California has 11.7% of the nation's population. It has 10% of the votes in the Electoral College.
Just saying. If we switched to a straight popular vote for president, big states would have only slightly more influence than they do now.
92 thoughts on “Factlet of the day: California and the Electoral College”
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That's not the right way to analyze it. If electoral votes were allocated proportionally, then it would be, but they're not. In most states, all of the electoral votes of that state are allocated via winner-take-all. Even in the states that allocated electoral votes individually, each one is winner-take-all.
The net result is that small imbalances in preference are severely magnified. That's the biggest problem with the Electoral College.
So would you be ok if each state did it like New Hampshire (i.e. electoral votes are allocated by voting district, not winner-take-all)?
New Hampshire doesn't do that, Maine and Nebraska do for the "House" electors. The "Senate" electors are winner-take-all statewide in both states.
The only thing that would approximate direct voting results would be a Constitutional Amendment mandating that the various states to allocate all of their EV's proportionately as closely as rounding allows.
You will NEVER get direct popular election because the small states -- both Blue and Red -- love their outsized power in the Electoral College.
Yes, sorry, I meant Maine, not NH.
atticus admits fallibility.
will wonders never cease?
Be careful what you wish for. Out of my own curiosity, I recently did a short research project on what would have happened in each of the elections since 1960 if the Maine/Nebraska system had been in use in all states at the time. In particular, would it have been more representative of the popular vote?
- Trump (2016) and GW Bush (2000) still would have won despite losing the popular vote.
- Carter and Ford (1976) would have *tied* in the Electoral College, although the House of Representatives would almost certainly have chosen Carter.
- Romney (2012) would have defeated Obama, despite losing the popular vote.
- Nixon (1960) would have defeated Kennedy, despite (barely) losing the popular vote.
Not a substantial improvement, to my way of thinking.
Gerrymandering means using congressional districts would not reflect the popular vote.
WORD! That's why the GOP is so hot to shift states to doing that like Maine and Nebraska does.
Very true.
But, I also think it is notable that even in earlier eras that were not as gerrymandered (or at least, not gerrymandered with algorithmic precision by big data analytics), the system doesn't get you any closer to reflecting the will of the people.
What about the extra 2 electoral votes given to each state for its Senators? Does that make a difference?
I remember running the numbers and Bush would have lost decisively in 2000 without those Senators' votes, I think.
Yes, electoral votes given to each state for Senators are electoral votes.
Yeah the 2 EC votes for the senators is what gives smaller states a disproportionate share of the EC.
The 2 main problems I have with the EC are that and the winner take all for each state, win 51-49 and you get 100% (except Nebraska and Maine)
The problem is not that the big states don't have enough sway, but that the small states have too much.
Wyoming, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana have .12% of the population of the United States, but has 3% of the electoral college. That means their power to influence the election of the president is 24 times greater than their share of the United States population.
That massively outsized power is not what the founders intended.
+1000
Thank you Bobby, someone who understands what the real inputs should be and the math hahahaha.
I do wonder if they did want that outsized power given to smaller states.
The Dutch Republic was dominated by the highly urbanized province of Holland, which caused some of the country's deep internal tensions (the urban/rural divide is very old). The half representative democracy, half kind-of king in the stadthouder also caused problems. The founders were not at all impressed by the governmental system of the Dutch Republic, which was not very stable and got into some pretty disastrous wars. The Federalist Papers called their governmental system an "imbecility."
So, while I'm pretty sure the Founders would be very upset about the President taking on a lot more power (as desired by Trump), I'm not entirely sure they'd be all that put out by the Electoral College's redistribution of voting power. Of course, the Founders did seem to learn from experience, so perhaps they'd be convinced by the actual history of the US that reform is needed.
Oops, I think you're off a decimal place there. I think you mean they have 1.2% of the population (combined), which makes the multiplier effect something closer to 3x.
Yes, 1.2%, not 0.12%.
"California has 11.7% of the nation's population. It has 10% of the votes in the Electoral College."
That's not a trivial difference--it's a swing between population and representation of 17 percent. Effectively, that's like pretending California has 5.6 million fewer residents than it does.
And that underrepresentation serves to give a whole bunch of empty states massive overrepresentation (such as North Dakota, which is 0.24% of the population, but receives 0.56% of the EVs, meaning North Dakotans have over double the say in the presidential outcome that they should).
This is why Trump was elected in 2016 despite losing the popular vote: Republicans (whether intentionally or no) have moneyballed an undemocratic system, by pursuing votes from regions with greater-than-democratic representation in the EC.
^+1. 17% is a huge disparity. Many presidential elections are decided by much fewer than 5.6mil votes. However, there are some sizeable red states, too, e.g Texas, Florida, and Ohio, to name a few. However, the margin of victory there has been much smaller.
The biggest problem is, as with all first past the post (winner take all) systems, is that they disenfranchise large parts of the population. It also means that some votes count much more than others.
But yes, the electoral college is far from the greatest absurdity in the US political system. The Senate is.
and the only reason why we have two senators from each state is because our Founding Fathers didn't want northern industrial states to overwhelm southern slave states.
Lately I've been remembering a social studies teacher who told me the USA has "majority rule with respect for minority rights."
He never specified which minority, but I figured it out.
Why don't you tell us what you figured out?
The North was not yet industrialized in 1789. Steam engines in England were horribly inefficient until about 1800 so it was only economical to use them if the fuel were essentially free, which is why they were all at coal mines. After 1800, sure, in England, which is when the engines finally got good enough to pull a train.
Ahistorical BS. At the time the Constitution was written there were no industrial states. The Connecticut Compromise that resulted in the Senate and House was designed as a comprise between the big states that wanted a population based legislature and the small states that wanted every state to have the same vote.
Every State assumed that their eventual population would be proportional to their area. So the big states were NY, PA, VA (the biggest by far) NC, SC, GA, and MA (they owned Maine). The small states were CT, RI, NH, & perhaps DE.
If we can ever get another constitutional amendment passed, we need to get rid of the electoral college and go to counting the popular vote. When the electoral college was devised, States had all kinds of widely varying restrictions on who could vote. Over the last hundred years these have all evaporated.
By the way, the state that stands just behind CA on under-representation in the Senate is TX. Be careful what you wish for.
> Be careful what you wish for.
I wish for every vote in Texas to be counted equally with every vote in California, and every vote in North Dakota, and every vote in...
But we agree, let's get rid of the Electoral College, if we can.
But for Jimmy Crow Texas would be a blue or purple state.
Although, as you say, big states would have only slightly more influence, you might also notice that small states would have a whole lot less influence. For better or worse, the electoral college system was a compromise designed specifically to give smaller states a proportionally larger say. There was a substantial group mostly of smaller states who favored essentially a Senate-like one state-one vote solution. Be glad we don't have that.
For better or worse, the electoral college system was a compromise designed specifically to give smaller states a proportionally larger say.
Yes, we know why it was done. And it was definitely done "for worse" — at least from our much more knowledgeable perspective in 2024.
If we moved to a popular vote, a North Dakota voter would have just as much power to determine the next president as a California voter.
Seems fair.
Doesn't seem fair to me. The whole state would essentially be written of by any candidate. Seems like the current system is the most equitable as its still mostly dependent on population but also gives some deference to the state as a whole.
Instead, every voter in the whole state of California is written off by presidential campaigns under the current system. How the hell is that fair?
They are not written off. They’re state has by far the most electoral votes.
I think what Joseph is alluding to is the fact that only swing states get any attention whatsoever. California doesn't get any more campaigning than Texas.
Right now the whole state of Texas is written off by Democrats. In 2020, Biden won 46.5% of the state’s vote, but got zero electoral votes. That is really unfair. My vote didn't count at all.
North Dakota is already pretty much ignored by candidates. It is a lock for Republicans, so there is no point in going there.
If we got rid of the Electoral College, candidates would want to focus of states like North Dakota. Increasing your vote total by 5% would suddenly matter for both parties.
Currently the only states that matter are early primary states and swing states.
The whole state would essentially be written of by any candidate.
Seems wrong.
If we moved to a popular vote, "all" states in some sense would be "written off" because candidates would not longer be targeting piece of territory. They'd be targeting voters.
Exactly. Why would they waist time and treasure on states like North Dakota?
"Exactly. Why would they waist time and treasure on states like North Dakota?"
Same question to you, buddy: why should presidential candidates seek the especial approval of ~780,000 people simply by virtue of them residing in North Dakota?
Why should they, though? That is what the State government is for.
> Why would they waist time and treasure on states like North Dakota?
Umm, because voters live there?
Look, I don't know exactly how much a political TV ad costs per voter in North Dakota vs. (say) Los Angeles, and I'm guessing that neither do you (apologies if you do). But *no one* knows what an ad costs per *persuadable* voter, which is a strategic decision for each campaign. I suspect that right now neither party is spending more than token money in North Dakota. If every voter's vote counted equally, they might actually consider it.
(Sorry if this is just a longer way of saying what Jasper in Boston said. In any case, it should be the voters that matter, not where they live.)
Yep, exactly.
In a popular vote system, every vote counts until you get to a majority of the country, whereas in the current system every vote in a state counts until you get a majority in that state.
Voters in North Dakota would be just as important as voters in California.
Why would they waist time and treasure on states like North Dakota?
They wouldn't ignore North Dakota. A North Dakotan's vote in a popular vote system would be every bit as valuable as a Californian's. Indeed, the opposite is true: under the status quo (EC), the Democratic nominee has essentially zero incentive to make a stop in North Dakota, or run advertising there, or, more generally, take the concerns of North Dakotans into account. (This is ironically true of Republicans also, who know perfectly well North Dakota's electoral votes are in the bag for the GOP).
The current system overwhelmingly incentivizes nearly all presidential political activity to concentrate in eight or nine states. That seems non-optimal for the health of our democracy.
I have a feeling you're well aware of this, but are simply digging your heels in to defend a system you realize benefits Republicans. Or, maybe you truly are this uninformed. Possible!
If that was the most cost effective place to get votes, that's where candidates would go.
The current system is closer to "one acre, one vote" than "one citizen, one vote." The idea that deference should be given to the arbitrary geography of states privileges real estate over people.
Agreed. I like to point that out when friends share those maps of "winner by county", which show the vast majority of the country colored red. Yes, if only we let trees vote (or maybe cattle? cactus?) instead of people.
I think of it as letting dirt vote.
after all, the tea partiers & magats are dumb as dirt.
One acre, one vote would give Alaska one-sixth of all the votes. As things now stand, Alaska has one one-hundred-and-seventy-ninth of the Electoral College vote.
Can you elaborate on "the whole state would be written off", do you mean that the state has interests separate from (and greater than) its individual voters?
"There was a substantial group mostly of smaller states who favored essentially a Senate-like one state-one vote solution. Be glad we don't have that."
And there was a substantial group of people in the late 18th century who still wanted King George III. I guess I should be glad that we don't have that, either?
At a certain point, the argument that we should happily endure forever an undemocratic system simply because a small handful of gentleman farmers* ~23 decades ago wanted an even worse system loses merit.
As Jasper notes, we know why it happend; that's just not a good reason for it to continue happening.
________
*and slavers, can't forget that.
The Gentlemen in question were ALL slavers. Don't kid ourselves. Slavery still existed in northern states in the 1780s. John Adams was an outlier.
No, you should be sad that King George III did not prevail.
The conservatives on the Supreme Court appear to agree with you.
1790
Largest state : smallest state = 13:1 (VA:DE)
2024
Largest state : smallest state = 67:1 (CA:WY)
The disparity has grown from substantial to ridiculous.
Large states can not survive without small states. Most of our calories and meat come from small states.
One-cow-one-vote? Why didn't the Founders think of that?
Anyway, the survival of large states is not in jeopardy. Three of the top five farm states are also top "people" states, though I'm not sure what the point of that is.
State: US Ag %
California: 10.8
Iowa: 8.0
Texas: 6.2
Nebraska: 5.4
Illinois: 5.0
Top 20 "people" states account for a majority of US agriculture.
This is gibberish. California is the country's largest agricultural producer. Texas is #4. "States" don't make food, individuals and companies make food.
Large states can not survive without small states. Most of our calories and meat come from small states.
And most of our financial services, tech and medical advanced come from large states. Your point?
I don't think anybody's proposing we stop interstate trade. If we switched to a popular vote system, North Dakota's farmers could continue to make immense profits selling calories to New York and LA!
I don't think we can say it was "designed" for any particular outcome. The framers could not have anticipated how the population was going to sort itself out over the decades and centuries. As usual, they were trying to blunt the effects of too much direct democracy on the political system.
Our current problem isn't so much the electoral college, but that we've become locked into a rural/conservative, (sub)urban/liberal divide that shows no signs of weakening.
It was designed to protect the plantations and the slave economy. Ironically it was plantations in Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
As I understand it if neither candidate gets a majority of the electoral votes the vote goes to the House of Representatives but with each state getting one vote. Thus North Dakota with a population of less than a million has as much clout as California.
Again, the framers failed to envision a scenario in the future where one party (we know which) has effectively gerrymandered their states to lock out their opponents, thus making an election thrown to the HoR a total joke in terms of it reflecting anything like a popular consensus.
Ah, but Kevin, the point isn’t to increase California’s influence. It is to decrease that of the Small States We Don’t Like.
"It is to decrease that of the Small States We Don’t Like."
Yes--to decrease the influence of the people of those small states down to the level warranted by the actual number of people in them. Quelle horreur!
If those small states voted similarly to California, I doubt we’d be asking for change.
Some of those small states *do* vote similarly to California, and yet here we are, asking for change.
Seriously, is your argument that antidemocratic anachronisms should endure forever because the people calling for their reform in part care about the practical outcomes of those reforms?
The point is electoral equality, which some people don't like and come up with Very Elaborate Reasons to work around.
California would have 17% more influence than it currently does. That is not the normal definition of "slightly".
As near as I can tell, "big" states have about 63% of the population and 50% of the electoral vote. Which would give big states 26% more influence than they currently have.
important caveat: congress, which under rare circumstances picks the president.
our fraction of representatives is a bit low, and of course, don't get me started on senate.
We desperately need to repeal the hard cap on the number of representatives in the House. We used to increase the numbers after every census in line with new population counts but in the 1920s the GOP controlled Congress put in the hard cap and it was never revisited to this day.
If presidents were elected by the popular vote, a helluva lot changes. For one thing, we would have avoided two of the most disastrous presidents in the history of our nation. Democracy would not be hanging on by a thread.
The Electoral College, probably as much as (or more than) any other single factor, is the reason for the extreme radicalization of the Republican Party.
It may be a nearly impossible problem to fix, but if you're not arguing against it, you're arguing against democracy and a better future for America.
Agree on all points.
"The Electoral College, probably as much as (or more than) any other single factor, is the reason for the extreme radicalization of the Republican Party."
Gerrymandering is the largest factor, because it positively promotes anti-democractic behaviour by elected officials. Primaries follow closely.
Electoral College is a problem, but with a working Congress it wouldn't be much of a problem. It is the Congress elections that need fixing first.
First move should be transferable vote, to get rid of primaries and blunt the effect of gerrymandering.
The Electoral College, probably as much as (or more than) any other single factor, is the reason for the extreme radicalization of the Republican Party.
We all agree that there EC causes or exacerbates many problems, but it is unlikely to be the main reason for “the extreme radicalization …”. Too many countries around the world without anything like our EC are experiencing extreme radicalization of a right wing party to blame ours on anything particular about our system.
It’s bigger than that.
It's not the big states that have roughly equal representation in the electoral college that's the problem. It the small states that are over represented in the electoral college.
IMO...
The more representative the Electoral College is to the popular vote, the more people we'd have participating in voting. If more people are voting, the outcomes would better represent the total population. That's a positive feedback loop.
The differences don't matter much when the Presidential election isn't close. They matter a great deal when it is close. That's a big part of why attempts to change it haven't gained much traction. But it's pretty silly to have someone who didn't get the most votes become President, all the same.
if gore had won florida (officially) the electoral college would be dead & buried.
Yes, let's get rid of the Electoral College. But I'm irritated when folks describe the chief beneficiaries of the EC system as Southern states. Here's a list from most advantaged to least of the most advantaged 15 states:
WY, VT, DC, Alaska, ND, MT, RI, SD, DE, Maine, NH, HI, Nebraska, NM, & WV.
On the other hand the 15 most disadvantaged states are: CA, TX, NY, FL, OH, PA, IL, MI, GA, VA, NJ, NC, AZ, WA, & MA. No Southern states in the first list and five in the second.
This is going to sound counter intuitive but the solution is more politicians. If we got rid of the permanent apportionment act and instead kept adding house members we could have house members representing less people making them more accountable and it would restore the balance between small and large states. For example if we said there would be one house member for every 500,000 people Wyoming would still have 1, California would have 79.
BINGO we need to repeal the the apportionment act of 1929.
And all it would take is an act of congress.
If the Senate reflected the three-cycle popular vote after accounting for jungle primaries by substituting the highest competitive race in that state, Republicans would have only held the Senate twice this century (‘06 and ‘12), and would generally have 2-5 less Senators at any point in time. Currently it would be 53-47 Democratic, and Manchin and Sinema would be irrelevant.
Strangely, the House has only flipped three times in the last century, all to Republicans.
"Strangely, the House has only flipped three times in the last century, all to Republicans."
Read that statement again. It does not make sense.
It's difficult to make a case that there is a systematic or pervasive difference in the interests of small states, from those of big states. The persistent difference of recent times is clearly rural vs. urban, and every state has both rural and urban regions. I did a spreadsheet a few years ago, and was somewhat surprised to find that for the ten smallest, and the ten largest states by population, each group is about evenly split between the parties. The GOP controls more of the middle-sized states, and that is how they frequently win the House, Senate and/or White House with a minority of national popular votes.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is the best chance to achieve popular election of the President. MikeTheMathGuy's analysis is correct; political campaigns would allocate to states/regions according to their best estimates of the cost to reach a persuadable* voter. No one knows how that would work out, because there has never been a reason to spend resources gathering the data. But it would certainly mean less money spent in the current swing states. And until the data was accumulated, campaigns would likely be fifty-state+DC operations. And it seems unlikely that campaigns would ever again be as narrowly focused as they currently are on six or eight swing states. One would think that the majority of states would favor this.
As others have suggested, the House should be expanded to reduce the 'rounding error' and minimum-representation contributions to inequality.
*'persuadable' meaning either to vote for one party/candidate over another, or to vote for a party/candidate over not voting.
I would argue under the current syatem, the individual CA voter has about as much influence as the average AL voter in Presidential elections, none (true for many other states too).
Because of winner take all, no reason to campaign for votes at either one for anybody. However, switch to popular vote and D's have incentive to run up the score in CA while R's have incentuve ro prevent that from happening ,(and vice-versa for AL). 50 state strategies become viable.
If no one gets a majority in the Electoral College (and an even split is possible even if only two candidates get all the EC votes), then the California delegation in the House has one vote, as does the Wyoming delegation.
More generally, it is not small states that are favored by the EC system today, it is swing states. Still undemocratic.
Errm.
Bad use of statistics.
That 1.7% underrepresentation for California is around 660,000 people, which is most of the population of several states.
It's not so much that those 660,000 in California essentially get no representation; it's that 660,000 in several other states get 1 or 2 Electoral College delegates.
Kevin, really. I can't tell if you're trolling or just had a brain fart.
- Two of the six elections this century have actually had a different result because of the electoral college. In both cases you supported the candidate who got shafted.
- The EC places decision-making power not in the *small* states, but in the *swing* states, which California has not been one of since 1988. You can run for president, pay no attention to California, not even visit the state, and win it. Every Democrat since 1992 has done this.
- If you look at the metric of residents per EC vote, and compare California to Wyoming, it's awful.