Why Dems Need Not Fear Much From GOP's Electoral College Reform

Because, in the end, it will hurt them just as much as it helps:

What’s going to stop these changes to the electoral system is not law, but politics. Republicans have a lot to lose by going down this road, which is why Florida’s legislative leaders have already balked at it. It’s also why you don’t see Republican legislatures simply reallocating Electoral College votes to themselves.

...The Obama and Romney campaigns would have campaigned very differently in these states if they were under a district system, targeting not voters across the state, but voters in the key districts needed to win the election. Yes, Republican gerrymandering of districts would have given the GOP some advantage, but it is far from clear it would have been enough to defeat the Obama campaign machine.

Think about it: The last thing Republican legislators want is national Democratic campaigns scrounging for every vote in conservative-leaning districts. Fewer Republicans will win legislative and Congressional seats because Republican districts will become more competitive by design. Why would Republican legislators vote for a plan that will make it harder for them to keep their jobs?

Further, adopting such a system immediately turns a battleground state into a less important state. If all that’s up for grabs in Ohio are the three or four marginal Electoral College votes, then the presidential campaigns pay less attention to Ohio, and Ohio gets fewer promises and benefits from presidential candidates coming through. Such a plan is not good for those states that cherish being crucial to presidential election outcomes—states like Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

In addition, the districting plan adopted in most of the swing states is a kind of unilateral disarmament. It is a sign of defeatism, an admission that the Republican Party no longer expects to win presidential elections in the state. Giving up on capturing a state’s full complement of Electoral College votes will make it harder in close elections for Republican presidential candidates to put together the number of votes they need to win the election. Do Republicans really want to give up on Virginia and Wisconsin? It might make sense on these grounds for Republicans to adopt this plan in Pennsylvania, but all of the other states are just too competitive to take this risk.

And finally, there is the risk of backlash, and this is where the Democratic freak-out comes into play. Republicans seem to have overplayed their hands in the 2012 election, adopting controversial voter identification, voter registration, and early voting rules intended to make it harder for Democrats to vote. To some extent these efforts in the voting wars backfired, subjecting Republicans to public criticism and some judicial reversals, and inspiring increased Democratic turnout to the polls. If Republicans proceed with these plans, any “rigging” or “gaming” of the Electoral College rules will be played up the same way by Democrats: Republicans can’t win fair and square, so they have to manipulate the rules.