I keep saying that once rise to the point where the problem is undeniable, Floridians will demand— and probably get— a colossal bailout on the taxpayers’ dime for their property, either in the form of some megaengineering project to hold back the ocean or just forcing the government to buy their homes, because Florida is a swing state with a large number of crucial electoral votes and neither major party can blow them off.
They basically already get that. All coastal communities and flood prone areas do. In the form of the National Flood Insurance Program. NFIP is massively subsidized flood insurance and does not charge nearly enough to cover the costs of liabilities. We've basically been rebuilding structures with taxpayer funding in flood prone areas ever since the NFIP started. Climate change has nothing to do with this bad policy.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to spend billions of dollars trying. Voters don’t like to be told “there’s no fix”; they’ll gravitate toward any politician who promises to preserve their property values, especially with other people’s money.
The sunbelt is a weird place as there are a lot of businesses there now, but many areas are dependent on tourism and retirement real estate.
I don’t know a lot about Florida, but I usually go to Hilton Head, SC every couple of years. The last trips there have been noticeable issues reported and evident about the lack of workers — you have bazillions of old people from somewhere else, but anyone who is working there cannot afford it.
It would be interesting to put some work into changing that. For example, national popular vote is basically a dead letter because you'd need support from states whose majority party benefits from the status quo (e.g. Texas), which you thereby can't get.
But suppose you throw them a bone and give them something like national popular vote weighted by electoral college delegates. Now you can get them on board because the change doesn't result in electoral math less favorable to their preferred political party, but it still removes swing states like Florida from their privileged position, to the benefit of the people of Texas, California and everywhere else who suddenly need to be paid attention to by both parties again.
So instead of the swing vote being in Florida the swing vote is somewhere else. Nobody is talking about designing a system without a marginal voter who determines the outcome. I don't think such a system is even a candidate in discussions.
It is a lot of mucking around for essentially no improvement; an argument that a swing voter living at address A is going to be better than a swing voter living at address B is suspect. You're still going to have a situation where ~50% of the voters will still be getting an outcome they didn't want.
National popular vote has been discussed, is being discussed and will continue to be discussed. It is, however, a terrible system.
Imagine a national vote where the margin of victory was 2,000 votes. The entire country would be consumed in a conflagration of litigation. It would be Florida in 2000 but 100 times worse.
The electoral college, for all its faults, is designed to create a clear winner and not contain the contagion of a close election to a state.
States experiment with alternatives. For example, I believe Vermont distributes its electors proportionally based on the popular vote within the state, which means everyone ignores the state because it makes at most 1 elector difference (to be fair, it's a safe blue state and only has 4 (IIRC) electors anyway).
> Imagine a national vote where the margin of victory was 2,000 votes. The entire country would be consumed in a conflagration of litigation. It would be Florida in 2000 but 100 times worse.
Except that it would also be far less likely to happen, to the point that it has only happened once in history, in 1880 when the US population was barely five million people. The closest Presidential election since 1888 was Nixon vs. Kennedy and that was a margin of more than a hundred thousand votes.
Moreover, if you have a close election then you have a recount. It's sufficiently rare that when it happens you just have to suck it up. And if it was actually a problem then we could address it ahead of time by improving the procedures for elections and recounts so that they take hours rather than weeks.
> The electoral college, for all its faults, is designed to create a clear winner and not contain the contagion of a close election to a state.
If you really want to do this then you should draw the lines like the delegates are assigned -- two to each state and one to each Congressional district. Then there would be swing districts rather than swing states, but there would be so many of them and they would be spread all over the country which would make it a lot harder to write off entire regions with millions of people in them.
The "safe states" could get together as a coalition and agree to vote according to that formula as well.
> States experiment with alternatives. For example, I believe Vermont distributes its electors proportionally based on the popular vote within the state, which means everyone ignores the state because it makes at most 1 elector difference (to be fair, it's a safe blue state and only has 4 (IIRC) electors anyway).
The reason states assign all their votes to the same candidate is pretty clear. If it's a swing state then it's because it causes candidates to pay disproportionate attention to them, because then it's the full number of delegates on the table and not just a difference of one or two. If it's not a swing state then to assign delegates proportionally you would be taking some from the majority party in that state and giving them to the minority, but the majority party likely controls the state government, so since they're the ones who would have to choose to do it, they typically don't.
But national popular vote doesn't have those incentives for the safe states, because the country as a whole is about evenly split, so (modulo the issue about proportionality of electoral college delegates) changing it doesn't inherently benefit one party over the other. Who it benefits is the people in the states that always go for the same party, because then their votes would be worth as much as the people in swing states instead of being completely worthless. And those states, it turns out, have the majority of the electoral votes. If you could get them to come together on this.
No it isn't. National popular will still have a marginal swing voter who decides the winner, that swing voter will still be pandered to and will still have the power to make about half the voters unhappy with the result.
At best, it changes the address of the swing voter. It is basically fiddling around the margins from that perspective. Complaints about the address of the swing voters is not a good reason to switch electoral systems. Saying the swing voter should be in California or Texas rather than Florida is basically just insulting Floridians for no reason (and they are still probably close to holding the opinions of the median voter). There are much better arguments for changing a voting system.
I don't understand. In NPV, the marginal voter is any voter, in any state. Or, to put it another way, every voter for the winning side is the marginal voter. You don't pander to a particular geography, you pander to the electorate as a whole, because that's whose votes count.
I wouldn't want to own property in Florida in the long term.