Nice NYTimes piece by Adam Liptak on the changing election landscape. Basic thesis is that only the swing states get to vote. And exaggeration, of course, but one that highlights the problem.
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November 3, 2012
The Vanishing Battleground
By ADAM LIPTAK
Washington
IN the razor-thin 1960 presidential election, John F. Kennedy campaigned in 49 states. Richard M. Nixon visited all 50.
The current contest is just as close and intense, but the candidates have campaigned in only 10 states since the political conventions. There are towns in Ohio that have received more attention than the entire West Coast.
The shrinking electoral battleground has altered the nature of American self-governance. There is evidence that the current system is depressing turnout, distorting policy, weakening accountability and effectively disenfranchising the vast majority of Americans.
“It’s a new way to run a country,” says Bill Bishop, co-author of “ The Big Sort,” a 2008 book that examined the most important cause of the trend: the recent tendency of like-minded people to live near one another.
That demographic shift means the country is now dominated by solidly Democratic states on the coasts and solidly Republican ones in the interior and in much of the South. In a close election, all of those states are completely out of reach for one candidate or the other.
This state of affairs is not rooted in the Constitution, but rather in the fact that almost every state chooses to allocate its electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. A candidate confident of winning or sure of losing a bare majority of a state’s popular vote has no reason to expend resources there.
Some of the people who live in the nation’s spectator states return the favor by staying home from the polls. In 2008, voter turnout in the 15 states that received the bulk of the candidates’ attention was 67 percent. In the remaining 35 states, it was six points lower.
That disparity increases the chances that one candidate will prevail in the Electoral College while another wins the popular vote. Polling experts believe Mitt Romney has a greater chance than President Obama of being on the losing end of that combination, by running up large margins in states dominated by Republican voters while losing most of the competitive ones.
Rob Richie, the executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy, said the new political landscape would be unrecognizable to a voter a few decades ago. “Back in ’76,” he said, “10 of the 11 biggest states were swing states.”
Indeed, in the extremely close 1960 and 1976 presidential elections, there were more than 30 contested states, including California, Illinois, New York and Texas.
The 2004 election, in which President George W. Bush gained a second term, was about as close as the one in 1976, which Jimmy Carter won. Both candidates prevailed in the overall vote by about two percentage points. In 1976, though, 20 states were won or lost by a margin of less than five percentage points. In 2004, only 11 states were within that margin.
In the current election, the battleground has grown almost comically small. Just three states — Florida, Ohio and Virginia — have accounted for almost two-thirds of the recent campaign appearances by the presidential candidates and their running mates. The three are home to an eighth of the nation’s people.
Four years ago, the presidential candidates and their supporters bought television advertising in about 100 of the 210 media markets, said Elizabeth Wilner of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. This year, she said, “the battlefield has shrunk by one-third to one-half.”
Living in a battleground state has advantages. People there receive disproportionate attention from presidential candidates during campaigns, which is perhaps a mixed blessing. But there is also reason to think that the voices of people who live in swing states are listened to more attentively and that their concerns are more likely to influence policy and spending.
Last year, when Pennsylvania toyed with moving from the usual winner-take-all allocation of its electoral votes to one that would apportion electoral votes based on the results in its Congressional districts, Arlen Specter, who had represented the state in the Senate for 30 years, mostly as a Republican, opposed the move on pragmatic grounds. (Mr. Specter died last month.)
“I think it’d be very bad for Pennsylvania because we wouldn’t attract attention from Washington on important funding projects for the state,” he told the Capitolwire news service, adding: “It’s undesirable to change the system so presidents won’t be asking us always for what we need, what they can do for us.”
Pennsylvania abandoned its plan, but there have been other calls for overhauls of how presidents are selected in light of the shrinking electoral battleground.
Two states, Maine and Nebraska, allocate all but two of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in each of their Congressional districts. The remaining votes, reflecting the extra electoral votes every state gets regardless of population, go to the winner of the statewide popular vote.
But splitting electoral votes by Congressional districts may exacerbate rather than reduce the likelihood that the electoral vote will not reflect the popular one. “It simply will create battleground Congressional districts,” said John R. Koza, a computer scientist who has become the driving force behind a plan to have states that control a majority of electoral votes agree to simply allocate them to the winner of the national popular vote.
A second possibility, but still an imperfect one if the goal is to reflect the national political will, is to split each state’s electoral votes according to the overall vote within the state. The problem is that electoral votes must be whole numbers, and so this plan would require very substantial rounding.
A third option is the National Popular Vote plan, the initiative proposed by Mr. Koza. Eight states and the District of Columbia have pledged their electoral votes — representing 49 percent of the required majority of 270 — to the candidate who wins the national popular vote.
A virtue of such a deal among these states, Mr. Koza says, is that it can be accomplished without a federal constitutional amendment. The wholesale elimination of the Electoral College, on the other hand, would require one.
The Koza proposal may be a pipe dream. In the meantime, though, there is little question that the current system is the new normal.
“Going to 2016,” Mr. Richie said, “there is no indication that there will be any new battlegrounds.”
Adam Liptak is the Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times.
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