IMHO the Electoral College has less intellectual merit than the demand that all voters must own property.
If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to defend one of these it would be the property requirement.
And the fuckiest part of all of is that the particular shape of that the US prioritized expanding the franchise due to the particular pressures of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian coalition. If that coalition had confronted different institutional frustrations, or John Quincy Adams hadn't gotten distracted with anti-masonism, maybe the Electoral College would have gotten the push instead.
Madison wanted to pass "district plan" amendments, and a version of the plan passed each house in his time, but no one passed both together.
"The leading statesmen
of both parties, including Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, James Wilson, Albert Gallatin, James Bayard, Rufus King, Na-
thaniel Macon, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren,
Robert Hayne, Daniel Webster, and many others, supported a version of
the district plan. "
It appears that the "district plan" was killed by majoritarians in each state. Pure selectorate shit.
I have an odd inkling that this would actually enable states to surface more diversity into the federal process. "Packing and cracking" gerrymandering is purely quantitative. But selecting what to demographics pack and what to crack is qualitative. Florida's politicians would want to pack and crack different constituencies than Maine's, Nebraska's, and so on.
Imagine that we're grand poo-bahs who run the political machinery of the great state of Wabash. We sit at the top because we have either rallied together a successful crew of other political elites, or maintained the value proposition of elite in-group membership in some way, or stand a credible chance of doing so in the immediate future. Our state-level political elites are not quite as rarified as the national political elites, but not quite as entrenched as the neighborhood-level poobahs
We're putting in this organizational effort to buy table stakes at a game of uncertain influence. We're betting on our odds to be either elite enough that the rentiers will bribe us with the loot extracted from the little people, or that our majority coalition will be broad enough to improve the chances of winning some club goods from a winning federal coalition.
At first glance, it seems obvious that the state-level poobahs are only interested in extracting club goods by way of throwing their state majorities behind winning federal coalitions. It's a mass-scale operation and it rewards a lot of the actions that we (poobahs) already have to do to control the political machinery.
The downside is a lot of the day-to-day client service that you have to thanklessly provide is going to make upper and lower levels think that they're calling the shots.
The main reason why local rentiers don't freeze you out and put their idiot nephews in office is because they don't like the oblique uncertainty involved in political gamesmanship, so they let you take the risk and exposure. And the federal coalitions try to can leverage the 50% of non-contested states against you: the Wabash poobahs want the winning coalition to pay for club good X, but the Fremont poobahs want the winning coalition to pay for club good Y, so don't get greedy because ...
... maybe the winning coalition will simply give up on Wabash and cultivate Fremont as a winning state instead. You can't be the tall poppy. So you'd better stick in the middle of the pack of state-level poobahs looking for club good X.
The federal level poobahs extract their cash by playing these games: maintaining the narrowest possible coalition that can still win through to getting some club goods. They're always playing the permutations, comparing the odds of success vs the expected value.
What I like about the District Plan is that it gives the state-level poobahs some of the same moves that the federal poobahs have EXCEPT the state-level poobahs also get a much sharper tool to directly fuck over local rentiers in favor of being part of the winning coalition and getting club good X.
Under the District Plan, the state-level poobah gets to approach the neighborhood boss and the local rentier and say, "I'm drawing lines. Do you want your base of support to be all-in on a coalition or split up between the two?" Packing gets you machine politics efficiencies at the risk of fragility. This opens up a lot of sharp-elbowing between the neighborhood bosses after which the state-level poobah gets to play kingmaker. It's a game homologous to the one the federal poobahs are playing
On the other side, the state-level poobahs can approach the federal poobahs with a sophisticated range of bids: packed-and-cracked gerrymanders to keep the winning coalition tightly targeted, or an array of swingier options for more operational freedom in assembling the winning coalition.
Basically, the game that the feds played on the state-poobahs is now a two-way street. The state-level poobahs have more moves to compel certain demographics into the winning coalition.
The crazy thing is that under the District Plan, the political influence at the level of the state onto the federal government wouldn't disappear. If anything, the district plan would move the target of state-level political actors from large-scale mobilization to delineation and articulation. The district plan would shift the influence of the state into constituting publics, IE choosing which redistricting plans could influence the state selectorate's powers over the federal government.