If one looks at the map of the last four elections the immediate thing that stands out is that almost the entire heartland and most of the Southeast is red. The Northeast and West Coast are mostly deep blue.
Interestingly, those blue states are all centers of urban population; New York Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, California, and Washington are invariably deep blue. Rural states like Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Arizona, Utah, the Dakotas, and Montana are deep red. Most Southern states and Alaska are also red, while several less populous states, notably, New Hampshire, Vermont, Michigan, Maine, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New Mexico seem to run blue. The rest are those “Toss-up” or “Battleground” states where most of the Presidential campaigning takes place.
Why is this? Should we blame the Electoral College? Should we blame the Founding Fathers? Well, maybe.
There were two highly contentious issues at the Constitutional Convention in 1887. The first was how representatives should be elected. The industrial states and agrarian states didn’t trust each other. Each was concerned about unequal representation. If the elections were based fully democratically, the more populous industrial states would receive far more representation than the rural, agricultural states. The solution at that time was to give slaves 5/9 per person count in allocating representatives.
Today, there are no slaves to tilt the scale toward equal representation in rural states, so once again the agricultural states get far less representation than the more urbanized ones. One look at the red state – blue state map and that inequality will stick out like Shaquille O’Neal in a jockey convention.
But whoa, isn’t that a map of the presidential elections? Yes, it is. And that brings us to the other big point of contention in the 1887 Constitutional Convention … the Presidency.
We had just fought for independence from the tyrannical rule of a monarch. The last thing anyone at that convention wanted was another monarch – although there were a few that pined for the rule of a king, they were well in the minority. But the Articles of Confederation were completely devoid of any executive authority, which made them totally ineffective. That was the main reason for the Constitutional Convention.
So, they relented to having a chief executive. Unfortunately, none of those learned men could define precisely what that executive could or should do. So, it was left mostly blank in the finished constitution – sort of a TBD job description. Until George Washington filled in those blanks by example, no one seemed to know just what the President was supposed to do.
When it came to deciding how this President should be selected, there was even more contention. It took four days to sort out the details and it still wasn’t definite. In the end, a cumbersome method of election by Electors was agreed upon, and those Electors could be determined by the individual states and allocated according to the number of legislators from each state.
That was probably a good idea at the time, but by now that method has become nearly a de-facto election by population representation. And again, the rural states have little or no say in the matter. But because of the large number of rural, “Red” states and the few “Blue” states, even though those “Blue” states have a greater number of Electors, the numbers force the election to be focused on several battleground states.
Folks, we are delegating the future of our country to a minority of people who can’t make up their minds! Our nation will neither be in the hands of a monarch nor will it be a true democracy, it is in the hands of the ambivalent. Yes, we are doomed to live in an “ambivalentocracy”.
