Althouse on California Electoral Vote Debate

Ann Althouse makes a couple of points on the debate:

Here you have the biggest state, but one party is so clearly going to win that it makes no sense for a presidential candidate to cater to it. Nor should either party pick its nominee based on what Californians will like. Isn't that bad for California? But since the majority is Democratic in California, and the Democratic candidate currently has a lock on all 55 electoral votes, why should that Democratic majority vote for a change that will only cede some of those votes to the Republican candidate? The proposal looks doomed.

But wait. Even if most voters who vote Democratic care mainly about the party's dominance at the national level, all you need is for some of the voters who vote Democratic to care more about the candidates' paying attention to California. Add those votes to those of the Republican minority, and you could get to a majority for change.

There have been some prominent bloggers, both in and out of election law, that have said that the ballot initiative will fail when Democrats start advertising against it. But the GOP doesn't need to convince all Democrats, as Althouse points out, just enough of them who care about California actually having a say in who is elected.

I think the initiative has a good chance of passing. But even if it is passed, and the effort clearly benefits Republican candidates, the move only divides the electoral votes, and probbably won't do anything for presidential competition in California. California's congressional districts were created in essentially a "sweetheart gerrymander" in that Republican seats prior to the 2000 Census were simply make more Republican and the same for Democratic seats. In all of California, there may be 2 or 3 truly competitive seats, the remainder are so overwhelming favoring one party or another as to be competitive wastelands. Thus, even with a proportional allocation system, only two or three electoral votes in California are going to be competitive and even small West Virginia has more electoral votes at stake and is competitive in certain circumstances. In short, there will not be enough electoral competition in California, even with the change.

The only way California will become an electorally competitive state is for the legislature to embrace some redistricting reforms. If the Congressional districts were drawn so as to favor competitive seats (i.e. a partisan make-up that does not overwhelmingly favor one party over the other), then and only then will California make a difference in electoral politics.