The Electoral College is Vitally Important

The Democrat Socialist Party wants to eliminate the Electoral College.  Others are pushing a compact among the states to have each state ignore the votes of its own citizens and award their electoral college votes to the Presidential candidate who won the plurality of votes in the nationwide election.  This interstate compact does not eliminate the Electoral College, but it does eliminate its purpose.

Both of these ideas would have awful consequences.  Among them are:

• Already extensive voter fraud will explode.  Contrary to the oft repeated claims of academics, who are in the pocket of the Democrat Socialist Party, that voter fraud is insignificant, actual election managers have known for decades that every Democrat Socialist Party Presidential Candidate has 150,000 fraudulent votes in Philadelphia.  New York City, Boston, Providence, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago will all deliver large numbers of fraudulent votes to the Democrat Socialist Party also.  Voter fraud can only operate on a massive scale where one political party has long held power over an area with a large population for a long period of time.  A nationwide plurality contest will make it much harder to triage the many cases of voter fraud for investigation.  With the Electoral College, one can focus voter fraud investigations on those areas where the vote will actually change the outcome of the state-wide election and the way its Electoral College votes are cast.

• The Democrat Socialist Party presidential candidate will spend even less time in rural areas of the country and in towns and small cities than they already do.  It is a great advantage to have the richest lode of one's voters crowded together in a few large cities.  Limited time and money can be far more effectively focused on these high density ant-nests of humanity than is possible for a candidate who seeks the votes of Americans living in lower population density areas of the nation.  Post-election maps will show even more of the nation in red even as a few dots of blue carry the Presidential election.  Future Presidents will be less and less able to claim that they are the President of all the People.  It will become ever easier for them to disregard those who live in fly-over country and to designate them the Deplorables.

• Legitimate government is government that protects the exercise of every citizen's individual rights.  Unfettered democracy is actually pressed to trample the rights of many citizen's in order to purchase the votes of a plurality of citizens.  In many cases, the interests of people living in cities and high density areas are different than those who live in lower density areas.  The city-dweller may be very happy to have all the products he needs that require natural resources as inputs to come from China, Africa, and South America.  He may be more ready to buy into environmental scare tactics than some who live in a mining area.  The city-dweller might be susceptible to using the government to drive down food prices at the expense of farmers and those who process and transport food materials.  The city-dweller likely has no interest in the fate of fishermen.  He is likely to want federal tax deductions for heavy state and local taxes at the expense of more rural people with less expensive governments.  The city-dweller will push for expensive subsidies for public transportation at the expense of people from lower density population areas.  City-dwellers and the Democrat Socialist Party are already very often seeking to force employers to pay high minimum wages such as the commonly demanded $15/hour wage.  Even in cities a minimum wage requirement does great harm to those who are little educated, have low work skills, or are little motivated to work.  But minimum wage requirements on the national level are even more devastating in rural areas where businesses have fewer potential customers and where the cost of living is commonly much lower.  Our Republic, under which the Electoral College is a key leg, was designed to discourage a portion of the disregard that an unfettered democracy has for individuals and minorities of the electorate.

• That party most eager to have a federal government which provides goodies to its voters while showing a great willingness to harm those who do not vote or who vote for another party will benefit most from keeping the Electoral College from doing the task it was set up to do by the Framers of the Constitution.  The Framers knew the dangers of democracy.  They knew that governments are biased in favor of increasing their power over the People.  They put many checks and balances into our system of federal governance in order to provide for our welfare by minimizing the dangers to individuals and minorities that democracies are inclined toward and by making it harder for governments to increase their power and control over the lives of the People.  When the state legislatures were no longer allowed to designate the electors to the Electoral College, the federal system was undermined.  The power of the states was diminished.  This made it easier for a party to ignore many states as it sought power at the federal government level.  

• A constitutional amendment is required to eliminate the Electoral College.  Such amendments are hard to pass.  An amendment ultimately requires the approval of three-quarters of the state legislatures.  This is pretty much an impossible task for the Democrat Socialist Party to achieve, since so many of the states are clearly to be ignored by them once they have eliminated the Electoral College.  The idea that everyone's vote should count in a Presidential election has a lot of naive appeal to many Americans, so the compact between the states that each state will cast its electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote across America has some appeal.  It requires the approval of many fewer state legislatures than does an amendment to the Constitution.  Many of the states to be ignored by the future government can also be ignored in the process of putting this compact into play.  I do wonder if once the People of a state have voted for candidate A, but candidate B wins the national popular vote, how stable the compact of legislatures will be when the People of that state find their own legislature betraying their state-wide vote.  For instance, imagine that Trump had won the popular vote.  Can you imagine the uproar in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and California when their electoral votes were cast for Trump?

• The entire plurality that Hillary Clinton won over Donald Trump was based on the vote in California, where Republicans are largely disenfranchised by a state election system that places Democrat Socialists running against Democrat Socialists for virtually every state-wide office in the general election and few if any Republicans are on the ballot.  This Democrat Socialist voting system is a strong voter suppression factor.  The interstate compact to award each state's electoral votes to the popular vote winner will encourage more states solidly controlled by a party to adopt this form of voter suppression.  All evidence to this point is that Democrats are more willing to suppress the vote of Republicans than Republicans are eager to suppress the Democrat vote. 

Most of the support for weakening the Electoral College is in the Democrat Socialist Party.  That is the same party that wants to have children, felons, and non-citizens vote, a $15 minimum wage, welfare for those who choose not to work, Medicare for all, no power except intermittent wind and solar, ever more federal land, regulations against any environmental harm that can be imagined by Chicken Little, catastrophic man-made global warming based on faulty physics and lacking any catastrophe, open borders with a welfare state, and which discourages people from having children.  There is no lunacy too loony for the Democrat Socialist Party which is well-represented by the donkey or ass and in some states also by the white segregationist rooster.

Hilary Clinton's loss of the last election brought on a new sense of urgency to undermine the Electoral College with her claim of a majority of the votes.  Actually, she only had a plurality.  What is more, the sum of the votes to the smaller government parties such as the Republican, Libertarian, and Constitution parties was greater than that for the likes of the Democrats, Green, Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Socialist Workers parties.

Rather than more unfettered democracy, we need more institutions and laws that protect individuals and minorities of all kinds -- not just racial, gender, or sexuality -- from the brutal use of force and the harms that a plurality of voters and their chosen power-hungry politicians are all too often eager to inflict upon them.

Mid-Term National Elections Have Fewer Uninformed Voters - Let Us Have More Mid-Term Elections

Only a small fraction of the US adult population know who the first President of the United States was.  No, I am not even talking about the first President under the 11 years of the Confederation of the United States.  I am saying they cannot name George Washington as the first president.  Most also do not know that we gained our independence from Great Britain, cannot name the original 13 states, do not know who the combatants were in the War of 1812 or in World War I, do not know the enumerated powers that Congress has under the Constitution, do not know how many justices serve on the Supreme Court, and have a greatly exaggerated idea of the powers of the President under our Constitution.

Now we ask these same people to follow and understand the operations of their local and state governments and of the federal government and cast an informed vote at least every two years.  Is there even a bit of realism in such an expectation?  The Framers of the Constitution certainly knew there were limits on the wisdom and knowledge of the People.  They were fully aware of the short lifespans of earlier democracies.  Indeed, they believed a short lifespan and great instability was a characteristic of any democracy.

Ben Franklin said:

Democracy... Is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

John Adams said:

Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

The Framers of the Constitution were familiar with mobs in the streets, which we still have to this day in Ferguson, Missouri and not long ago had in many cities, such as Watts, California.  But 1789 and the 124 years that followed, government was much simpler to understand.  Government still paid attention to the enumerated powers of the Constitution.  The power to tax in order to fulfill the functions enumerated had not become a power to do anything which might be supported by a tax.  ObamaCare was recently ruled by the Supreme Court to be justified because it was so supported by a tax.  The interstate commerce regulation authority had not then been expanded to allow the regulation of all commercial activity.  The power and scope of government were much smaller then.  This was not only at the federal level, but also at the state and local level.  Yet, the People were not to have their intelligence and their diligence to inform themselves so taxed that they were to choose their own Senators.  Until 1913, Senators were chosen by state legislatures, which represented a body of people who were more interested in and informed about government.

Because so many of the People have an exaggerated expectation of the power of the President and so few appreciate the real power of Congress, they turn out to vote in much larger numbers for presidential national elections than they do for the mid-term elections.  Let us examine the voter turnout in the last few elections:

2014, 36.3%
2012, 53.6%, presidential
2010, 37.8%
2008, 56.8%, presidential
2006, 37.1%
2004, 55.3%, presidential
2002, 37.0%
2000, 51.3%, presidential

The average presidential year turnout was 54.25%, while the mid-term election turnout was 37.05%.  In presidential election years the turnout is 17.2% higher on average.  The significance of this is more readily seen by noting that presidential elections have 1.46 times as many voters.  I would maintain that in a presidential election year this means that for every 3 voters there is one voter who is less informed than the average voter in a mid-term election.

We made the federal government excessively democratic when we made Senators stand for popular election in 1913.  This also decreased the power of the states in the state - federal balance of power.  This loss of state power is now clearly seen to be ill-advised and has greatly contributed to the political divisiveness of the present times.  While I think it would be wise to remove the 17th Amendment that unbalanced our federal system of government, there is more that we can do to rectify the ills that plague our federal government.

Government is now so powerful, so into everyone's pocket and business, that it is no wonder that even fairly intelligent people do not have the time or the will to devote effort to understanding what it is doing and what the consequences of those actions are.  Even full-time politicians are overwhelmed and uninformed.  Just in the last day or so, Obama said in a press conference that he had just become informed that Jonathan Gruber had spoken about how the framers of the PPACA, more accurately the Patient Subjugation and Unaffordable Care Act, had purposely deceived the voters, who Gruber called stupid in a too forthright admission of the Progressive Elitist assessment of others.  Of course, that infamous bill was passed by a Democrat Congress few, if any, of whose members who had read the bill.  Other such examples abound.  So if the full time politicians are so uninformed, how can the People generally be expected to make rational choices at the polls?

The present system of too much democracy has led us into a morass of tyrannical government.  People vote on the basis of their wishes after buying into undeliverable promises by politicians.  They do not critically evaluate the promises for their supportability or their consequences.  To be sure, some major element of democracy is unavoidable if one is to avoid a tyranny of an oligarchy or of a despot.  So, how can we adjust the system modestly so that the People may still exercise their vote and make their corrections to the system?

I propose that we have more mid-term elections and fewer presidential elections.  Let us allow a President one and only one six-year term of office.  With government as complex as it is today, the demands placed on a President are much greater than they were in the early years of our Republic.  Yet, when I read biographies of our early Presidents, even with much smaller governments, they were extraordinarily busy men, beset with huge burdens of worries.  Most who served even four years in office were worn out.  Eight years in office is too much for mortal man and very few of our Presidents are really extraordinary men.  They come into office with a few core ideas and those that are politically palatable are commonly put into place in the first couple of years they are in office.  After that they seem to tire out, run out of ideas, and certainly lose touch with the People.  At the end of six years, it is time to send them back to their plows.

Yet, it is not the worn-out President that is the chief reason for this proposal.  The chief reason is that having two mid-term elections for every presidential election would tend to keep that one out of three voters who is least informed away from the polls for two elections for every time they vote.  Everyone who is a citizen would still have the right to vote just as often, but he would have to motivate himself to come to the polls even when no one was up for the office of the now Imperial Presidency.  This would give us more of the outcomes for smaller government that the 2014 and 2010 elections provided.  This would give us a less tyrannical set of governments at all levels of government, since it is clearly the less informed and less motivated voters who are most susceptible to the empty promises of politicians who would grow the governments at the expense of the private sector and our individual rights.

Frankly, it would help to diminish the power of the Democratic Party, the party Franklin and Adams might name the Murder or Suicide Party.  Government is never a proper means of association unless it is necessary that force be used and supplant voluntary cooperation.  Whenever an individual asserts his individual rights as justification for not obeying the dictates of government, government replies that it is ready to use deadly force to command obedience.  When government fulfills its legitimate function of protecting individual rights and does no more, there is no conflict with the rational individual.  But when government tries to take the life, or the hours of the life, or the income of one's work, or the property acquired through prior work, it is actively using force to deprive one of what is one's by right.

Such governments are prepared to murder citizens and in so doing or threatening to do, they do great harm to many of the People.  They are weakening the society.  Big Governments put different groups with special interests at one another's throats and cause a general breakdown in cooperative, private sector associations.  Such governments murder some minorities and even the more favored minorities suffer the general losses due to a weakened society.  In the end, a society so ruled commits suicide.

Last Electoral College Result Prediction on Presidential Election

I believe the most likely outcome of the Presidential election will be:

Of the generally recognized swing states, the only one that I believe is foolish enough to vote for Obama is Nevada.  Nevada showed its perfidy by voting for Senator Harry Reid, who has refused to allow the Senate to obey the law and produce a budget ever since Obama occupied the White House.  Harry Reid is wily, but a very wrongheaded man.  The state that could send him over and over to the Senate has the good judgment of a Las Vegas labor union.  In other words, Nevada is too much like California now, with which state it shares both an astronomical unemployment rate and home foreclosure rate.  Sometimes, no oftentimes, the people of a given area suffer mass delusions.  I know, I live in the Baltimore - Washington corridor, where mass delusion reigns supreme.  I do think there is about a 40% chance that Nevada will vote for the much superior candidate, Romney.

There is about a 20% likelihood that one of the three states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota will vote for Romney.  I believe Romney will win the election with a differential in the percentage total vote of between 2 and 4%.  If I am wrong, I think a win by 5% is more likely than one by 1%.  A win by 5% will mean that Romney will likely carry at least two of the states Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Minnesota.  Both Pennsylvania and Michigan will be very hard hit by Obama's plans to shut down the coal-fired electric power plants and both will be hurt by his plans to discourage hydraulic fracturing to release shale oil and gas.

Most of the polls are underestimating the turnout of Republicans and those Independents who have had more than enough of Obama.  They are overestimating the turnout of Democrats.  This is even true of Rasmussen polls, which are among the best of the polls.  The fact that Romney has a normal Republican lead with men and Obama has much less than the normal Democrat lead with women figures very big in my understanding of how this election will turn out.  Another key factor is the fact that Independents are decidedly favoring Romney over Obama.  There will also be substantially more crossover Democrats voting for Romney than Republicans voting for Obama in this election.  These factors have to generally push all of the swing states, most of which are now mostly Republican at the state level, into the Romney column.  The work of the Tea Party Americans in ensuring this is also underestimated.  The Evangelicals have also become aroused.

Obama is left only with substantial majorities among young people, blacks, and Hispanic Americans.  Each of these groups has suffered just unbelievably high unemployment.  Falling incomes and rising prices, such as energy prices, have hit blacks and Hispanic Americans especially hard.  The fraction of young Americans who favor Obama is high, but usually these young Americans do not vote in large numbers.  We will see that many fewer of them will vote in this election than in 2008 and of those who vote, a very substantially larger fraction will vote Republican.  The turnout of black and Hispanic Americans will also be lower.  The decrease in the fraction who vote for Obama this time as compared to 2008 will be much smaller than that among the young, though it will be greater for Hispanics than blacks.

Now that Americans have had so much time to get to know Obama and to be angered so many times by his lies and deceptions, I am very disappointed that we are still in a situation in which nearly half of all Americans will vote for this con man and failed President.  How anyone could want four years of constant attacks on our individual rights and the resulting economic stagnation, is very much beyond my understanding.  Romney should have easily surpassed Obama with well over 300 electoral votes.  It appears more likely that there are too many very foolish Americans for that to happen.  At this point, it looks to me that Romney will get 295 electoral votes.

I will be heartened if Romney comes very close in Minnesota, my birth state, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, however.  Coupling that with wins in Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio and the continued shift of the Midwest into the Republican column may be a good sign of things to come.  We have already seen these states send more Republicans to their state houses and to the House of Representatives.  They have been electing Republican governors as well.  The private sector unions have been losing power as they have lost membership.  More and more Mid-westerners are learning that if they are to have well-paying jobs, it is good that the governments not be anti-business.  As Mid-westerners show more respect for economic freedoms, they will align more with the more reality-interested Republican Party than with the socialist Democratic Party.  This re-alignment may take a couple more election cycles to be complete, but it sure is important to America's future freedom and prosperity.

Making Sense of the Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll

According to a three-day average over 3 - 5 October, the daily Rasmussen Presidential Poll reports that Romney was leading by 49% to 47%.  However, Rasmussen also says that Romney has the vote of 89% of Republicans and Obama has the vote of 88% of Democrats, while Romney is up 16% on Obama among those not affiliated with the Republican or Democrat Parties.  The report I have seen does not say how many Republicans are planning to vote for Obama or how many Democrats plan to vote for Romney.  The report also does not say what percentage of Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated voters were sampled.

The Rasmussen party affiliation survey for September is now available.  According to it party affiliation is as follows:

Republicans, 36.8%
Democrats, 34.2%
Other, 29.0%

Democrats have increased by 0.9% since August, Republicans have decreased by 0.6%, and Others have decreased by 0.2%.  I expect the media claims that the Romney campaign was losing and Romney did nothing but make gaffes had pushed down the Republican affiliations and boosted the Democrat affiliation.  Romney's debate performance may reverse that trend in October.

I will assume that 4% of the 29.0% may vote for the micro-parties such as Libertarian, Green, Constitution, and Socialist Workers.  This leaves 25.0% of non-affiliated voters to pick either Romney or Obama and Romney is up by +16, so this implies that 58% will vote for Romney and 42% will vote for Obama.  The last two Washington Post/ABC News polls I adjusted for party affiliation had about 7% of each party voting for the candidate of the other party, so I will assume that here, to the advantage of Obama.  So, how does the adjusted vote turn out then:

Romney:  (0.89)(36.8%) + (0.07)(34.2%) + (0.58)(25.0%) = 49.6%

Obama:   (0.07)(36.8%) + (0.88)(34.2%) + (0.42)(25.0%) = 43.2%

Thus, Romney had a 6.4% advantage in a poll including the day of the debate and the two days after the debate.  How on Earth Rasmussen manages to reduce this to a 2% Romney advantage, I have no idea.

If the pollsters are thinking that Republicans and anti-Obama unaffiliated voters are not going to vote in this election, I think they are out of their minds.  What is more, Rasmussen reported that this poll gave Romney a double-digit advantage with voters over 40 years of age and these voters do turn up at the polls.  Obama on the other hand had a double-digit advantage with voters under 40.  That part of his pool under 25 are represented among the unemployed in large numbers.  Many of them cannot afford the high Obama gasoline costs to fuel their overly expensive clunkers (thanks to the Cash for Clunkers Obama program that made old cars scarce) to get to the polling places.  In general, the younger voters do not vote in the same percentages as older voters, so my adjusted results probably understate the extent of the Romney advantage.

In my lifetime, no presidential candidate has won the electoral vote when behind in the popular vote by more than a few tenths of a percent.  Even before the debate, there was considerable evidence that the polls of the swing states were heavily over-sampling Democrats and the reported leads by Obama in many of those states were fallacious.  An evaluation of polls for the states of Florida, Ohio, and Virginia made before the debate indicated that they were highly misleading and that Romney was really ahead in each of them.  I think Romney is going to win the election despite the best efforts of most of the media to throw the election to Obama.

I am quite disappointed in Scott Rasmussen and his polls.  I thought he usually did a good job polling, but the evidence here is that he is not doing so now.

Adjustment of Washington Post/ABC Poll for Party Affiliation

The Washington Post/ABC News presidential poll published on 1 October 2012 says that Obama leads Romney among likely voters by 49% to 47% and among registered voters by 49% to 44%.  The poll was based on 1002 respondents between 26 and 29 September.  But the respondents broke down as follows:

Democrats 33%
Republicans 28%
Independents 34%
Other 4%
Don't Know 1%

Because only about 9% of the people asked to respond to a poll will do so and because there were 58 questions in this poll, it is very likely that those willing to respond are not necessarily a good representative sample of those who will vote.  For instance, what fraction of small business owners, struggling very hard these last four years to keep their businesses going in the Obama economy, will take the time to answer these questions?  Yet, this group of people is heavily Republican.  In general, one also can imagine that the sample of people willing to take this time on the phone may be more heavily weighted toward the unemployed than the employed.

So, we need to find a source of how many people are Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Others.  Rasmussen Reports has such data here.  They do not have their September numbers up yet, so I will use the August numbers as I did in my prior adjustment of Washington Post/ABC News presidential poll results from 11 September.  The Rasmussen party affiliation numbers are:

Democrats 33.3%
Republicans 37.6%
Other 29.2%, of whom I expect 25.2% are Independents and 4% are Libertarians, Greens, Constitutional Party, Social Workers Party and other micro-parties

We can use the registered voter results of the WaPo/ABC poll to see what percentage of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents will vote for either Obama or Romney and apply the Rasmussen party affiliation weightings to adjust for the proper sampling of voters by party.  According to this poll,

Democrats: 89% for Obama, 7% for Romney
Republicans: 7% for Obama, 87% for Romney
Independents: 47% for Obama, 47% for Romney

With the Rasmussen party weightings among registered voter respondents:

Votes for Obama = (0.89)(33.3%) + (0.07)(37.6%) + (0.47)(25.2%) = 44.1%

Votes for Romney = (0.07)(33.3%) + (0.87)(37.6%) + (0.47)(25.2%) = 46.9%

The Washington Post 49% to 44% advantage to Obama becomes a 47% to 44% advantage for Romney among registered voters.  If we use the WaPo/ABC poll adjustments for likely voters we get:

Votes for Obama = (0.91)(33.3%) + (0.06)(37.6%) + (0.45)(25.2%) = 43.9%

Votes for Romney = (0.07)(33.3%) + (0.90)(37.6%) + (0.49)(25.2%) = 48.5%

The recalculated likely voter advantage for Romney is 4.6% compared to his recalculated registered voter advantage of 2.8%.  The WaPo/ABC advantage of likely voters was given as a 2% Obama advantage by them.

Of course this change in the advantage hinges upon the Republicans having a registration advantage over Democrats. There have been a few people who have checked on this in some of the states that will report how many people are registered as Democrats, Republicans, and Other or Independents.  The general story seems to be that Democrat registrations are way down and registrations as Independents are way up compared to 2008.  Republican registrations are more constant, but generally up a bit.  Here is one such report by John Hinderaker at Powerline on registrations in Ohio.

We should also be aware that there are many more Republican governors, Senators, Representatives, and state legislators now than there were in 2008, so it is very probable that there has been a trend away from Democrat to Republican party affiliation since then.  Even in this election, Real Clear Politics has the Republicans in the House with 226 seats leaning to them, the Democrats with 183 seats leaning to them, and only 26 toss-up seats of which more than half are now Republican.  If the Republicans win in half of the toss-up seats, they will still have a substantial House majority.  Such a majority would be unlikely if the Democrats had the 5% registered voter edge implied by this WaPo/ABC poll with their sample of registered voters.  That cannot be the case.

It should also be noted that this is an unusual poll result in that it implies that among Independent registered voters the split for Obama/Romney is 50-50, or more precisely 47-47.  Almost every other poll has shown Romney to be winning among Independents.  It will be interesting to see if future WaPo/ABC polls continue to show a trend toward equality of Obama and Romney among Independents.  Personally, given the continued dire state of the Obama-mismanaged and abused economy and Obama's failure to provide adequate security in our embassies and consulates as the Mideast sinks into chaos, I expect Romney to improve his advantage among Independents.

The Democrats are claiming that Romney was greatly hurt by his fundraiser comments that he could not expect many of the votes of the 47% not paying income tax and of those highly dependent upon government welfare programs.  No doubt he was hurt, but one of the questions in this WaPo/ABC survey was whether people thought too many people were dependent upon the government and they answered heavily in favor that yes, too many were dependent.  This poll also noted that more people believed the economy would recover with Romney as President, despite the skewed sample.  That has to be a most important Romney advantage.

Economic Freedom and the Presidential Election

The Pacific Research Institute in association with Forbes produced the U.S. Economic Freedom Index, 2008 Report by Lawrence J. McQuillan, Michael T. Maloney, Eric Daniels, and Brent M. Eastwood and I have been intending to discuss it for some time. Then I thought that it might be interesting to correlate it with the results of the presidential election, which can now be done.

The report says, "Economic freedom is the right of individuals to pursue their interests through voluntary exchange of private property under a rule of law. This freedom forms the foundation of market economies. Subject to a minimal level of government to provide safety and a stable legal foundation, legislative or judicial acts that inhibit this right reduce economic freedom."

They set up 35 indices including such factors as tax rates, state spending, occupational licensing, environmental regulations, income redistribution, right-to-work and prevailing-wage laws, tort reform, and many others. They then assumed that people want to be free, so they search out locations, governments, and situations where freedom reigns. So they made migration their metric for deciding which index among the 35 they had set up as possible good indicators of economic freedom they would use to rank the states for economic freedom.

The formula for the Index is: Index = (0.2313 x Fiscal Score) + (0.2159 x Regulatory Score) + (0.1894 x Judicial Score) + (0.1208 x Government Score) + (0.2426 x Welfare-Spending Score)

The net migration score for the 20 freest states was 27.36 people per thousand. For the 20 most economically oppressed states the net migration score was 1.17 per thousand. For every one place improvement in state rank, a state's net migration per 1,000 people typically increased about one person.

The results of this economic freedom study are given below with the presidential popular vote result for each state, as State, Economic Freedom Score, 2008 Rank, 2004 Rank, 1999 Rank, McCain Vote %, Obama Vote %.

South Dakota, 14.54, 1, 15, 5, 53%, 45%
Idaho, 14.81, 2, 4, 1, 61%, 36%
Colorado, 14.91, 2, 14, 45%, 53%
Utah, 15.16, 4, 5, 3, 63%, 34%
Wyoming, 15.39, 5, 9, 4, 65%, 33%
Nevada, 15.70, 6, 12, 20, 43%, 55%
Oklahoma, 16.74, 7, 6, 18, 66%, 34%
New Hampshire, 17.07, 8, 7, 6, 45%, 55%
Virginia, 17.07, 9, 3, 2, 47%, 52%
Kansas, 18.06, 10, 1, 10, 57%, 41%
Georgia, 18.22, 11, 19, 12, 53%, 46%
North Dakota, 18.56, 12, 18, 21, 53%, 45%
Montana, 18.56, 13, 21, 26, 50%, 47%
Arkansas, 18.82, 14, 23, 15, 59%, 39%
Missouri, 18.90, 15, 10, 13, 50%, 49%
Alabama, 19.03, 16, 25, 11, 61%, 39%
South Carolina, 19.08, 17, 13, 16, 54%, 45%
Wisconsin, 19.15, 18, 38, 37, 43%, 56%
Mississippi, 19.28, 19, 28, 9, 57%, 43%
Delaware, 19.61, 20, 8, 7, 37%, 62%
Arizona, 19.78, 21, 11, 25, 54%, 45%
Iowa, 19.88, 22, 16, 24, 45%, 54%
Indiana, 19.92, 23, 14, 22, 49%, 50%
Hawaii, 19.92, 24, 35, 39, 27%, 72%
Nebraska, 19.93, 25, 20, 23, 57%, 41%
Minnesota, 20.92, 26, 44, 43, 44%, 54%
Illinois, 21.16, 27, 46, 36, 37%, 62%
Florida, 21.16, 28, 22, 30, 49%, 51%
Tennessee, 21.18, 29, 26, 19, 57%, 42%
Oregon, 21.24, 30, 29, 41, 42%, 56%
Texas, 21.32, 31, 17, 8, 55%, 44%
Lousiana, 21.36, 32, 40, 31, 59%, 40%
Massachussetts, 21.72, 33, 41, 47, 36%, 62%
Maryland, 21.73, 34, 27, 35, 38%, 61%
Maine, 21.81, 35, 30, 42, 41%, 58%
North Carolina, 21.87, 36, 24, 17, 49%, 50%
Washington, 21.92, 37, 31, 40, 41%, 58%
West Virginia, 22.55, 38, 32, 32, 56%, 43%
Connecticut, 22.66, 39, 48, 46, 39%, 60%
Kentucky, 22.71, 40, 39, 29, 58%, 41%
New Mexico, 22.82, 41, 37, 28, 42%, 57%
Vermont, 22.87, 42, 36, 34, 32%, 67%
Michigan, 23.08, 43, 34, 27, 41%, 57%
Ohio, 23.34, 44, 43, 33, 47%, 51%
Alaska, 23.38, 45, 33, 38, 62%, 36%
Pennsylvania, 23.88, 46, 45, 45, 44%, 55%
California, 23.89, 47, 49, 44, 37%, 61%
New Jersey, 23.94, 48, 42, 48, 42%, 57%
Rhode Island, 24.18, 49, 47, 49, 35%, 63%
New York, 27.39, 50, 50, 50, 37%, 62%

Of the top 25 freest states by economic freedom ranking, McCain won 16 of the states. In the most oppressed 25 states, he won only 6 states. The voters who consistently pursue restrictions upon our individual economic freedoms, were fairly consistent in choosing the socialist Obama. Of the six states that gave McCain 61% or more of the vote, five were ranked in the top 16 by economic freedom index and four were ranked in the top 7 by economic freedom. The other state was Alaska, whose people think of themselves as being self-reliant and independent, but who are massively on welfare. It will be interesting to see if those states voting for Obama tumble in future economic freedom rankings.

The states of Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, New Hampshire, and Virginia have consistently had top ten rankings in all of the three evaluations in 1999, 2004, and 2008. Until this election, all of these states had voted Republican in the last several presidential elections. Now that New Hampshire and Virginia have defected to the socialist candidate, I expect to see them fall out of the top 10. Indeed, they are barely hanging in there now, both having lost position steadily since 1999. There are other states whose economic freedom ranking has steadily fallen also: Ohio, Michigan, Vermont, New Mexico, Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and Delaware, where I have ordered them from most oppressive to least oppressive. Of the 11 falling states, 8 are already ranked 29 or worse.

There are a few steadily improving states as well. These are Nevada, North Dakota, Montana, and Hawaii. Then there is one state which has been remarkably consistent: New York. It has ranked dead last as the most oppressive state of all in each of the last three evaluations. Most of us will realize that this means it is ranked #50, but for Mr. Obama's sake, I will point out that the last rank is not 57. 57 is the number of Heinz varities, Mr. Obama.

South Dakota at number 1 has no corporate income tax, no personal income tax, no personal property tax, no business inventory tax, and no inheritance tax. Companies are moving into the state. In 2007, the Small Business Survival Foundation ranked South Dakota the best business climate for entrepreneurs. Forbes magazine says Sioux Falls is the best smaller metro area for business and careers. The Milken Institute says it has a low cost of doing business.

The freest states are in the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain states, while the most oppressed are in the Northeast. South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois have all made major improvements in economic freedom in the Upper Midwest. But, Indiana has fallen somewhat and Michigan and Ohio are both very bad and falling. The fact that Indiana and Ohio have fallen may say a lot about why they voted for Obama and these states may be hard for the Republicans to win in the future given their poor attitude toward economic freedom.

The states with the biggest drops were Texas, Alaska, Delaware, North Carolina, and Arizona. Again, these rapid drops may be a harbinger of future defections to the socialist Democrats of Texas and Arizona and the continued loss of North Carolina.

Among those states having values which have given rise to more economic freedom, the Republicans should find states it will be particularly beneficial to try to swing into the Republican column before the next election. Among these states are Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, Virginia, Wisconsin, Delaware, Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota, Illinois, and Florida. OK, maybe Illinois will have to wait until they do not have a socialist Native Son in the presidency. A determined and consistent effort in these states might well provide a big payoff in the next election or two. Meanwhile, the Republicans should make a strong effort to improve the economic liberty of Texas and Arizona, so they will not lose them in the future. They should do the same in North Carolina in an effort to recover it.