Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?

An interesting thing about this proposal is that it would make every state besides CA, TX, OK, and LA pretty much irrelevant for the outcome of the presidential election. E.g. in this election, whichever candidate won CATXOKLA would have enough electoral votes to win the election, even if the other candidate won every swing state.

...which of course would be unfair to the non-CATXOKLA states, but like, not any more unfair than the current system?

To prevent this, there must be a provision that once signed by all 4 states, the compact can't be repealed by any state until after the next election.

It's not obvious that state legislatures have the authority, under their own constitutions, to bind themselves that way. Especially not across their own election cycles.

So why don't the four states sign a compact to assign all their electoral votes in 2028 and future presidential elections to the winner of the aggregate popular vote in those four states? Would this even be legal?

It would be legal to make an agreement like this (states are authorized to appoint electors and direct their votes however they like; see Chiafalo v. Washington) but it's not enforceable in the sense that if one of the states reneges, the outcome of the presidential election won't be reversed.

I want this to be a board game

Merging states would be far superior incentive-wise, as the influence of every signatory would increase and there would be essentially no expected net shift in the election results.

Suppose I am an Okalahoman who will always vote for the farther right candidate or a Californian who will always vote for the farther left candidate. Wouldn't I only support this if my odds on this increasing the chance of the farther right (resp. farther left) candidate winning was at least 50%? Wouldn't most people fall in one of these two categories?

I don't know if this would be good for the country, but it would certainly be good political entertainment.

I think it would be a bad idea to actually do (there are so many problems with it in practice), but it is a bit of an interesting thing to note how being a swing state helps convince everyone to try to cater to you, and not just a little. This would be the swing state to end all swing states, I suppose.

The way to get this done that might actually work is probably to make it an amendment to each state's constitution that can only be repealed for future elections and not the one the constitutional change reverting this would be voted on in. (If necessary, you can always amend how the state constitution is amended to make this doable.)

This proposal increases the influence of the states, in the sense of "how much does it matter that any given person bothered to vote?", but does it increase their preference satisfaction? If the 4 states each conceive of themselves as red or blue states, then each of them will be thinking "under the current system I estimate an X% chance that we'll elect my party's president while under the new system I estimate a Y% chance we'll elect my party's president". If both sides are perfect predictors then one will conclude that Y<X so they should not do the deal. If both sides are imperfect predictors such that they both think Y>X, then the outside view still tells them it's equally likely that they're the sucker here and shouldn't participate.

That would be interesting; on the other hand, why not just merge all the states? I guess it would be a more dramatic change and may be harder to execute and unnecessary in this case.

I wonder if anybody has tried to quantify how much it's worth to be a swing voter. I imagine if you are the government contractor up for renewal then it's worth quite a lot, but I wonder how much of the money/benefits the average Joe sees.

I don't know much about swing state benefits except that Milwaukee, Wisconsin got their lead pipes replaced by the fed and the workers were required to be local and they say they were paid quite well https://youtube.com/watch?v=4VpwgG0P8VU

I feel that the goal here is to reproduce the effects of choosing a president by popular vote without abolishing the electoral college. Wouldn't an electoral reform to abolish the electoral college be a more realistic goal?

Are any of the socio-economic-political-demographic problems of the world actually fixable or improvable in the time before the imminent singularity renders them all moot anyway?  It all feels like bread-and-circuses to me.

The pressing political issues of today are unlikely to even be in the top-10 in a decade.

Many states have already passed something like this, which only takes effect once enough states sign on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

However, I think it's unlikely that this will get over the 270 hump anytime soon, because right now GOP-run states (correctly) perceive that the EC has a pro-GOP tilt (for now at least); and the swing states benefit a lot from swing status.