Beyond that, the idea loses sight of the fact that we have a federal government. The individual states are supposed to have some power over the process. If a so-called National Popular Vote plan were put in place, citizens of states like Delaware and South Dakota could forget about ever seeing a presidential candidate. Why bother, when you can concentrate on running up a bigger majority in LA or NYC?

Bruce Bartlett makes several good points, among them this one:

Advertising necessarily will shift away from local markets to national media. The principal impact of this will be to raise the cost of campaigning.
…
If the cost of running for president rises, then there is going to be increased pressure on taxpayers to chip in more money for federal subsidies and more complaints about fundraising abuses, soft money and the like.

That doesn’t mean individual states can’t alter their own laws on distribution of electors. Maine and Nebraska currently have laws close to what arcman proposes. That’s fine if that’s what the citizens of the state want, and it doesn’t run afoul of the constitution. But the whole idea of direct popular vote election of the president is a can of worms we should not think about opening.

Respectfully, PCB is reiterating conventional wisdom that doesn’t hold up when you look at the numbers. If one presdiential candidate were to receive 75% of the vote in the 100 largest cities in the US, that is still less than 1/2 the votes necessary to get elected President under a national popular vote plan. Do the math.

Sooo the top 200 cities out of the 25,000-30,000 cities in the United States are going to be able to pick the President?? Nice!!! All a Candidate would have to do is pander to the larger cities, and bada boom bada bing they are the next President of the United States. This is completely illogical, the whole point of the electoral college is to neurtalize the effect of the larger states over the smaller states. Also, any and all state laws along these lines are going to have to go under constitutional muster, and they ain’t gonna make it. This is more waste of time from polititians who apparently have too much time on their hands.

I just checked an Electoral College Map and you would have to win the top 11 states in order to be over the 263 Electoral Votes to win.
55 California
34 Texas
31 New York
27 Florida
21 Illinois
21 Pennsylvania
Are the top 6 and only get you 189 votes

You would also have to win:
20 Ohio
17 Michigan
15 New Jersey
15 Georgia
15 North Carolina
The home state of my Very Favorite Blog Mistress

Those states put you over the top Electorially, so to speak. With the popular vote you could have California and New York conspire together to vote for a specific candidate and trump virtually every other state in the union. Just CA and NY have a voting population that is over half of the votes that John Kerry received in 2004. Why should the rest of the states be held hostage to what those two states want??? I know this is a simplistic analysis, and I completely understand that not everyone in CA or NY are going to vote for a specific candidate, but I also only see this as cry baby antics cuz Al Gore lost the 2000 elections. – Lorica

Candidate will have to compete for every vote. It will not matter to them if they get it from a big city or a rural area. Any candidate who focuses all or even a significant majority of their time in big cities is destined to lose.

The major shortcoming of the current system arises from the winner-take-all rule (currently used by 48 states) under which all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who gets the most votes in the state. If the partisan divide in a state is not initially closer than about 46%-54%, no amount of campaigning during a brief presidential campaign is realistically going to change the winner of the state. As a result, presidential candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the concerns of voters of states that they cannot possibly win or lose. North Carolina is among the 40-some states that are totally ignored in presidential campaigns. Instead, candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of “battleground” states. 88% of the money is focused onto just 9 closely divided battleground states: Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and New Hampshire.

It will also force candidates to campaign everywhere. Currently they ignore most of the country and focus exclusively on battleground states. This skews the campaign so they discuss issues like the US-Cuba relationship because it is important in Florida. The US-Mexico relationship is virtually ignored because candidates don’t have to campaign in California, or Texas.