I did the numbers: even if electoral votes were apportioned strictly by population, we still lose

[jmowreader]

We've been talking about electoral votes here, and how a vote in Wyoming or Idaho counts for more at the electoral college than one from Pennsylvania. Which brought to mind the obvious: if the country was apportioned using the population of Wyoming as the basis for issuing a state electors, how would we have done?

Turns out we'd still lose.

My first move was to go to www.electoral-vote.com and get the current elector counts. There are 538 of them, and Hillary got 232. She needed 270 to win. I lovingly wrote down (well, put into a computer file; if you PM me I will send you a copy) all the states and how many electoral votes each gets.

Then I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population and got each state's population at the 2010 Census. Wyoming, the smallest state, has 563,000 people living there. Divide 563,000 by the 3 electoral votes Wyoming currently has, and you get a constant of 188,000 - or a "W" (for Wyoming, not wacked-out president) of 188. I then rounded to the whole thousand each state's population - California had 37,254,503 population but I used 37,254. Then I divided each state's population by W and awarded the whole number of electors to each state. (If a state has population/W of 44.725, they get 44 electors. I did this shit at 1 am. I'm not getting into higher math when most of y'all are getting into bed.) Then I added up the number of electors Hillary would have taken if all states were winner-take-all.

We end up with 1617 electors. You need 809 to win, and Hillary got 708.

Democrats made the same fucking mistake we make every fucking election: We blow off the ENTIRE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING COUNTRY because the Pacific Coast, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Michigan are going to save us...until they don't, like happened this year. We can no longer ignore the under-five-EV states because shit like Trump happens when we do.

[guillaumeb]

1. A nice post and an affirmation of Howard Dean's 50 state strategy.

Far too many politicians are guilty of this same "overlooking of the Red states" strategy. That essentially writes off most of the country and makes Democrats look like a minority party because the state map shows mostly red.

[Tiggeroshii]

2. Gerrymandering

I figured as much

[pansypoo53219]

7. or CHEATING.

THEY have to CHEAT & STEAL.

[Tiggeroshii]

10. Gerrymandering, voter id laws, poll closure

Just another way if saying

[stopbush]

3. The Pacific Coast went for Hillary, overwhelmingly.

We did our part and then some in the popular vote, but we have only so many EC votes.

We did all the "saving" we could. Maxed out what we could do, in fact.

[jmowreader]

4. Yes, we did

But that's still not going to fix the massive problem caused by us gifting 24 states to the GOP before a single vote is cast.

[RelativelyJones]

5. Never should have abandoned the 50 state strategy

Once that happened the GOP had hundreds of uncontested safe zones. This probably goes back to that fool, Rahm Emanuel, and his vendetta against Howard Dean. We have been paying ever since.

[Yo_Mama]

6. Dean's 50-state strategy made sense.

I remember reading that Hillary Clinton's team lost the 2008 nomination because they didn't bother to focus on a lot of states.

I wonder if they committed somewhat the same error this time?

I agree with your post. We should assume we are going to lose every general election no matter what polls say, and we should go digging for every vote in every state.

We lost this one, but that doesn't mean we have to lose the next one.

[radius777]

9. campaigns have limited resources though,

and in a winner take all system, have to focus on states they can actually win.

Hillary did make a play for states like AZ, GA, and even campaigned some in TX, and did improve the margins for Dems, especially in TX where we only lost by 9 points.

Dems are the party of cities/metro areas and bordering suburbs, and we need to go around the country to the smaller cities and industrial towns, or cities in red states, and try to overtake those areas and build party infrastructure - those are the areas most likely to turn (and stay) blue and thus turn the entire state blue.

[radius777]

8. We probably need a proportional system

like the Dem primaries, where the popular vote percentage of a particular state is tied to the number of electors (or whatever) the candidate would get.

That would force the candidates to campaign in states they can't win, to try to maximize their turnout across the country.

This would likely lead to less polarization and more moderation, as very red or very blue states wouldn't get 'left in the dark' to stew in their own ideology, but would be challenged more.