During my American Politics class today, we were talking about the Electoral College and how it is a DANGER TO DEMOCRACY!!! The leftists loved it, the teacher enjoyed spewing the garbage, and I sat there dumbfounded. I think it is safe to say that the left wants to get rid of the Electoral College and the right wants to preserve it (like any sane human being).
After being so tired of hearing the Electoral College bashing, I decided to speak up. I brought up the fact that (using NY as an example) considering almost the entirety of NYS votes red but there's one tiny part of NY that harbors the most amount of people in the state, and it votes blue, which causes the ENTIRE state to vote blue. I also mentioned a big reason the Electoral College exists is so large populations in certain states don't control the entire election. If you abolish the Electoral College, California and New York will run every single election. Campaigning targets will shift. And nobody will care about the important issues facing certain states. Once I mentioned everything above, the entire class was silent. They had no rebuttal. The teacher then said "thank you for bringing that up, we will revisit it later." (It was not revisited later.)
So class ended and I was feeling good. I just stumped the entire class! But it gets better. I received an email from my teacher and it said THIS: (Keep in mind my teacher is VERY MUCH A LEFTIST)
Just a quick note to say thank you for your comment today. You are absolutely right about the points you made and I feel badly as your teacher that I didn't bring them up first. You are quite correct in your statements and they added a necessary counterpoint to the discussion. Thank you for speaking up.
A leftist admitting a conservative is right about something is YUUUUUUUGE in the redpilling process. I can't wait for more chances at tossing those redpills around.
That's it for now, pedes! There will definitely be more stories to come.
The counter to this is that in a democracy, the vote should be proportional to the people.
While this may be true in theory, it doesn't address the fact that different states have different voting laws, and the electoral college allows the states to determine how voting is done for their own people, rather than having it done at the federal level.
For instance, the federal government would not allow non-citizen immigrants to vote, and thus, they would have no representation. But since the electoral college is largely based upon population, not based upon eligible voters, California gets more representatives because of their immigrant population. Trump may be changing whether immigrants get electoral representation, but it doesn't change the calculus for California.
Also, the combination of the equal senate seats allows the federal government to greater reflect the political discourse at the state houses in the less dense states. The more sober and pointed political discourse at the state level would be totally drowned out by the populist sentiments that blow across the country if we lost senate representation.
Lastly, people are free to move to places where they would have more representation under the electoral college. The electoral college therefore promotes the development of underdeveloped areas of the country by giving additional voice to those who are taming the wilderness and are at the complete graces of mother nature. Those people are too busy building up their communities to go try to convince the cities of why we must have certain laws. The cities must be convinced to go preach to the people in the wilderness instead, because the people in the cities have more free time and generally have more money. Without the EC, the people developing the wilderness would have too small a voice, and then future generations would have no where to go to when the cities become too packed.
The EC has a lot of benefits, but it's important to know your audience. Some of these arguments make your argument skeptical of your motivation. If you don't promote the democratic ideal of letting the states decide how to vote, then progressives will tune you out. Discuss ranked choice voting and the move to let felons vote. None of that would happen without the EC.