Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez loves to hate on the Electoral College. Once again, she has the nation up in arms about America’s unique presidential election system.
The Electoral College, the New York Democrat said on Instagram last week, is a “scam” that “effectively weighs white voters over voters of color.” Then on Friday afternoon, she doubled down, tweeting that the Electoral College is nothing more than “affirmative action” for rural voters.
In her view, rural areas are too white—and too powerful in presidential elections.
Perhaps Ocasio-Cortez should take a step back in time. Civil rights leaders once had a different view, and they came out in force to argue for the preservation of the Electoral College.
Appearing before Congress in 1979, National Urban League President Vernon Jordan said, “Take away the Electoral College, and the importance of that black vote melts away. Blacks, instead of being crucial to victory in major states, simply become 10% of the total electorate, with reduced impact.”
Indeed, he and other civil rights leaders noted benefits of the Electoral College that tend to be ignored today.
First, the winner-take-all allocation of votes in the Electoral College prevents third-party extremists from succeeding at the national level.
In 1968, segregationist Gov. George Wallace of Alabama struggled to make a good showing, even though he had strong regional support. Civil rights leaders at the time noticed—and they even praised his defeat in congressional testimony.
Second, the concentration of black voters in certain large metropolitan areas can be an advantage, at least in some states.
“[T]he real issue,” Jordan told Congress in 1979, “is not only one of how many black voters are located in which states, but where blacks can reasonably expect to build coalitions with other minorities and whites to achieve true justice and equality.”
In other words, shared concerns within urban areas lead to coalition-building. Jordan called this “the empathy factor.” In those parts of the country, coalitions can swing a large metropolitan area—and thus an entire state.
Perhaps New York voters outside of Ocasio-Cortez’s district can feel this pain: Upstate New York voters are constantly outvoted by New York City. Voters in that metropolitan area swing the state’s entire block of 29 electors, regardless of what the state’s rural voters prefer.
Rural New York voters are surely puzzled to hear Ocasio-Cortez describe them as “too powerful.”
Jordan’s testimony must be bewildering to Electoral College defenders who argue that the system gives small states and rural areas a leg up at election time. Who is right?
Somewhat confusingly, both sides are right. Urban areas are not always as powerful as Jordan hoped. They might be able to swing certain states, but they can’t swing the whole country, either.
On the other hand, urban areas aren’t as weak as Ocasio-Cortez says. Rural voters in California, New York, and Illinois would surely testify to that.
In short, the Electoral College creates balance in our political system in many ways—and this unexpected balance of power between urban and rural areas is just one of them.
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Liberals approach everything like they do gun violence; they don’t solve problems, they merely react in a way that would tend to benefit themselves. They lose an election, their reaction is to destroy the very basis of the electoral system and hope it doesn’t bite them in the ass later, like Reid getting rid of the filibuster for appointee approvals did.