Let’s squarely face an ugly possibility: President Trump could get elected a second time without winning the popular vote. Indeed, according to most experts, that’s the only way he could be re-elected.
This would surely prompt another chorus of calls to scrap the Electoral College. I think that would be a mistake.
I say that even as I acknowledge that Trump has undermined the Electoral College’s legitimacy—not because he owes his election to it, but because of how he has behaved since taking office.
One of the Electoral College’s purposes is to broaden the president’s mandate and agenda by forcing candidates to appeal to different parts of the country and not just rack up votes in one region or a handful of states. But previous presidents who didn’t win the popular vote made a point of reaching out, once in office, beyond the coalition that elected them and at least pretending to lead the whole country.
Trump went a different way, effectively putting his thumb in the eye of the majority that didn’t vote for him.
But that’s not an argument for getting rid of the Electoral College, nor does it address the reasons people are mistakenly focusing on it.
The first problem with its elimination is purely pragmatic. Electing presidents via popular vote would be a logistical disaster, rendering every recount a national recount. Moreover, eliminating the Electoral College would require a wholesale revision of the Constitution. That process would almost surely fail, and it would certainly be ugly.
Reasonable reformers understand this, which is why they propose a national compact by which states agree to direct their electors to vote in accordance with the national popular vote.
That would be better than outright repeal, partly because if the compact backfired, it could be easily reversed. But popular elections would still raise problems. Candidates would be incentivized to rack up huge majorities among their bases. An outright majority of votes could be gained simply with populist appeals to a handful of large, highly urbanized states. If you’re a pure-democracy fetishist, that may sound fine. But how would it lessen polarization?
Indeed, I think polarization, not love of democracy, is what’s driving antipathy for the Electoral College. Prior to 2016, there was a period when Democrats boasted of their “Blue Wall,” which gave them an Electoral College advantage. But once Trump crashed through the wall, many of the same people suddenly declared the Electoral College to be a white supremacist vestige of slavery. (It isn’t.)
For complicated reasons all fueled by polarization, voters, parties and politicians increasingly act as if we live in a parliamentary democracy, casting ballots for a party more than a candidate. Presidential contenders encourage this by insinuating, or stating outright, that winning an election is all that’s required to implement their agenda.
Partisan legislators—and they are nearly all partisans now—vote in near lockstep with their president when they’re of the same party and in lockstep opposition when they’re not.
Our constitutional system wasn’t designed for this dysfunction. The federal system of checks and balances was intended to foster stability and compromise while protecting the rights of political minorities and, crucially, individual liberty. If you really think government should be answerable only to the immediate desires of 50 percent plus one of voters, why have a Bill of Rights?
Such considerations are swept away when voters, parties, and political institutions have neither the interest nor the capacity to honor them.
The growing anger at the Electoral College comes from the desire—and expectation—that all your political desires should be fulfilled without constraints simply by voting.
But even parliamentary democracies don’t work this way. Despite all the rhetoric about the Electoral College being anachronistic, very few advanced democracies—and none in Western Europe—elect national leaders without some mediating process designed to filter out demagogues or the unfit. Such mechanisms are arguably more important in our system because we combine the head of state and the head of government in one person. From this perspective, one could argue the Electoral College isn’t too strong, but too weak.
Regardless, the Electoral College, like states themselves, is part of a system intended not so much to constrain democracy, but to channel it productively. Removing it—a major step toward nullifying states themselves—would further centralize government and fuel the disordered politics driving the foolish effort to abandon the Electoral College in the first place.
Photograph by Mark Makela/Getty Images.
I tend to find how people feel about the EC depends on where they call home.
I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and I viewed the EC as a divinely inspired system, essential to a functioning Republic. I defended the system for years when I moved to SF and then NYC to my peers who thought less highly of the system.
I don't currently have a "magic bullet" answer on the best way to run national elections. But I can tell you that something feels *extremely* off about the fact that my vote matters A LOT less as a NYC voter than it did as a Pennsylvania voter.
I also have a lot of sympathy for people in cities who feel like the system completely ignores them. In cities, you have a lot more exposure to European immigrants or visitors who are completely baffled by America's lackluster public transit system (non-connected systems, rather) and embarrassment of a healthcare system. There's a sense of "I can't have an affordable health care system because voters in Montana and Michigan and Ohio have a vote that is valued more than mine?" - it doesn't feel like the system is working for you.
I also reject this notion that in the long term a national vote would only favor Democratic politicians. There's this idea that urban centers can only vote on one party. If you think voters in Manhattan aren't open to market based solutions around climate change or making the subway system solvent, then you haven't spent enough time in Midtown or the Financial District. But Republicans have currently embraced so many positions that are unthinkable to people who live in a diverse, cosmopolitan community that they currently can't compete.
Political parties need to adapt to survive. Seismic political shift has been studied by political scientists for decades. Right-wing media loves to talk about how Black populations have been underserved by Democratic administration. But Republicans have either offered non-existent, bad, or offensive solutions to racial injustices for the last several decades - the GOP has completely removed itself from being a viable contender in the marketplace for ideas on this issue, because they have squandered trust in these communities by focus on dog-whistle politics. See the post-mortem reports from the RNC around 2012 elections - there was a sense that the party needed to embrace a bigger tent and speak to these issues to win on a national stage, but Trump threw out this plan by playing to a base that was disproportionately represented in a handful of swing states.
The Dispatch has a couple of articles about conservative, market based approaches to climate change. I love these thought pieces, and I would further love to see a conservative movement engage in the national discourse on saving the planet. But the modern GOP has no reason to seriously engage in these conversations, because it can play to an electoral strategy where the party does not need to engage in this debate.
TL;DR - Conservative ideas can play on a national stage, and I think the country would be served better if they competed in 'markets' that the modern GOP ignores. The modern GOP, especially with its embrace of Trumpism but with racial and cultural issues that predate Trump, probably cannot compete on a national stage due to the brand they've forged.
Democrats back at hating on the electoral college huh? They have been really unhappy with it since George W. Bush won both his elections.
I’m fine with the Electoral College. Not a big fan of everything being decided with the popular vote, especially when it comes to the head of the executive branch.