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This is why we have the Electoral College and not a pure popular vote system.
As I noted in my Electoral College piece, a presidential candidate who is not even on the ballot in politically homogenous states - as Lincoln wasn't in the South in 1860 - skews the national popular vote. nationalreview.com/2019/04/what-t…
I used this hypothetical example: R candidate wins 48 states by identical 54-46 margins, D wins CA, NY & DC by 75-25 margins, D wins national popular vote. Who should win? 
Anyway, I believe the last incumbent president who wasn't on the ballot in all the states was Taft.
Just imagine if, say, Mississippi had come up with an excuse to keep Barack Obama off the ballot.
6. The California Democrat who was celebrating this plan has blocked me, but you will notice that its explicit intention is to discourage Republican voters from the polls. Which of course is fine with these folks
7. Here's the original tweets, if you, too, are blocked
8. I see a bunch of folks on the Left have belatedly discovered this thread, so let's address some of the big ones here. This one is of the "but it's OK when we do it" variety. (Also, note: none of those efforts were ever passed by an entire State Senate)
9. Actually, I used 2016 turnout in every state. And used that for a hypothetical
10. As I noted in my article, a candidate getting 54% of the vote in states he wins but almost zero in the states he loses is not simply a hypothetical. It is what actually happened in 1860 to a Republican named Abe Lincoln. nationalreview.com/2019/04/what-t…
11. Actually, "States" is right there in the name of the country. And no, I don't think Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois & Ohio are just empty land with no people.
12. When you drill down into these responses, this sort of thing is where you end up: abolishing the states
13. The Electoral College is distributed according to population.
14. Again, as noted, we have a winner-take-all system, and the 54% hypothetical is based on the actual 1860 election
15. This illustrates my other key point about the Electoral College's legitimizing function: situations where nobody gets a majority of the popular vote, so the "winner" can be somebody who got a third of the vote, all of it from one radicalized region
16. This is a genre of response you get a lot from supposedly adult progressives:
Conservative: [argue policy or point out that a progressive has misstated the facts]
Progressive: Oh boo hoo you poor snowflake.
Conservative: [argue policy or point out that a progressive has misstated the facts]
Progressive: Oh boo hoo you poor snowflake.
17. States have a distinct role in the United States that counties do not. The country is broader & more diverse than any one state. And no state weights counties by population as does the Electoral College
18. Again, this ignores the fact that the Electoral College is weighted by population. Texas, for example, has so many electoral votes because it has 28 million people
19. I submit that my hypothetical, which assumes 2016 turnout in every state & gives the R the same average share in winning states as Lincoln in 1860 (& more in the losing states than Lincoln got) is considerably more realistic than this
20. I don't see the need for that: not how it has historically been done & few states are as vast & diverse as the whole country. But not a terrible idea for, say, California if the districts were regularly re-weighted by pop like the EC.
21. Again, bear in mind - as noted in my column - that in practical effect, the Electoral College in nearly every case goes to the winner of popular *majorities*; it comes into play mainly where neither candidate gets one. nationalreview.com/2019/04/what-t…
22. You: but if we eliminated winner-take-all states, what might the candidate field look like?
Me: Let's consider a real-world example:
Me: Let's consider a real-world example:
23. As for Trump's tax returns: the norm of candidates releasing their taxes is a valuable one, & both Trump & Romney did themselves political damage by delaying/flouting it. But it's not a job requirement. Until 1916, no presidential candidate even paid income taxes.
24. I'll circle back another day to the Electoral College's historical roots, which tend to be oversimplified by the progressive narrative. This, from a liberal historian, is a useful partial corrective nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opi…
25. My chief historical argument is that we've had the Electoral College in its current form since 1804. What other country's system for popular sovereignty has lasted that long? The world's longest continuous constitutional system is nothing to discard lightly.
26. Also the Solid South from 1880 to 1944 is an important part of the history. I dealt in this thread with the example of 1888, when the Electoral College prevented the lockstep Jim Crow South from re-electing Grover Cleveland.
27. Of course, the real scandal of the Solid South's role in Congress and presidential elections in those years is that Congress never enforced Section 2 of the 14th Amendment against them. But that's another day's story.
28. All of that said, while the Electoral College resolves popular vote pluralities, we do face a realistic possibility in 2020 of facing the Electoral College's real weakness: a tie decided by the House. Which would likely go to Trump, depending how the 2020 House races go.
29. Sure. Lots of things would change about how elections are conducted, who runs, etc., and lots more rules would require changing. Which is why it's silly to critique the current rules with national popular vote figures
30. I guess some folks are still doing the thing where they call a plurality a majority? The main practical effect of the Electoral College is to resolve elections where there is no majority, like 2016.
31. We should not count votes differently by race. I'm not sure why anyone in this century would argue we should.
32. One thing I discovered in reading the responses is quite how many people on Twitter are unaware that Texas and Florida each have more people than New York.
33. "Meaningless subgroups"? Massachusetts and Virginia have both existed more than twice as long as Germany or Italy.
34. Actually - and again, this is covered in my piece - very few developed countries choose a head of state by national popular plurality. The German system, like ours, has a federalist structure. nationalreview.com/2019/04/what-t…
35. Too many responses to get to everyone, but once you start adding runoffs, redrawing state boundaries, rewriting ballot & voting eligibility rules, you grasp what a radical reworking of the whole system is being proposed.
