The President is only indirectly elected by the country as a whole. Therefore, the president is highly incentivized to pander to a half-dozen or so states. And a few key voters within those states. It's exactly the same problem created by regionally-allocated representatives; the only difference is that the mechanism is just a little more opaque.
Because strong presidents drive policy-making, this difference ("a few key states" vs. "the country as a whole") definitely shows up in Congressional behavior.
A much simpler (and more plausible) solution to chapium's problem is simply getting rid of the electoral college.
> A much simpler (and more plausible) solution to chapium's problem is simply getting rid of the electoral college.
Which would then require that a candidate only pander to an even smaller number of densely populated cities.
It would be far better to revoke much of the power of the central government rather than to try and debug our way through to a mythical process by which all individual interests are considered. Because, in the end, minority interests will always be cast aside once the election is over anyway.
> Which would then require that a candidate only pander to an even smaller number of densely populated cities.
NYC/LA/Chicago combined is only 15M people. That's clearly not enough people to win a majority of a 300M+ population. Perhaps you mean a wider class of cities. But 80% of Americans live in cities! If you can't get elected by "pandering" to a whopping 80% of your electorate then something is terribly wrong. We have to choose a very "just right" definition of "city" for your assertion to be true.
But there's an even more important misunderstanding here.
When discussing this topic, many people get distracted by the fact that removing the electoral college would increase the voting power of Massachusetts residents and decrease the voting power of Montana residents in presidential elections.
This is a distraction because neither Massachusetts nor Montana is the winner in the current system! It's states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that have a truly distortionary amount of power in the current system. Those states are not particularly rural or particularly urban.
Here's the key observation that could make changes to the electoral college politically feasible: if you don't live in a presidential swing state, getting rid of the electoral college increases the power of your region in selecting the president regardless of the size of your state/city.
So, this is not a case of favoring one small set of states over another small set. Removing the electoral college would substantially weaken the power of 5-6 states over the Executive branch and increase the power of the other 45 states (some more than others, sure, but nearly everyone wins compared to the status quo).
> Because, in the end, minority interests will always be cast aside once the election is over anyway.
This is exactly why I favor keeping Congress as it is but reforming the electoral process for the Executive branch. Montana has a very loud voice in the Senate and House relative to its population. I do not suggest changing that.
> It would be far better to...
1. An omniscient and beneficent dictator would be even better; the point of my post was to suggest plausible alternatives :-)
2. There are many merits to federalism, but this is quite a bag of worms and we're already straying OT.
