CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Consider how different the states are that make up the United States of America.
New York has Wall Street. It is the country’s financial center. California, for better or worse, is the nation’s cultural center. And it dominates the tech sector too. Agriculture is different in Wisconsin, which has the most cows per capital in the country, than Iowa, which leads the nation in production agriculture. Tiny Delaware has more corporate headquarters than anywhere. Texas produces more oil than any other state in the lower 48, but Louisiana is the nation’s top chemical producer.
And consider how different our people are. A down-home Kansan may have little in common with an erudite Rhode Islander. Florida has more retirees. Utah has the youngest median population. Hawaiians have a different and distinct culture, than, say, Maryland, where part of the state identifies and southern and part northern.
And someone who wants to be President must cobble together a constituency from those diverse states to win the White House. And that is the beauty, indeed, the brilliance of the much maligned Electoral College. Because the reality of our great nation is that we are made up of individual states – each one unique – with its own values and interests and traditions.
Do away with the electoral college? Why? We might as well divide our country into large administrative districts: the northeast, the midwest, the Pacific. We could do away with governors and state legislatures and let the federal government run everything. The candidate who wins Los Angeles, New York, and maybe Chicago and Miami would be president.
Those who want to scrap the electoral college not only don’t understand that make-up of our nation, but they don’t understand our history. No electoral college? No United States. Virginia and Massachusetts, the biggest of the early states, would have dominated the smaller Vermont and Maryland. The electoral college, where each state could express its preference for the nation’s chief executive, is what allowed the federal government to come into being. And the make-up; one elector for each representative and for each senator, gave slightly more weight to the smaller states. Is that slightly undemocratic? Yes. But we are not a direct democracy. We are a republic. And the concept that the President must appeal to broad and diverse swaths of the nation is uniquely American, and a critical part of our nation’s heritage.
Chris Conley
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