I anticipate some caterwauling this election from the Democrats again about the Electoral College. Here is part two of an ongoing series on reasons that we still need the Electoral College.
Reason The Second: It Requires Candidates To Make Their Pitch To Large Parts Of The Country
The EC forces candidates to craft policies that appeal to large sections of the country, not just to one or two cities. It also forces them to visit large sections of the country. If we had a popular vote system, candidates would quite logically spend all of their time in NY, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, LA, and Seattle. They would do this for the same reason that you rake your leaves into one big pile before bagging them instead of wandering the yard with a sack, bending over to pick up each individual leaf: transaction costs. When people are grouped together, it is much easier, faster, and cheaper to pander to them.
Make one stop in NYC and you have access to 10 million voters. To do the same in rural states you would have to make more like 100 stops, with large distances between each stop. It’s a lot cheaper per-person to advertise in NYC than it is to advertise in a fifteen-state region. The electoral college makes those 100 stops a lot more attractive to the candidates, because each stop represents a couple of electoral votes.
Even if a state doesn’t have many electoral votes, the candidate generally tries to hit it at least once, because if his opponent wins, she gets a small but meaningful boost. In a popular contest, no such incentive applies. You don’t really care that your opponent got 90,000 votes in Rhode Island and you only got 80,000; you will make that up with one photo op in Greenwich Village. The electoral system makes that 10,000 vote margin worth 3 EC votes, and you can’t really afford to just blow off any particular state. It’s better to forget about running up the score in NYC and start bolstering your support in other parts of the nation.
