I want to address Andrea Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on the electoral college. Her understanding of it is deeply mistaken, but she does make one valuable claim about expanding it if we don’t eliminate it.
I begin with two contextual comments. First, I care little about the electoral college. It’s generally so irrelevant that I don’t think it’s worth giving much energy to either pro or con. When it does come into play, it’s usually in an election that’s so close a coin flip would be as fair. It looks much more undemocratic than it has actually been.
Second, the popular conception that it peculiarly favours conservatives is not so true as popularly believed. If you take the smallest 15 states, those with 5 or fewer electoral votes (including DC), we would expect the Republicans to get 29 and Democrats to get 26. Out of 58 presidential elections, the number that have been decided by a three electoral vote margin is two, 1796 & 1876, both of which were long before our current liberal/conservative dynamic developed. Maybe 5 electoral votes is the wrong cut point. You tell me, before doing the Math and based on some neutral principle, what the cut point should be. It’s not simple.
AOC’s First Claim (from last fall): “The EC is a vestige of slavery.” This is false. The electoral college was merely a compromise between those who wanted presidential selection by Congress and those who wanted popular election. Critics of popular election likened it to asking a blind person to choose colours, and critics of legislative selection predicted cabals and intrigues producing an executive with no independence from Congress. In short, both had reasonable criticisms that kept them from accepting their opponents’ proposal. They did not choose the electoral college for any of the noble reasons some conservatives attribute to them nor for the crass reasons some liberals attribute to them. It was a nearly theoretically substance-less compromise, merely procedural to resolve a conflict. Granted, because of the wholly separate 3/5 compromise, the EC did over-represent slave states in proportion to their eligible voters, but that ended with the 15th Amendment.
AOC’s Second Claim: “African-American, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters are underrepresented by the Electoral College compared with white Americans.” Well, probably so, but to a substantial degree that’s a matter of choice, as individuals in those groups have tended to cluster more in certain states. It’s not as though African-Americans and Hispanics can’t thrive in rural regions. Just drive through the south or the southwest and that becomes clear. And consider Idaho (4 electoral votes), where the Hispanic population has been growing over 3% per year and is now over 12% of the state’s population. That’s not terrible far off of New York’s 929 electoral votes) over 17%, but both are dwarfed by small (and blue) state New Mexico’s (5 electoral votes) 56%. Or we could consider Mississippi’s (6 electoral votes) 37% black population. Imagine what 5-10 million of California’s 23 million minorities moving to small states could accomplish! I wouldn’t lift a finger to save the electoral college, and it’s true there are better ways to ensure proportionate minority representation (consociationalism or PR being far more effective than direct election of a president), but complaining about the rules instead of taking advantage of them (like a smart athlete or bureaucratic in-fighter does) doesn’t impress me.
AOC’s Third Claim: “Defenders of the Electoral College should advocate the inclusion of Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, and other US territories "aka colonies" that do not have electoral votes.” She’s absolutely right, assuming the people of those territories also favour it (D.C. does in spades, P.R. is less certain; I can’t speak intelligently of all our colonies – and like AOC, let’s not shy away from that word – but I know American Samoa might be reluctant because they’d have to revise their traditional family-based governance system). But it should be advocated for on its own merit, by everyone, IMO, and has nothing in particular to do with support for the electoral college.
Overall, these are very weak arguments. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t reasonable arguments for eliminating the electoral college. In my mind, the best reason to eliminate it is also the same reason for not bothering to eliminate it: it’s really not that meaningful.