“I don’t think we need to change the rules of the game, I think we need to get better.”
By So states the (Republican) Speaker of the Florida State House, coming out in opposition to the RNC’s strategy of assigning Electoral College votes by Congressional district in Blue / Red states (Obama states governed by Republican legislatures and executives) — essentially “stealing the White House one gerrymander at a time“. This is something we’ve written about here at LGM, including my bit on the frequency with which such elections would be determined by the House if all 50 states adopted the CD model. Loomis was correct when he suggested that “This is THE political story of the next 4 years.”
According to the TPM story linked above, it looks as though four of the six states most likely to switch to the district model of distributing EC votes won’t. Virginia’s lost 11-4 in a full committee vote. “Key Republican officials” have spoken out against it in Ohio, Michigan, and Florida. That leaves Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Our pal Scott Walker is wavering, according to the TPM piece, and said “because Wisconsin is a battleground state, presidential and vice presidential candidates have an incentive to make repeated campaign stops here. He says he’s wary that changing the system could dissuade candidates from visiting.”
That leaves PA as the most likely of the bunch to convert to a district system. Given the Governor tried it in 2011, and PA has (I believe) the worst translation of votes into seats for its House delegation, I wouldn’t put it past PA to go in that direction. Pressure can still be brought to bear, both through publicizing the issue (it’s electoral theft, albeit constitutional electoral theft) and hopefully cooler heads in the Republican party, both in PA and nationally, will point out the blatant anti-democratic features of this plan.
But we might have won this one for the time being.
UPDATE: Lemieux beat me to it. I blame the two impromptu meetings in my office that happened between starting and finishing this post.
