> The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.
What's interesting, and in defense of the electoral college, these three actually pick the winner in very different ways, making it harder for a single party to take control, and requiring some amount of compromise. If we just used popular vote for choosing the president, they're more likely to be the same party as the one controlling the House.
Other countries handle it just fine with popular votes.
E.g., South Korea has a presidential election every 5 years, congressional election every 4 years, and gubernatorial(?) election every 4 years (staggered in the middle between congressional elections). In this way, a government losing popular support quickly finds itself surrounded by elected officers from opposing parties.
I'm not sure at what scale this makes a difference, but South Korea has a population somewhat larger than California in a landmass a little bigger than Indiana. The US constitution obviously wasn't designed with 300M people and 50 states in-mind, but it's larger and more diverse than South Korea, so it probably needs to be governed differently. It's like how having states in Singapore would be silly, just at a different scale. I do think what system of elected government makes the most sense for a given country based on size, population density, population concentration, and other factors is actually an interesting question.
Well last time it happened (2012) the conservative party won the congress in April 2012 and then went on to win the presidential election in December ... the elected person was Park Geun-Hye, widely considered the worst leader in decades, and was impeached among corruption scandal four years later.
Maybe that's an argument for staggering elections even more regularly, or maybe it's just one of those coincidences pundits love to talk about, I don't know. :)
What's interesting, and in defense of the electoral college, these three actually pick the winner in very different ways, making it harder for a single party to take control, and requiring some amount of compromise. If we just used popular vote for choosing the president, they're more likely to be the same party as the one controlling the House.