Wow, I was wondering if anyone was even going to read all the way through this. :)
So, what's neat about the Electoral College is that it's basically a mapping from population; states receive as many electors as they have Senators (2 for every state) plus Representatives (proportional to the state's population). This was designed so that neither the high-population Northeast states nor the more numerous but lower-density Southern states (bear in mind, this was back in the late 18th century when all the states were up and down the East Coast) would have an unfair advantage against one another in the electorate. (It's a side-effect of this states'-rights idea that Europeans seem to find terribly confusing.)
So, to get the population distribution, all we have to do is look at the total electoral vote distribution (286 Bush, 252 Kerry) and subtract as follows:
62 from Bush (31 red states) 38 from Kerry (19 blue states) Another 3 from Kerry (I didn't include the District of Columbia in any of my calculations)
leaving 224 Bush, 211 Kerry.
Naturally, we could also just look up the population figures, but this was faster. ;)
I don't know what percentage of the federal tax income comes from blue states. It should be in the report I linked in the comments thread of the last post, except the full report isn't available yet. Fuckers. I agree it's a good thing to know, though.
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Date: 2004-11-12 07:05 pm (UTC)So, what's neat about the Electoral College is that it's basically a mapping from population; states receive as many electors as they have Senators (2 for every state) plus Representatives (proportional to the state's population). This was designed so that neither the high-population Northeast states nor the more numerous but lower-density Southern states (bear in mind, this was back in the late 18th century when all the states were up and down the East Coast) would have an unfair advantage against one another in the electorate. (It's a side-effect of this states'-rights idea that Europeans seem to find terribly confusing.)
So, to get the population distribution, all we have to do is look at the total electoral vote distribution (286 Bush, 252 Kerry) and subtract as follows:
62 from Bush (31 red states)
38 from Kerry (19 blue states)
Another 3 from Kerry (I didn't include the District of Columbia in any of my calculations)
leaving 224 Bush, 211 Kerry.
Naturally, we could also just look up the population figures, but this was faster. ;)
I don't know what percentage of the federal tax income comes from blue states. It should be in the report I linked in the comments thread of the last post, except the full report isn't available yet. Fuckers. I agree it's a good thing to know, though.