How Much Misery Will We Endure Before Scrapping the Electoral College?
In the year 2000, George W. Bush, despite having lost the popular vote, won the Electoral College and the presidency in an exceptionally tense and drawn-out battle, ended only by the U.S. Supreme Court 5–4 decision, Bush v Gore. Four years later, John Kerry lost the presidential election to George W. Bush. The Electoral College split was 286 for Bush, 251 for Kerry. Had John Kerry won Ohio, however, he would have received 20 additional Electoral College votes and Bush would have lost 20. Kerry would, in that hypothetical, have won the Electoral College, 271 to 266. Bush would have won the popular vote by about 3 million, while still losing the presidential election, about the same margin by which Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in her Electoral College loss in 2016.
Had Kerry won Ohio and the presidency in 2004 Republicans too would have experienced the frustration of watching their candidate win a popular vote, only to be deprived of the presidency by the Electoral College. It might have been possible at that point to move more decisively towards replacing the profoundly undemocratic Electoral College with direct election of the president.
In the current system, we are enduring an ever greater likelihood of having presidents who win the office while losing the popular vote. We already have a Senate that grossly over-represents rural interests. We also have a House of Representatives that further erodes urban and popular interests through intense and frequent partisan gerrymandering.
In 1968, a higher proportion of Republicans (66%) than Democrats (64%) favored amending the constitution to replace the Electoral College with direct election of the president. When Obama won reelection in 2012, in a surprisingly large Electoral College victory, over 50% of Republicans favored amending the constitution to replace the Electoral College with direct election of the president. After Donald Trump won the presidency, while losing by nearly 3 million votes in the popular vote, however, Republican support for getting rid of the Electoral College dropped to 19%!
The Electoral College, as most of us know, for either of the major parties, makes the general election all about winning the relatively few states that are plausibly competitive. The millions of Democrats in Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, or Ohio will find their votes are wasted if, as is likely, their states’ electoral votes all go to the winning Republican. The same is likely to happen to the millions of Republican votes in Democratic strongholds like California, Washington, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts.
Although much is made of how tight the grip of the Democratic Party is in California, the fact is that there were nearly as many California Republicans voting for Romney in 2012 as voted for him in Texas. Romney garnered 4.5 million meaningless votes in California, where he received not a single electoral vote, while winning all the electoral votes in Texas with 4.7 million voters. In 2016, the Trump vote in California was 4.5 million, the third most numerous in the nation, slightly below Texas (4.7 million) and Florida (4.6 million). In a national election, with direct voting for the president, candidates would campaign and seek votes wherever there are votes to be had.
A Republican would obviously spend a lot of time in California, Washington, and Oregon, where there are millions of Republican votes, even while those states are “Democratic.” A Democratic candidate would be aggressive in Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio, even if those states are Republican or lean that way, because despite the Republican dominance in those states, they also have millions of Democratic voters.
Moving to direct election of the president expands the terrain over which candidates campaign, and voters from a greater variety of states would see more electioneering and campaigning in their states. Interest in the presidential election will increase among voters in states that previously would have been considered “lost causes.”
The Electoral College, along with a number of other institutional pathologies, like extreme partisan gerrymandering, also dramatically under-represents urban interests. Direct election of the president permits urban places across the nation, even in states dominated by rural interests, to play a greater role in presidential elections. Consider that Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, New Orleans, Miami, Salt Lake City, Boise, Phoenix, St. Louis, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, and many other cities and urban centers have more in common with one another than they do with the less urban and rural parts of their respective states.
Most of the U.S. GDP is generated by about 260 of the nation’s larger cities. Based on 2015 data, just the 20 largest metro areas of the U.S. contribute 52 percent of the nation’s GDP. Yet their economic heft and their many needs are muted by the Electoral College. Addressing challenges related to the nation’s aging physical infrastructure, social integration of diverse populations, climate change, and education and workforce development are too often deferred, if not under-resourced or ignored. The neglect stems in no small part because of the perverse incentives that the Electoral College creates.
The current system assumes that state governments in the twenty-first century have the same status in the world of globalized supply chains and commerce, world-wide ecological change, and international population migrations, as they did in the late eighteenth century.
No doubt crafting support for ratifying the federal constitution was in the late 1780s an enormous challenge. The Electoral College, together with other constitutional features, might have been necessary to get the constitution approved. But the cost of that bargain, especially as it relates to the Electoral College, is today choking off the development of a national vision. A president who is beholden to constituents who vote directly for the office is more likely to have a broader sense of the nation than one crabbed by a relatively few “key” states that she or he has to win in today’s Electoral College system.
The issues facing Americans today, perhaps dramatized by the terrifying, current public health crisis, extend far beyond state boundaries. As I’ve argued before, the Electoral College, combined with having the presidency held by a deeply flawed person, militates against effective national action in the current health scourge.
There are proposals to work around the requirement to amend the constitution. For example there is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, with states committing their electoral votes to the candidate with the most votes nationwide. It is, however, by definition, only a temporary or politically unstable patch, even if enough states sign on.
Yes, the problems we face might finally be dire enough, damaging enough, scary enough, with enough immediacy to push away enough of our parochialism, thereby possibly making way for some needed institutional change. It is tragic, though, that so much misery and even death is required to produce a modest increase in the chances for positive change. And, yet, even with all that, the odds still seem long. How much misery will it take to abolish the Electoral College?
