Make every state a battleground state

"Isn't it crazy that the future of our country will be decided by 50,000 un-engaged low-information voters in Pennsylvania?"
          A man in a diner in Massachusetts (not a swing state)

No wonder people feel frustrated about politics. 

I favor a system where every vote matters. I favor a popular vote for president.

We all know the battleground states. These were the 2020 states. The same states are battlegrounds in 2024.

A popular election would mean that every vote matters. The current system of election by states -- or in Nebraska and Maine by congressional district -- means that the votes for the losing candidate in that state or district are discarded before the final tally. This system has undesirable consequences.

1. There is no electoral incentive to have policies that are especially popular to people of any one state. There is no value in running up the score because a safe 54 percent victory brings no more electoral votes than does a landslide. In the real world, this diminishes the influence of the farm states, since a Republican victory is assumed, and there is no more value in a big win versus a big-enough win. Similarly in the opposite way for blue California. In either case, the "extra" votes are wasted.

2. The system undervalues small states and their voters. This is opposite the usual presumption that a system that gives almost three times the presidential vote weight to low-population states as a large one. In fact, presidential math means that the small states and their voters can essentially be ignored, and in fact they are. Their influence is capped by the three or four votes they bring to the Electoral College. No use pandering to Idaho potato farmers. A Republican candidate has all the votes he needs to get a majority; no use winning extra votes. 

3. Winner-take-all voting by states, in the close elections that we now experience, puts the attention and tipping point decision-making on a small and unrepresentative group of swing voters in swing states. We lose the "wisdom of crowds" by putting our democracy's future in the hands of about one percent of people in seven states, people who are so unusually uninformed and disengaged that they find themselves in October of an election year barely aware of who is running, but possibly willing to be goaded into voting.

4. The current system leaves nearly every voter cheated. Their votes are not part of the national total, which vote is a drop in a bucket, sure, but at least it's a drop. They have skin in the game. But in Oregon, for example, votes in my neighborhood for Trump simply disappear as they are overwhelmed by blue votes in the Portland metropolitan area. All Oregon's electoral votes will go to Harris. Trump got six million votes in California in 2020, but every Trump voter knew full well that their vote never made its way to be part of the final tally. In 42 or 43 states out of 50, its voters are bystanders to the election. 

A national popular vote is legally and politically possible. State legislatures, by law in their states, can agree to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote. From the National Popular Vote Compact website:

The National Popular Vote Compact has been enacted into law by 17 states and the District of Columbia, including 5 small states (DE, HI, ME, RI, VT), 9 medium-sized states (CO, CT, MD, MA, MN, NJ, NM, OR, WA), and 3 big states (CA, IL, NY). These jurisdictions have 209 of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate the law.

What will it take to get the few additional states to join the compact? Perhaps one more screwy election, only this time with the Republican winning the popular vote and the Democrat winning a couple of battleground states by a tiny margin, and therefore the presidency. There is no guarantee that the Electoral College advantages Republicans, although it has done so in recent elections. A few votes in a few states would change that. If Florida or North Carolina flipped blue by a few votes, the electoral college would advantage Democrats.

Sooner or later enough people will feel fed up that the presidential election decision is made somewhere else by somebody else, and change will happen. In the meantime, keep your eye on that voter in Pennsylvania, that voter who knows nothing and cares little, and who might or might not bother to vote, depending on the weather and what is on TV. That is whose vote decides the future of the country. Not yours.