How Electoral College pollutes COVID relief

Forty states in this country receive more money from the federal government than their residents pay out in federal taxes. Let’s think of those as Taker States.

The other 10 states pay more to the federal government than they receive. We’ll call them Donor States.

Eight of those 10 Donor States, including the top six donors, voted Democratic in the 2016 presidential election.

This is relevant only because U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell recently badmouthed the idea of the federal government helping pull states out of the fiscal gutter that the COVID-19 pandemic (and the accompanying economic shutdown) has caused.

In a radio interview last week, the Kentucky Republican said he preferred to see states declare bankruptcy than have Congress appropriate budget-stabilization funds for them. His office followed up with a statement decrying what it referred to as a “blue state bailout.”

The statement was absurd on its face. This isn’t a blue-state issue. The shutting down of businesses and the collapse of consumer demand in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak has decimated the revenue bases for states across the country and across the political spectrum.

In Texas, a red state which has also seen the bottom fall out of its petroleum industry, the revenue problem is particularly acute. We’re facing massive cuts in basic state services next year unless the federal government comes through.

McConnell knows all that. On April 11, the National Governors Association (whose chairman, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, happens to be a Republican) released a statement urging the federal government to allocate $500 billion to “meet the states’ budgetary shortfalls that have resulted from the unprecedented public health crisis.”

McConnell, however, with the full public backing of President Donald Trump, has decided to frame the issue as a case of mismanaged Democratic-run states trying to shake down Congress to cover for their own fiscal negligence.

This crisis is not the result of blue-state profligate spending, and only a cynical partisan would claim otherwise.

Among other things, McConnell’s ploy — and Trump’s Twitter ditto — offered an illustration of how much damage the Electoral College system continues to inflict on our politics.

If we had a one-person, one-vote national system for electing presidents, McConnell would have to worry about alienating voters in Democratic states, the same way that Gov. Greg Abbott has to worry about alienating voters in the blue counties of Texas.

Abbott lost Bexar County to Lupe Valdez in 2018, but he still captured more than 251,000 votes here. He doesn’t want to go out of his way to antagonize those voters, because they all count on the state vote total.

By contrast, the voters of New York and New Jersey — our two biggest Donor States, and the two states with the highest number of COVID-19 cases — are politically irrelevant to Trump (and, by extension, McConnell).

In 2016, Trump received more than 22 million votes in the states carried by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. For all he cares, however, he might as well have gotten zero votes in those states, because that’s how many electoral votes he received.

In a popular-vote system — the kind that we use for every type of election in this country, from school boards all the way up to the U.S. Senate — those 22 million voters would have to be nurtured by Trump.

Each New York or Massachusetts vote would mean just as much to Trump as a Kentucky or Alabama vote. He would hurt himself by depriving crucial funding to any of those blue states.

We’re constantly told that if we abandoned the electoral-vote system, small states would get ignored by candidates. Of course, under the current system, both large and small states already are ignored, unless they are among the dozen or so whose electoral votes are up for grabs.

Three of our four biggest states (California, Texas and New York) get no interest or attention from presidential nominees. How is that a healthy system?

The other argument that tends to drive the pro-Electoral College side is that we’ve always done it this way, so we shouldn’t change now. Truthfully, we haven’t been all that consistent in the way we’ve elected presidents.

Early on, state legislatures (not voters) decided which candidate would get a state’s electoral votes. Also, the winner-take-all nature of electoral-vote allocation was purely a creation of the states, not the U.S. Constitution.

We’re in the deepest national crisis we’ve faced since the Great Depression. People across the country are hurting, through no fault of their own.

All of our states will need additional help from the federal government to get through this.

It shouldn’t matter whether their electoral votes land in the blue or red column. ggarcia@express-news.net @gilgamesh470