We’ve heard a lot recently about “Project 2025,” a policy paper released by the conservative Heritage Foundation that was initially positioned as a transition guidebook for a second Trump administration, but which Trump promptly claimed to know nothing about (because who but him can have any ideas he would subscribe to?).
Its guiding premise – not entirely insane – is that the federal bureaucracy is too big and too unaccountable, and (this is the insane part) needs to be brought to heel under a “unitary executive,” meaning a vastly more powerful president who would have centralized control over formerly independent agencies like (take a breath) the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Federal Reserve, the FCC, and the FTC. Trump’s disavowals notwithstanding, the concept of a “unitary executive” surely holds great appeal to him, as it sounds not unlike a king.
The instinct to reform the obvious dysfunctions in our system of self-government is a noble one, even if we disagree on the details. The Heritage Foundation’s version seems misguided if not outright dangerous, but so is our general complacency about the glaring defects of our constitutional status quo. Some of that complacency is a by-product of cynicism about politics in general. But mainly it’s the result of ignorance and civic laziness.
As a nation, we tend to shy away from structural reform because we’re one of the few democracies with a detailed, written constitution, and that constitution not only created a fundamentally sound governmental structure, but locked it into place by making it extremely difficult to amend. A country that couldn’t pass the Equal Rights Amendment is a country that is resistant to even the most benign constitutional reforms. But that built-in resistance doesn’t mean that structural change is impossible, and the Founders would surely be appalled to observe that we act as though it is.
So let’s try to imagine what a nonpartisan Project 2025 might look like, and how we might go about implementing it. Let’s be modest, much more modest than the Heritage Foundation. Let’s target just three immediate goals, none of which requires the cumbersome and likely futile process of amending the Constitution, and none of which requires a king, but simply a motivated and informed electorate.
Goal 1: Reform the Electoral College
To listen to news media, you’d think that having our presidential election hinge on perhaps 50,000 votes scattered across a handful of swing states is not only a given, but kind of fun, like the college football playoffs (themselves recently reformed), a tactical game where we watch the candidates race back and forth among the few swing states trying to establish a “path to victory” in the Electoral College. The fact that this path completely circumvents the will of the majority in the national popular vote doesn’t even warrant a mention, much less an outcry. It’s just the way it is, and aren’t we an interesting democracy that would employ such a manifestly undemocratic method of electing its president? Well, no. We’re a silly country for letting it persist.
The blatantly antidemocratic nature of our current electoral college system cries out for reform. More specifically, we need to move past the “winner-take-all” system, adopted by all but two states, that allocates 100% of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the most popular votes in the state, effectively negating votes for other candidates. This is not, despite our laziness in thinking so, required by the Constitution, but is rather the result of state-by-state legislation that is eminently fixable by those same legislatures, which could immediately adopt either an allocation of electoral votes in proportion with their state’s popular vote, or allocation according to who wins in each congressional district.
Instead, the quadrennial pattern repeats itself: first, our political attentiveness is diverted and degraded by overlong party primaries and endless campaign seasons. When the election year is upon us we become obsessed with polls, whose utility largely depends on having only a few states “in play.” Then the election happens, and we’re either delighted or disgusted, but certainly exhausted. The next presidential election seems far away, and we’re on to other concerns. Repeat.
But beyond our having the attention spans of squirrels and next to no political stamina, what explains the lack of attention to, or even mention of, the utter strangeness at the heart of our electoral system? There would seem to be only a few possibilities.
Perhaps we believe that if we selected presidents by national popular vote, or even by the proportional allocation of electoral votes described above, the outcomes would be radically different. But while it’s true that candidates would no longer spend all their time grandstanding in a few swing states, the result might be the same: if district-by-district award of electoral votes, as is the rule in Maine and Nebraska, had been in effect in all states in 2020, Biden still would have won in the electoral college. In 2016, Trump also still would have won (despite losing the popular vote), and if it had applied in 2012, Obama still would have won (while also winning the popular vote). So we’re not talking about radical departures in outcomes, just bringing the electoral vote tally into more granular conformity with the popular vote in each state.
Perhaps we think it’s appropriate that certain states have disproportionate sway in national elections. This is another way of saying we like drama, or we like crazy, which clearly we do. But seriously, over-representation by small states is already built into the Senate, where each state, no matter how underpopulated, gets two votes, and is built into the arbitrarily constricted size of the House (see Goal 3). We all get that the Electoral College makes candidates briefly pay attention to states they otherwise might not visit. But why concede the outcome of a presidential election to that handful of states?
Perhaps we adhere to the inside political baseball view that doing away with winner-take-all would result in a proliferation of fringe parties, none of which could win even a plurality of votes in a given state, but who would nonetheless be awarded a proportional number of electoral votes (unless the states also adopted ranked voting, a subject for another post). The result, these worriers say, would be more cases in which no candidate wins the required 270 electoral votes, resulting in the outcome being decided by a state-by-state vote in the House of Representatives – arguably an even less democratic process than what we have now. This risk seems less likely now than in recent history given the dominance of of the two major parties, but it’s a risk we should willingly take to reform the system of mass disenfranchisement currently in place.
Whatever the excuses for inaction, we need a groundswell of demand for electoral college reform. It should outrage all of us who live in “red” or “blue” states that our non-plurality votes count for nothing in presidential elections. Legislatures are paralyzed by partisan self-interest, but popular citizens’ ballot measures have resulted in state-level constitutional change on issues like gerrymandering and a woman’s right to an abortion, so we know that grass-roots demand for change can work. Let’s make reforming the Electoral College Goal 1 in our new Project 2025.
Goal 2: Move Election Day to a Saturday
There is no godly reason to hold national (or any) elections on a Tuesday in November. It’s like a bad joke. It’s the lingering result of an 1845 federal law that was intended to force the various states to hold elections on the same day (so they couldn’t influence one another’s results), and to allow the farmers and devout Christians that we all were then to travel, by horse and buggy on a day other than the Sabbath, from their fields to the town centers to vote and then get back home in time for market day on Wednesday. And in November because there wasn’t much happening on the farms then.
That’s it. That’s the reason we vote on the first Tuesday in November. All of it irrelevant today, but the reason we perennially rank near the bottom in eligible voter turnout among democratic nations (the 2020 election saw a high for the US in the 21st century, at 66%). To paraphrase Chris Rock, would you hold a party on a Tuesday? No, because nobody would come!
We should end this nonsense. You only like voting on a Tuesday if you like voter suppression (which, for certain, some politicians do). But voters themselves think it’s grossly inconvenient. All that’s needed to change it is an amendment to an 1845 law that’s long outlived its usefulness. Bills to get it done are proposed in nearly every session of Congress. Let’s get it done.
Goal 3: Enlarge the House of Representatives
Article I of the Constitution stipulates that House seats are to be apportioned among the states “according to their respective Numbers [of population],” and sets a ratio of not greater than one representative for every 30,000 persons, which gives us an idea of what the Founders thought was an appropriate level of representation.
The decennial census is conducted primarily to meet this constitutional requirement. After the first US census in 1790 counted 3.9 million people in the then much geographically smaller US, the number of representatives in the House stood at a cozy, intimate 105, about the size of your average Gen Z wedding.
Over the years, Congress used its constitutional authority to expand the size of the House to keep up with the growing US population, but since the Permanent Reapportionment Act of 1929, engineered by Republicans who feared the ballooning of the urban voting base, the number of House representatives has been frozen at 435, and that fixed number of seats has been allocated among the states in what is, of mathematical necessity given the growing disparity between the most and least populous states, an increasingly undemocratic pattern.
In 1790, the average size of a Congressional district was just shy of 40,000 persons. In 1929, when the number of House seats was fixed at 435, the average district numbered around 280,000. Today it stands at 761,169 (per the 2020 census), a number that would leave the Founders gobsmacked. Allocating an arbitrarily limited number of seats among states of wildly disparate populations results in a situation where, for instance, Montana has two seats to Wyoming’s one even though Montana’s population is twice that of Wyoming’s, and Montana and Idaho each have two seats even though Idaho has around 800,000 more residents than Montana.
One long-proposed solution to this problem is the so-called “Wyoming Rule,” which would increase the number of representatives in the House to the level where the ratio of representatives to population would equal that of the least-populous state – i.e., Wyoming. This would result in a ratio of one representative per every 520,000 or so persons and, given the current size of the US population, a House composed of 545 representatives, compared to the current 435.
More importantly, the larger states would gain representatives to bring their number more in line with their populations. California would gain 17 seats, Texas 13 seats, New York 9, Florida 9, while places like Alaska, Nebraska, and New Hampshire would gain none. No state would lose seats, and the House would be more representative of the population at large, as our hallowed Founders intended as a counterbalance to the deliberately un-democratic Senate, where two seats are given to each state irrespective of population.
There are other legitimate methodologies for increasing the size of the House, such as conforming it to the cube root of the total population, which would result in a body proportional in size to those of other representative democracies (and add around 157 representatives). But they all share the goal of aligning the institution more closely with the hopefully inarguable principle of distributing voting power in proportion with population.
The objections? Some say a larger House would be even more unwieldy than it already is, but it’s just as plausible that more equably apportioned districts would reduce the rabid partisanship that currently afflicts us. No, the real objection is unchanged since 1929 — that the political oxen of Republicans whose base tends to reside in less-populous states might get mildly gored. But this isn’t a uniform outcome, as the cases of Texas and Florida illustrate, and the result would be an indisputably more democratic House.
Two implications of proposals for a larger House are worth noting: first, like our other goals, it could be accomplished without the need for a laborious and likely doomed Constitutional amendment process, since reapportionment lies squarely within the legislative purview of Congress; and second, enlarging the House would mitigate the distortions inherent in the Electoral College (see Goal 1). Given that the College is populated with the same number of votes, allocated among the states in the same way, as representatives to the House, enlarging the House would also serve to bring the College into closer alignment with the popular vote.
Even conservatives would have to agree that the Founders never dreamed of a country of 328 million people represented by a group of only 435 individuals, and any constitutional originalist would concede that the original concept of the House is being thwarted by the current status quo. Something’s got to give, and now’s the time to let it.
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Of course, there are a host of other national structural deficiencies that cry out for attention – immigration reform, securing the future of Social Security, reducing the national debt, to name just a few – but let’s start modestly. Let’s start with the three goals of our better, nonpartisan Project 2025. And when we achieve those, perhaps we’ll be emboldened to try for more, reminded of our capacity for change, our appetite for getting things done, and, most importantly, the true nature and scope, often obscured by politicians, of our shared interests as citizens.