Can Democrats effectively abolish Electoral College after midterm wins?

hereme888

That would result in civil war

ecshafer

Abolishing the Electoral College would be interesting. Politicians would pay less attention to more rural states, probably less subsidies for farmers (which would end up being bad for food prices). But also less silly ideas like Ethanol. Trump won the popular vote in 2024, its not so cut and dry about it just being an absolute blue team win. It would cause more republicans in blue states to vote in presidential campaigns, and more democrats in red states to vote. I know many people in NYS that just never bother to vote since their vote doesn't matter anyway.

austin-cheney

Nope. That is not going to happen because it will require a constitutional amendment which does not benefit supremely rural states. Even if these extremely conservative rural states completely flipped to hard blue they would still be rural. The Electoral College is not a bad idea. It is just implemented poorly. It would work better if it actually represented the voting constituents instead of a controlling party. Nebraska and Maine have it correct.

dgrin91

The real answer here is nobody knows, and it will likely be up to SCOTUS. Everyone saying it needs a constitutional amendment doesn't understand what NPVIC is. The whole point of it is to do an end-run around the constitutional amendment process - a hack if you will. Whether this hack is legal is a complicated question ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutionality_of_the_Natio... ) that realistically can't be answered by anyone but SCOTUS. If states pull the trigger on NPVIC then I would bet good money that it ends up in SCOTUS, but who knows how they will rule.

justaskingthequ

Maybe a more interesting question is do they have the strength and/or guts to jettison the supermajority rule, impeach the top two executive branch officials in one go, and appoint the Speaker of the House to the top slot? There is no constitutional or legal reason why they couldn't do both at once in one resolution and no really constraining definitions of the necessary "charges". It's all convention and tradition, which we've seen at this point is basically fictional rules for the meek and incoherent.

RickJWagner

I’d be deeply disappointed and highly motivated to act against such a thing. Same feelings about changes to the Supreme Court. America has a well balanced system, as demonstrated by this weeks blue wave. If the party in power fails to adequately deliver, the people throw them out. Changing the formula to give a strategic advantage to one side would be a dangerous move.

ChrisArchitect

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50379853

davidham

I can’t see the Snopes piece, but from what I understand, the push is not to abolish the electoral college, but to get the newly Democrat-controlled states to ratify the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in which participating states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote, once the compact’s member states total 270 or more electoral votes. So, preventing future occurrences like 2016 where Trump won the EC but lost the popular vote.

comrade1234

You could end up in a situation where your state voted for one candidate but all of its electoral votes went to another. For example CA voted for... honestly I can't remember her name - she took over after Biden dropped out - but trump won the popular vote so you, as a Californian, your vote would go to trump.