A reelection strategy: Bush goes to electoral college.

On July 4, George W. Bush gave a speech celebrating America as the home of freedom and emphasizing American unity since the September 11 attacks. He said, "In a moment, we discovered again that we're a single people--when you strike one American, you strike us all."

The speech was what you would expect from an American president under the circumstances. The place where he delivered it was not--Ripley, West Virginia. Bush chose Ripley not because it has anything to do with the war on terrorism, but because it has everything to do with the electoral wars in the presidential race of 2004.

In the race for the presidency, Americans are not a single people. Rather, because the vote is by states in the Electoral College, we are fifty-one (including the District of Columbia's three electoral votes) separate peoples. Given the winner-take-all nature of the state races, a candidate, including a sitting president, is best served by focusing his vote-getting efforts on the key minority of states in which the vote is likely to be close. How this aspect of American political life is influencing Bush's behavior in the run-up to the next election shows why we need Electoral College reform.

George Bush won the first presidential race of the twenty-first century in a way no president in the twentieth century did--he lost the popular vote but prevailed in the Electoral College. Bush remembers how close it was and has, since the day he became president, been working on a strategy to ensure that it won't be that close next time.

Not surprisingly, this strategy focuses on the states where the race was tight in 2000: Florida, obviously, but also states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon--and West Virginia. West Virginia has traditionally voted Democratic in presidential elections, but its five electoral votes went to Bush in 2000, exactly the number of electoral votes by which he defeated Al Gore. Hence, the Independence Day trip to Ripley, the fourth time Bush visited West Virginia since he took office.

If the only impact of our electoral system on a sitting president was on his travel schedule, that would be fairly innocuous. What is insidious is the way the electoral system can influence policy decisions, moving a president in a direction favoring the parochial interests of states whose votes he covets.

Take the president's decision to impose a 30-percent tariff on imported steel, which happens to benefit coal-producing states like West Virginia. As David Broder of the Washington Post reported on March 10, 2002, Bush was lobbied heavily by Republican governors and senators from Ohio, which he narrowly won, and Pennsylvania, which he narrowly lost, to impose a tariff favored by the steel industry and its workers. His economic advisors argued against doing so because it "would invite almost certain retaliation from European and Asian governments and impede the broader international barrier-lowering initiative Bush has espoused," but their views were "trumped by political advisors who count electoral votes." So much for the president's statement in an earlier speech that "open trade is not just an economic opportunity; it is a moral imperative."

This is not the only instance in which Bush has veered from his stated principles in an attempt to gain advantage in the next election. Florida and Jeb Bush's gubernatorial reelection campaign have also been the beneficiaries of the president's flip-flops. President Bush favors increased domestic oil exploration--except in Florida. There, he blocked offshore drilling in the Panhandle and the Everglades by buying back oil and gas leases at a cost of $235 million. The administration also backed restrictions on off-road vehicles in Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve. In contrast, as Ryan Lizza pointed out in the New Republic (July 29, 2002), the administration at the same time lifted a Clinton-era ban on snowmobiling in Yellowstone National Park.

Bush's strategy is not without risk. The local favoritism and policy discrepancies that have characterized his electoral strategy have been widely reported. In addition to Broder and Lizza, a July 5, 2002, front-page article in the Boston Globe ("Bush Following a Map to '04") and the July 17, 2002 cover story in USA Today ("Bush Policies Follow Politics of States Needed in 2004"), have exposed the administration's pandering. But Bush is likely to take whatever heat he gets from the press because, even in the midst of the war on terrorism that initially brought him 80-percent approval ratings, his reelection is far from certain.

The first time a president won the Electoral College but not the popular vote, the losing candidate, a Tennessean, came back four years later and defeated his nemesis, who happened to be the son of another president. True, Al Gore is no Andrew Jackson (and George Bush is not the bookish ex-secretary of state that John Quincy Adams was). But Bush's father's presidency is also pertinent. George Herbert Walker Bush crushed Michael Dukakis in 1988 by 315 electoral votes, and was riding high after the Gulf War, but when the economy faltered Bill Clinton defeated him in 1992 by 202 electoral votes. Similarly, the current president has slipped in popularity since the beginning of the war on terrorism--his current approval ratings have fallen into the 60s--as the country has turned its attention to a sour economy.

Bush's favoritism toward key states reminds us of the case for reform of the Electoral College. The Electoral College has survived, first because any constitutional change is a daunting project. But also because both small and large states think they benefit from the current system. The advantage small states receive is obvious. The number of each state's electors is equal to the number of its representatives plus its senators. Hence, Delaware, Wyoming, and North Dakota get the same extra two votes as every other state. On the other hand, large states benefit from the winner-take-all nature of the vote. These states have so many more electoral votes to offer that candidates are practically compelled to pay attention.

You don't have to be a mathematician to see that it is simply not possible for every state to profit from the Electoral College setup. Bush's reelection strategy shows how only states made important by the current political climate win. Take Nevada and California. Bush needed Nevada's four electoral votes to win in 2000 and, to get them, he promised not to approve a national nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, until all questions about the potential to contamination of groundwater had been resolved. Bush barely won Nevada, but earlier this year he went ahead and approved the Yucca Mountain site, even though contamination issues remain. Yucca Mountain won't be ready to receive nuclear waste for years, so why break a campaign promise now? David Strow of the Las Vegas Sun (May 17, 2002) offered this explanation: "burying 77,000 tons of nuclear waste under the mountain ridge in Southern Nevada will free states such as ... Pennsylvania from keeping waste that their [nuclear] plants generate."

In the end, the possibility of gaining twenty-one electoral votes from Pennsylvania is more important to Bush than holding on to Nevada's meager four. Yet bigness alone does not ensure presidential favor. For example, California has been so solidly Democratic for the past few elections that Bush has little incentive to curry favor there. Indeed, he seems to be trying to achieve the opposite. He declined to intervene in California's electrical-power crisis in the summer of 2001. Although he is buying back offshore oil and gas leases in Florida, he is not going to do so in California. And NASA moved hundreds of jobs from Southern California to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

So long as the country remains evenly divided politically, and presidential elections are consequently close, our electoral system will continue to benefit the few at the expense of the many. But the more presidents, Democratic or Republican, pursue policies blatantly favoring a few key states, the more the call for a fundamental change will come from the vast majority of states left out in the cold.

James P. Rooney is an administrative law judge in Boston.