It's easy to remove the incentive: Just add some statewide delegates that are elected based on the "wasted" votes. That way you get both local representation and overall proportionality.
I never see this discussed in the US context, even though it's done like that all over the world. Apparently people will rather come up with obscure algorithms based on problematic census data.
The only way I could see something like what you suggest happening would be for the Democrats to gerrymander the blue states to even things out, and then a better solution could be agreeable to both sides.
I guess you are right, but isn't that the same deal with the filibuster? Anvf that hasn't stopped people from talking about it.
Can you make this more generic so that people who don't understand the US political system could follow your proposal?
You can think of it as FPTP (per district) and a party-list election at the same time. The FPTP winner in each district gets a guaranteed seat, but the remaining seats are filled (based on the party lists) such that the final proportions in parlament match the party-list election.
In theory, you get the best of both worlds: a direct representative for everyone and parlament according to popular vote.
I live in a country using another method, and in each election a lot of people begs for a change in the aggregation system. Some even say that the U.S. system is the best solution, while you are defending basically our election system.
"Tiered" voting, where we add up local majorities, is known as the tribe system in mathematical social choice theory and can be proven to be the worst possible in terms of making the individual vote matter.
If out of 5000 voters, 4985 voters prefer Alice to anybody else, 10 prefer Bob and only 5 prefer Charlie; Arrow does not mean Bob and Charlie can tell their voters "See, nobody knows who really won". Alice won. Overwhelmingly the voters prefer Alice. Arrow has nothing interesting to tell us about this scenario.
But if only 2400 prefer Alice, 1800 prefer Bob and 800 prefer Charlie, it gets trickier and Arrow starts to appear on the horizon. After all, what if every one of those Charlie supporters hates Alice and would rather have voted for Bob than see Alice win? We can try to improve our system to try to ensure we get this case right, but Arrow proves that we can't ever do a good enough job for every such case.
Especially in the case of US election it's worth remembering that if you only have two candidates, Arrow doesn't actually apply at all. A straight-forward majority works fine if all you wanted to do was decide whether the Red or Blue team wins.
Arrow's Theorem doesn't care about "tactical voting", it's about the Impossibility of what appear to be intuitively reasonable fairness constraints on the outcome. Specifically you cannot have: unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, Pareto efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives
Gibbard–Satterthwaite says if there are at least three candidates, then either one of them can't win, or some of the electorate should offer an insincere preference (ie tactical voting) to best achieve their goal.
They're closely related, if you have proved Arrow then you can get to Gibbard–Satterthwaite from there, but they are not the same exact thing.
Even though this is around 140 times more representative then the USA, and the party distribution is a lot more reflective of the popular vote then in the USA (or the UK for that matter), people are still complaining that it is not good enough. There is a huge popular support for uniting the constituencies into just a single national constituency. E.g. people don’t see the point in having the local representatives on the national assembly. And I agree with it.
That said, if the people in the USA disagree with this (or think it is not applicable in the USA) and demand a local representative. The 700,000 residents per representative is kind of ridiculous. It is so low that it begs some questions about what we consider a true democracy. Even China (a country most people don’t consider democratic) has around 500,000 residents per representative in their national assembly (40% more representative then the USA).
See, e.g., Scottish National Party having 35 seats with 3% of the vote vs. Lib Dems having 12 seats with 7%.
I live near to the Island, and so this comes up here very often. The Island currently has one Member [of parliament], but its population is far too large for only one district, yet too small to just become two districts. So the obvious reform, considering the practical links between the Island and its relatively rural coastal neighbours, is to redistrict so as to create two districts which each contain half the island plus a chunk of rural Hampshire.
However, a considerable number of people would prefer to be grossly under-represented (all the people on the entire Island get just one Member) rather than risk either or both of their two Members being less interested in the Island because they also represent some coast dwellers on the mainland.