It's illegal to write that kind of thing about Pennsylvania without referencing Clinton's "Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Arkansas in between" line -- which is actually pretty accurate.
These are all valid points. Yet it still feels like there's a specific sense in which the EC is unusually salient in the era of Trump. He has only been competitive in national politics, despite his lack of popularity, because he performs unusually well in 3 states that Republicans hadn't won since 1988, and "performs unusually well" in this case means "is capable of winning by the skin of his teeth, and no more."
If I disagree with anything, it's your last paragraph; it seems that for most of US history, most campaigns DID at least sort of behave as though the national popular vote mattered, and this was rational when it was generally a near-perfect indicator of who would win the EC. It's a lot easier to try to win over the American people more broadly, rather than try to hack your way into an EC-winning minority coalition by narrowly tipping a few swing states in your favor in exchange for accepting bigger-than-usual blowout margins in states you can't win. Trump presumably stumbled upon his 2016 map by dumb luck -- he too was trying to win a majority of the popular vote and maybe still believes that he actually did win it. But having discovered that "hack", recreating that 2016 map as much as possible is the only plausible path for victory for him that he or anyone else can see.
It's illegal to write that kind of thing about Pennsylvania without referencing Clinton's "Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Arkansas in between" line -- which is actually pretty accurate.
If memory serves that quote is attributed to James Carville.
These are all valid points. Yet it still feels like there's a specific sense in which the EC is unusually salient in the era of Trump. He has only been competitive in national politics, despite his lack of popularity, because he performs unusually well in 3 states that Republicans hadn't won since 1988, and "performs unusually well" in this case means "is capable of winning by the skin of his teeth, and no more."
If I disagree with anything, it's your last paragraph; it seems that for most of US history, most campaigns DID at least sort of behave as though the national popular vote mattered, and this was rational when it was generally a near-perfect indicator of who would win the EC. It's a lot easier to try to win over the American people more broadly, rather than try to hack your way into an EC-winning minority coalition by narrowly tipping a few swing states in your favor in exchange for accepting bigger-than-usual blowout margins in states you can't win. Trump presumably stumbled upon his 2016 map by dumb luck -- he too was trying to win a majority of the popular vote and maybe still believes that he actually did win it. But having discovered that "hack", recreating that 2016 map as much as possible is the only plausible path for victory for him that he or anyone else can see.