 percent, then the College votes in that state are not split proportionately. Instead, the winner of the 51 percent of the popular vote gets 100 percent of the College votes for that state.
That's how President Ronald Reagan ran up a humiliating 525 to 13 College win over Walter Mondale in 1984 — which translates into a 97 percent to 3 percent margin — even though the popular vote margin was only a landslide of 59 percent to 41 percent.
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