In the USA, the president isn’t determined by a straight vote. Instead, each state gets a certain number of Electoral College (EC) votes, and the candidate with 270 EC votes wins.
It’s up to each state to decide how to allocate its EC votes. Most do “winner-takes-all,” but some, e.g., Maine and Nebraska, split them up.
California and Texas have the most EC votes of any state, with 54 and 40 votes respectively, so you would think they would get a lot of love from presidential candidates. Instead, they’re mostly ignored—California will always be Blue, and Texas Red, so what’s the point of pandering to them? This is clearly bad for Californians and Texans as their interests aren’t listened to.
So why doesn’t California switch to a proportional EC vote split? One that would ensure that there’s always something to gain by pandering to Californian interests?
Because most Californians are Democrats, and while a proportional vote split would be good for Californians, it would be bad for Democrats, who in the 2020 election would have lost 20 EC votes—over half of Biden’s margin of 37. All in all, not worth it.
But the same issue impacts Texas too, which, if they’d switched to proportional splitting, would have handed Biden 18 votes.
This suggests an obvious solution: California and Texas should mutually agree to split their vote proportionally. That way, neither Republicans nor Democrats significantly gain, but California and Texas would finally be on the presidential campaign circuit!
How to put California and Texas on the campaign trail!
In the USA, the president isn’t determined by a straight vote. Instead, each state gets a certain number of Electoral College (EC) votes, and the candidate with 270 EC votes wins.
It’s up to each state to decide how to allocate its EC votes. Most do “winner-takes-all,” but some, e.g., Maine and Nebraska, split them up.
California and Texas have the most EC votes of any state, with 54 and 40 votes respectively, so you would think they would get a lot of love from presidential candidates. Instead, they’re mostly ignored—California will always be Blue, and Texas Red, so what’s the point of pandering to them? This is clearly bad for Californians and Texans as their interests aren’t listened to.
So why doesn’t California switch to a proportional EC vote split? One that would ensure that there’s always something to gain by pandering to Californian interests?
Because most Californians are Democrats, and while a proportional vote split would be good for Californians, it would be bad for Democrats, who in the 2020 election would have lost 20 EC votes—over half of Biden’s margin of 37. All in all, not worth it.
But the same issue impacts Texas too, which, if they’d switched to proportional splitting, would have handed Biden 18 votes.
This suggests an obvious solution: California and Texas should mutually agree to split their vote proportionally. That way, neither Republicans nor Democrats significantly gain, but California and Texas would finally be on the presidential campaign circuit!