To those who reckon the next presidential election has already been lost by the Republicans, we commend the latest number of the New Yorker, where Hendrik Hertzberg has, in the Talk of the Town, a piece in respect of the ballot initiative working its way under the radar in California. In “Votescam,” Mr. Hertzberg reports that the initiative was filed by “one of the most important Republican lawyers in Sacremento” with the idea of ending “the practice of granting all fifty-five of California’s electoral votes to the statewide winner,” a move the sage of Conde Nast reckons would “spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes.”

We were startled by this, for we’ve been in a glancing conversation of some years now with Mr. Hertzberg over the question of proportional representation. It is the idea that the outcome of an election should be a legislature that roughly reflects the popular vote — i.e., if a labor party were to deliver a third of the vote, it ought to get a third of the seats. Mr. Hertzberg has been one of the most impassioned and eloquent advocates of this idea, as has a professor of law at Harvard, Lani Guinier. This is a camp that has been fighting for years a principled campaign against the winner-take-all concept of our presidential system.

Suddenly Mr. Hertzberg is veering into the anti-proportional camp in a big state where such a system might, at least this year, help the Republicans. In another piece, “Pileup,” issued in April, Mr. Hertzberg complained about the changes being made to what he reckoned could be considered “the constitution broadly understood.” Quoth he: “A lot of that constitution is outside the Constitution, notably when it comes to elections.” He was set off by moves to change the dates of primaries. He noted that the Framers’ document “makes no mention of parties, primaries, or nominating conventions” and leaves to the states the manner in which they can appoint their electors. We wouldn’t want to sign up for proportional representation only when it helps Republicans, but it would be something were the GOP minority in New York (never mind California) empowered by the divvying up of electors the way people voted.