A canard: Direct popular vote in presidential elections would not favor larger states

The current electoral system also produces the effect that the candidates campaign almost entirely on the "swing states" of 10 (or 12). If you think that direct popular vote would be "skewed" or "biased" towards big states California or New York, why would you support an electoral, non-direct-popular-vote system that also allows the major-party candidates to also completely ignore Texas, the Deep South"?

Actually, the electoral system does not skew to larger population states, certainly not all the time, as Florida was heavily targeted and visited by both candidates. And Michigan and Pennsylvania, two large states, skewed the election towards Trump by virtue precisely of being large states (18, 20 electoral votes, I believe), which he was able to carry by tiny margins.

A direct popular vote would not benefit a larger state any more than an electoral system does, in fact, probably much less in fact. It would have mitigated greatly the effect of Trump winning two large states by small margins in the thousands.

A small state would benefit under a direct popular vote precisely as this presidential election shows because it would not have the weight of all the electoral votes a large state has, particularly when the margin of the popular vote divide was small. Michigan, Pennsylvania, and to a somewhat lesser extent Florida showed how much clout the larger states have under an electoral system.

Under the electoral system a larger state (Texas, New York, California, Florida) has a disproportionately large effect on the outcome simply because the "winner-takes-all" is able, as in 2016, to win a huge swathe of electoral votes--and tip the election in this case--on the basis of a tiny margin of several thousand.  Smaller states are disadvantaged under the current system!   They would have MORE clout, not less, in a direct popular vote system.

Small states like West Virginia or Wyoming could have had Trump ahead 95:1 and still their electoral weight would still have penalized them no matter the margin won the winner of the popular vote, while a win of 300 votes in California could very well have, figuratively speaking, had the ceiling coming down in terms of the ultimate outcome of the election.


Quel canard...