Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — This question reads differently than it would have in October, and that’s the useful thing about answering it now.

The winner carried the popular vote. So the argument most people have actually been having for twenty-four years — that the mechanism produces winners the country didn’t choose — didn’t arise this time.

What that exposes is that most of the dissatisfaction was about outcomes rather than about structure. The structural question is separate and it’s the one worth asking: does forcing coalitions across states serve a purpose worth its costs?

I think it does. I’d rather make that argument in a year when my side doesn’t need it.

Wheeling, WV Correspondent — The College prevents a purely population-weighted outcome and requires broader geographic support.

The complication I’d raise from a small state is that it doesn’t do what people say it does. Candidates don’t campaign here. They campaigned in seven states and ignored the other forty-three, including all the small ones the system supposedly protects.

So the defense isn’t that it makes candidates visit us. It’s that it makes them visit somewhere other than the largest metros, and the somewhere is currently a handful of states that happen to be close.

That’s a weaker defense than the one usually offered and I still think it’s sufficient.

Bismarck, ND Correspondent — It forces candidates to care about more than the biggest cities and that federal balance is the point.

North Dakota gets three electoral votes and no visits, and I’d rather have the three than a national tally where we’d have neither.

That’s the honest small-state position. It isn’t about attention. It’s about a floor.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — The College preserves a role for states and whether that remains desirable is a values question.

I’d offer the observation that federations elsewhere handle this differently and none of them elects a national executive this way.

What is unusual about yours is not the federal weighting. It is the winner-take-all allocation within states, which is not in your Constitution and was adopted by states individually for partisan advantage in the early nineteenth century.

That is the feature producing the seven-state campaign, and it could be changed by any state legislature tomorrow without touching the document. Nobody discusses it because both parties benefit in the states they control.

Cheyenne, WY Correspondent — It keeps a continent from being three metros and a television.

Scrap it and you campaign only where the towers are.

Keep the College. It’s still the best ugly tool for a federation.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent — A national popular vote would turn the map into a few media markets.

I’ll say the thing I’d have said if the result had gone the other way, because that’s the test.

The mechanism produced a winner without a plurality twice in my adult life and both times my side benefited and I defended it. This time it produced a winner with a plurality. My argument hasn’t changed and it shouldn’t, and anybody whose argument changed this year was never arguing about the mechanism.

Knoxville, TN Correspondent — Appalachia isn’t a suburb of a mega-metro and the College is how a hill still matters on a Tuesday.

Polarized times make people hate the referee and hate isn’t a reason to hand the trophy to the largest airport.

Long Island, NY Correspondent — I live in a dense state that sometimes resents the arithmetic, and resentment isn’t a constitution.

The practical point is that abolition requires an amendment and an amendment requires thirty-eight states, which is arithmetically impossible for a change that reduces the weight of small states.

So the argument is academic and the reforms that aren’t academic are the ones nobody discusses. Proportional allocation within states. Expanding the House, which would dilute the small-state bonus without touching the Constitution. Fixing the contingent election procedure, which is genuinely dangerous and would hand a tied election to a vote by state delegation.

That last one is a live risk and it’s the piece of this system that would actually produce a crisis.

Owatonna, MN Correspondent — I’d note what the College has become versus what it was designed to be.

The framers intended electors to exercise independent judgment, chosen by legislatures. That died within a generation and we’ve had a rubber-stamp mechanism ever since, which the Court confirmed in 2020 by upholding faithless-elector penalties.

So we’re defending an institution that performs none of its original function, on grounds the framers didn’t articulate, and it may still be the right answer. Institutions do drift into new purposes.

The argument should be made on the current purpose rather than on the founding one.

Orange County, CA Correspondent — California cast more votes for the losing candidate than any state cast for anybody, and it didn’t matter, and I’d note that’s true in both directions.

Millions of Republicans here are also unrepresented in the count. The winner-take-all rule disenfranchises the minority in every state, and the minority is enormous in the large ones.

Whatever one thinks of the federal balance, the within-state rule is the part doing most of the damage and it’s the part nobody defends on the merits.

Myrtle Beach, SC Correspondent — South Carolina hasn’t been contested in my lifetime and I’ve never seen a presidential campaign here.

That’s the experience of most Americans, and it’s worth saying when the argument is about geographic representation.

I still support it, on the grounds Bismarck gave — a floor rather than attention.

Jacksonville, FL Correspondent — Florida spent twenty years as the decisive state and then stopped, and the change in what campaigns owe us was immediate.

That’s the system working as designed and also a reminder that the protection is temporary. A state matters until it doesn’t, and then it’s Ohio.

Keep the mechanism. Understand that it protects competitiveness rather than any particular place.