I have an argument against using the popular vote.
The presidency is decided by the electoral college for a similar reason that the world series is decided by games, and not by total runs. If your opponent has one or two bad days and loses big - you get 40 or 50 runs on them - but you lose all the other games ...who is actually the better team?
Answer: it's the team that wins consistently, not the one that won by a fluke.
The president is president of ...the united *states*. Therefore, he is elected by winning states.
I'm certain you wont like this argument, but that's okay. At least now you can never again say, "they never have any argument." But I bet I'll be able to say, "when presented with an argument, they have no meaningful rebuttal to it."
There's not magical about a swing state. California could be a swing state if only didn't drive away sane people with your insane policies.
Here's your proper rebuttal, then.
To facilitate the goal you've stated the electoral college to have, said college was meant to be a proportional representation of each state's respective population so that the states all still get an appropriate amount of say to their actual percentage of the populace of the overall country. The electors ensure that each state's
overall culture is indeed properly reflected, but ideally, their influences are still weighted fairly in regards to American culture as a whole. Despite this, elector counts have not been updated to reflect states' actual populations in a long time, giving less-populated states an outsized influence compared to what they deserve even if you were to argue that the electoral college is the proper way of running things.
Republicans have fought to keep it this way for similar reasons to gerrymandering*: they would rather divide up the populace in a way that's favorable to them so that large chunks of Democrat votes are thrown out but proportionally less Republican ones are, only compounded by the outdated elector counts. California has 67x the population of Wyoming (39m vs. 584k) yet has only 18x the number of electors (54 vs 3). This is not dividing a sports contest up into equal segments to smooth out statistical anomalies like a baseball series or a tennis set. This is the electoral college, albeit at its most extreme example, literally giving a voter in a red state nearly quadruple the voice (67 / 18 = 3.7x) of that of a voter in a blue state. In a properly-weighted college, Wyoming would have 1 elector to California's 67, and the other states would all be re-weighted accordingly. The same goes with the House of Representatives--as outlined in the
Connecticut Compromise, the Senate is the chamber of Congress where states are given equal say while the House is
explicitly stated to provide states representation
proportional to their populations, yet this too has not been updated to reflect the actual populations for far too long. Again, this is solely to the Republicans' benefit.
It should be noted that in the past 8 elections--every election since
1988, so nearly four
decades--Republicans have won the popular vote exactly
once, in 2004, in the midst of post-9/11 hysteria. In 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020, the majority of Americans voted for the Democrat candidate. This is not statistical noise. This is not "the Republicans having a bad day". This is a clear generational shift since the days where Reagan famously won a whopping 525 electoral votes to Mondale's 13, and yet the Republicans have hung on by virtue of an outdated electoral system that favors them despite their ever-shrinking favor among the overall public. Yet in two of those cases, 2000 and 2016, they have won power despite the objections of the majority of actual voters and in both cases, the consequences have been catastrophic. If the electoral college accurately reflected the peoples it's meant to represent, the Republicans would arguably not even be a major party anymore.
And you may argue that would be unfair, or "tyranny of the majority", for the Democrats alone to be
the major party. But there's a term for the
opposite scenario where instead the minority unfairly holds a disproportionate amount of power: in that case, it's just called
tyranny. A scenario where the Republicans' influence shrinks in accordance with their shrinking constituency would not be "unfair", but the system working as intended: one where a significantly smaller faction does not have equal or arguably
greater say than a larger one, and where parties with dying ideologies and constituencies themselves die out and are replaced with new ones rather than stick around for what appears solely to be the sake of
tradition at this point.
There is a reason many states are forming a
coalition to disregard their own votes entirely and award their electors to the popular vote winner. You may point out, perhaps as what you believe is some sort of "gotcha", that this is primarily blue states entering this coalition, and you'd be correct, because the blue states currently have no other recourse to combat their
downsized influence compared to what they deserve. And it should be noted that should Trump somehow win the popular vote, this coalition will indeed obligate all those states to turn their votes in as red, so it's a double-edged sword, not merely a Democrat power grab. Nonetheless, it's possible this may be the last election where the NPVIC's influence does not exceed 270 electoral votes, so the electoral college may be on borrowed time as it is in its current state, barring a possible elector count refresh.
Because here's the thing about baseball and tennis: the number of players on each team is
equal.
*The following interactive demonstration goes into detail on gerrymandering via small-scale simulations. It's not hard to see the same principles at play in the current state of the electoral college. Note particularly the "packing and cracking" concept.
