This whole column is invalid in the face of the fact that Trump does not owe his win to the Electoral College, seeing as he won the popular vote and Democrats finally can't use that particular whinge about how they shoulda-coulda-woulda won if only NYC and a few metros in California got to outvote everyone else.
Also, Trump's one and only opponent of note (because the big problem is FPTP voting, not the Electoral College, else Trump would have more than one opponent of note) was Harris, who when she finally deigned to express an economic policy, dribbled out something about "price controls" and "tax unrealized capital gains" which is also what you'd say if you were actively looking for a short list of policies economists agree are *even worse than tariffs*.
And frankly, globalization has been terrible for everyone but the very top income bracket in the USA. It's just that Trump is an idiot chaos monkey, and his approach to protectionism and even to tariffs in particular is bad.
The point of the column is that anti-trade narratives are more prominent in our dialogue than they should be because those narratives play well in battleground states.
I made sure that this column was a non-paywalled one specifically so that people wouldn’t make this misinterpretation and it still didn’t work.
If this "misunderstanding" was so predictable, why not explicitly address it in the column and get out in front of it? Then we could more quickly move on to the fact that anti-trade rhetoric played well in a lot of other places because globalization has not been good to us in most places.
"Why not explicitly address it in the column and get out in front of it?"
Why not make a counter argument to the counter argument to an argument I didn't make? Well I guess because if I devote column inches counterting arguments that people imagine I perhaps COULD have made (but didn't), then every column would be only that.
Globalization has been quite good for us in most places, our economy during the era of globalization (last 30 years or so) has been growing quickly, unemployment has been low, prices have been low, the combination of these factors has led to steady upward growth in median wages.
I'd also add that trade is better than everyone shooting high tech weaponry at each other. There seems to be a correlation...and anyone, please, feel free to contradict me on this...between slow or no trade and people shooting at each other.
Track the times throughout history when civilizations "fell apart", and those times correlate tightly with protectionist anti-trade initiatives, i.e., not going global.
Yeah, a bunch of them. They're all in a TED talk about "How Civilizations Fall Apart"...or some such title, which I can't find in my Youtube stack right now. I'm in Wuhan, it's about 1am here, and I'm going to sleep.
I've gotten tired of TED talks, but this one was enlightening. Summary being, when trade stops, the shooting starts and everything goes to shit.
That statement is true to some degree (Political truths are like that sometimes), I just think that if we removed the EC and went to some other system of voting, that would just create a different set of incentives guiding and shaping political rhetorical choices. There is a stone cold truth that in a NPV, concerns of California and New York would ride high and feds would promise lots of investment in subways and large urban planning projects and those concerns would quickly become outsized to the number of people who would benefit for them. I dont mind that any system of elections has consequences.
One of the great things an election does is reveal the competence and discernment of the candidates to respond and adapt their messages to reach voters. I just look at elections in say Germany and France, (And England and Canada and South Korea) and see how unsettled and difficult those places have found it to even form a government, let alone an effective one that advances their national interests, and then say a prayer for the wisdom of the founders.
The history of America has shown how the list of what is a swing state has constantly evolved. Colorado and Missouri used to be very swingy and now aren't. Give it fifty years and they might come back.
Enough tosh about throwing out the electoral college. It has its quirks but it also is probably the best and providing definitive answers to "Who is in charge around here?". I get the feeling you dont like Trump all that much (it is a theme I am beginning to detect in your recent writings) but he clearly won and the system of elections delivered us certainty so that policy could begin to be shaped. Again, I understand you dont like the policies but at least you know that Democrats had a chance to alter this outcome, they just chose to take actions that almost assured Trump a victory (coronating Kamala without delay and before that looking the other way as Bidens pudding brains leaked all over the White House.).
Talking about winning the popular vote is like talking about who killed more pieces in a game of chess. It doesn't matter. Only the king matters, and that drives how chess is played. If chess had different rules, it would be a very different game.
You know who really deserves the blame for the current situation? Congress. They have completely abdicated their responsibility for legislating by delegating legislative-like powers to the executive.
Not much that Trump is doing doesn't have at least the veneer (thin, mismatched, and peeling off in some places, sure) of legality through some legislation such as the Alien Enemies Act and the Emergency Economic Powers Act.
And, the cynic in me says that despite the performative wailing, rending of garments, and talking and talking and talking and talking for 24 hours straight for no apparent reason and no discernable effect, the Democrats actually appreciate how Trump is behaving because they can use it as a test case for when they get back in power.
Yes. Although, I'd put the Senate first in line before Congress because the scum could've voted for impeachment, which every one of them knew was the correct method for dealing with that asshole, and they DIDN'T DO IT.
Broadly agreed with everything here—especially the idea that tanking the global economy is bad, even if like thirty autoworkers benefit—but I'm from Michigan, and want to very briefly defend the idea that it's been HOLLOWED OUT.
My uncle came into town the other day (we live in Ann Arbor, which is basically San-Mateo-but-the-Midwest). He got an uber from the airport, his driver was from Saginaw, and they had a conversation. What sub-four unemployment looks like, in the post-autoworker age, is a bunch of men with shitty jobs (fry cook, janitor, uber driver, etc.) who are often late to work and get fired every month or two. (Because the work doesn't feel fulfilling? Maybe. Because they're making worse money doing less interesting things than their fathers, who had worked in the factories? Yes, I think.) Eventually, their high school girlfriends (with whom they had four kids by the age of 20) get tired of it, go on welfare, and leave them. The kids grow up poor without decent father figures, the fathers are saddled with child support even if they eventually do hold down a job, and the city keeps on spiraling toward ruin.
Also see "Allentown," by Billy Joel.
None of this is really trade's fault—automation is a big factor—and probably very little of it will be solved by the tariffs—poverty culture is a hardy weed, or something—but the grievances are extremely real, and cities like Saginaw and Flint truly are super-duper hollowed out nowadays.
You jumped from weekly to monthly wages. That Trenton story says weekly so assuming the Petroleum number is also weekly, that bumps your inflation adjusted yearly salary to ~90k. That's solidly white collar middle class wages currently, and often are jobs requiring a master's degree today, unlike manufacturing jobs that asked only for a high school diploma.
I suppose this all seems right to me, but there's obviously something a lot more degrading about cleaning vomit out of a McDonald's bathroom. Telling aggrieved people, "STOP BEING AGGRIEVED, YOU IDIOT!" generally doesn't work so well. I think it's ok to have compassion for communities that feel emptier and more purposeless than they used to, while *also* saying that, realistically, tariffs and manufacturing are not a good way to introduce meaning and prosperity.
People worship Henry Ford here. The hospitals are named after him. It's just part of the culture in a weird and intractable way.
I'm arguing right now with a guy on another substack who says "lol men can't compete in the modern economy and are crying about it." Which I guarantee is not my position.
Someone *does* have to clean vomit out of the McDonald's bathroom, and everyone saying "as long as it's some other person" doesn't work.
There's a lot of jobs men see as "women's work" and won't do, which is partially on men but also partially on women who don't like men who do women's work.
Just tossing a thought out... OK, who SHOULD get the deciding votes? Caifornia? NY? Florida?!? Somehow, I don't feel like that's right either.
OK, wait...a lightning bolt just struck....What if the Dems hadn't lied to us about prune juice brains being as dynamic as a stud bull, or put up someone other than THE WEAKEST FUCKING CANDIDATE IMAGINABLE?
Yeah, speaking as a Dem myself, that really WAS a shitty election strategy. Can’t argue with the logic (although the Electoral College, a vestigial anachronism of the antebellum America must go).
Agree on the Electoral College going away... That said, one might think the Dems would take something like the EC into account, which they did not. There was a single metric, which was grabbed by the self named "colored girls" and one Jim Clyburn who, in typical Dem fashion decided it was their turn, and woe be anyone who might suggest that Kamala was a losing proposition, let alone her empty headed campaign of "Joy!" If one can't run a campaign, now does one run a country?
And they lost to TRUMP, fer chrissakes. TRUMP. The whole shebangabang was a good argument against democracy.
The electoral college was agreed to by the 13 original states unanimously. It was put in place because small states feared they would be marginalized by a few large states (like NY). It IS the law of the land.
Every subsequent state that joined the union agreed to follow the constitution, and agreed to the electoral college.
The concerns of the states are still valid today. It takes 34 states to ratify an amendment, the Ds won 19 in the last election. It’s not going to happen.
I understand the Electoral College. It’s a problem, but wouldn’t be if the Dems hadn’t lied to us about Joe, and then when the truth became unavoidable, pivoted to possibly the worst candidate imaginable because appearances are all that matter to the Dems.
Love the column Jeff but have to disagree. It sort of just assumes that non-democratic party voters in solid blue states simply wouldn't vote. This cuts both ways. There are plenty of people in say, NY state, who don't bother voting in presidential elections because they say "what's the point?". Regardless, in this case, nominating Harris as their candidate was disastrous. She's probably the only person (yes, I think Biden would have won) who could have managed to lose to the incompetent buffoon currently in the white house.
While I share Jeff's disdain for Biden picking Harris https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/hey-you-cant-double-destroy-your the deck was stacked massively against all incumbent parties worldwide, and particularly for those that had presided over large rises in inflation.
Foreigners get it too: a French politician is on the record saying (paraphrasing from memory) that his country can't "make our national security and alliances depend every four years on a handful of voters in Wisconsin."
Worse than the electoral college is the two party system. In any voting scheme where we'd be allowed to vote for more than one presidential candidate, Trump would likely have lost to a more moderate candidate in 2016, and CERTAINLY would have lost in 2024 given his unpopularity and the disgust that moderate conservatives now hold for him.
Score voting would give us the maximum ability to express our preferences, and stop every collection from being between a bad candidate and a terrible one.
Love you, but Trump won a majority, however slim, of the popular vote. It wasn't the electoral college this time. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hate the mess, but at least the market is up today. Maybe we'll get back to normal. ha ha ha
Now, I only did a quick search and then used the first result I found, so I think you and I can agree that this is the finest, most rigorous research. But one problem with your argument is that swing states change from election to election, and based on the evidence, a lot are non-Midwestern states:
The other issue is that by singling out the EC for blame, you implicitly endorse an election by popular vote... but then the same coastal cities would ALWAYS control the election. In other words, the most obvious alternative would make the problem worse, not better. Unless, of course, those cities were ever ACTUALLY hollowed out.
I do tend to agree with your overall premise, though -- there's no political hay to be made from telling your voters they want the wrong things. But that seems to be more a weakness of Democracy in general than an indictment of our system specifically. Are you aware of any cases where, "I know that's what you want, but this is what you need," has actually worked for a candidate?
Rust Belt states are not the only swing states, but for the past few decades, they have been a disproportionate share of the swing states. Pennsylvania has been a swing state in every election this century, same is basically true for Michigan and Wisconsin (those were less close when Obama was winning big), Ohio used to be a swing state and Minnesota is sometimes in play.
If we didn't have the Electoral College, then everyone's vote would count the same. If more people care about an issue, then that issue would be more important in the election. The coastal cities would not control the election -- the places with people (including places like Texas and Florida) would control the election.
Truth be told, Trump also won the popular vote. “Donald Trump received approximately 49.8% of the popular vote in the 2024 election. His total was about 77.3 million votes compared to Kamala Harris's 75 million votes, which accounted for around 48.4%.
I think Jeff's larger point is that our electoral system (and the swing states it produces) drives campaign messaging and, in the case of Trump, actual policy.
I agree but isn't this sort of tautological? Election system "x" tends to drive election messaging in a certain way? I don't want NY and CA being the sole decider of elections either. I don't have a ready solution but there are compromises in every system.
If it was based on the national popular vote, *every vote would count the same*, by definition. NY *as a state* would only have more influence in an *absolute* sense because there are *more NYers* than, eg, North Dakotans.
By the logic and spirit of one person one vote, you know, democracy - that thing everyone loves until the electoral college benefits them and then it's like "oh we're not a democracy we're a republic" - by the spirit of that thing: what are you even arguing for? Geographical area let alone *state count* isn't equivalent to population; don't be fooled.
The way it is now, no, your vote in NY doesn't count, or it only counts in the sense that if everybody decided it didn't count and didn't vote than suddenly it would count, but that's not going to happen so no, it doesn't count.
Under an NPV system, the bang for your buck as a campaign would be highest where the populations are densest, which would result in urban agglomerations like NYC and LA getting disproportionate attention from campaigns and consequently catering national policy to their parochial concerns in much the same way Maurer says the EC results in undue consideration to the Rust Belt.
Maybe that leads to better overall policy outcomes--it certainly provides more incentive for the GOP to develop infrastructure for competing in big cities, which would probably moderate them on all kinds of issues--but it's still a predictable tradeoff.
There probably would be a strong county and neighborhood/precent level analysis of swing districts just like there is today (but expanded nationwide). Neighborhoods that vote 90% for one party for past 4 elections aren't getting many visits unless they are full of donors. My guess is that there are something like 20 large suburban areas that account for a plurality of the swing vote.
There would be more focus by campaigns on the ground in cities and to a lesser extent in airwaves. But at the end of the day, a vote is a vote. Every vote would be equal. That is so much more important.
The senate already exists as DEI for less populated areas of the United States. Let the presidency be one person one vote.
Yes, the Rust Belt was "hollowed out," whether by trade or automation, it makes no difference. From 1990 to today, employment in industry has collapsed, with less than half the number of employees today. You made the point in another article that the share of GDP has remained the same, and that is true, but most of the workers lost their jobs, and there is a political consequence to that.
This article fails to address how badly Middle America has been decimated by globalization. (There's probably a better way to phrase that).
how about: hollowed out?
It’s been concavified. Become circumvacumitory. Totally enechoed. Besucked.
This whole column is invalid in the face of the fact that Trump does not owe his win to the Electoral College, seeing as he won the popular vote and Democrats finally can't use that particular whinge about how they shoulda-coulda-woulda won if only NYC and a few metros in California got to outvote everyone else.
Also, Trump's one and only opponent of note (because the big problem is FPTP voting, not the Electoral College, else Trump would have more than one opponent of note) was Harris, who when she finally deigned to express an economic policy, dribbled out something about "price controls" and "tax unrealized capital gains" which is also what you'd say if you were actively looking for a short list of policies economists agree are *even worse than tariffs*.
And frankly, globalization has been terrible for everyone but the very top income bracket in the USA. It's just that Trump is an idiot chaos monkey, and his approach to protectionism and even to tariffs in particular is bad.
The point of the column is that anti-trade narratives are more prominent in our dialogue than they should be because those narratives play well in battleground states.
I made sure that this column was a non-paywalled one specifically so that people wouldn’t make this misinterpretation and it still didn’t work.
If this "misunderstanding" was so predictable, why not explicitly address it in the column and get out in front of it? Then we could more quickly move on to the fact that anti-trade rhetoric played well in a lot of other places because globalization has not been good to us in most places.
Nothing to say to the rest?
"Why not explicitly address it in the column and get out in front of it?"
Why not make a counter argument to the counter argument to an argument I didn't make? Well I guess because if I devote column inches counterting arguments that people imagine I perhaps COULD have made (but didn't), then every column would be only that.
Globalization has been quite good for us in most places, our economy during the era of globalization (last 30 years or so) has been growing quickly, unemployment has been low, prices have been low, the combination of these factors has led to steady upward growth in median wages.
I'd also add that trade is better than everyone shooting high tech weaponry at each other. There seems to be a correlation...and anyone, please, feel free to contradict me on this...between slow or no trade and people shooting at each other.
Track the times throughout history when civilizations "fell apart", and those times correlate tightly with protectionist anti-trade initiatives, i.e., not going global.
That's an interesting thought...do you have some examples in mind?
Yeah, a bunch of them. They're all in a TED talk about "How Civilizations Fall Apart"...or some such title, which I can't find in my Youtube stack right now. I'm in Wuhan, it's about 1am here, and I'm going to sleep.
I've gotten tired of TED talks, but this one was enlightening. Summary being, when trade stops, the shooting starts and everything goes to shit.
That statement is true to some degree (Political truths are like that sometimes), I just think that if we removed the EC and went to some other system of voting, that would just create a different set of incentives guiding and shaping political rhetorical choices. There is a stone cold truth that in a NPV, concerns of California and New York would ride high and feds would promise lots of investment in subways and large urban planning projects and those concerns would quickly become outsized to the number of people who would benefit for them. I dont mind that any system of elections has consequences.
One of the great things an election does is reveal the competence and discernment of the candidates to respond and adapt their messages to reach voters. I just look at elections in say Germany and France, (And England and Canada and South Korea) and see how unsettled and difficult those places have found it to even form a government, let alone an effective one that advances their national interests, and then say a prayer for the wisdom of the founders.
The history of America has shown how the list of what is a swing state has constantly evolved. Colorado and Missouri used to be very swingy and now aren't. Give it fifty years and they might come back.
Enough tosh about throwing out the electoral college. It has its quirks but it also is probably the best and providing definitive answers to "Who is in charge around here?". I get the feeling you dont like Trump all that much (it is a theme I am beginning to detect in your recent writings) but he clearly won and the system of elections delivered us certainty so that policy could begin to be shaped. Again, I understand you dont like the policies but at least you know that Democrats had a chance to alter this outcome, they just chose to take actions that almost assured Trump a victory (coronating Kamala without delay and before that looking the other way as Bidens pudding brains leaked all over the White House.).
Talking about winning the popular vote is like talking about who killed more pieces in a game of chess. It doesn't matter. Only the king matters, and that drives how chess is played. If chess had different rules, it would be a very different game.
But it doesn't, so it isn't.
You know who really deserves the blame for the current situation? Congress. They have completely abdicated their responsibility for legislating by delegating legislative-like powers to the executive.
Not much that Trump is doing doesn't have at least the veneer (thin, mismatched, and peeling off in some places, sure) of legality through some legislation such as the Alien Enemies Act and the Emergency Economic Powers Act.
And, the cynic in me says that despite the performative wailing, rending of garments, and talking and talking and talking and talking for 24 hours straight for no apparent reason and no discernable effect, the Democrats actually appreciate how Trump is behaving because they can use it as a test case for when they get back in power.
Yes. Although, I'd put the Senate first in line before Congress because the scum could've voted for impeachment, which every one of them knew was the correct method for dealing with that asshole, and they DIDN'T DO IT.
If Hawaii were a swing state, the Jones Act would have been repealed by now.
HAWAII FOR RHE LOVE OF GOD COTE FOR REPUBLICANS JN 2028 I need this
Broadly agreed with everything here—especially the idea that tanking the global economy is bad, even if like thirty autoworkers benefit—but I'm from Michigan, and want to very briefly defend the idea that it's been HOLLOWED OUT.
My uncle came into town the other day (we live in Ann Arbor, which is basically San-Mateo-but-the-Midwest). He got an uber from the airport, his driver was from Saginaw, and they had a conversation. What sub-four unemployment looks like, in the post-autoworker age, is a bunch of men with shitty jobs (fry cook, janitor, uber driver, etc.) who are often late to work and get fired every month or two. (Because the work doesn't feel fulfilling? Maybe. Because they're making worse money doing less interesting things than their fathers, who had worked in the factories? Yes, I think.) Eventually, their high school girlfriends (with whom they had four kids by the age of 20) get tired of it, go on welfare, and leave them. The kids grow up poor without decent father figures, the fathers are saddled with child support even if they eventually do hold down a job, and the city keeps on spiraling toward ruin.
Also see "Allentown," by Billy Joel.
None of this is really trade's fault—automation is a big factor—and probably very little of it will be solved by the tariffs—poverty culture is a hardy weed, or something—but the grievances are extremely real, and cities like Saginaw and Flint truly are super-duper hollowed out nowadays.
> doing less interesting things than their fathers, who had worked in the factories?
While "I build cars" sounds better, tightening the same bolt 1200 times a day will very fast become uninteresting.
> Because they're making worse money
EDIT: stupid math on my part, they got good wages by today's purchasing power
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1975/12/28/archives/workers-pay-at-record-high-workers-pay-up-to-a-record-high.html
[2] https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
You jumped from weekly to monthly wages. That Trenton story says weekly so assuming the Petroleum number is also weekly, that bumps your inflation adjusted yearly salary to ~90k. That's solidly white collar middle class wages currently, and often are jobs requiring a master's degree today, unlike manufacturing jobs that asked only for a high school diploma.
You're absolutely right.
I suppose this all seems right to me, but there's obviously something a lot more degrading about cleaning vomit out of a McDonald's bathroom. Telling aggrieved people, "STOP BEING AGGRIEVED, YOU IDIOT!" generally doesn't work so well. I think it's ok to have compassion for communities that feel emptier and more purposeless than they used to, while *also* saying that, realistically, tariffs and manufacturing are not a good way to introduce meaning and prosperity.
People worship Henry Ford here. The hospitals are named after him. It's just part of the culture in a weird and intractable way.
I'm arguing right now with a guy on another substack who says "lol men can't compete in the modern economy and are crying about it." Which I guarantee is not my position.
Someone *does* have to clean vomit out of the McDonald's bathroom, and everyone saying "as long as it's some other person" doesn't work.
There's a lot of jobs men see as "women's work" and won't do, which is partially on men but also partially on women who don't like men who do women's work.
The other responder pointed out my math was bad.
Just tossing a thought out... OK, who SHOULD get the deciding votes? Caifornia? NY? Florida?!? Somehow, I don't feel like that's right either.
OK, wait...a lightning bolt just struck....What if the Dems hadn't lied to us about prune juice brains being as dynamic as a stud bull, or put up someone other than THE WEAKEST FUCKING CANDIDATE IMAGINABLE?
Just a thought...
Yeah, speaking as a Dem myself, that really WAS a shitty election strategy. Can’t argue with the logic (although the Electoral College, a vestigial anachronism of the antebellum America must go).
Agree on the Electoral College going away... That said, one might think the Dems would take something like the EC into account, which they did not. There was a single metric, which was grabbed by the self named "colored girls" and one Jim Clyburn who, in typical Dem fashion decided it was their turn, and woe be anyone who might suggest that Kamala was a losing proposition, let alone her empty headed campaign of "Joy!" If one can't run a campaign, now does one run a country?
And they lost to TRUMP, fer chrissakes. TRUMP. The whole shebangabang was a good argument against democracy.
The electoral college was agreed to by the 13 original states unanimously. It was put in place because small states feared they would be marginalized by a few large states (like NY). It IS the law of the land.
Every subsequent state that joined the union agreed to follow the constitution, and agreed to the electoral college.
The concerns of the states are still valid today. It takes 34 states to ratify an amendment, the Ds won 19 in the last election. It’s not going to happen.
I understand the Electoral College. It’s a problem, but wouldn’t be if the Dems hadn’t lied to us about Joe, and then when the truth became unavoidable, pivoted to possibly the worst candidate imaginable because appearances are all that matter to the Dems.
Love the column Jeff but have to disagree. It sort of just assumes that non-democratic party voters in solid blue states simply wouldn't vote. This cuts both ways. There are plenty of people in say, NY state, who don't bother voting in presidential elections because they say "what's the point?". Regardless, in this case, nominating Harris as their candidate was disastrous. She's probably the only person (yes, I think Biden would have won) who could have managed to lose to the incompetent buffoon currently in the white house.
While I share Jeff's disdain for Biden picking Harris https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/hey-you-cant-double-destroy-your the deck was stacked massively against all incumbent parties worldwide, and particularly for those that had presided over large rises in inflation.
Absolutely brilliant.
Foreigners get it too: a French politician is on the record saying (paraphrasing from memory) that his country can't "make our national security and alliances depend every four years on a handful of voters in Wisconsin."
Worse than the electoral college is the two party system. In any voting scheme where we'd be allowed to vote for more than one presidential candidate, Trump would likely have lost to a more moderate candidate in 2016, and CERTAINLY would have lost in 2024 given his unpopularity and the disgust that moderate conservatives now hold for him.
Score voting would give us the maximum ability to express our preferences, and stop every collection from being between a bad candidate and a terrible one.
Love you, but Trump won a majority, however slim, of the popular vote. It wasn't the electoral college this time. Maybe I'm wrong, and I hate the mess, but at least the market is up today. Maybe we'll get back to normal. ha ha ha
This isn't the argument I made.
I was wrong.
Now, I only did a quick search and then used the first result I found, so I think you and I can agree that this is the finest, most rigorous research. But one problem with your argument is that swing states change from election to election, and based on the evidence, a lot are non-Midwestern states:
https://usafacts.org/articles/what-are-the-current-swing-states-and-how-have-they-changed-over-time/
The other issue is that by singling out the EC for blame, you implicitly endorse an election by popular vote... but then the same coastal cities would ALWAYS control the election. In other words, the most obvious alternative would make the problem worse, not better. Unless, of course, those cities were ever ACTUALLY hollowed out.
I do tend to agree with your overall premise, though -- there's no political hay to be made from telling your voters they want the wrong things. But that seems to be more a weakness of Democracy in general than an indictment of our system specifically. Are you aware of any cases where, "I know that's what you want, but this is what you need," has actually worked for a candidate?
Rust Belt states are not the only swing states, but for the past few decades, they have been a disproportionate share of the swing states. Pennsylvania has been a swing state in every election this century, same is basically true for Michigan and Wisconsin (those were less close when Obama was winning big), Ohio used to be a swing state and Minnesota is sometimes in play.
If we didn't have the Electoral College, then everyone's vote would count the same. If more people care about an issue, then that issue would be more important in the election. The coastal cities would not control the election -- the places with people (including places like Texas and Florida) would control the election.
Truth be told, Trump also won the popular vote. “Donald Trump received approximately 49.8% of the popular vote in the 2024 election. His total was about 77.3 million votes compared to Kamala Harris's 75 million votes, which accounted for around 48.4%.
I think Jeff's larger point is that our electoral system (and the swing states it produces) drives campaign messaging and, in the case of Trump, actual policy.
I agree but isn't this sort of tautological? Election system "x" tends to drive election messaging in a certain way? I don't want NY and CA being the sole decider of elections either. I don't have a ready solution but there are compromises in every system.
This is such an unfortunate zombie argument.
If it was based on the national popular vote, *every vote would count the same*, by definition. NY *as a state* would only have more influence in an *absolute* sense because there are *more NYers* than, eg, North Dakotans.
By the logic and spirit of one person one vote, you know, democracy - that thing everyone loves until the electoral college benefits them and then it's like "oh we're not a democracy we're a republic" - by the spirit of that thing: what are you even arguing for? Geographical area let alone *state count* isn't equivalent to population; don't be fooled.
The way it is now, no, your vote in NY doesn't count, or it only counts in the sense that if everybody decided it didn't count and didn't vote than suddenly it would count, but that's not going to happen so no, it doesn't count.
Under an NPV system, the bang for your buck as a campaign would be highest where the populations are densest, which would result in urban agglomerations like NYC and LA getting disproportionate attention from campaigns and consequently catering national policy to their parochial concerns in much the same way Maurer says the EC results in undue consideration to the Rust Belt.
Maybe that leads to better overall policy outcomes--it certainly provides more incentive for the GOP to develop infrastructure for competing in big cities, which would probably moderate them on all kinds of issues--but it's still a predictable tradeoff.
There probably would be a strong county and neighborhood/precent level analysis of swing districts just like there is today (but expanded nationwide). Neighborhoods that vote 90% for one party for past 4 elections aren't getting many visits unless they are full of donors. My guess is that there are something like 20 large suburban areas that account for a plurality of the swing vote.
There would be more focus by campaigns on the ground in cities and to a lesser extent in airwaves. But at the end of the day, a vote is a vote. Every vote would be equal. That is so much more important.
The senate already exists as DEI for less populated areas of the United States. Let the presidency be one person one vote.
Your statement is based on a false premise. Trump got more votes in California than any other state.
And those votes don’t count either. It’s not actually about who they vote for that makes the EC a lousy system for a democracy.
I would agree. However, my single point is that the majority of us voted for insanity.
Trump won the popular vote
Democrats lost the working class. What used to be their primary constituency has rejected their turn to identity politics.
The “threat to democracy” didn’t convince anyone, maybe because the Dems had a coronation instead of primaries.
Yet the author believes abolishing the electoral college is the best strategy to win again.
The first step in rehabilitation is to admit you have a problem. I guess we’re not there yet.
Yes, the Rust Belt was "hollowed out," whether by trade or automation, it makes no difference. From 1990 to today, employment in industry has collapsed, with less than half the number of employees today. You made the point in another article that the share of GDP has remained the same, and that is true, but most of the workers lost their jobs, and there is a political consequence to that.
Maurer, didn’t you already use the (awesome) Toonces reference for Trump?
Wait, that was someone else.