It wasn’t so long ago, coming off a bruising presidential election, that Republicans were looking at ways to increase vote percentages among younger and minority voters to remain a contender in national elections. But it appears professional Republicans have decided that’s either impossible, unnecessary or perhaps just too hard. Because now they’re going for another possibility: rig the electoral college to insure Republican presidential victories with a decreasing voter base.

In other words, nuclear gerrymandering.

The plan is to game the electoral college to rig the system for Republicans. It works like this. Because of big victories in the 2010 midterm — and defending majorities in 2012 — Republicans now enjoy complete control of a number of midwestern states that usually vote Democratic in national (and increasingly in senatorial) elections. It may be temporary control but for now it’s total. Use that unified control in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania to change the system of electoral vote allocation from winner-take-all to proportional allotment.

So if you win Ohio by one percent you get about half the electoral votes and just a smidge more as opposed to winning everything.

On it’s own terms, that’s not necessarily a bad thing (probably but not necessarily) — if all the states take the same course. But that’s the idea — just do it in states where Republicans routinely lose. Obviously, if it’s proportional in Dem-leaning swing states and winner-take-all in the Red States that leaves Republicans with a massive advantage. And that’s the idea.

Now, I’m not sure how successful it’s going to be. This has been tried half-heartedly in the past. And when it comes down to it, state legislators and governors usually are not inclined to damage their own state’s electoral clout for electoral gain quite that transparently.

Just for example, say you’re Ohio. You’ve just had an electoral cycle where both campaigns are catering to your every whim and being highly solicitous of the state’s needs for about two years straight. Switch to proportional representation and all that disappears over night because winning or losing only gets you maybe one or two electoral votes.

It’s a reasonable question whether this is great for California or Texas, which don’t get much presidential attention. But it’s definitely good for Ohio. So for Ohio legislators or a governor to do this means putting your party’s interests above your state’s in about the most transparent way possible.

Nationally, though, it’s the big picture that matters. Plug the electoral dike by locking in GOP electoral victories even in the face of fairly significant popular vote loses. In other words, gerrymander the White House like the House.

Keep an eye on this. It could matter a lot for 2016.

To review, here’s how it works. The US electoral college system is based on winner take all delegate allocation in all but two states. If you get just one more vote than the other candidate you get all the electoral votes. One way to change the system is go to proportional allocation. That would still give some advantage to the overall winner. But not much. The key to the Republican plan is to do this but only in Democratic leaning swing states — not in any of the states where Republicans win. That means you take away all the advantage Dems win by winning states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and so forth.

But the Republican plan goes a step further.

Rather than going by the overall vote in a state, they’d allocate by congressional district. And this is where it gets real good, or bad, depending on your point of view. Democrats are now increasingly concentrated in urban areas and Republicans did an extremely successful round of gerrymandering in 2010, enough to enable them to hold on to a substantial House majority even thoughthey got fewer votes in House races than Democrats.

In other words, the new plan is to make the electoral college as wired for Republicans as the House currently is. But only in Dem leaning states. In Republican states just keep it winner take all. So Dems get no electoral votes at all.

Another way of looking at this is that the new system makes the votes of whites count for much more than non-whites — which is a helpful thing if you’re overwhelmingly dependent on white votes in a country that is increasingly non-white.

This all sounds pretty crazy. But it gets even crazier when you see the actual numbers. Here’s a very illustrative example. They’re already pushing a bill to do this in the Virginia legislature. Remember, Barack Obama won Virginia and got 13 electoral votes. But as Benjy Sarlin reportedtoday in a series of posts, if the plan now being worked on would have been in place last November, Mitt Romney would have lost the state but still got 9 electoral votes to Obama’s 4. Think of that, two-thirds of the electoral votes for losing the state. If the Virginia plan had been in place across the country, as Republicans are now planning to do, Mitt Romney would have been elected president even though he lost by more than 5 million votes.

Remember, plans to do this are already underway in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and other states in the Midwest.

This is happening.

FairVote, a non-partisan advocacy group, wants to radically transform the Electoral College through state legislation. So do Virginia Republicans pushing a scheme to reapportion their electoral votes by Congressional district. But the similarities end there as FairVote is condemning the Virginia bill as a partisan perversion of their own mission.

FairVote executive director Rob Richie described the Virginia plan as “an incredibly unfair and indefensible proposal” to TPM and said he was drafting a message to supporters rallying against its passage. He testified against a similar proposal in Pennsylvania, whose lawmakers briefly considered splitting its electoral votes for the 2012 election before backing down amid a public outcry against the maneuver.

Virginia’s bill, which emerged from a subcommittee on a tie vote Wednesday, would award the state’s electoral votes by individual congressional districts, with its two at-large electors going to whichever candidate won the most districts. But the districts, which were redrawn under Republican control in 2010, are so gerrymandered that President Obama would have won just four votes to Mitt Romney’s nine despite handily winning the state’s popular vote. As Richie noted, the result would be to massively water down Democratic votes concentrated into a few urban districts — many of them cast by African Americans — while boosting the impact of whiter and more rural districts.

“It is basically an obvious attempt by the Republican senator who proposed it and the Republicans who are backing it to completely distort the outcome of Virginia’s presidential electors,” Devin McCarthy, a research fellow for FairVote told TPM. “It would effectively guarantee Republicans at least 8 votes in Virginia no matter what happened in a national election, whereas this year they won 0.”

But the Virginia bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Charles Carrico, evokes the same rhetoric as Electoral College reformers like Richie and McCarthy in pushing the legislation. In an interview with Slate’s Dave Weigel last month, Carrico complained that the Electoral College’s usual winner-take-all system diverted candidates’ attention toward more populated, urban portions of the state — whose votes apparently should count less in order to correct the imbalance.

“It comes down for me, as a rural legislator, to a fairness issue,” Carrico said. “I’m making sure the people of my district are represented.”

FairVote has complained about the electoral vote system’s winner-take-all method on a national level in similar terms, charging it with encouraging candidates to ignore safe states in favor of a handful of battleground states, and instead calling for a national popular vote to determine the president. But it’s also warned that states can’t disarm the system unilaterally without threatening basic principles of “one man, one vote” and making things even worse. That’s why its proposed fix is to pass state legislation giving each state’s electoral votes to the national popular vote winner but not having those laws take effect until after enough states to form a 270-electoral-vote majority signed on. So far eight states and the District of Columbia have passed bills that would activate should such a threshold be reached.

As Richie pointed out to TPM, Carrico’s arguments and similar ones from rural lawmakers in other Republican-controlled states don’t make sense on their own terms. Dividing Virginia’s electoral votes into individual districts would just recreate the same problems that safe states face on a national level.

“Because the statewide vote would be absolutely meaningless, the only political activity would be in the small number of districts where political activity might change the outcome,” Richie wrote.

That small number of competitive regions does not include Carrico’s ultra-conservative 9th District, meaning his constituents would almost certainly lose influence under his own plan even as they boosted the national GOP.

RNC Chair: Rig The Next Presidential Election For Republicans

By Ian Millhiser on Jan 14, 2013 at 1:50 pm