Most current speculation on a mismatch between the popular vote and the electoral college currently focuses, for various reasons, on the prospect of McCain winning the election with fewer votes than Obama gets. Nate at 538, however, points out a significant way in which the electoral college is disadvantaging the Republicans -- it's based on where people lived during the 2000 census rather than where they live today.
If you re-did the allocation based on 2007 Current Population Survey data you'd give three electoral votes to Texas and one each to Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, and Utah. Most of those are solid GOP states, and the two that aren't (Nevada and Florida) have a distinct GOP tilt. Meanwhile, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania would each lose one electoral vote and Ohio would lose two. So consider that a reason for conservatives to want to get behind the National Popular Vote movement.
Meanwhile, there's obviously a problem here for Democrats in 2012. The good news is that as some of these states gain population -- especially Arizona, Nevada, and Texas -- they seem to be becoming less solidly Republican. But we're probably still quite a ways from Texas being a competitive state. So you see further evidence that the Democrats' future (or lack thereof) is in the Southwest and the party's ability to start reliably getting electoral votes out of Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico to replace some of the ones that are going to be taken away from the Northeast.
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Heads in the Sand
Bush gained about a dozen electoral votes between 2000 and 2004 due to electoral college voting shifts. Kerry came close to winning in the EC while losing the popular vote anyway, by almost carrying Ohio.
Media commentators like to go on about the political effects of population shifts, but they always wind up evening out. The reason is that moving from a blue area to a red area doesn't magically change people's political preferences. You have to engage in deliberate gerrymandering to draw lines to turn a popular vote minority into a representative majority, and you can't redraw the state boundaries by definition. So campaigns are left with the old fashioned method of trying to convince the most voters, regardless of where they happen to live.
More technically, the more representatives an area has, the easier it is for a minority to grab a seat, and vice versa. So if an area is losing representation, this may not hurt the majority party in that area since the eliminated seats will turn out to have been held by the majority party. If an area is gaining representation, the minority party might find it easier to win one of the new seats and gain a foothold.
In the current US political alignment, the Republicans are the party of people with large families, and the party of "growth" area (ie spending on government contracts and highways is good, spending on low income people left behind in low growth areas is bad). So the Republican states always turn out to be the fast growing states. But that is because the Republican base is the fast growing areas. Once an area is no longer fast growing, it stops voting Republican and the new Republican base becomes the next fast growing area, and so on. Being the party of areas growing fastest in population only helps if you can somehow keep those areas once the growth cools off.
The same applies to arguments that since the Republicans are the party of large families, they will somehow just outreproduce the Democrats. That will only happen if every child in the large family has a large family of their own, unlikely given the nature of an industrialized economy and an educated workforce.
Posted by Ed | June 8, 2008 1:26 PM