I was going to let this go, but I just saw Andrew Gelman’s post about what a terrible idea electoral-votes-by-congressional-district would be, and that makes the third one (here’s one of the others; I’ve lost the other one) I’ve seen that gets this wrong in the last 24 hours.
Hey, everyone writing about this: the Republican plan isn’t electoral-votes-by-congressional-district. It’s electoral votes by congressional district in the states where it would help Republicans (see, for example, here). In fact, it’s probably better to just say that their plan is that electoral votes in every state should be apportioned in whatever way is best for Republicans. How do we know this? Well, RNC Chair Reince Priebus said so: “a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at.”
I still think it’s far more likely than not that all of this will fizzle out; passing the plan requires state legislators to act against their personal and state interest and in favor of their national party interest, even putting aside the possibility that they would be subject to a vote backlash. But who knows — it surely could happen, and certainly a fair number of Republicans are talking it up. Sure, it’s fine to use it as an excuse to talk about various electoral vote schemes, as Gelman does in an otherwise perfectly fine, informative post. It’s just that everyone should make clear exactly what Republicans are doing, and it’s just not a national uniform plan.
[Cross-posted at A plain blog about politics]
