Splitting the Electoral College

I know the Republicans aren't playing this game in good faith or anything, but just for fun let's look and see what the results of the 2008 Presidential election would have been if every state had allocated its electoral votes in the Maine/Nebraska manner, i.e. 2 for the winner of the state and then 1 for the winner of each Congressional district. As it happens, Obama would have won 301 electoral votes, compared to 237 for John McCain. That's a lot narrower than his actual 365-to-173 win. However, it represents Obama taking a slightly larger percentage of total electoral votes, 55.9%, than he received in actual votes, where he got just 52.9%. It's even an increase over his two-party-vote performance; dropping third-party votes, Obama won just 53.7% of the remainder. So a split electoral college in 2008 would've produced an overall result very similar to the popular vote numbers, with a slight boost to the winner, instead of the lopsided 68% win that the (mostly) winner-take-all version gave him. I quite honestly have no problem running things this way instead of the way we do it, but the point is that we need to do it uniformly. Also, in this case I suppose I would have even more of a problem with gerrymandering than I do currently; in fact, I even think switching to this kind of system would make me more interested in the arguments that Baker v. Carr and its progeny would then require an extension to prohibit gerrymandering. When I have time later, I hope to take a look at the '04 and '00 elections and see if a split electoral college would've made any difference (I bet it would have in 2000).

Of course, the real solution is just to ditch the electoral college altogether, either through the National Popular Vote Compact or, preferably, through a Constitutional Amendment. I wonder if the spectacle of Republican state legislatures screwing with their electoral votes might be enough to give one or both of those projects the boost they need to succeed.


UPDATE:

So, I've run the numbers on 2000 and 2004. In 2000, Al Gore won 266 electoral votes in "reality," but if we used the split electoral-college rules instead, we'd get 252 EV's for Gore. That's a reduction of 14, or just over 5% of his "real-life" total. Obama, by contrast, loses 64 EVs, 17.5% of his total. John Kerry fares nearly as bad, going from his actual 251-EV close call to a 219-EV blowout. That's a loss of 32, or nearly 13%. On average it looks like we're costing Democrats at least a tenth of their electoral votes. I was kind of hoping that in the two close elections prior to Obama's fairly convincing win there wouldn't be any dramatic shift, so that it would seem like using the splitting rules just makes the electoral college approximate the popular vote better. Hell, I was hoping it would show a Gore win. But I guess not: I guess the real dynamic here is that Democrats tend to win our Congressional districts more overwhelmingly, because they're cities, so we've got our voters packed inefficiently. Admittedly the Voting Rights Act has something to do with this as well. So I don't think that switching to these split rules could be done in a uniform, good-faith way that would avoid having any particular partisan impact, at least not until we change the way we draw our districts.

It would make for interesting elections, though. I've sometimes said that the electoral college exists mainly to benefit election-watchers, who would only have one big national election to follow if we ever get sensible and abolish it. But currently the Presidential election is a combination of fifty-six contests, one for each of the fifty-one states (incl. DC) plus the five Congressional districts in Maine and Nebraska that get their own votes. If we switched to the Maine/Nebraska system, we'd be dealing with 479 different contests, one for all 436 Congressional districts (incl. DC) plus another 43 for every state with more than one district. That's an order of magnitude more elections to watch. Of course, the importance of each contest would be reduced exponentially as well, but I do think it would make for some interesting strategy about whether to turn out voters in big cities (for Democrats) and try to win the whole state, or push more resources toward tipping the scales of the swing districts. Anyway, I oppose it in the current reality, at the very least, and Republican efforts to use partial adoption of the strategy as a bad-faith tool of total political warfare is emphatically not cool.