Electoral College may be in glare again

[Nicholas_J]

By Tom Baxter
Cox News Service
Thursday, August 26, 2004



ATLANTA — There were a few days four years ago when the possibility that George W. Bush might win the popular vote while falling short in the Electoral College was a matter of hot speculation.

It hasn't popped up on anybody's radar screen so far this year, but the possibility exists again.

In the days before the November 2000 election, Democratic strategist James Carville put the odds on the scenario at 30 percent, and two Columbia University political scientists published a paper showing how it could happen. Bush campaign officials were said to be concerned about the possibility.

No one of note, it seems, guessed the real outcome: that Al Gore would win the popular vote while Bush won in the Electoral College.

With next week's Republican National Convention about to raise the curtain on the fall campaign, nothing is certain in this year's race. But if it remains as close as it has been, there is again the possibility the Electoral College and the popular vote could diverge.

All things being equal, Bush should have a clear electoral advantage this year due to the post-2000 congressional redistricting, in which states where the majority of voters favored him four years ago picked up nine electoral votes at the expense of the states that voted for Gore. Among them:

— Bush's home state, solidly Republican Texas, gained two votes.

— Georgia, another Republican stronghold, gained two votes.

— Dependably Democratic New York lost two votes.

But at present, the electoral count doesn't tilt that way. Though Bush and Kerry have sometimes traded leads in polls of the popular vote appearing on the same day, a different race has evolved in the state-by-state battle for electoral votes, where, in all but a few cases, the winner of a state's popular vote takes all the electoral votes, no matter how close the tally.

In the White House Scoreboard, a compilation of the most recent state polls on the National Journal's Hotline Web site, Kerry passed Bush in electoral votes the week he named Sen. John Edwards as his running mate and has held the lead for more than two months, though in recent weeks, the gap has narrowed.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/shared/news/politics/stories/08/26close.html

[bunkerbuster1]

1. In one way, I hope the 2000 roles are reversed in 2004.

Sure, I'd like for Kerry to take the electoral and the popular vote and start out of the box with a clear backing of a majority of the public.

but IF Kerry were to win the electoral college by (say) five, and lose the popular vote by (say) half a million, we'd have a healthy national debate on how stupid our electoral college system is, and how embarassing it is in the 21st to be picking a country's CEO in this fashion.

It'd be real nice if the Constitution could be amended by 2008 to have a popular vote, or at least something more representative than these dumb winner-take-all state-by-state things.