Dropping out of the electoral college

There was some discussion of the electoral college after the last two elections, and I can't say that I'm a big fan of the spurious blue-sate/red-state culture it's fostered in politics and in the media. It's also interesting to note who the proponents are, and judging from this article-- which isn't very intellectually honest of me-- they seem to be reliable conservatives. But that stands to reason when your policies are only popular with a third of the nation.

Recently, George Will wrote a pro-electoral college column featuring some of the strangest rationales I have ever heard. He argued, for instance, that the electoral college "encourages candidates to form coalitions of states with various political cultures." That's an old electoral college rationale: It discourages presidential campaigns based on narrow geographic support and encourages those with a national base. I don't think that's a strong enough reason to let the second-place vote-getter win, but it is a reason, or it would be if it were true.

But it's not. As nearly everybody knows, our politics has grown regionally polarized under the current system. Bush is loathed in the Northeast, West Coast, and upper Midwest and wildly popular in the South, border states, and Mountain West. (Or, at least, he was a couple of years ago. Now he's pretty much loathed everywhere.) The electoral college exacerbates this tension. The Republican candidate has no incentive to try to coax more support in New England, which he can't win anyway, while the Democrat has no reason to shop for votes in Texas. (. . .)

I've noticed that electoral college defenders don't really weigh the pros and cons of each system. They just conjure up some hypothetical drawback that could occur under a popular-vote system. That sort of "reasoning" is bad enough. What makes it worse is that the drawbacks are usually things that happen anyway.