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While in Washington yesterday, longshot presidential contender Rick Santorum (R-PA) expressed his approval for a scheme by Pennsylvania Republicans to split up the state's electoral votes. Bucking the winner-takes-all tradition (which awarded all of the state's votes to Barack Obama in 2008), the plan proposed by GOP Gov. Tom Corbett is a nakedly partisan attempt to give away as many as a dozen of Pennsylvania's electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate for free.
Slate's Dave Weigel reports that Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, had no qualms about admitting that the idea is a transparently political ploy designed to advantage his party:
"Certainly, from the standpoint of a Republican, it's a winner," Santorum said. "Republicans will come out ahead in Pennsylvania in every election. The way Democrats win, they have two big cities with huge concentrations of voters — and then overwhelm the rest of the state." [...]
"All of a sudden, a Republican can win — and would probably routinely win — all but three or four congressional districts in Pennsylvania," he said. "It would turn it from a state Democrats rely on, as part of the base, to a state that they're gonna lose under almost any scenario."
Weigel observes that Republicans' real problem seems to be that "because the votes of urban Democrats count as much as the votes of suburban Republicans, Democrats are often able to win Pennsylvania by getting more people to choose their candidate." So Republicans have devised a scheme to award some votes to their guy even when most Pennsylvanians don't vote for him! Santorum also seemed to be all in favor of gerrymandering tactics that would pour all urban Democrats into a few seats, thereby allowing Republicans to further maximize their voting power.
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