* ... unless you live in a "battleground state". But there's hope.
My fellow Americans, today we choose the most powerful man in the world for the upcoming quadrennium. Many of you will have chosen to stick with President Barack Obama, while many others will have decided to give former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney a chance at the job. The two will have spent a record amount trying to earn your vote in this election, about $2 billion according to most estimates. Compared against the 130 million votes cast in the 2008 election, that's about $15 in spending for each of us. Or so you would think.
Of course, the reality is far from that. You see, unless you live in one of 9 states, the candidates have done next to nothing to win you over. Whether your state is "strong blue" (reliably Democratic) or "certain red" (reliably Republican) on election day, neither Obama nor Romney has held rallies there, run many (if any) TV ads you've seen, or really done a thing to convince you they're the best man to lead the country. The good news is those 9 states look somewhat like the country at large. First, Wisconsin and Ohio represent the industrial Midwest. Then, Colorado and Nevada, examples of the gradual-yet-certain shift away from an America that was nearly 90% white as late as 1940 but is today only 63% populated with non-Hispanic whites. That shift is like a tectonic demographic earthquake that started in California (which became "majority-minority" in 2000) but it's heading east.
Virginia and North Carolina represent the eastern seaboard; they were breakthroughs for the president in 2008. This time around, they figure to be more competitive. Again, the racial dynamic is at play as Obama is expected to garner 90% of the black vote, a significant majority among Latinos, and to be thumped by Romney among white voters. There are representatives of the small states (New Hampshire and Iowa), and one of the largest, Florida, which arguably is all the phenomena discussed above in microcosm. The one critical common element across all of them: In a country where most states have become more Republican or Democratic, they have stubbornly clung to a more even split among the major parties. Mostly, that's just a coincidence of geography.
And the other 41 states worth of us who have dare to get "bluer" or "redder"? The candidates' response amounts to "Not so much."
This contest is expected to be decided by a razor-thin margin in not just the popular vote but the infamous Electoral College too. We've seen squeakers several times in recent elections: George W. Bush vs. Al Gore was decided not by Gore's 500,000 vote-margin nationally, but instead by about 500 votes in Florida and less than 400 in New Mexico. Had the Bush campaign won over a small town's worth of voters in the Land of Enchantment, the Florida recount and the Supreme Court intervention would not have mattered at all. In 2004, John Kerry lost by 3 million votes nationally. But had he convinced just 60,000 of Bush's Ohio voters to select him instead, Kerry would have been elected president.
Close elections didn't always work this way. A New York Times story titled "The Vanishing Battleground" opens with a brief recalling of the close Kennedy-Nixon race 52 years ago:
IN the razor-thin 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy campaigned in 49 states. Richard M. Nixon visited all 50.
Our candidates in 2012 managed to visit one-fifth as many despite each having access to state-of-the-art aircraft. Carl Cannon summed it up nicely at Real Clear Politics:
"Never has so much money been spent,” Obama pollster Joel Benenson told RCP, “in pursuit of so small a group of voters.” Not all that long ago, this country held presidential elections in which the two major party tickets had to compete, and win, in the populous states of California, Texas, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.
The reality is that the Electoral College has become its own sort of deterministic destroyer of the voting power of nearly all Americans in states red and blue, large and small. Romney has millions of supporters in California but no incentive to try to find a million more in the Central Valley here. Obama has -- believe it or not -- millions of Texans casting votes for him. Yet, he too has no reason to try to motivate the "nth" Austin resident to come out and vote.
But Wyoming, Montana, Hawaii and Vermont all get ignored as well -- red and blue alike. The idea that the Electoral College is preserving the "power" of those small states flies in the face of everything we know to be true. There is no way those states could have less influence than they do now. They are safe for one candidate or the other -- mostly the Republican -- but cannot determine the winner. Imagine, by contrast, a world in which the popular vote counts. Take an election like 2000's -- with it's half-million vote margin -- and perhaps Bush recognizing how close it was going to be. He could actually campaign across the Dakotas, Oklahoma, Utah and Arkansas, where some of his most fervent support resided, and encourage people to make sure their neighbors get to the polls and vote Bush. Across enough small states, 500,000 votes might decide a close election.
What those small states will never do is decide any election in the current system. Since they are "banked" by the candidates before the campaign even begins, the race for the White House is fought elsewhere. In this case, elsewhere also doesn't include the pre-determined deep blue and deep red states either, e.g. Texas, California, New York, Tennessee.
So we are left with this current reality: Roughly 25 million of the 130 million votes come from "battleground states" and decide the presidency. The rest of us -- north of 100 million voters -- amount to window dressing. Surely there must be a better way.
And there is. The National Popular Vote was conceived by angry Democrats in 2000 after Gore's popular-vote win translated into early retirement from politics. It effectively performs an "end-around" to amending the Constitution by guaranteeing the White House goes to whichever candidate wins the most total votes on Election Day. If states representing at least 270 electoral votes approve this interstate "compact", National Popular Vote becomes law as it meets the requirements laid out in Article II and the 12th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
At the 2012 Republican National Convention, the party explicitly rejected this idea in its platform. I have no idea why. The demographic tsunami in the U.S. may be slow moving, but it's arrival on all shores is most certain. Republicans sometimes take solace in having turned once blue states red, like West Virginia. And there is some possibility that the industrial Midwest could be competitive in the future (think: Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota) along with Pennsylvania. But Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina put it best: ""We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term."
He was speaking broadly, of course, but he's doubtless aware that reliably red states like Texas, Arizona, Georgia are certain to become more competitive as their minority populations increase. Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada are likely to become reliably blue in future elections. North Carolina and Virginia are turning disturbingly purple for the GOP's tastes -- and over time it can only get worse in that regard. The percentage of the total vote cast by whites will fall about 2% every presidential cycle.
While the party's message has been effective at the state level, garnering many governorships and control of many statehouses as well, its long-term hope of getting a new resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is currently predicated on somehow eventually appealing to more Latinos and Asian-Americans. And, look, the future is hazy; it could certainly happen. If we're sitting here in 1956, we probably would not have anticipated the Democratic hold on the "solid south" disappearing in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But demographics are destiny here. The population shifts are coming no matter how far the anti-immigrant sentiment gets in border states. Further, people will flow among and between the states, changing their electoral vote power. Whether those states are then "in play" during an election, however, is a matter of happenstance. Until the system gets fixed so that everyone's vote matters equally no matter where they live, most people will be ignored. Sometimes, neighbors on one side of the state line will matter, while others can only spectate.
So far, 8 states and the District of Columbia have approved National Popular Vote. Each is "true blue" and together they represent 132 electoral votes. In Rhode Island and Colorado, the law passed both houses of the state legislature and in 10 other states it has passed one house. Together, those represent another 109 electoral votes. It's safe to say this is a good ways from becoming the de facto law of the land unless some mavericks in both parties get on board to make it happen. It shouldn't take a reverse of 2000 -- Republican loses to Democrat while winning more total votes -- to make it so, however. All one really needs is some enlightened self-interest mixed with some common sense. If you are concerned that there is even some chance Republican presidents might be an endangered species in the near future or just downright angry that the votes in 41 states don't matter, let your state legislators know.
Otherwise, we'll keep reconvening every four years so that 80% of us can cast a meaningless vote on Election Day while a small fortunate few pick the president. The choice is ours.
