{"id":2447392,"date":"2019-08-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-11T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=311031"},"modified":"2019-08-12T10:30:58","modified_gmt":"2019-08-12T16:30:58","slug":"glenn-k-beaton-many-journalists-dont-understand-the-electoral-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/glenn-k-beaton-many-journalists-dont-understand-the-electoral-college\/","title":{"rendered":"Glenn K. Beaton: Many journalists don\u2019t understand the Electoral College"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Forget about the Rooskies, plastic straws and gender-based pronouns. The latest boogieman\/boogie-womyn\/boogie-etc for the Democrats is the Electoral College.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s of course the system where each state gets electoral votes in rough proportion to its population. The electoral votes are then cast in accordance with state law for presidential candidates. A candidate needs 270 to win the presidency.<\/p>\n

In almost all states, it\u2019s winner-take-all. Whichever candidate wins the most votes in a state gets all that state\u2019s electoral votes.<\/p>\n

This winner-take-all system chosen by the states can produce a president who did not win the most votes nationwide. This happens if one candidate wins by large margins in some states while the other candidate wins by small margins in other states. This happened in 2016 when Hillary Clinton won landslides in some states, but Donald Trump won narrowly in others.<\/p>\n

The Electoral College is the system enshrined in the Constitution (remember that?) by the founders. They rejected a system of electing presidents through a nationwide vote. They wanted sovereign states united by a federal government. It\u2019s called Federalism, and it has served us well.<\/p>\n

But the Electoral College is under attack by Democrats ever since Trump won with 304 votes to Clinton\u2019s 227. State sovereignty is out of fashion with the Dems except on certain favored issues like illegal immigration.<\/p>\n

Aware that they could never get a Constitutional amendment passed to abolish the Electoral College, the Dems are instead scheming to nullify it with a pact among the states. Their scheme is probably a violation of the Constitutional prohibition (ah, that pesky Constitution again!) on interstate compacts, but we won\u2019t know that for sure until the Supreme Court says so.<\/p>\n

Federalism in general is a good thing to debate, as the Founders did. But some of the partisan attacks on the Electoral College are simply wrong on the facts. To wit:<\/p>\n

It is not true that the Electoral College favors small states, as some journalists contend. Electoral College votes are in proportion to state population, aside from a small error introduced by allowing each state a vote corresponding to its two senators (another aspect of Federalism). Montana, Delaware and Wyoming each has only three votes and Rhode Island has four, while California has 55, New York has 29 and Texas has 36.<\/p>\n

It also is not true that the Electoral College necessarily favors Republicans, as some journalists have wrongly claimed. What it may favor are the voters in states where the vote is close. Hillary won Maryland and its 10 votes by a landslide, while Trump won Wisconsin and its matching 10 votes by a sliver. An argument can be made, therefore, that each Wisconsin vote was more important than each Maryland vote in the sense that more of the Maryland votes were unneeded \u201cexcess\u201d ones.<\/p>\n

But a similar result obtains if we were to elect the president with a nationwide popular vote. All the votes for the winner in excess of the votes received by the losing candidate plus one vote, are unneeded \u201cexcess\u201d votes.<\/p>\n

In any event, the party affiliation of the voters has no bearing on this phenomenon. It can go either way, and in any given election it does. For example, Trump won Texas by a landslide, but still earned only 36 Electoral College votes \u2014 the same as if he\u2019d won it by a single vote. A large number of Texas votes for Trump therefore wound up unneeded \u201cexcess\u201d ones.<\/p>\n

And finally, it is not true that the Electoral College somehow favors conservative rural voters at the expense of progressive urban ones as some liberal media outlets claim. To the contrary, an urban vote counts for exactly the same as a rural one. In California, the vote of a San Franciscan counts the same as the vote of a farmer in the Central Valley. The vote of a Floridian counts the same whether he\u2019s in a Miami condo or a panhandle orange grove.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that in 2016 each of those California votes wound up less important than each Florida vote. But that\u2019s not because the Florida votes were rural and the California votes were urban. It\u2019s because the vote in Florida was close while the vote in California was not.<\/p>\n

The lesson for voters who want their votes to be important is this. Make your state purple, not red or blue. Candidates don\u2019t waste time campaigning in California or Texas, because those states are already in the bag. But they do campaign in Ohio and Florida, because those states can go either way.<\/p>\n

Your state can be purple by being receptive to candidates from the other tribe. A purple state is a close state, and the votes in a close state are important.<\/p>\n

To be fair, I think most journalists don\u2019t intend to deceive in their reporting on the effects of the Electoral College (though I think the Dem politicians do, because it gins up their base).<\/p>\n

Rather, I think many journalists simply lack the care and acumen to translate the Electoral College system into the Electoral College consequences. That\u2019s unfortunate.<\/p>\n

Correspond and subscribe at theAspenbeat@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Forget about the Rooskies, plastic straws and gender-based pronouns. The latest boogieman\/boogie-womyn\/boogie-etc for the Democrats is the Electoral College. That\u2019s of course the system where each state gets electoral votes in rough proportion to its population. The electoral votes are then cast in accordance with state law for presidential candidates. A candidate needs 270 to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2447392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-21 19:20:12","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2447392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2447433,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447392\/revisions\/2447433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2447392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2447392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2447392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}