Skewered
Hello to all the visitors from Slate's Fray. Ordinarily this blog sees a visitor every hour or two, but they've been rolling in at a rate of almost one per minute for the last twenty-four hours. I've gotten a lot of feedback from readers, and would like to take a moment to address one common refrain about the "dissolution" idea of California.
Several readers have noted that such a change would probably likely sway the country rightwards. This is true. Largely due to the liberalism of the major cities (San Diego, Los Angeles, the Bay Area), California is now a reliably liberal state... though if it had a decent Republican party my guess is that the entire state would be more consistently conservative than many realize.
So, the charge is likely true, but I disagree with the few who have expressed dismay at such a prospect. Orange County is a very conservative place, and has more people than the state of Iowa. This may or may not be an outrage, but it is manifestly unfair. Forcing Orange County to deliver its five electoral votes (5 Representatives) to the Democrats in an election is numerically equivalent to making Nebraska allocate its electoral votes based on the results of an election in Chicago.
If you trust the American system more than one party or another, such an outcome shouldn't be something to be afraid of. California's electoral situation wasn't created by design, and I'm not calling it an outrage. But, when judging the situation, it's important to keep in mind that American democracy is more important than partisan advantage.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to tinker with the electoral system so that it always yields results that you agree with. Having a partisan affiliation, I'm no more immune to such thoughts than anybody else. But that manner of thinking is an anti-democratic vice that shouldn't be indulged. It's as wrong to me to disenfranchise 2 million California Republicans every four years as it is to disenfranchise 1/3 of Florida's black men for life...
3 Comments:
Although I am a fairly liberal Dem, I completely agree with you on the fairness issue. I just still would like to see the red/blue county breakdown, to see exactly what the effect of your dissolution idea would be.
One might note that similarly, Boulder differs from CO, Austin from TX, and so on.
Of course, I suspect that if we broke things all the way down -- allocated one electoral college vote per house-district, as another Fray poster suggested -- it would be very bad news for us Dems. The overall pattern of the country seems to be that Democratic voters are packed into more highly concentrated House districts than Republicans; I can't see any other way to explain the fact that the Dems won the popular vote in '00, yet remained at a significant disadvantage in the House. In most regions of the south where split tickets are common, it's people who vote for conservative Dems in the House and local gov't, but for Republicans for President and perhaps Senate.
Oh, sorry, meant to sign off on that last -- I'm Auros. (Auros-4 on the Fray, because of the stupid thing where they assigned numbers for each IP you'd logged in from; I don't have access to the -1 through -3 machines, so I can't log them in using my MSN Passport, and FrEd has ignored repeated pleas to fix the problem.)
Possibly I should create a blogger account, but I already have a LiveJournal (under the username "auros", surprisingly enough).
San Diego is not Dem territory. Count the D/R districts in the county and the pop. of those districts. SD County would be two more R senators to balance MA or CT.
Post a Comment
<< Home