Free market solution to Electoral College dilemma.
Corporations and their shareholders should make major investments in the counties (Maine and Nebraska) whose Electoral College representatives are allowed to vote outside their state "winner take all" system. Like a "magnet school", these counties economic benefits would create incentives for other states to slowly loosen the "winner take all" system which is responsible - twice in 2 decades - for promoting a candidate with fewer popular votes to Chief Executive. Detroit should be the first. Had Michigan allowed the City of Detroit to cast its own proportionate electoral votes, investors would be saving the city and politicians wouldn't appeal solely to the Michigan rural majority. Whichever Michigan governor pulled it off would be credited with healing the city, which has become the very thing that "white" Michigan cities (Howell etc) fear in its current state.
I'm constantly asked to explain the USA's Electoral College whenever the topic of a USA election comes up. It's a civics lesson about a rational decision by smaller state actors. Here's how I explain it to Europeans.
Imagine if Europe were to try to elect a President of EU. Its "United States of Europe" constitution would require the buy-in, or joining, of individual member states with their own cultures and languages. Those states would, in a completely free market, face the same market forces as urbanization. Money is more efficiently concentrated in one place. Smaller nation-states would fear being lost in the shuffle.
Why build a bridge or an airport or a stadium in a small state, like Vermont or Belgium or Denmark, if the marketplace and political (voter) economics reward spending that infrastructure money in a big city like London, Paris, Milan, etc? If you were a President, you could always win more votes by spending every federal dollar in the cities and states with the most votes. If you were an EU state like Belgium, you'd be about the population of Michigan in the USA (in proportion to USA/EU population). That fear created the "winner take all" electoral college, and Luxembourg would as likely want "all its votes" cast on one candidate, to ensure candidates don't just passively take 45% of their votes and move on.
