Highlights from the Comments on the Gubernatorial Electoral College

Some Constitutional Amendments #5, Part III: Your responses!

The Australian Senate (sans Australians). Photo by JJ Harrison (Creative Commons Att-SA 3.0 license)

The comment thread for “Towards an Unelected President” was terrific, maybe the best conversation I’ve ever seen De Civitate’s readers have with one another.

On the whole, readers were open to my basic proposal: we should amend the Constitution so that the President of the United States is elected by a college of governors, who should be insulated against democratic pressure and forced to compromise on a consensus candidate.

However, lots of you had suggestions or variations that you wanted to try instead. Eventually, it got to the point where I was overwhelmed trying to answer all the comments, and I decided to address the broad themes in a post.

This is not unlike what would actually happen at an Article V Convention of the States. Everyone will come to the table with their own idea of a perfect solution, just as the individual Founding Fathers all had very different ideas about what system would work best back in 1787. There will have to be negotiation and compromise between the different proposals in order to build up majority support.

This is especially important when proposing things like ending presidential elections. I won’t call any of the amendments in Some Constitutional Amendments radical, because they aren’t. They all go out of their way to work within the political and constitutional framework that we have, rather than throwing it out and starting fresh. Instead of pulling up the roots (like communism or integralism), I’ve aimed to shore up faltering or collapsed sections of republicanism. This is the opposite of radicalism.

Yet I admit that some of these proposals are startling. Radical slogans like “abolish the police” or “end capitalism” or “secure a future for white children” excite certain imaginations, but suggest something as simple as build a bigger building for Congress and suddenly people want to know how much it’s gonna cost. I think Some Constitutional Amendments falls in the political uncanny valley, where the proposals are realistic enough to take seriously, but just unrealistic enough to startle.

Startling is not good at a constitutional convention. Startling gets clicks, but not votes. So, if you are, in the future, a negotiator at an Article V convention, you will have to be pretty canny, and altogether more flexible than is probably comfortable.

With that in mind, let’s look at some of last month’s comments from the perspective of that hypothetical negotiator:

“Executive Authority”

Evan Þ

suggests a wording tweak:

Also, for a wording concern that plays into my "proxy" fears: your amendment currently reposes this power in whoever (if anyone) holds the title "governor." But what if some state retitles its executive as something else (maybe "chairman") and creates another office titled "governor" with no duties except this? Athens did a similar thing when they became a republic, and kept a magistrate around with the title "king" for religious rituals. I think it would be better to just say "executive authority" and depend on Congress or the Electoral Convention to identify the correct one.

A big concern with any process-based constitutional amendment is how political parties will, inevitably, try to evade and undermine them for short-term political gain. (This can no more be prevented than the moon.) I think Evan’s suggestion is spot-on—so much so that I’m going back now to edit the original post to include it.

Different Supermajorities

My proposal allows the governors to elect a president by simple majority of the states if that majority represents a simple majority of the United States population. (A “double majority” requirement.)

Drea

suggests changing it to a simple majority of the states if that majority represents a three-fifths majority (60%) of the United States population. Drea defends this asymmetry:

The system needs to force compromise, and not just in terms of one or two party defectors shifting to the majority party, which votes as a bloc. It's absolutely wild and broken that, in the search for a new Speaker of the House, we didn't have conservative Democrats and Republicans come together to choose a moderate Republican, which would allow them to ignore the far-right Republicans who were breaking the process. It seems almost unthinkable for us, but in a functioning democracy, this is what has to happen.

…Setting a high requirement for population representation means that it's almost never possible to get a president without substantial support from more than one party. Yes, this means that neither Democrats nor Republicans get to pick without the other party's input unless they have such overwhelming nationwide support that the other party must clearly rethink its strategies entirely…

Requiring a simple majority of states provides a different guarantee, that large states can't simply call the shots and that single regions can't rule the country. Requiring that majority is already a heavier weight than the electoral college. Setting it any higher starts to give fewer people pretty overwhelming authority.

Another way of looking at it is that, in the current political landscape, Republicans are likely to keep having a majority of states for a long time, because of the way that their policies appeal more to less populated areas. Democrats will always be forced to negotiate. There need to be stable conditions forcing negotiation on both sides, particularly when the popular vote (distinct from representation by population) remains pretty close. The high population threshold helps guarantee that, even if the current alignment of voting blocs changes (which it eventually must).

What do you think of the feasibility of this proposal? Republicans seem to like the electoral college because it benefits them, and Democrats are all aboard the popular vote train. Your goal was to propose amendments that would have some prayer of passing. Do you see conservatives supporting this idea?

There’s two parts of this response that need consideration: first, the idea of increasing the threshold to elect the President. This obviously forces more compromise, more often. Second, the idea of asymmetrically increasing the population threshold while leaving the state threshold the same. In our current political environment, this will tend to help Democrats, who tend to perform better in high-population states.¹

Supermajorities: A Higher Threshold

To the first: the question of how much compromise we should force is always going to be a prudential question. There’s no magic number, and different cultural moments may call for different amounts of compromise. It’s all about the tradeoffs!

The first tradeoff is between moderation and deadlock: the higher the threshold, the more moderate someone has to be to win, but the higher the risk of deadlock. The second, sneakier tradeoff is between dynamism and stasis (which tends to be what the moderate consensus prefers). Like salt in a soup, you sprinkle to taste. Fortunately, the presidency is an office where you want a high level of stasis. The presidency exists to meekly, competently carry out the will of Congress and to execute a stable foreign policy. I am therefore concerned mainly with the first tradeoff.

We see these tradeoffs all the time when constitutions impose super-majority rules. For example, in a relatively homogenous early America, there was enough broad agreement about enough things that it possibly made sense for Article V to require a double-supermajority from Congress (two-thirds) to propose an amendment, followed by a super-super-majority of state legislatures (three-quarters!) to ratify. Today, however, that threshold is so high that it is nearly unattainable, especially if a measure has even a teensy-tiny partisan valence. (Stay tuned for our next episode of Some Constitutional Amendments!) As a result, no new constitutional amendment has passed since the end of the Great Consensus Era (1945-1979).²

So, as we weigh our trades, the main thing we want to know is: how hard is it for a single presidential candidate to win the support of governors representing 50% of national population versus 60% of national population? For that matter, forget the asymmetry for a moment—how hard is it to get to 60% of the states? Is this going to push us too far into deadlock territory to be viable?

Imagine a perfectly neutral national political environment: Republican governors have won all safe Red states plus the reddish swing states Montana, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. This means Republican and Democratic governors represent an even slice of half the national population. (Republicans have an advantage in total states, 55-45%). To get to 60% of population, a Republican candidate would have to hold all the red states, plus some blue states. There are a few roads she could take to get there:

• Large blue states: if California agreed to vote for the Republican-aligned candidate, that alone would push the candidate to over 60% of national population. Alternatively, NY + PA or PA + IL would do it.

  • N.B.: This means the Republicans would win about 58% of states overall. This means that getting to 60% of population, even by the shortest possible path, means almost getting to 60% of states anyway. This will come up in a minute when we talk about the asymmetrical part of Drea’s suggestion.

• small blue states: all of the 13 smallest blue states (VT, DC, DE, RI, ME, NH, HI, NM, NV, CT, OR, CO, MD) could put the candidate over the top. (This means they win about 80% of states overall).

• median blue states: most likely, they’d get a mixed grab-bag of blue-state governors to support their candidate, requiring a median of 7 blue states to support the GOP candidate (say: MA+MD+CO+OR+CT+NV+NM). (This is about 70% of states overall.)

This answer is getting long, so I’ll just say that it’s surprisingly similar for the Democratic candidate, who must win support from a median of 9 red-state governors.³

A presidential candidate who could win over both the governor of liberal Connecticut and the governor of conservative Utah seems like a big ask. Setting the population threshold this high would certainly force moderation, but it does strike me as very, very hard—for either party. Therefore, in a perfectly neutral environment, I think the risk of deadlock would be pretty high.

On the other hand, we rarely actually have a perfectly neutral national environment. One party almost always has the edge. Today, Democrats represent 55% of population, because they did well in 2022 gubernatorial races (the GOP nominated a bunch of lunatics in key battlegrounds). Democrats were in a similar position in 2020 after the 2018 midterms. On the other foot, in 2016, the Republicans represented 60% of the nation’s population outright, and 55% of the nation’s population in 2012.⁴ As long as this holds true, it won’t be quite this hard for a consensus candidate to assemble a majority coalition.

Still, my gut says that, if we drive the requirement up to 60% of population, that’s sometimes going to be too hard, and, in those years, we create a real risk of deadlock and a presidential vacancy. (SOURCE: gut feeling! I said this was a prudential judgment.) 55% is probably reasonable, though. It might even have better outcomes than the original proposal, although it is more complex than “simple majority.”

On the other hand, maybe we don’t need to fear deadlock so much? The Twentieth Amendment exists. We know what to do if there’s no president-elect: the Speaker of the House resigns and becomes Acting President. Is that a disaster? Mayyyybe not.

In short, I am of two minds about Drea’s idea of pushing the election thresholds a little bit higher. It really comes down to a judgment call, and I’ve honestly gone back and forth on it while working on this post. I prefer sticking with the simple majority threshold (which I think will still force plenty of compromise, given the diverse governors who will have to agree), but I don’t oppose a higher threshold, especially if other delegates at the Article V convention have strong feelings about it.

However, that was only the first thing.

Supermajorities: Different Thresholds

Drea didn’t want to simply increase the population requirement to 60%. She wanted to increase the population requirement to 60%, while holding the number-of-states requirement at 50%.

Any asymmetry in the proposed amendment makes me uneasy, because asymmetries have to be explained to voters. These voters will be partisan and suspicious. They will already be looking for ways the amendment could give the other party too much power. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have asymmetries when they’re called for, but we should only have them when we really need them—and, even then, only if we can produce a clear explanation for them.

I don’t think this asymmetry would hurt the proposal very much. As we saw above, requiring 60% of population generally speaking means getting around 60% or more of states anyway.⁵ For the same reason, though, it isn’t obvious to me how this asymmetry would help the proposal.

If I understand Drea’s theoretical basis for this (correct me if I’m wrong, Drea!), the principle here is that, as long as the nation remains closely divided, both parties should face nearly equal challenges in assembling a winning coalition, modulo their electoral success. Perceiving that the Republican advantage in the number of states they tend to control is simply bigger than the Democrats’ population advantage, Drea tries to correct the imbalance by putting extra weight on the population advantage.

If the states were as well-sorted by population and party as individual cities and towns are, Drea would probably be right. But, because there are a number of large Republican states and a number of small Democratic states, and because getting a supermajority of population generally means getting a supermajority of states anyway, I don’t think Republicans’ state-based advantage is bigger than the Democrats’ population-based advantage. At least, I don’t think it’s large enough to justify this asymmetry, and I don’t know how to clearly articulate it to a skeptical population.

Since it doesn’t seem to lead to worse outcomes, I wouldn’t fight against this if a convention started going this direction, and the ratifying public seemed to like it. I would fight it if it became a political problem, though, because it doesn’t seem to me to lead to better outcomes, either.

Preserve National Elections

Phil H

, a good chap, doesn’t think this proposal could ever fly, so it needs to scale back:

Once voters have a direct election power they will not give it up, and punish elected officials who try to do so. So the GEC will never fly (even though it’s an interesting proposal).

And in any case the real problem is how the candidates for President and Vice-President are nominated. Currently, there are no Constitutional mechanisms governing that process at all. Maybe there should be a provision for the governors to caucus and make those nominations, with no other candidates being eligible for electoral votes? …But voters electing the President even mediated by an electoral vote system is here to stay.

Putting at least the nomination process in the hands of the governors would certainly be progress. It would be worth supporting if it were absolutely politically impossible to do anything more.

But I think I need to repeat something I said in Parts I and II: mass national elections for the most powerful office on Earth are inherently bad. They are bad for the People, who become drunk with the drama and gradually turn the exercise into Reality TV, choosing presidents based on “who they’d like to get a beer with” instead of a sober assessment of fitness. They are bad for the President, who has to play the People’s game and turn into a wild demagogue in order to get elected—making a bunch of promises in the process that he may or may not be able to keep. (Note: he will bend or break whatever rules he has to in order to keep his promises.) They are worst for Congress, which is supposed to be the democratic heart of our government, but can never, ever enjoy the democratic mandate that a victorious president can wield against Congress. That’s one of the many reasons why the Founders designed a system to prevent mass national elections for President! Abolishing the mob election for President is not one of this proposal’s side benefits; it’s the core feature.

I am therefore unwilling to give up on what seems like a good idea simply because the modern U.S. population, trained with a knee-jerk assumption that more democracy is always good, does not currently support this republican proposal that they’ve never heard of. I think that, if we make the case to them that presidential elections are a bad idea, they might very well come around. Their reflexive support of Moar Democracy is just that: a reflex. Like the gag reflex, it can be trained away, and then they’ll give this proposal a fair-minded shake. Indeed, I think it’s slightly probative that nobody in this comments section actually defended mass national elections. The strongest argument in favor of keeping them was Phil’s, and all he said was that other people wouldn’t be willing to get rid of them! But if the only argument for keeping presidential elections is that somebody else wants to keep them, then… maybe nobody really wants to keep them, deep down?

That being said, if we make our case against mass national elections and can’t get anyone at the Article V convention to listen to us, then, yes, the idea of replacing the party primaries with gubernatorial nominating caucuses would be much better than what we have now, if a far cry from the ideal. It would be pretty close to the early-American informal Congressional nominating caucuses, so not unprecedented, either.

However, Phil goes on with another alternative:

Rather than add complexity to the process of electing a President, radically changing to a "Governors Electoral College" or trying to take over the party nomination process, I have a simple solution: Add a qualification so that a President (and of necessity, Vice-President) must be a current or former state governor. That's it. Change nothing else. Not the Electoral College. Not the nomination process.

This one, I’m afraid, is a non-starter for me.

I suspect it’s true that governors are, on average, somewhat better at presidenting than non-governors. How did I put it in Part II? Governors are our “least bad” group of officials? However, imposing a constraint like this comes at a noticeable cost: there are cases where America might very reasonably want a celebrated non-governor to be president (George Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower), and this would exclude them.

At a deeper level, the problem with this response is that, in my view, it misses the point. My argument all along has been that the fundamental problem with American presidential elections is that there is no deliberative, representative body involved in picking the President anymore, not since the McGovern Reforms and the destruction of caucuses. The Founding Fathers included such a body in their design of the Constitution, but their design failed. We should fix that. I turned to governors as the “least bad” group of officials because I think they can represent and deliberate better than anyone else. The heart of the proposal, though, is representative deliberation.

Excluding non-governors would solve the 2024 problem, but, I think, only by coincidence. It so happens that Joe Biden was a long-time senator, not a governor, but I think there are plenty of people who follow Joe Biden’s general career path who end up as governors. Certainly, if this were the law of the land, many would. Once they’ve earned the credit of serving as governor, even for a short time, they would then be eligible to run for president for the rest of their lives. We’d end up with 16 presidential candidates on the primary debate stage on Fox News again, with 6 of them only there to help their flagging book sales. (We know this, because more than a few ex-governors have already done it.)

Worse, as states adapted to the new structure, they could start finding workarounds. “Governor” could become a mere ceremonial title given to a state’s favorite son, making him eligible to serve as President, while most executive authority might lie elsewhere. Governors’ terms might be made quite short in order to make as many state residents eligible for the presidency as possible.

Don’t get me wrong: if we required Presidents to have gubernatorial experience, but otherwise kept the whole post-McGovern primary + general election structure the same, it probably would be better, at least for a little while. I don’t deny that. But imposing this requirement would be such a big lift, for such a small gain. It wouldn’t fix the part of the Constitution that broke in the first place (the electoral college). Therefore, I would not support this proposal at an Article V convention.

That said, it still feels unnatural to disagree with Phil and I don’t like it.

Congress Elects

Sathya Rađa

suggests, straightforwardly:

What about having the president elected by a supermajority of Congress?

Sathya later clarified that this question assumed both houses of Congress would need to concur, just like with a constitutional amendment, which put a whole new color on the idea for me.

This reaches into a future installment Some Constitutional Amendments, but one of the things I briefly touched on in “Expand the House, You Cowards” was the homogenization of the two houses of Congress. The House and Senate used to be very different bodies, but, during the Twentieth Century, we began to eliminate those differences, and now the two houses are very nearly the same—answering to similar electorates, deliberating in similar ways. I really want to restore that difference. I think the House needs to be restored to its fundamental function as the “People’s House” through radical expansion (and extra power over money bills). Meanwhile, I think the Senate needs to be restored to its function as a steady hand on the tiller, tacking into the political winds.

If you had both houses of Congress fulfilling their function, I think the two, by their powers combined, might be very smart about picking presidents. I think they might be very smart about a whole lot of things!

I also think that the pre-election risk of divided government (forcing compromise) would at least discourage the parties from pre-choosing their nominees and turning the whole House election into a proxy election for President (as has happened in most parliamentary democracies). This risk still worries me, but not as much—as long as electing the President requires agreement from both houses and both houses are functionally different.

But I think requiring a supermajority is asking too much when you’re dealing with partisans, especially in an expanded House. After all, Congress has not managed a super-majority for a single new constitutional amendment proposal since Jimmy Carter was president.⁶ Unlike governors, they have nowhere else to be except Washington, so they have much lower incentives to compromise, even to resolve a deadlock. Indeed, the House in particular has some incentives to deadlock: if they deadlock, the current federal succession statute says the Speaker of the House becomes acting president until the deadlock resolves. (This statute could be changed, of course.) Also unlike governors, Congresscritters are much more vulnerable to party discipline, which makes it politically difficult for them to even consider the necessary compromises, and makes them vulnerable to pressure to support specific candidates approved by the highly partisan base. We’ve seen this very recently, in the bitter fight to replace Kevin McCarthy as Speaker… and Speaker of the House isn’t even a position with any real power! Expanding the House probably reduces, but does not eliminate, this polarization.

The best anyone can ask for from Congress is probably a simple majority of both houses eventually agreeing to a president. If either party secures both houses of Congress, well, elections have consequences, and you may end up with a pretty partisan president. (I hope my planned reforms to the Senate would help with this, but that’s a future installment.)

It’s worth remembering that, in the early republic, voters really hated how involved Congress was in the election of the President, because they believed it was inappropriate for the legislative branch to have so much influence over the executive branch. They thought it damaged the separation of powers. However, given how weak Congress has become today, especially against the imperial presidency, subordinating the president to Congress in this way might count as a feature, not a bug. (On the other hand, it means divided government would not happen as often, since any party that captured both House and Senate would be almost guaranteed the presidential trifecta.)

Of course, the single strongest argument for having Congress elect the President is that it’s so simple and obvious and the world has lots of experience with it. Nearly every other democracy you can think of has its legislative branch elect its chief executive! England! Hungary! Ireland! Canada! This list is too Anglocentric! Uh, Malta! India! Dammit!

I think the gubernatorial electoral college probably leads to better outcomes (fewer deadlocks, more compromises, less public pressure), and, bonus, it feels more distinctively “American.” However, there’s a strong case to be made that there are a lot of “unknown unknowns” with the GEC because of its novelty. If, instead, you just have the legislature elect the executive, that system is pretty battle-tested. You know what you’re buying. It’s easy to grok. That’s a huge selling point at an Article V convention, and I would probably switch to advocating for this if I couldn’t get any traction on my original “gubernatorial electoral college” idea.

The Party Doesn’t Decide

AG (who appears to be untaggable) simply asks:

Would Conventions like those in the 19th century re-emerge to nominate and filter out candidates to sort of help out this Gubernatorial Electoral Convention decide on someone, while the GEC still retains the theoretical ability to elect anyone they collectively agree upon? Perhaps party power would strengthen with this GEC?

I must admit, it’s impossible to know exactly how the surrounding system would adapt to account for the new gubernatorial electoral college. Constitution design is just darned hard. Every major change causes tons of other unexpected downstream changes, and, of course, the political parties will stop at nothing to gain as much power for themselves as they can wrest. I can therefore make no promises.

Still, this specific possibility is one I anticipated, and, even if its exact dimensions are unknowable, I think the GEC is fairly well insulated against it:

• Governors are probably better insulated against party pressure than any other elected official in the country, including judges. They usually run the state party, rather than answering to it. They are also usually more popular than the state party. They have enormous power to dole out favors, which gives them tremendous leverage against even hostile factions of the party.

• The proposed amendment explicitly nullifies all instructions to governors on how to vote (from political parties) and all pledges by governors (to respect the will of the party). This means governors who offer pledges to support the party’s candidate are unlikely to be believed, and governors who do not wish to offer pledges in support (because they have, like, personal integrity or something—I know it’s unlikely!) have political cover to say, “The Constitution says I can’t tip my hand about my plans in advance.”

• The proposal gives the gubernatorial electoral college at least an opportunity for secrecy. Members of the winning coalition can trade their votes in exchange for a promise that the records of the conclave will be kept secret. Political parties can’t effectively hold electors accountable when they don’t know who the defectors are, which drains their leverage.

• The proposal selects electors years in advance, long before anything like a presidential race has been run (or could be run), so parties are hindered from weeding out gubernatorial candidates who might be “disloyal” to a candidate who likely hasn’t even declared yet.

• The proposal disables all explicit party accountability mechanisms by making them not just illegal, but unconstitutional. A party is simply not allowed to, say, kick a governor out of the party because they suspect he voted the “wrong” way. Of course, parties will come with covert accountability mechanisms, but these are likely to be less effective, and attempts to actually remove the governor from office are likewise forbidden.

• Above all: in most years, the proposed double-majority rule makes it likely that there will be some need for compromise, usually with the other political party. The person who becomes president will be someone who can remain above the fray and command respect from both parties. The need for this will be known well in advance. You know what the worst possible way is to remain above the fray? Become the official nominee of a major political party! Being nominated by a political party will, in most years, make a candidate much less likely to become president. Therefore, people who actually want to be president will run, not walk away from anything that looks like a primary or caucus, and the whole system will wither away.

Because constitution-writing is hard, I am almost guaranteed to be wrong about at least one of these, probably two. That’s why there’s six, though.

The parties could, of course, still organize and try to make a list of, say, “people we wouldn’t mind seeing as President” (as long as it didn’t rise to the level of express “advice” to the electors, which is prohibited by this proposal). That might even be a good thing! Parties tamed in this way might even be able to act wisely and come up with some actual good names. But, in our proposal, we’ve given the governor-electors all the firepower they need to ignore that advice and act on their own—firepower the actual presidential electors of the electoral college have never had, and which national convention delegates have not had in decades. Parties were originally able to assert the power that they did because presidential electors couldn’t stand up to them, and neither could scattered Congressmen operating informally. They saw a power leak and leapt on it; who could blame them? There’s no power leak here, so I think the risk is much smaller.

Conclusion

I decided to write this post instead of continuing to write comments when I realized that I was going to end up breaking the Substack comment character limit in some of my replies, and I didn’t want to deal with the threading. (Substack comments are a lot better than the wholly non-functional comment section of the old Wordpress blog, but they still leave much to be desired.)

Boy howdy, was I right! This wasn’t nearly as short a post as I expected!

Please don’t let my wordiness hinder the conversation, though. Carry right on replying to me and others! I’ve loved reading it!

(P.S. don’t forget to actually go back and read the actual comments section in question. I was forced to focus on just excerpts from just a handful of comments, but there are some other great comments back there—including a good discussion with John May and some terrific contributions by Daniel Pareja, who is my go-to guy for comparative government and election law and always has an example you’ve never heard of at the ready.)

NEXT VOYAGE: Worthy Reads is queued up and ready to publish, and I am just finishing up the last book I needed to read as part of the next Letter to a Growing Catholic. Also, June is Supreme Court season!

Tags: #SomeConstitutionalAmendments

1. At the state level, this is only a tendency, not a rule. Democrats always perform better in more urban and densely populated areas—that’s a rule—but states have enough of a mixture that Republicans control several very large states. Two of the top five states by population vote Democrat (#1 California and #4 New York), but two of them vote Republican (#2 Texas and #3 Florida) while the fifth (Pennsylvania) is currently the nation’s key swing state.

2. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment was ratified in 1992, but Congress proposed it in 1789. It therefore got to skip both houses and several states on its road to ratification.

The so-called “Equal Rights Amendment” was proposed during the end of the Great Consensus Era. However, as I have oft remarked, the ERA failed and cannot be revived, except by starting over from scratch. Although some people are trying to revive it, they are doing so illegally, because they are lawless vandals who deserve to be ruled by equally lawless vandal Donald Trump. Thus, the last Constitutional amendment to be proposed and ratified was in 1971.

3. Details if you want ‘em: the Democratic candidate could get to 60% of population by holding all blue states, plus any of these paths:

• big red states: TX + FL gets them to 60% of population, but they need a third state (OH?) to have the required 50% of the states.

• small red states: all of the 16 smallest red states (WY, AK, ND, SD, MT, WV, ID, NE, MS, KS, AK, IA, UT, OK, KY, LA), which adds up to 76% of states overall.

• median red states: they will need a median of 9 red states to back the Democratic candidate (the most median would be: KS+AK+IA+UT+OK+KY+LA+AL+SC), giving Democrats about 60% of states overall.

4. Here are all the breakdowns for recent election years where I did the actual math:

2024:

Population: Democrats (55%)

States: Republicans (53%)

Result: COMPROMISE

2020:

Population: Democrats (55%)

States: Republicans (51%)

Result: COMPROMISE

2016:

Population: Republicans (61%)

States: Republicans (61%)

Result: REPUBLICANS

2012:

Population: Republicans (55%)

States: Republicans (57%)

Result: REPUBLICANS if only a simple majority is required, SOME COMPROMISE if 60% required

2008:

Population: Democrats (54%)

States: Democrats (57%)

Result: DEMOCRATS if only a simple majority is required, SOME COMPROMISE if 60% required.

2004:

Population: Republicans (59%)

States: Republicans (54%)

Result: REPUBLICANS if only a simple majority is required, SOME COMPROMISE if 60% required. But remember that this is 2004, so the Republicans in question include people who would identify as Democrats, or at least independents, today—Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), Frank Murkowski (R-AK), and George Pataki (R-NY)

5. The exception to this is that Democrats would generally have the option of cutting a deal with a few large red states and then could still elect a President with well under 60% of the states. Republicans, who do hold a narrow natural small-state advantage, generally would not have this option. However, if Democrats make deals with a more evenly distributed cross-section of red states, this “advantage” goes away.

6. The District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment, proposed 1978; died in 1985 upon failure to ratify.