No More Electoral College?

I've stayed out of the election talk almost entirely, and don't really plan on starting now. However there has been a lot of egghead discussion about the possibility of eliminating the electoral college if we get another election where the popular and electoral votes point in different directions. See, for example, Matthew Yglesias:

Speaking seriously, a Kerry win without the popular vote would probably create a real chance to eliminate the electoral college, since both parties would have tasted its wrath in recent memory and neither would have any particular love for it. That, I think, would be a good thing.

There are two points to be made here, I think. The first is that I'm quite sure there is NO real chance to eliminate the electoral college. Contrary to Yglesias' inference, support for the electoral college probably falls either on a small state / large state axis, or on a battleground state / non-battleground state axis (or some combination thereof), not on any partisan one that I can think of. And some people, believe it or not, actually have principled positions on the matter. I would not have supported abandoning the electoral college in 2000, and I won't support it in 2004, regardless of the outcome.

The even bigger obstacle, of course, is that it requries amending the Constitution. We're not talking about getting a slim majority in both houses of Congress with the signature of a President who just won under the current system. We're talking about overwhelming majorities both in Congress and in the state legislatures. And that's a rather different undertaking, almost doomed from the start. There's a pretty simple entrenchment problem. As much as the current system upsets some, it also gives a lot of power to others. The latter don't have much incentive to give up the status quo, and I don't think another close election will alter their incentives much.

Small, battleground states get far more attention than they would in a popular national election, and small uncontested states will probably be ignored just as much as they are now (likely too few votes to justify the expense). Hard to get 38 states to approve a dramatic, unpredictable constitutional change that either decreases or has no positive effect on their power.

The second point is that I am not at all sure that eliminating the electoral college would be a good thing. I'm not sure that it would be bad, but I think it is more complicated than most people really think. I started this post thinking I would go into a long litany of potential problems, but I've not thought it through as well as I like, and will save it for another day.

The little I can add right now might be to suggest that though a historical understanding of the electoral college's creation is not as relevant as one might hope, it might give some insight.

What Madison was most afraid of was not direct popular election on a national scale, which modern anti-electoral college advocates desire. That wasn't even an option back then, it would have been a laughable proposition. Instead, what he was fighting against was the proposal that the president be elected directly by the state legislatures. He feared, rightly so, that if a president were elected by state legislatures, and was eligible for re-election, thrn he would become a puppet of those legislatures. And since the nationalist Madison of 1787 was most concerned with correcting the abuse of power by state legislatures, this was a non-starter.

So he crafted an ingenious compromise, in which a new body would be formed for the sole purpose of electing the president, and would be immediately dissolved thereafter. It would have none of its own institutional desires for power, and no capacity for such.

The state legislatures were given responsibility for deciding the process for creating this body, but it would be some time before popular votes for electors even took hold within the states. But just keep in mind that the debate over the electoral college in 1787 does not look much like the debate about it now.

I don't know if that adds anything to the discussion, but it has been on my mind.