Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

When it comes to electoral college votes in a U.S. presidential race, 48 of the 50 states have a “winner take all” contest, whomever polls the best statewide gets all the state’s electoral college votes.

Two states, Nebraska and Maine, have distributed the electoral votes attributed to the congressional districts by those districts. So a state could have some electoral votes go to one candidate and some to another.

One argument for that is that it will more closely follow the popular vote. Another is that in some states, such as the 20 states where one party has dominated presidential voting since 1988, members of the other major party are almost voiceless.

If you are in California and you are a Republican your vote may not have much impact on a presidential election and the reverse is true in Republican states like Wyoming where Democrats may feel their votes don’t count.

In Minnesota we have four Democrats and four Republicans in our eight House of Representative seats. Republicans, who seem to have the more power in rural Minnesota might like to see such an arrangement since the Twin Cities area dominated by Democrats carries the state in the presidential race. The Nebraska system would give Republicans four electoral college votes whereas now they get none.

As you might guess, it is usually in states where one party is continually on the losing side in the presidential races that the losing party would like to see a split. And in those cases the prevailing party usually has no interest in splitting the votes and giving up some of its power.

While it seems more fair there are those who say it may not be the easy answer some think. For one, while it may more closely follow the popular vote there are districts where there would still be wide variations. Add those up and the popular vote spread may not be a lot different than the spread can be now.

Other critics of the system say it would encourage more gerrymandering, drawing crazy district lines to insure that one party or another had power or doesn’t have power.

Looking at the two types of measuring presidential outcomes there is a difference. In 2020 President Joe Biden had 81,283,501 votes or 51.31% of the total vote count according to the Federal Election Commission while former President Donald J. Trump had 74,223,975 votes or 46.85% of the total. (2,922,155 people voted for candidates other than Biden or Trump and that amounted to 1.84% of the vote).

If you look at the electoral vote count, however, Biden received 56.9 percent while Trump received 43.1 percent because of the winner take all in effect in most states. Nebraska’s five electoral college votes were split one for Biden and four for Trump while Maine’s four votes were split three for Biden and one for Trump.

What are the big states vote-wise? In the 2020 election the largest was California with 55 electoral college votes. Biden had an edge there of 11,110,639 to Trump’s 6,006,518. Second highest is Texas with 30 electoral college votes where Trump had a closer margin of 5,890,347 to Biden’s 5,259,126. Third highest was Florida with 29 electoral college votes where Trump led with 5,668,731 votes to Biden’s 5,297,045.

There are other states where the margin of difference between Trump and Biden supporters was even greater percentage-wise in 2020. Wyoming, for example, gave Trump 193,559 votes compared to Biden’s 73,491. Massachusetts cast 2,382,202 for Biden and 1,167,202 for Trump. Maybe some voters on the short end of those tallies would like to see the Maine and Nebraska models applied there.

Three other states have considered the Nebraska-Maine models, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Hampshire, but the legislation to approve it has been stalled in their legislatures.

One thing the Nebraska-Maine model might do is spread out a presidential campaign over a larger portion of the country than the seven or eight “battleground” states where major parties are more evenly split.