Ancient times, 1976, Eisenhower as best twentieth-century President, Electoral College reform

Ancient times, 1976, Eisenhower as best twentieth-century President, Electoral College reform

I'm somewhat entertained; Democrats win largest House majority since 1976, reported by those young broadcasters as though that is ancient history. I was through college and well into my life then.

It is always a trip listening to 20-something broadcast reporters frame events from the 1970s like they’re discussing ancient history. For those of us who lived through the era, 1976—the year Jimmy Carter won the White House while Democrats held a towering 292 seats in the House—feels remarkably vivid.

Perspective is everything in modern news. Today’s media environment often lacks long-term historical context, so when a party scores a substantial wave, commentators lean into hyperbolic terms like "historic landmark" or "unprecedented" simply because it’s the largest margin in their adult lives.

Having lived through post-Watergate politics, the 1994 Republican Revolution, and the 2010 wave elections, you’ve seen the pendulum swing back and forth enough times to know that "ancient history" is relative.
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Election info changes quickly. Verify responses with official sources.

That was the bicentennial of 1776, I remember the jets buzzing the SF skyscrapers in formation.

That July 4th weekend in 1976 was unforgettable across the Bay Area. The Blue Angels and military formations roared directly between the downtown towers, banking low over the Embarcadero and Transamerica Pyramid.

The SF celebrations hit a rare pitch: red-white-and-blue tall ships in the Bay, dense crowds wrapping around Fisherman's Wharf, and military flyovers echoing across the city before the fireworks went off over the Golden Gate.

Seeing supersonic jets rattle glass skyscrapers while half the country was dressed in red, white, and blue keyhole shirts is the kind of visceral memory newsroom commentators completely miss when reading off historical trivia.
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Carter was a decent, good, intelligent man, but not a successful President. I think his problem was inability to delegate, as with Johnson. That is what tends to cause me to put Eisenhower at the top of my twentieth century presidents. He was a manager.

Your diagnosis of Jimmy Carter matches the consensus among many political historians and contemporaries. Carter entered the Oval Office as a naval engineer and Governor who prided himself on mastery of detail—infamously micro-managing everything down to the scheduling of the White House tennis courts during his early months in office. That obsession with process and policy mechanics often blurred his strategic vision, leaving him bogged down in technicalities while grand political narratives escaped him.

Comparing that to Lyndon Johnson highlights an interesting operational contrast: while LBJ certainly micro-managed specific tactical elements (most notoriously targeting individual bombing runs during Vietnam), his management breakdown was driven by overreach and personal legislative obsession rather than bureaucratic perfectionism.

Eisenhower, by contrast, brought a lifetime of supreme executive command to the presidency. Having organized D-Day and managed the fractious Allied coalition, Ike understood that the president’s role is strategic alignment, structural delegation, and long-range planning.
Key Management Styles of 20th-Century Executives

    Dwight D. Eisenhower (Delegated Command Structure): Established the modern formal White House Chief of Staff role (under Sherman Adams) and developed the "Hidden-Hand Presidency." He delegated operational execution to strong Cabinet secretaries (like John Foster Dulles at State) so he could focus on broad strategy, maintain political capital, and act as a unifier.

    Jimmy Carter (Hub-and-Spokes / Detail-First): Initially ran the White House without a Chief of Staff, attempting to digest massive briefing books personally. While highly principled and deeply analytical, his refusal to rely on strong legislative liaisons alienated key Congressional leaders like Tip O'Neill.

    Lyndon B. Johnson (Personal Force & Micro-Detail): Relied on relentless personal arm-twisting (the "LBJ Treatment") and deep mastery of legislative mechanics to pass the Great Society, but struggled to delegate complex foreign policy execution as Vietnam escalated.

Eisenhower’s corporate-and-military management model made the presidency look remarkably steady—a quality that looks better and better with historical hindsight.
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There is talk that it is possible to effectively end the Electoral College without an actual Constitutional Amendment. Comment?

You are referring to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). It is one of the most clever—and controversial—legal maneuvers in modern American constitutional politics.

Rather than going through the nearly impossible process of passing a Constitutional Amendment (which requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-fourths of state legislatures), the compact attempts to use the Constitution’s own mechanisms to render the Electoral College functionally obsolete.

The strategy boils down to a legal loophole, a critical mass threshold, and an inevitable Supreme Court showdown.
How the Compact Works

The Founders left one massive variable in the hands of the states in Article II, Section 1:

    "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors..."

The Constitution does not mandate a winner-take-all system; states only adopted that method over time. Under the NPVIC, participating states pass legislation promising to award all of their state's electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall national popular vote, regardless of who won inside their individual state borders.

Crucially, the contract contains a trigger clause: it only takes effect once states representing a controlling majority of the Electoral College (270 or more electoral votes) join. Once that threshold is crossed, whoever wins the national popular vote automatically secures a minimum of 270 electoral votes, guaranteeing them the White House.

As of late 2026, 18 states and the District of Columbia have enacted the compact into law, combining for 222 electoral votes—putting proponents just 48 votes shy of activation.

Current NPVIC Electoral Vote Count vs. Activation Threshold

[ Enacted: 222 EVs ] ░░░░░░░░░ [ Needed: 48 EVs ]
================================================== 270 EVs

The Legal Obstacles Ahead

While it sounds simple on paper, if the compact ever reaches 270 votes, it will immediately spark a landmark legal crisis. Opponents point to three key constitutional hurdles:

    The Compact Clause (Article I, Section 10): The Constitution explicitly states that "No State shall, without the Consent of Congress... enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State." Compact advocates argue Congressional consent isn't required because Supreme Court precedent (e.g., Virginia v. Tennessee, 1893) established that states only need federal approval if a compact encroaches on federal supremacy or shifts political power away from non-compact states. Critics counter that fundamentally altering presidential elections certainly impacts federal power and non-member states.

    The Intent of the Founders: Textualist legal scholars argue that while states have authority over appointing electors, using that power in a coordinated bloc to bypass the intended constitutional mechanism breaches the structural intent of the 12th Amendment.

    Voting Admin & Fraud Disparities: Because voting qualifications, mail-in rules, and recount procedures vary wildy from state to state, opponents argue that tying one state’s electors to votes cast in another state violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. If a state with loose voting rules experiences a recount crisis, it could dictate the national total for a state with strict voting rules.

The Verdict

The NPVIC is theoretically feasible, but legally fragile. It relies on using state power to route around a constitutional design without actually amending the Constitution. If it ever crosses the 270-vote finish line, the nation will witness an unprecedented Supreme Court battle over federalism, state sovereignty, and presidential elections.
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There is no doubt in my mind that the Electoral College is one of many obsolete provisions in the Constitution. People are proud of how old it is. To me it is showing its age. It represents an aristocratic distrust of the population, not appropriate for a country calling itself a democracy. That said, this sort of device makes me uneasy.

Your unease gets right to the heart of the dilemma: even when an institution feels archaic, bypassing it with a tactical workaround can feel like a dangerous precedent.

The Electoral College was explicitly built out of an 18th-century compromise that blended federalism with an aristocratic safety check. Publius—writing as Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 68—openly celebrated the system because it ensured the presidency would not fall to anyone lacking "the requisite qualifications," trusting instead a small group of elite electors to make the final call. That explicit distrust of direct popular democracy was core to the constitutional architecture of 1787.

The tension you are feeling with the National Popular Vote Compact stems from a fundamental conflict between substance and process:

    Substance vs. Process: You can strongly believe that the nation should govern itself by simple majority rule, while simultaneously worrying that using an inter-state contract to bypass a constitutional amendment erodes the rule of law.

    The Escalation Risk: If one political faction successfully uses a clever statutory workaround to side-step a core feature of the Constitution without amending it, it opens the door for the opposing faction to use similar procedural maneuvers on other structural rules (such as Senate representation, statehood, or judicial tenure).

    Legitimacy Crisis: A President elected via a statutory compact—rather than a universally accepted constitutional process or a straightforward popular vote standard—might face an ongoing crisis of executive legitimacy, with half the country viewing the election mechanism itself as a legal end-run.

It highlights a broader tragedy of modern American governance: the Constitutional Amendment process laid out in Article V is so difficult to achieve in a polarized country that reformers feel compelled to find legislative side doors, even if those side doors weaken the structural predictability of the republic.
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Of course what Publius said is not how it has worked in practice.

You are spot on—the system Hamilton envisioned in Federalist No. 68 collapsed almost immediately in practice.

Hamilton pictured an elite body of independent, highly respected citizens meeting in their respective states to deliberately deliberate, debate, and choose the most qualified executive—acting as a cool-headed buffer against demagoguery and mob passion.

Instead, three things happened very quickly that shattered that vision:

    The Rise of Political Parties (1796 & 1800): The Framers failed to anticipate organized national parties. By the fourth presidential election, electors were no longer independent statesmen evaluating candidates on merit; they were party loyalists rubber-stamping pre-selected party nominees.

    The 12th Amendment (1804): The electors originally cast two votes for president, with the runner-up becoming vice president. After the gridlock of 1800 (when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied), the 12th Amendment separated the ballots for President and Vice President. This officially codified party tickets, permanently stripping electors of their independent, deliberative function.

    State Winner-Take-All Laws (1820s–1830s): The Constitution left the method of choosing electors to state legislatures. During the Jacksonian era, states realized that awarding all their electors to the statewide popular winner maximized their political clout. By the mid-19th century, nearly every state had adopted winner-take-all, turning electors into mere mathematical tally marks.

Today, rather than a deliberative council of wise elders, the Electoral College functions as a rigid, partisan voting mechanism—producing outcomes where the electoral vote can diverge from the national popular vote while possessing none of the aristocratic wisdom Publius originally promised.
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I will note that campaigns would have to be genuine national contests if popular vote is the issue, not just in a few "swing" states.

That is the central argument made by proponents of a national popular vote. Under the current winner-take-all Electoral College system, presidential elections effectively ignore vast swathes of the country.

In recent election cycles, roughly 94% of all campaign events and candidate ad spending were concentrated in just 6 to 7 battleground states. Millions of voters living in reliably "safe" states—whether conservative voters in California and New York or progressive voters in Texas and Idaho—are largely bypassed by campaign operations because their individual votes hold zero marginal value toward unlocking electoral votes.

A pure national popular vote system would fundamentally alter campaign strategy, mechanics, and incentives in several ways:
1. From "Battleground States" to "Turnout Everywhere"

Instead of competing for a few thousand undecided voters in suburban Philadelphia, Milwaukee, or Phoenix, campaigns would need to maximize vote tallies anywhere they could find them. A vote in rural Nebraska or urban Chicago would carry the exact same weight. Candidates would have an incentive to turn out conservative voters in deep-blue cities and progressive voters in deep-red rural counties.
2. Media Buys and Field Work Go Truly National

Campaign spending under the Electoral College acts as a hyper-targeted laser aimed at local TV markets in swing states. Under a national popular vote, campaigns would rely heavily on national media buys, broad digital outreach, and distributed organizing, ensuring that voters across all 50 states see active campaigning.
3. Policy Appeals to National Priorities

Critics of the Electoral College point out that the current system gives outsized policy leverage to the specific economic interests of a handful of swing states—such as corn ethanol subsidies in Iowa, steel and manufacturing policy in Pennsylvania, or natural gas/fracking in Ohio and Pennsylvania. A national vote would force candidates to pitch policies aimed at broader, nationwide demographics.
The Counter-Argument: Population Center Dominance?

Opponents of a national popular vote raise a key concern about this shift: they argue it would swap one form of geographical isolation for another.

Rather than focusing on a handful of swing states, critics argue candidates under a national vote would focus almost exclusively on high-density metropolitan areas—such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta—where campaigns can reach millions of voters at a far lower cost per vote than traveling to low-density rural regions.

Proponents counter that even the largest metropolitan areas combined account for only a minority of the overall population, meaning no candidate could win without building a broad coalition across suburban, small-town, and rural America alike.
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I know I don't generally bother to vote in my home state (Washington) because where I live is urban and outcomes are known well in advance.

That is a perspective shared by millions of voters living in "safe" states across the country. When state-level outcomes are treated as a foregone conclusion, the perceived value of an individual vote drops significantly.

Washington state's electoral history illustrates this clearly: it has voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1988. In an Electoral College framework where winning the state by 1 vote yields the exact same 12 electoral votes as winning it by 1,000,000 votes, voters across the political spectrum in Washington often feel their presidential ballots have zero leverage on the final result.

This dynamic creates two distinct types of non-participation:

    Suppression of the Majority: Progressive voters in safe-blue states (or conservative voters in safe-red states) often stay home because they know their candidate will win the state anyway.

    Suppression of the Minority: Conservative voters in urban Washington (or progressive voters in rural Alabama) feel their votes are essentially erased by the winner-take-all rule before they ever reach the national tally.

Under a direct national popular vote system, that dynamic vanishes entirely. Every vote in Seattle, Spokane, Yakima, or rural Ferry County would count directly toward the national total—making a voter in Washington just as valuable to a campaign as a voter in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.
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Is there any particular gain for one or the other two major parties if the change were to be achieved?

In the short term, conventional wisdom suggests that shifting to a national popular vote would give a clear advantage to Democrats. In the long term, however, a popular vote requirement would fundamentally shift how both parties operate, forcing strategic adaptations that could ultimately benefit either side depending on how they evolve.   
Mother Jones
The Short-Term Advantage: Democrats

The political drive behind reforms like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) has come almost entirely from Democrats, and for obvious tactical reasons:   
Mother Jones

    Recent Historical Precedent: In two presidential elections (2000 and 2016), the Democratic candidate won the national popular vote but lost the Electoral College. Democrats have consistently won the national popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential contests, making a direct popular vote look like a safer institutional path for them.

    Raw Demographic Density: The current Democratic base is heavily concentrated in major metropolitan centers and populous coastal states like California and New York. Under winner-take-all, "extra" votes in deep-blue states are wasted once the state margin is secured. A popular vote instantly captures all those surplus votes.

The Strategic Counter-Weight: How Republicans Could Benefit

While Republicans generally oppose ending the Electoral College—viewing it as a protective shield for conservative and rural interests—a pure popular vote framework would unlock substantial hidden assets for the GOP:

    Unlocking Millions of "Wasted" Republican Votes: Just as Democrats have unused votes in blue states, Republicans leave massive blocks of voters on the sidelines. There are more registered Republicans in California than in dozens of red states combined, yet those voters have zero impact on presidential contests under the winner-take-all system. The same applies to conservative voters in New York, Illinois, and Washington state.

    Turnout Incentives in Red Strongholds: In solid-red states (such as Alabama, Wyoming, or Idaho), Republican turnout often lulls because voters know the state outcome is guaranteed. A national vote gives the GOP a reason to run aggressive turnout operations in deep-red rural and suburban counties to bank massive vote totals.

    Protection Against Shifting Electoral Maps: The Electoral College is a double-edged sword. If demographic shifts or broad political waves push massive states like Texas, Georgia, or Florida solidly blue in a given election cycle, the Republican path to 270 electoral votes collapses instantly. A national popular vote removes the single-state catastrophic failure point.

The Long-Term Reality: Dynamic Adaptation

Parties are not static; they adapt to win under whatever rules exist.

If the country shifted to a popular vote system, neither party could afford to run campaigns the way they do today. Democrats would have to moderate their message to appeal to rural and working-class voters nationwide to avoid getting buried by non-urban margins, while Republicans would have to actively compete for suburban and urban voters to prevent Democrats from running up unreachable totals in major cities.

In the end, while Democrats would likely enjoy an immediate edge based on current voter alignments, a national popular vote would eventually force both parties to reshape their coalitions, making long-term control a toss-up.   
Mother Jones
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Explore how a popular vote could impact third-party candidates
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