Streetwise Professor

A quick follow up on the implications of a national majoritarian system.

Under the Electoral College, the marginal value of a vote in a national election varies across states. At present, the marginal value of a vote in say California or New York or Texas is zero or close to it. The marginal value of a vote in a battleground state is higher. (Because Hillary was an idiot, she didn’t take this into account, and ignored Wisconsin and other places).

Under national majoritarianism, the marginal value of a vote is the same everywhere. This alone would tend to cause candidates to shift their efforts–and their promises–away from closely divided states, and those elected would adopt policies that disadvantage the closely divided states to reward California, etc.

I conjecture that the marginal cost of getting votes is lower in urban areas, especially for Democrats (particularly when fraud is taken into account). If correct, this would further shift electoral efforts and policies away from closely divided states to urban areas.

Relatedly, the median voter nationally is likely urban or very urban adjacent. The median voter in many closely divided states is not. Using the Median Voter Theorem as a crude predictive tool, this also means that policies in a national majoritarian system would skew heavily pro-urban.

Since progressives are overwhelmingly urban, it is no surprise comrades that they prefer this system.

But this analysis also demonstrates that the system would be inherently more divisive than the present one and lead to regional disagreements that could rise to the level of secession attempts or rebellion in a country with as much regional diversity as the United States. Since government is inherently redistributionist, and driven more by distributive goals than efficiency ones, a shift in power to the urban areas would lead to greater wealth extraction from the non-urban areas (and/or a reduction in benefits in these areas).

Distributive policies inherently create tensions and disagreements, and since their impact will vary substantially between urban and non-urban regions, this will create inter-regional tensions that can lead to calls for exit, since voice will be pointless under this system.

(And note that this diversity exists intra-state, consider states like California, New York, and Illinois with large urban centers and large rural areas. Or the “Greater Idaho” movement in Oregon with rurals wanting to get away from the coastals).

The main obstacle to concerted secessionist pressure will be that the regions disadvantaged under a national majoritarian system will be highly geographically dispersed, whereas the advantaged regions will be highly concentrated: the Red-Blue maps by county illustrate this clearly. The scattered and diffuse and itself heterogeneous area of net losers will find it hard to coordinate on collective action. Isolated and uncoordinated secessionist pressures are easily suppressed.

Contrast this to the pre-Civil War South. The opposition to the Federal government was geographically concentrated and had considerable homogeneity. (With exceptions like the mountainous regions of Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama–which were often in quasi-rebellion against the Confederacy. The mountain region of Virginia did secede from it). This made collective action on secession feasible.

So I would predict the progressive national majoritarian constitution would lead to seething discontent over widespread areas of the country, but would be unlikely to result in widespread secession or rebellion precisely because the discontented areas would be so far flung.

Nonetheless, rising discontent, even if inchoate, would lead the security state to ramp up its repressive efforts. Meaning that an America under a progressive constitution would be far less free than the country is today.