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I’m trying to enjoy my sabbatical this semester but Dan Crenshaw keeps forcing me to relive the one set of Intro to American Politics discussions that invariably gets me genuinely and unprofessionally aggravated.
As a sidenote, part of the multidimensional aggravating-ness of these discussions is that these people aren't even mounting this (horrible) defense on behalf of the right institution.
The EC does give a somewhat disproportionate voice to small state residents, but by far the most significant driver of distortion and of pop-vote/EC mismatches is the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes everywhere except for ME and NE.
That's not a constitutional feature at all and has nothing to do with protecting rural folks. And while the Trump-era GOP has an electoral coalition that for arbitrary reasons really DOES benefit from the EC in a major way, that's not a longstanding feature of modern politics.
As recently as 2004, John Kerry came close to winning an EC victory while losing the popular vote. The case against the EC is just that it's a ridiculous goofy vestigial institution that functions in no way as intended (not that what HAD been intended was any great shakes).
When people make Cranshaw's argument, they SHOULD be using it to defend the Senate, which really does (to a massively greater extent than the EC) distort one-person-one-vote to benefit small-state residents and thus bias partisan outcomes drastically in the modern GOP's favor.
But saying that is just to underscore the profound and truly consequential anti-democratic awfulness of the U.S. Senate. The Electoral College is a kind of embarrassing (if increasingly crisis-prone) testament to our Constitution's dotage. It's the Senate that will doom us. /end
