Political Effects of Puerto Rican Statehood

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the results of Puerto Rico’s latest statehood referendum, and how residents of the island should have the final say on whether or not they become the fifty-first state. It was outside the scope of that post to discuss the effects that a bid for statehood would have on national politics, but I wanted to briefly address some of those political considerations here.

The greatest effect that Puerto Rican statehood would have on national politics would be in two areas—Congressional representation and the number of votes in the Electoral College. The population of the island, which currently stands at a little over 3.4 million according to the latest Census Bureau estimates, would presumably entitle the hypothetical state to either four or five U.S. representatives (when all states are ranked by population, Puerto Rico lands between Iowa, with four representatives, and Connecticut, with five). It would also receive two U.S. senators and, depending on the exact size of its congressional delegation, either six or seven electoral votes.

The most immediate result of statehood would be the reallocation of congressional seats. Whereas there is no statutory limit on the total membership of the U.S. Senate (or, for that matter, the number of votes in the Electoral College, which currently stands at 538), there is currently a cap on voting members of the House, set at 435. Unless Congress decided to raise that limit, or do away with it altogether (which wouldn’t be advisable, for practical reasons), several states would automatically lose a member of Congress to make way for Puerto Rico. As noted by the author of the Hill article linked above, the states most at risk, based on the 2010 redistricting process, would be California, Florida, Minnesota, Texas, and Washington.

Of course, which specific districts in those states would be consolidated, and how the maps would be redrawn, would be anyone’s guess until the process actually occurred. But it is a certainty that none of those states would take the prospect of losing congressional representation particularly well.

The partisan makeup of the new state’s congressional delegation—as well as the island’s partisan tendencies in presidential elections—would be the other major question with regard to the political effects of statehood. Here as well, those effects are difficult to predict. Puerto Ricans in the United States are known for their tendency to vote Democratic, but island politics are more often based around local parties such as the PNP and PPD. Many politicians also choose to affiliate themselves with the mainline Democratic and Republican parties, and based on this Democrats would start out with a significant advantage in island-wide elections, as well as in many of the new congressional districts (currently, the governor and all three nonvoting representatives in Congress are Democrats). But several Republican-affiliated candidates have also found success in recent years, at both the gubernatorial level and in races for the several at-large seats in the legislature, indicating that the island would couldn’t be counted on to vote as a heavily partisan block.

In short, none of the very real effects of admitting Puerto Rico as the fifty-first state can be known for sure, until that day comes (if it ever does). But two things are a certainty: the substantive impact on national politics will be both noticeable and permanent, and that impact will be sure to become a key factor in any debate over the formal admittance of Puerto Rico into the Union.

The Final Results of the 2016 Presidential Election Are In

The results are in: Donald Trump has officially been elected as the 45^th President of the United States.

On Election Day, according to state laws governing the awarding of electoral votes based on the results of the popular vote, Trump won 306 votes, and Hillary Clinton won 232. The margin was virtually unchanged yesterday; Trump took 304, and Clinton, 227. Two pledged Trump electors from Texas went rogue, one voting for John Kasich and the other for Ron Paul. (So the Libertarian Party will still end up with an electoral vote, despite Gary Johnson's failure to make a splash.) Meanwhile, five Clinton electors across the country voted for several other people, including Bernie Sanders, Colin Powell, and Faith Spotted Eagle (an American Indian activist involved in the Dakota Access pipeline fight).

Amusingly, for all the talk of Republican electors voting for someone other than Trump, Clinton actually lost more votes to faithless electors. And it could have been even worse for her—another three pledged Clinton electors in Minnesota, Maine, and Colorado attempted to vote for someone else (Sanders in Maine and Minnesota, and Kasich in Colorado) but had their votes invalidated due to state laws binding electors to the results of the statewide popular vote.

Some unexpected names also received electoral votes for Vice President: Carly Fiorina, Susan Collins, Maria Cantwell, and Winona LaDuke (the Green Party’s 2000 VP nominee).

Seven rogue electors may be well short of the thirty-seven that would have been needed to actually change the results of the election, but it’s still hard to count the ways in which this was historic:

·         Most number of faithless electors in a single election, beating the previous record of six, set in 1808.

·         Most people to receive at least one electoral vote for president in a single election.

·         First time the Green Party has received an electoral vote for President or Vice President (Winona LaDuke).

·         First time faithless electors voted for a candidate from the other major party (the three Democrats in Washington State who voted for Colin Powell).

·         And Faith Spotted Eagle now has a place in history, going from completely unknown activist to one of only two women (along with Hillary Clinton) to have won Electoral College votes for President.

Odd footnotes to a crazy year.

And presumably, now that Trump has officially been elected President, liberals will forget their brief infatuation with the power of the Electoral College and “Hamilton electors” and go back to decrying it as a relic of slavery.

There Are Many Ways to Reform the Electoral College Without Repealing It

So much ink, both digital and otherwise, has been spilled since the election debating the merits of the Electoral College that I won’t bother rehashing old arguments here, beyond simply stating that I believe the institution is an ingenious way of furthering the goals of federalism, separation of powers, and the equality of all people and states that are at the very heart of the Constitution. But what I do want to do is briefly make the case that, for all the liberals’ talk of repealing the Electoral College, there are a number of ways to reform the system without violating either the Constitution itself or the Framers’ original intent.

It’s first worth looking at the relevant sections of the Constitution that establish the Electoral College. Article II, Section 1, Clause 2:

“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a  Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.” (Emphasis added.)

And Article II, Section 1, Clause 4:

“The Congress may determine the Time of chusing [sic] the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.”

The key is that every single state has the discretion, under the Constitution, to award electoral votes in whatever way that state sees fit. The complaints from liberals today (other than whining that the system is racist and Hillary won the popular vote) seems to be that in nearly all of the major swing states, Trump won by only a point or less, and yet won all of the electoral votes from those states. For instance, Trump won Pennsylvania by just over one percentage point—and yet won all twenty of the state’s votes in the Electoral College.

But there’s no requirement that states use a winner-take-all system. Nebraska and Maine are currently the only two states that don’t, awarding two votes to the statewide winner, and an additional vote to the winner of each of their Congressional districts (Nebraska split its votes in 2008, giving one vote from the Second District to Barack Obama, and Maine similarly gave one vote to Donald Trump this year). Republicans proposed that very system for Pennsylvania several years ago, back when the state was still considered an integral part of the “Blue Wall”, but Democrats quickly shot it down.

Or if that system isn’t to liberals liking, they could try a different kind of proportional system, where the number of electors a candidate wins in a given state directly relates to the percentage of the vote they receive in that state. This is a favored method of awarding delegates in both parties’ presidential primaries—for example, in the Iowa Republican caucuses, Ted Cruz won narrowly and received eight delegates. Donald Trump and Marco Rubio were close behind, and each earned seven delegates, and so on down to Jeb Bush’s one delegate. What’s to stop the adoption of a similar system for the general election?

The only real limits to the methods of reforming the Electoral College are the Constitution (states can’t restrict voting to just men or just women) and imagination. And there are a multitude of potential changes that could be made that I haven’t discussed here and are just waiting for their time to shine (although I imagine that the party currently pushing for a national popular vote would not embrace the notion of state legislatures selecting electors without any public vote at all, although that too is both allowed under the Constitution and has historical precedent).

I personally am a fan of the current winner-take-all system. As I said, it strengthens federalism, makes campaigning logistically easier, and gives focus to more local issues that otherwise wouldn’t receive a great deal of attention (think ethanol in Iowa). But states are the laboratories of democracy. Be creative! There are plenty of options to reform the Electoral College without blowing up the whole Constitution.