Posted on 01/08/2013 7:16:16 AM PST by SeekAndFind
If votes in every state were awarded by congressional district, President-elect Romney would be planning his inauguration right now.
According to the Cook Political Report, Mitt Romney won roughly about 52 percent of the congressional districts.
Currently, all states except for Maine and Nebraska award electoral votes on a winner-takes-all basis. Long-term, that looks like a worrisome trend for the GOP. Several formerly red strongholds, including Georgia and Arizona, are becoming more Democratic. Still, demographics are not destiny and if Republicans succeed in winning over more Hispanics than they have in recent years, for instance, these states could well remain red.
If states stop awarding votes on a winner-take-all basis, Republicans could also win — and without necessarily getting more votes. Determining Electoral College voting by congressional districts represents one obvious opportunity for Republicans: In that scenario, the effect of urban Democratic strongholds (such as those Philadelphia precincts where Obama was supported by 99 percent of voters) would be isolated. Instead of shifting the entire state’s electoral votes, those precincts would only influence their congressional districts.
Fair Vote, an organization that advocates switching the presidential-election process to a national popular vote, analyzed six possible new scenarios in six swing states that went blue this year despite having Republican state legislatures and governors. (They were Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, and Florida.) In two of the scenarios — proportional and a slight variation on proportional — Obama still would have won, despite the proportional awarding of votes in those six states.
But if votes had been awarded by congressional districts, Romney would have won in two of three scenarios. In the first situation, in which most of the electoral votes were awarded based on congressional-district outcomes but two of them were given to the candidate who had won the most votes overall in the state, Obama narrowly edged out Romney, with 270 votes to Romney’s 268. But in the other two scenarios — in which two electoral votes were awarded proportionally, or to whichever candidate had won the most congressional districts (not votes) — Romney would have won. In the first case, the final national electoral count would have been 274 for Romney and 264 for Obama; in the second, 280 for Romney and 258 for Obama.
In other words, if 44 states and D.C. kept their policies exactly the same, Republican state legislators in these particular six states could still succeed in paving a much easier path for a GOP presidential candidate by changing the way electoral votes are awarded.
Whether there is genuine — and sustainable — interest in doing that is another matter. According to Michigan-based Gownger News Service, state representative Peter Lund, a Republican, will re-introduce this year in the state legislature his bill to award electoral votes by congressional district. In Pennsylvania in December, state senate majority leader Dominic Pileggi said he wants to start distributing the electoral votes proportionally. “Senior Republicans say they will try to leverage their party’s majorities in Democratic-leaning states in an effort to end the winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes,” National Journal’s Reid Wilson reported last month. ”Instead, bills that will be introduced in several Democratic states would award electoral votes on a proportional basis.”
Another way Republicans could overcome their disadvantage, as the number of red states shrinks, would be to embrace the national popular vote. Having a national popular vote would lead to entirely different campaigns — think far fewer stops in Ohio, and far more in partisan strongholds like California and Texas — which could potentially swing voters who are more inclined to thoughtlessly vote the party line when they perceive their vote as not counting. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan GOP chair and a consultant to the National Popular Vote organization, argues that switching the system to a popular vote would also make it significantly harder to commit fraud that would swing presidential elections. Instead of having to affect tens of thousands of votes in a swing state, he observes, the candidate would now have to fraudulently obtain millions of votes across the country.
Whether it’s politically prudent for Republicans to push any of these measures is unclear, much less whether it’s a good idea on principle. But for those frustrated over 2012’s results, it might be worth thinking about whether it’s time to overhaul the system itself.
— Katrina Trinko is an NRO reporter.
Completely wrong. 70% with two page ballot.
100% of all votes in numerous counties nationwide voted for Obambi
Wrong again. Those were black precincts with 100% Obama votes. There were 59 (about 10% of black precincts or divisions) in Philly that made 100% although more than that tried to. It is true that Romney should have gotten 5 or 10 votes in each of those but did not. But it would have made no difference.
If you are on welfare (IE: A Ward of the state or country), your right to vote is rescinded until such time as you are a producer, not a taker.
In this way, those who are on the government dole do not have a say in maintaining and increasing their own largess, and politicians will stop playing to them as they would no longer be a voter-block that they can buy with OPM (ours, the producers).
Romney could NOT have won. He was, after all, Romney. In fact, what is being said here is that someone else could have won. With that I agree. However, NOT Romney. I said that back in the early Primaries that Romney would lose in a landslide and take the Senate & House down with him. While I was a bit off on the House, anyone with a lick of sense could see that Romney was going to get slaughtered.
Some good points here but it could turn around and bite you just as well.
I am sure it has been mentioned here before but I got to thinking this AM how many ‘fence straddlers’ didn’t vote because ‘WE’ were duped into thinking Romney had a huge lead and BO was faltering?
When you think about it, the Dems didn’t panic as BO’s #’s were supposedly going down and with the ‘conspiratorial’ theory - MAYBE they knew something and figured no sense showing concern??
It (supposedly) happened in FL when the state was called and people just didn’t leave the house to vote for Bush - in the part of the state he was strongest overall.
Works until some additional governors from the D side are elected and house districts get gerrymandered more to the D side than to the R side as they are now.
Those who think the problem is only a process problem are deluding themselves.
Democrats have eliminated the problem of Republicans attracting more Hispanics by opening the border and assuring more Hispanics will come. Republicans are beaten by simple math and the grind of being on the low side of a percentage. The Republican Party needs to concentrate its efforts on winning state and local elections to buttress itself against the single party control of the Democrats nationally.
Yet another story about “How To Fix The Republican Party’s Issues” that doesn’t use a key word.
“Conservatism”.
It is the message:
Free stuff (until it runs out)
Stuff you have to work for (but there is plenty)
Which line will be longer?
With everyone fleeing California at some point Congressional seats will be lost as will its electoral affected.
I know! I Know!
Actually be a conservative.
Amen laweeks. You could say it a few more times apparently as well, since nobody seems to notice.
Really, the only things that could help going forward need to address two issues.
The first is to cut down voter fraud.
The second is to reduce media bias.
The only other thing is to hope that things get really bad, I think that is a given however.
Everything else is just bluster.
Unfortunately, not everyone is fleeing. We have a huge population of illegals, and so we’ll probably see a somewhat stable population. Also, stories today are talking about how California is getting older.
It will be interesting to see what happens, but electoral votes by Congressional District is a good idea.
The population is so low in those counties they don't matter all that much.
Romney losing women in the DC suburbs was of far greater importance.
There were precincts in Utah with 100% Romney votes, as well.
The problem was the GOP nominating a Socialist-statist fraud like Willard in the first place.
If chess was a contact sport, I'd win more often.
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