Electoral College Insanity: Florida Edition
Trump is significantly outpeforming his 2020 results in New York and Florida. It doesn't matter.
A couple-day-old report by Nate Cohn, “A Florida Poll That Should Change the Way You Look at the Election,” is yet another data point in how strange our method of electing Presidents is. The first several paragraphs highlight that the latest NYT/Sienna poll shows Donald Trump with a staggering 13-point lead in his now-home state of Florida and argues that, despite this being wildly different from what other polls are showing, we should believe it.
That, really, is neither here nor there. We’ll know in a month, after all. But here’s the thing that matters:
In a key respect, a big lead for Mr. Trump in Florida doesn’t affect the presidential election much. The state had already drifted off most analysts’ lists of core battleground states; Florida voted for Mr. Trump by more than three percentage points in 2020. And in the winner-take-all Electoral College, it doesn’t matter if you win Florida by four points or 13 points — either way, you get all the state’s 30 electoral votes.
Intellectually, of course, we all know this. With the minimal exceptions of Maine and Nebraska, all the states and the District of Columbia award their entire Electoral slate to the popular vote winner in that state, regardless of margin. That Trump is doing considerably better in Florida (which, those of us of a certain age will recall was the crucial state in determining the 2000 election and thus the swingiest of the swing states) than the last two cycles is completely irrelevant to the outcome of the election. And that makes no sense whatsoever in a rational system.
Interestingly, this is not the point Cohn came to make. Rather, he’s seeing further signs of a re-alignment or at least yet more sorting on cultural lines.
If Florida becomes more solidly Republican in 2024, it suggests that the upheaval during and after the pandemic has had a lasting effect on American politics.
This poll, after all, is far from the first indication of Republican strength in the Sunshine State. Republicans won a landslide victory here in the 2022 midterms, as the state was ground zero for the conservative reaction against lockdowns, vaccine mandates and “woke.”
These same issues didn’t do nearly as much to help Republicans elsewhere in the country. In fact, there were other states — like Michigan, Kansas and Pennsylvania — where the backlash against Mr. Trump’s stop-the-steal campaign and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade seemed to outweigh them and propelled decisive Democratic victories.
Which makes sense on one level—Ron Desantis is Florida’s governor after all—but shows the impermanence of the blueness or redness of a given state. Both the ideological tenor of the parties and the demographics of the states change over time. And what appeals to “undecided” voters in the South is going to be different than what appeals to their counterparts in the Rust Belt.
In the short term, though, this means our weirdly undemocratic system is becoming more democratic in practice.
Importantly, the pattern is consistent with the idea that Mr. Trump’s edge in the Electoral College relative to the popular vote has shrunk somewhat since 2020.
A 10-point gain for Mr. Trump in Florida and New York — where Siena College also shows enduring Republican strength, though the state remains safely Democratic — would be enough to shave about one (inefficient) point off Vice President Harris’s lead in the popular vote.
While true in the aggregate, it’s ass-backward in the particular. If it turns out to be true that Trump has gained 10 percentage points in popularity in New York over the last four years, the takeaway isn’t that this will lessen the distortion caused by the Electoral College but rather the opposite. In 2020, 61% of New Yorkers voted for Biden while 38% voted for Trump, so the distortion was that 38%. If, in 2024, it’s 51% Harris, 48% Trump, it would be a distortion of 48%.
We’re talking here about the third (Florida) and fourth (New York) most populous states in the union, combining for 12.5% of the entire US population. That the votes that don’t count in the two largely cancel out is a matter of happenstance, not design.
I saw this same argument on The Bulwark. It just means that in NY fewer peoples votes actually count. It’s as if they think that as long as EC and popular vote are the same all is golden. EC is still a shitshow.
By the way, did you know that they tried to get rid of the EC in 1969. Passed the House, Nixon was going to sign, but got filibustered in the Senate.
I don’t believe those polls, but I so want Harris to win the electoral count, but Trump to win the popular vote, so I kind of hope they are right.
The only way we will get rid of the electoral college is if it is a problem for an everyone. (We’d probably also need a much lower vote count in California — maybe a fire where a large number of absentee ballots are stored)
I think early November is going to distressing (or eyeopening) as the realignment of the parties comes more into focus.
It is interesting that Trump is holding events in CA and NY. Considered a waste of his time, but then if he gets the disillusioned voters in those states out to vote for him, it could be the germ of a shift.
We shall see over the next week as the pollsters who wish to retain some credibility move their polls closer to what is really going to happen. Seems the Harris “advantage” is going to fade as the polls seek to avoid being caught totally out.
@JKB:
In a normal campaign, this would be to boost the down-ballot races, particularly if there is a fundraiser in the area.
Given that it’s Trump, we should also consider that he might be looking to spend campaign money for a trip he has to make for other reasons, that he is hauling back freight in his campaign plane, or that he is just high on his own supply.
I would not give a lot of credence to the NYT poll in Fl. It literally is an outlier poll. The textual definition of the terminology. Nobody else come close to the 13 point lead in that poll. The average is 7, no doubt aided by that poll.
It’s 2024. The pandemic’s effects were first identified in March of 2020. It’s a wee bit too soon to discuss “lasting effects” of the pandemic on American politics.
I’m not sure when the poll was conducted, but I’d be cautious about assessing too much value to polling in a hurricane-hit state–you get weird results post-disasters.
I see no chance that we will ever amend the constitution to delete the electoral college. Right now, the electoral college presents a significant advantage to Republicans, and, therefore, will not get through Congress, and/or be ratified by the states. If that dynamic changes in the future to benefit the Democrats, then the Democrats will preclude a constitutional amendment to delete the electoral college.
In my view, perhaps the best alternative is to go the route of Nebraska and Maine, and allow electoral votes to be allocated by the winner of the individual congressional districts within a state. Each individual state can make that decision for itself. The two electoral votes that correspond to the Senate seats, could go to the winner of the overall vote in the state.
There aren’t “signs” of a realignment, it’s screaming in our faces and has been for a while now.
Absent changing the Constitution to adopt a popular vote system, the next best (and much, much, much easier alternative) is to increase the size of the House.
@Gustopher:
Yes, if Harris got a decisive EC victory and lost the PV, it would be entertaining to see the tribal partisans switch sides. But I agree – reform is difficult in any case, but it’s going to be impossible if it’s seen as, or actually does, benefit one party at the expense of the other.
It’s one reason I keep talking about expanding the House. Each side has something to gain and a bit to lose from that.
@Rob Robinson:
It may be the Democrats would consent to abolish the EC if they won it while losing the popular vote. Partly it would depend on how badly the GQP goes overboard complaining about the result. In 1992, and to a lesser extent in 1996, there was much complain from Republicans that Clinton did not win a majority of the popular vote (he did win more votes that Bush the Elder, Dole, and Perot), adn therefore his presidencies were illegitimate.
A reform allocating votes by Congressional district would require a law to eliminate partisan gerrymandering as well. Otherwise things would be even worse. Like Democrats always winning the popular vote and always losing the Electoral Vote.
I’d favor a proportional allocation of EVs as a compromise, strictly by share of the vote. But I’ve yet to see how that would work in practice, and how to allocate EVs to the small fry parties.
Calling what’s happening a realignment is very polite way of talking about why crime and immigration are salient for Trump voters. It’s not because crime is going up or migrants are eating cats.
With NY, you are getting resentful suburbanites who need to believe that the city is a cesspool. Meanwhile, Harris’ ultra-cool stepdaughter lives in post-trendy Bushwick and does ketamine in places people like them have never been shown. It’s the same dynamic with the divorced guy exodus to Florida, where their kids dutifully visit them in their misery once a year in exchange for money.
There’s something very bad going on with why MAGA appeals to a certain type of person, regardless of race. The fact that it doesn’t spill over in any economic way is telling. It’s just all isolated people being fed the stories they want to hear about ‘chaos’ and believing it because they are resentful and afraid of everything, and it seems unfair that others—especially the ‘elite’ college grads—are comfortable where they are not.
The problem with the Electoral College is that unless you vote for the winner in your state, you vote doesn’t count. At all. It is as if you did not vote at all. A D voter in an R state essentially did not vote. Vice versa.
If you vote for the winner of your state and your state is relatively low population you get two extra EC votes unearned. Gravy on top.
It’s undemocratic. No one’s vote should be meaningless. An R voter voting for Trump in California should count. Currently, it doesn’t. Likewise, a Harris voter in Alabama.
How do you increase voter percentage per pop in a hard lean state? What’s the point if it doesn’t matter?
There should be no weight difference in voting.
Imagine that there was an income weighted voting system. Would that fly?
We have the opposite, kinda, now. Smaller pop states are disproportionately advantaged.
Agitate for, advocate for national popular vote.
The current system is gross disenfranchisement.