So imagine you're a state that has given its electoral college votes to Republican candidates in every election except for the very biggest Democratic landslides, and has done so for 11 straight elections. But you have this very cute provision, whereby some of your state's electoral college votes can be peeled off, if the other party manages to win in any of the state's federal congressional districts. Now of course, this has never happened since the rule was put in place, so it was just a bit of cute trivia for election geeks to blather about, but no one expected it to actually happen.
Then one election, it actually does. Now you're the State's dominant party, the Republican party. What do you do?
Why, end the system and go back to a winner-take-all, of course.
This weekend, Chris Bowers posted on North Carolina's flirtation with shaking up the electoral college. The gist of it is that they want to stop giving all their electoral votes to the statewide winner and start apportioning them by Congressional district. I was kind of ambivalent about this idea until I gave it some more thought. And by "gave it some more thought", I mean read Hendrick Hertzberg. Because it turns out California is going to have to consider it now too.
