Fun With Numbers

***Of Bush's 286 electoral votes, 133, or 46.5%, came from non-Confederate states. The remaining 153 votes came from all the states that fought a war to destroy the United States.

***One of the most common electoral college reform proposals is reducing the number of electors for each state by two, thereby eliminating the artificial, non-population dependent senatorial delegation bonus. If that had been implemented for the 2004 election, Bush's final EV tally would have been 224. Kerry's would have been 212. Still not good enough, but closer. (Under this system, there are 436 electoral votes. If they were apportioned according to the popular vote, Bush would have received 222.36, Kerry would have received 209.28, and the independents would have received 4.36 EV. Still off, but the error is rather smaller than under the present rules.) The obvious point is that the electoral college has a significant in-built advantage for candidates who win the larger number of states, regardless of the popular vote total. Further counter-evidence to Chris Suellentrop's contention.

***Of course, the electoral college has double-edged advantages. It privileges horseshit states like Wyoming and the Dakotas by giving them about 7000% (I'm not exaggerating) the representation they're entitled to. But it also significantly privileges big states by virtue of the winner-take-all rule, whereby Kerry won California by 5.4 million to 4.4 million votes, and received all 55 of California's electoral votes. It's medium-sized states, like my homestate of New Jersey, that get fucked the hardest.

***The 2008 presidential election will be the first since 1952 (the first time Eisenhower drubbed Stevenson) when neither a sitting president nor a sitting vice president will head either ticket. Then, as in 1952, I expect the Republican to win 55-45 and carry over 400 electoral votes.