Ted Costa is at it again trying to shake up California politics. Costa, head of People’s Advocate, filed the recall petition against Governor Gray Davis that lead to the successful campaign to remove Davis from office replaced by soon-to-retire Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Now, Costa wants to change the landscape for presidential politics in California by requiring that electors in the Electoral College vote for the candidate who wins each congressional district. Costa filed an initiative this week as the first step to change the law.
California has a winner-take-all Electoral College system. As the most populous state, the current whopping total of 55 electoral votes puts the winner of the California election a huge step closer to the White House. Since the 1992 election, the winner has always been a Democrat.
With California almost a sure thing in presidential politics, candidates from the two major parties, for the most part, ignore the state and it millions of people during the campaign. The candidates spend much more time in smaller states that may carry only a handful of Electoral College votes. However, those few votes in contested states may be crucial to a victory.
Under the Costa plan, the winner of a congressional district in the state would get that vote in the Electoral College’s final tally and the overall winner in the state would get two additional electoral votes.
Looking at the 2008 presidential election, even with Barack Obama’s landslide victory of 24-percent over John McCain in the Golden State, under the Costa plan, McCain would have secured 11 Electoral votes. Obama carried 42 congressional districts, including eight represented by Republicans, and would have taken 44 electoral votes.
Obama ran up big scores in the large urban areas capturing 70-percen of the vote in Los Angeles County and 80-percent of the vote in the East Bay in Alameda County and Berkeley. Costa argues that the current system discriminates against voters in rural and less populous areas of the state because “mega urban areas dominate the process.”
By giving the Republicans a chance to win some Electoral College votes in this very blue state, neither party candidate could afford to ignore California.
Two other states have proportional Electoral College provisions: Nebraska and Maine.
This is not the first time a similar initiative effort has been filed in California. A measure was filed prior to the 2008 election but it never qualified for the ballot.
Whether Costa has the resources to qualify this measure for the ballot is uncertain. However, he went ahead with his recall petition for Davis and money soon appeared to support his effort, mostly supplied by Congressman Darrell Issa.
Will national or state Republicans see an opportunity to find electoral votes in a place that seems lost to them for the foreseeable future and again come to the aid of a Costa political shake-up effort? It could happen opening up an expensive initiative campaign if the measure qualifies for the ballot.