The Sacramento Bee Couldn't Have Gotten the Electoral College Story More Wrong if they Tried

An editorial in today's Sacramento Bee seriously tries to conflate the Republicans' electoral college power grab with the "Democrats'" electoral college popular vote reform. I recognize that it's popular among some journalists to assume universal moral equivalency among the political parties, but in this case, the Bee is just flat out wrong. Says the Bee:

"Democrats across the country are justifiably alarmed. To defend against the Republican initiative, they are pushing a rival measure that would require California electors to cast their Electoral College votes for whichever presidential candidate wins the popular vote nationally. They are betting that the country, deeply disappointed with a Republican president's performance in an unpopular war, will vote Democratic next year.

They may be right in 2008, but what about four years from then, or eight? What if a Democrat wins California but loses the national popular vote? In that case, it would be as if the ballots of California voters didn't count at all. Will Democrats change the rules again to fit some new presidential political calculus?"

Allow me to speak for Democrats everywhere and answer that last question: no! Believe it or not, most Democrats I know would actually like to see all elections determined through a popular vote. More commonly that's known as a democracy.

To pretend that this reform is designed to benefit Democrats is ludicrous. The Bee wants us to believe that the popular vote initiative is a nefarious attempt to secure the 2008 election for Democrats, but in reality, it wouldn't even take effect until "states representing a majority of the electoral votes agree to the change." And that certainly won't be in time for the 2008 election. Moreover, it's not at all clear that Democrats are better off under a popular vote system. Yes, Al Gore would have won in 2000 if this reform were in place, but likewise, had John Kerry managed to pick up Ohio in 2004, he would have won, despite losing the popular vote by some 300,000 votes! 

And while we all know the fallout from the 2000 election, may I remind the Sacramento Bee that many analysts actually expected Bush to win the popular vote and Gore to win the electoral college vote in that election. Take this Washington Times piece from October 23, 2000:

"Vice President Al Gore's strategy to go after states rich with electoral votes raises a remote possibility that has not occurred in presidential politics since 1888.

There is a chance he could capture 270 electoral votes and win the presidency even if he loses the popular vote to Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

"This election season has been so volatile, so fluid and so crazy that I'm not ruling anything out," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles.

The Texas governor leads Mr. Gore in numerous popular vote surveys, including the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, which showed Mr. Bush ahead of Mr. Gore 51 percent to 40 percent. And in the latest Newsweek poll, the Texas governor has pulled in front of his Democratic rival, 48 percent to 41 percent.

In another poll conducted by pollster John Zogby for Reuters/MSNBC, released Saturday, Mr. Bush regained a one-point advantage over Mr. Gore, 45 percent to 44 percent.

Despite that Mr. Bush is pulling ahead, Mr. Gore still could win the election with enough electoral votes."

So here's some free advice for the Bee. Before you accuse an initiative campaign of partisan "schemes", do your homework. You are journalists after all, and you should be embarrassed that a partisan blog has to do your job. Ironically, it's a job you did remarkably well only one year ago in this editorial:

"Polls for the last 30 years have shown that Americans overwhelmingly support direct election of the president, but Congress hasn't budged on a constitutional amendment.

A new campaign, "National Popular Vote," spearheaded by several former members of Congress, including California's Tom Campbell (most recently Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's finance director), has a creative way to get the same result.

The campaign uses an old mechanism -- an interstate compact -- to achieve the direct election of the president. The idea is modeled on existing interstate compacts, such the Colorado River Compact, which divides water among seven Western states. The compact depends on states changing their own rules for dividing up their electoral votes.

We'd prefer a constitutional amendment simply abolishing the Electoral College, but this state-by-state reform is an achievable second-best solution to a defective product that even the Founding Fathers regarded wearily and warily."

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