Can Democrats Win Without Scrapping the Electoral College?

According to Time Magazine, Howard Dean has some thoughts on the Electoral College:

In an interview, Democratic Party boss Howard Dean calls for the end of the electoral college: "It’s unrepresentative of where the American people are. It was fine for the days of the Pony Express, but it’s not necessary to avoid a popular vote on Presidents now.”

Why would Dean want to make such a change. A writer at the Huffington Post gives a possible scenerio for November:

Barack Obama will win California and New York and all the blue coastal states by huge margins - he will be millions of votes ahead on the basis of New York, California, Illinois and Massachusetts alone. Barack could be as much as 5,000,000 votes ahead out of those four states and what will prevent it from being even larger is minimum focus on those states by the nominee in the fall. But remember, you win by one, you win by a million, you still are limited in your electoral college votes.

He will win these states by margins that may well give him a popular vote victory. He also will get more votes in states where Kerry was non-existent, like Alabama, but he won't win those states, or their Electoral College votes.

So if Obama wins the popular vote by five or ten million votes, he wins the White House right? Well, no. Because he hasn't picked up the needed 18 Electoral College votes.

Jim Geraghty has some thoughts:

(First reaction: Hey, guys, fix your own nominating rules so that you count all 50 states before you start mucking around with the Constitution.)

I wonder if we're witnessing a new Democratic strategy for well beyond the 2008 election — scrap the electoral college (a challenge, obviously) and nominate a candidate who can "run up" the vote totals in the areas Democrats already run well — big cities and university towns.

Here are a couple of things that are worth looking at. First of all, the 2000 and 2004 electoral maps. Do we really want the presidency decided by a handful of heavily populated (and heavily Democrat) counties?

Secondly, I offered my own suggestion of how to revise the electoral college, and I think it makes more sense than scrapping the whole thing. You can read it here.