Stop Stressing Over the Electoral College

There has obviously been a lot of dramatics and hysterics over the Electoral College this election season, and not just in the last couple days.  The complaints range from the typical (and understandable) position that "I live in [heavily Republican or heavily Democrat state] and my vote doesn't matter" to "the candidates only pay attention to 9 (or 8 or 10, depending on your view) states!  They don't care about the rest of the country."

Well, the truth is, it doesn't matter whether we use the Electoral College or a straight popular vote.  Yes, I can sense your reactions--probably ranging to a lot of the reactions I get on Twitter: "Your fucking ignorant" (most) to "This is why I love following you" (a few).  Certainly, my argument is probably nothing terribly insightful or new, but here it is.

Currently, neither party does much campaigning on the West Coast, the Deep South (except FL), the Northeast, or the Plains because there are few persuadable voters there.  The majority in those regions are fairly locked-in and aren't changing from their established positions.  People in the remaining 8-10 states have more undecided and persuadable voters (or going Nate Silver on you, they are more elastic).  Campaigning there only makes sense.

People will say, "Sure, but if it was a popular vote, candidates would go to more places, trying to get every vote they can".  No, they wouldn't and here's why:  The Republican is going to get the VAST majority of voters in AK, AL, MS, LA, AR, TX, TN, KY, ND, SD, NE, KS, ID, WY and UT and large, but not mind-blowing margins in GA, MT and AZ.  Why would the Republican candidate candidate EVER go to ID or UT or WY?  For one thing, not enough people live there anyway and secondly, how many more votes can they really get there?  The same is true in Democrat strongholds.  It's all about diminishing returns--you can spend money and time trying to get another 50,000 votes in WY or you can just focus on FL to maximize the 4 million votes there.  (Without paying as much attention as they do now, a candidate might only get 3.4 or 3.5 million votes).  You can't invest time or money in 51 places.  You can't fly to AK to campaign if you're Mitt Romney to get even 30,000 of the 91,000 votes that went to Obama.

The final point is that despite the Constitutional headaches that can occur in an Electoral College tie, etc, the truth is greater headaches could occur in a very close election if the popular vote is used.  This year, thus far, there are 118,500,000 votes for President.  Where do you set the trigger for an automatic recount?  If you set it at 0.1%, that's still 118,500 votes.  How do you recount every state?  That doesn't make any sense.  So if the total is within 0.1%, do you then have a recount in any state that is within 0.5%?  The same legal fights that already occur in states like FL or OH are exactly where they would occur in a popular vote election.  It's time to focus on more important, broader issues.