AHC: Have Nebraska and Maine not go for Congressional district Electoral votes, yet other states do

What it says on the tin. What other states could use the Nebraska and Maine method of allocating electoral votes, yet have Nebraska and Maine not go for it?
 
Well, simply put, have Maine not adopt it in 1972, or Nebraska in 1992. NE will be fairly easy: Have the GOP vote down the district plan out of fear of a Dem winning the 2nd district. With Maine, have the reverse happen.

The NE GOP actually tried to adopt WTA in 1995 and 1997, but it was vetoed by the D Governor.

Then, in 2010, have PA adopt the system to thwart Obama’s re-election. Not sure about what other states would adopt it.
 
Well, simply put, have Maine not adopt it in 1972, or Nebraska in 1992. NE will be fairly easy: Have the GOP vote down the district plan out of fear of a Dem winning the 2nd district. With Maine, have the reverse happen.

The NE GOP actually tried to adopt WTA in 1995 and 1997, but it was vetoed by the D Governor.

Then, in 2010, have PA adopt the system to thwart Obama’s re-election. Not sure about what other states would adopt it.

I think the VAGOP tried to adopt the system as well after 2012.

Had PA adopted the system in 2010, Romney would have gotten ~13 more electoral votes. Maybe fewer because some of those suburban GOP districts might still vote for Obama, but at least 10 more electoral votes for Romney would be impactful.
 
I think the VAGOP tried to adopt the system as well after 2012.

Had PA adopted the system in 2010, Romney would have gotten ~13 more electoral votes. Maybe fewer because some of those suburban GOP districts might still vote for Obama, but at least 10 more electoral votes for Romney would be impactful.

The VA System was slightly different: Instead of the 2 remaining votes going to the statewide PV winner, they would’ve gone to whoever won the most CDs in the state.

Reasonably. Given that Romney would’ve won under a CD system nationwide, it might have the impact of getting more GOP-held states to switch to such a system afterwards.
 
Since Congressional districts are equal in population, if enough states do this, won't Gore win in 2000 and Clinton in 2016?

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EDIT: Not the case, because of urban-rural sorting and gerrymandering.
 
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Since Congressional districts are equal in population, if enough states do this, won't Gore win in 2000 and Clinton in 2016?

No, no, no, no, no. Even apart from deliberate gerrymandering (which is done by both parties, but the Republicans had far more opportunity to do it in the 2010's and even in the 2000's because of their control of more state legislatures) choosing electors by congressional districts would favor the Republicans simply because Democrats are far more concentrated in ultra-partisan congressional districts. E.g., in 2016, only one congressional district went over 80% for Trump--AL-04 with 80.4%. By contrast 24 congressional districts went over 80% for HRC! The concentration of Democratic votes in these (mostly heavily African American and Hispanic) districts hurts the Democrats in (relatively) closer districts. "Despite losing the national popular vote by 2.1 percent, Donald Trump carried 230 congressional districts and Hillary Clinton just 205..." https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...al-election-results-by-congressional-district

I'll quote an old post of mine:

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As I indicated earlier, 2012 would have changed; Romney won 226 congressional districts to Obama's 209. http://cookpolitical.com/file/2013-04-50.pdf

2008 and 2000 would not have changed. In 2008, Obama carried 242 congressional districts, McCain 193. http://blog.timesunion.com/rogergre...nebraska-rules-would-obama-still-have-won/380 In 2000 Bush won 228 congressional districts to 207 for Gore. http://www.polidata.org/press/wpr1c20z.pdf (Given that Gore actually won the popular vote and came very close to winning the Electoral College in OTL, this relatively comfortable Bush victory in congressional districts shows that a congressional-district method is somewhat weighted toward the Republicans even when they do not have a gerrymandering advantage-- because Democrats are hurt by the "clustering" effect.)

1980 would definitely not have been changed. Reagan carried 308 congressional districts that year. http://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/ar...4484-af99-ce8254ac348a/?resType=accessibility I think the reason you mistakenly thought 1980 would have been changed is that the Democrats won the majority of House seats that year. But in those days there was a big difference between how people voted for president and how they voted for Congress. Especially in the South and border states many people voted for a Republican presidential candidate but for (usually conservative) Democrats for Congress. In Oklahoma, for example, Reagan carried all six congressional districts in 1980, yet the state elected five Democratic congressmen to only one Republican!

Incidentally, the congressional-district method would have elected Nixon in 1960. He carried 228 congressional districts to 206 for JFK and three for unpledged electors. https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal64-1302939 (There were temporarily 437 House seats because of the admission of Alaska and Hawaii to the Union.)

The most interesting result would have been 1976. Carter won 220 congressional districts to Ford's 215--but Ford carried 27 states to Carter's 23. Result: a 269-269 tie and the election goes into the House! http://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...kennedy/f4a1ef3a-3df6-4dfd-aa3f-84932a88bd91/

There is just no getting around it: In any reasonably close election in recent decades, a congressional-districts apportionment (plus two votes at-large for the winner in the state) will favor the GOP in the Electoral College (though I think Carter would win in the House in 1976--the Democrats controlled more delegations). Once again, this is not due so much to the Republicans controlling redistricting (though they had an advantage in that respect after the 2010 election and even to a lesser extent after the 2000 one) as it is to the Democrats' "clustering" problem.

(Yes, I know it is unrealistic to assume that everyone would vote exactly as they did in OTL, but that doesn't change the basic point.)

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I might add a striking fact here. As you know, Doug Jones (D) narrowly defeated Roy Moore (R) in the Alabama special election for the US Senate. Nevertheless, Moore carried six of Alabama's seven congressional districts! He carried all the white-majority districts--much less overwhelmingly than Trump did, but he still carried them. Meanwhile, Jones only carried the predominantly African American 7th District. Yet his huge majority there, coupled with large minorities in the other districts, was enough for a narrow win. That shows you how far "who carried the most congressional districts" can be from "who won the popular vote"... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...t-still-won-the-state/?utm_term=.f4c61bf8dec0

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The Virginia GOP contemplated doing this in the aftermath of 2012, but it ended up going nowhere; as an aside, there was also some informal talk about Re-retrocession of Northern Virginia back to D.C. as well.
 
The Virginia GOP contemplated doing this in the aftermath of 2012, but it ended up going nowhere; as an aside, there was also some informal talk about Re-retrocession of Northern Virginia back to D.C. as well.

Amusingly, Republican legislators in PA, MI, and WI considered doing this after Obama carried their states in 2012! (Trump would still have won had they had done so, but his margin in the Electoral College would have been narrower.)
 
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Yes, I'm being won over.

But please notice that Clinton got 34% of the votes in District 1, got 33% in District 2, etc. Meaning, if I'm a Democratic voter in a rural area, I can find fellow Democrats.

And if I'm a Republican voter in an urban area, I can still find fellow Republicans.

Roughly, it can oscillate between one third and two thirds, and that's significant, yes, we might call it the Big Sort.
 
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And blue region 7 maybe puts tentacles into Birmingham and Montgomery, and down south toward Mobile.

Which would mean intentional gerrymandering by the state legislature.

Region 7 might be part of what's called the "Black Belt" in southern U.S. states.
 
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And blue region 7 maybe puts tentacles into Birmingham and Montgomery, and down south toward Mobile.

Which would mean intentional gerrymandering by the state legislature.

Region 7 might be part of what's called the "Black Belt" in southern U.S. states.

In all fairness, it has to be said that there was a time when the creation of heavily African American districts was favored not only by Republicans but by some African American Democrats who argued it was the only way to guarantee African American representation in congressional delegations like Alabama's. (There seems to be less of a tendency of African Americans to support such plans today, many African American Democrats arguing that it does very little good to have one guaranteed seat if the other six seats are guaranteed to go for people who oppose the things you stand for.) There was also an argument that it was required by the Voting Rights Act, which I find dubious. Even if the VRA is held to require the creation of at least one African-American majority district in Alabama, it didn't have to be as overwhelmingly African American as the AL-07 of OTL. It would have been perfectly compliant with the VRA to have one district with a smaller black majority and a second "minority influence" district over 40% African American.
 
. . . many African American Democrats arguing that it does very little good to have one guaranteed seat if the other six seats are guaranteed to go for people who oppose the things you stand for. . .
President Clinton nominated Lani Guinier to head the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department, and then withdrew her nomination June '93. I think she had views about multi-member districts, similar to ways stockholders elect boards of directors.

I remember hearing a fellow talk about Burlington, Vermont. At that time, they had 14 people on their city council and only 2 of them were Republican. And the guy said, you got to figure more than 1/7 of the citizens are Republicans.

Some New England towns do something called "threshold voting." Citizens rank order multiple candidates. The threshold equals (?) 1/(n-1) where n is the number of seats on the city council. Once, a candidate hits "threshold," he or she is rolled off the top and their votes redistributed to the voter's next choice. One advantage is that if a voter is a centrist voter, he or she might feel his has a stake in several candidates who are successfully elected, and watch them more closely. I wish I understood more of the details.
 
I had a political science professor in 1991 who was talking about why we had a Democratic Congress and a Republican president (Bush, Sr.). He thought gerrymandering only explained maybe 30% of it. He thought the bigger reason was that traditionally Democratic districts tended to have lighter turnout on election day (probably in large part because low-income persons both tend to vote Democratic and tend to vote less often).

And now with a very different situation in 2018, I don't want to be completely satisfied with gerrymandering as the only explanation.
 
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