How A Constitutional Quirk Could Guarantee A Republican President In 2016

It looks as though divided government might be inescapable for the foreseeable future. There are more Americans likely to vote Democrat, and it will be a challenge for a Republican to win the presidency. Meanwhile, Republicans look set to hold onto the House for the next several cycles due to their broader geographic distribution.

Jim Geraghty laid out a plan for untying the knot over the weekend, one that will make Democrats livid: Republicans in the state legislatures in several swing states could change how their states' votes are divvied up in the Electoral College, using their authority under the Constitution. The result would be that Republican candidates, not Democrats, would be the odds-on favorite in any presidential race.

Most states allocate all their votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the most ballots statewide, but they're not required to do things that way. The statewide winner gets only two votes in Maine and Nebraska, while each remaining vote is awarded for winning a congressional district within the state. Since Republicans are more spread out across the country, this system would benefit Republicans if it were used in every state. Even implementing it in a few swing states where Democratic candidates could otherwise hope to win all the votes would destroy their chances of winning a majority in the Electoral College.

For example, in the winner-take-all system that most states use now, a Democratic candidate could hope to win all of the votes that Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin have in Electoral College. As Geraghty writes, if Republicans who control the state governments in those states switched to the model that Maine and Nebraska use, neither party's presidential nominee could expect to win much more than half of the electoral votes from each of those states. With little hope of winning those votes, a Democrat would have little chance of winning the presidency.

This isn't a new idea. As Matthew Yglesias notes, this idea has been proposed and rejected by Republican elected officials already in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Perhaps the proposal just seemed too slimy, even though it's constitutional. Perhaps those Republican politicians remembered why so many states adopted the winner-takes-all system in the first place, about 200 years ago: when a state's electors vote as a bloc, they're much more influential.

Take a state like Ohio, where the congressional districts aren't all that competitive. With luck, a candidate campaigning hard in Ohio might win a couple of additional votes in the Electoral College under Geraghty's proposal, but it wouldn't be worth the time or the money. Ohio voters and their concerns would simply be left out of the presidential election. (They would also be excluded if the legislature simply appointed a slate of Republican electors to cast votes for the party's nominee, without even holding an election, which is another constitutional option. In that case, even if a majority of voters preferred the Democratic nominee, all the state's electoral votes would go to the Republican.)

In short, any changes would require Republican governors to sacrifice their state's interests in order to advance the national party's chosen candidate, whoever that might turn out to be. Given all the dissent and bitter differences of opinion among the G.O.P. rank and file, that sacrifice is probably not one that state leaders will be eager to make.