Today is election day in the United States (remember to vote!). The presidential candidates are competing for votes in the Electoral College. Electoral College votes are distributed to states proportional to their number of members of Congress. What if Electoral College votes were instead allocated proportional to their contribution to society? Clearly, in this case we would have no choice but to allocate electors based on the number of college swim programs in a state. (Is this a serious article? No.)
There are 554 colleges and universities that offer NCAA swimming in the US, relatively close to the 538 electoral college votes that actually exist. The change to college swim program based voting would be very favorable to Democrats. Many strong Democratic states have large numbers of college programs, whereas more rural Republican states do not. For example, Democratic stronghold New York has 29 electoral votes to 70 college swim programs. Heavily Republican Texas has 38 electoral votes and only 13 college swim programs.
Awarding states won by Obama in 2012 to the Democrats and the states won by Romney to the Republicans results in a 429-125 landslide for the Democrats. Here are the “demographic” splits:
| All | D1 Only | D2 Only | D3 Only | Men | Women | |
| Republicans | 125 | 59 | 41 | 25 | 94 | 123 |
| Democrats | 429 | 136 | 62 | 231 | 335 | 426 |
A visual look at these results:
Here is a list of real electoral college votes vs number of college swim programs (this is also an extremely rough college swim programs per capita, but something that’s potentially interesting is outside the scope of an article this silly):
| College Swim Programs | Electoral College | |
| AL | 3 | 9 |
| AK | 1 | 3 |
| AZ | 4 | 11 |
| AR | 6 | 6 |
| CA | 33 | 55 |
| CO | 10 | 9 |
| CT | 14 | 7 |
| DE | 1 | 3 |
| DC | 6 | 3 |
| FL | 15 | 29 |
| GA | 7 | 16 |
| HI | 1 | 4 |
| ID | 2 | 4 |
| IL | 23 | 20 |
| IN | 15 | 11 |
| IA | 8 | 6 |
| KS | 1 | 6 |
| KY | 5 | 8 |
| LA | 3 | 8 |
| ME | 7 | 2 |
| MD | 14 | 10 |
| MA | 30 | 11 |
| MI | 15 | 16 |
| MN | 17 | 10 |
| MS | 1 | 6 |
| MO | 11 | 10 |
| MT | 0 | 3 |
| NE | 4 | 2 |
| NV | 2 | 6 |
| NH | 5 | 4 |
| NJ | 15 | 14 |
| NM | 2 | 5 |
| NY | 70 | 29 |
| NC | 19 | 15 |
| ND | 2 | 3 |
| OH | 32 | 18 |
| OK | 1 | 7 |
| OR | 5 | 7 |
| PA | 56 | 20 |
| RI | 6 | 4 |
| SC | 4 | 9 |
| SD | 5 | 3 |
| TN | 6 | 11 |
| TX | 13 | 38 |
| UT | 3 | 6 |
| VT | 4 | 3 |
| VA | 19 | 13 |
| WA | 6 | 12 |
| WV | 8 | 5 |
| WI | 13 | 10 |
| WY | 1 | 3 |
Bet bobo is wearing orange today !
I should pull up my original DT defence vs Bobo . When did he host the Golden Goggles? Well it was way back then . Not a surprise to me at all ( Ive been watching US closely since Dec 07) but ShockandAwe for billions
Not surprised by the number of D3 programs going Democrat. D3 programs are concentrated in regions that lean Democrat (New England area, Midwest and West Coast)
Should HRC win and she’s able to follow through with the “free college” plan you can kiss a bunch of these swim programs goodbye.
A more practical option would be to just cut the undergraduate degree to 3 years . This is the global norm unless there is an honours or trade qual incorporated. Massive savings in time & money . & you could be finished that part of life at 20.
I don’t think you will have to worry. Not that I don’t think she’ll win, I just don’t think that particular campaign issue will be fully addressed during her presidency. Think that was only said to mitigate the hemorrhaging of young voters to Bernie in the primaries.
swimming only please
…That’s literally what this post is about.
Uh.. this is crazy
What?
I think your column headings are flipped.
True. Fixed.