I want to see the NPVIC get passed to make the electoral college obsolete and make the popular vote matter. It's getting close to 200 votes worth and just needs to get to 270. Yes, they have been mostly democratic states to this point, but there are conservative states that are supposedly starting to consider it more seriously.
Campaign finance is definitely a big issue.
Term limits have already shown to be counterproductive for reasons explained above.
What is the problem that the NPVIC is supposed to solve? That Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton?
Citing previous elections where the Electoral College vote went one way and the popular vote went the other way doesn't prove anything. The campaign was to gain electoral votes. Had it been to gain popular votes, it might have gone differently. We don't know that Samuel Tilden would have been a better president than Rutherford B. Hayes, or that Al Gore would have been a better president than George W. Bush, or that Hillary Clinton would have done any better than Donald Trump.
And what will be the unintended consequences of changing the presidential election to a mass popular vote? Many, many unintended consequences. And some malignant changes that might well be intended. Don't mess with the constitutional order unless you've got a good idea of what it was intended to accomplish and whether your "fix" is going to make things better or worse.
I hate the situation with crooked/bought-off/overly-concerned-about-their-re-election politicians as much as anyone, but I have yet to see a campaign-finance-reform proposal that is not a restriction on political speech and freedom of the press. And political speech is what the First Amendment's protection of speech is all about. And freedom of the press is not limited to newspapers and magazines. It's also for Joe Six-Pack and his printer/photocopier.
We've only seen the one case cited in the argument against term limits. I would not say that that means that the case is closed.
Finally, I think there's a good case to be made for stronger parties. When parties are stronger, we know who to blame for the mess. A stronger GOP would have been able to keep Donald Trump from joining it and taking it over. When parties are too weak to enforce party discipline, it sets up a situation where the politicians are lone operators, selling out to the highest bidder.
I'm not defending the stench emanating from Washington, DC. But we need to make sure that fixes don't make the situation worse.
I'll offer an example of fixes that made the existing situation worse. Everyone can cite the 18th Amendment as a bad idea that had the major achievement of enriching organized crime figures like Al Capone (and other non-organized criminals like Joseph P. Kennedy). But I think that the 17th Amendment was even worse. It was supposed to "clean up" the Senate by making Senators elected directly by the people. (I'll insert here that few of us have had much to say good about "the people" on this thread.) What it accomplished was to inflict much damage on the system of checks and balances. Not just the federal government's system, where the Senate and the House are supposed to check and balance each other, but whole federal system where the states were supposed to play a role in checking the federal government. Now Senators are like Representatives with bigger districts and longer terms, essentially beholden to the same interests as those Reps are. And the state governments, which used to elect the Senators to represent the states' interests, now have no direct way of influencing federal policy-making.
