Brian Beutler is right to point out the policy distortions that stem happen when we pretend we're running a national election but instead run 50 state elections where each state votes under winner-take-all rules. Right now, for instance, Michigan is going to be a key battleground, and so an industry of particular importance to Michigan, auto manufacturers, are going to get up to $25 billion dollars in free taxpayer money because neither candidate can afford to sacrifice their electoral votes. Of course, if it wasn't Michigan, and it was Ohio, you'd have a lot of weird policy meant to slow the decline of the manufacturing industry. And if it wasn't Ohio, but it was Nevada, you'd have the world's loudest condemnation of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump. And actually, since it's all of them, you're going to have all those policy promises. Meanwhile, since California and Alabama aren't conceivably in play, their priorities get no particular attention at all. There are two things to say about this. The first is that the particular assemblage of states a candidate means to win actually has a large impact on his or her policy promises. If the path to an electoral college majority cuts through the Rust Belt, then you can expect some serious subsidies if dying industries. If it cuts through the Sun Belt, you can expect a lot more attention to issues of immigration, conservation, and water use. If it settles in Florida, then Cuba will be a key issue. If all of them look close, then you're going to have a level of pandering that leads to an incredible number of odd policy decisions once in office. It was George W. Bush's desire to win West Virginia, for instance, that gave us the 2001 steel tariffs. The other is that the National Popular Vote idea so beloved by Rick Hertzberg is not simply a matter of fairness, or of eliminating an odd electoral wrinkle that can, in extremely rare circumstances, lead to undemocratic outcomes. Rather, it's a substantive reform that would actually lead to better policy down the road. In this, it's akin to any good government effort to reduce the power of interest groups: The system has a variety of vulnerabilities that organized interest groups target. One is Congress's susceptibility to organized lobbying, and so we seek lobbying reforms to reduce their power. Another is campaign fundraising, and so we seek finance reforms to blunt the power of PACs. And another is the rules of the presidential election, where we need reforms to reduce the system's vulnerability to individual states who find themselves able to arbitrage the electoral college.
