I beg permission to rant (once again) against the Electoral College: to explain at least one of the reasons Republicans love it so much; to mention (again) an elegant fix for its problems that aren’t making much progress; and to suggest one (antidemocratic) reason why Republicans may oppose it.
Let’s get the partisan punchline out of the way. Five men have “won” presidential elections while losing the popular vote. None of them were Democrats. Four of them were Republicans. (The other one was a Whig, the no longer-existent party that sort of turned into the Republican Party in the mid-19th century).
Two of the Republican loser-winners were quite recent. One of those was Donald Trump, who we will get back to in a bit.
You can call complaining about this stuff partisan sour grapes if you feel the need to dismiss it, but I don’t think it would be honest. You can also argue that the Electoral College as currently constituted has a bias in favor of Republicans (I think it rather obviously does). What I don’t think you can do is make a fair, rational or intellectually honest case that it is a net-positive feature of our system that enables the popular-vote loser to triumph in the presidential election, which, as I mentioned, has happened five times, twice recently.
Background: The United States, which is often viewed as a democracy, is not really one. It is a republic, and could be called a “democratic republic,” because it relies on elections. It wasn’t so reliant on them in the early years of American “democracy,” when U.S. House members were the only federal officials subject to popular vote (and even then, only propertied white males could vote in most places).
To summarize the biggest undemocratic elements of America’s first century: Voting in many states was limited to propertied white males; U.S. senators were elected by state legislatures, not the voting public; presidents were (and still are) elected indirectly by the Electoral College (although the earliest electors were not quite such party animals are they are now); and justices of the Supreme Court are (and have always) been appointed to life terms but nonetheless have the power to overrule the elected branches on what legislation is permissible.
Put those together and you can see why I say the United States hasn’t really been a democracy for much of its history. And unelected officials (starting with Supreme Court justices) still hold enormous power. But the power of unelected officials has a deep history in our poor, dear nation, specifically in the U.S. Senate.
For the first century and a half of constitutional history (which is the majority of our history), Senators were “elected” not directly by voters but indirectly by state legislatures. That was changed by a constitutional amendment in the early 20th Century. Since that change, every feature of the U.S. federal system (other than Supreme justices) is at least subject to some input from the electorate, but perhaps not as much as you think.
As you well know, the presidency, while subject to a state-by-state choice of “electors,” preserves the possibility of being “won” by the loser of the national popular vote thanks to the quirks of the Electoral College. I won’t go into those quirks. You know most of them.
The first popular-vote loser to win the presidency was John Quincy Adams in 1824, whose party affiliation changed often during his career, when the whole party situation was much more fluid. But when JQA “won” the presidency (he finished second, by solid margins, in both the popular and electoral vote to Andrew Jackson), Adams identified with a party called the Democratic-Republicans. He later became a Whig.
His opponent, war hero Jackson, also identified as a “Democratic-Republican,” although he and his large following morphed into the Democratic Party soon after as the new two-party system came into being. (The modern Democratic Party once acknowledged its two founders by calling its annual banquet the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, though many state parties — including Minnesota’s DFL party — have changed the name in recent years.)
Anyway, in that 1824 election, Jackson finished a solid first in both popular and electoral votes. But no one had an electoral vote majority as required by the Constitution. That threw the election into the House.
Quincy Adams made a deal (known to history as the “corrupt bargain”) to get the support of third-place finisher Henry Clay by promising to make Clay secretary of state, an office which, until then, had been the stepping-stone to the presidency. It worked, and although it was legal, it was a scandal even then.
The other four cases of loser-winners were simpler. Instead of getting the most votes nationwide, the Republican candidate “won” by getting the most votes in the right states, especially swing states. The most conspicuous example of this was the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million votes. That was, by far, the biggest popular vote-winning margin for any candidate who lost in the Electoral College.
There may be valid principled arguments in favor of preserving the Electoral College system, although I don’t agree with any of them. But when Republicans make any such arguments, they are not principled arguments; they are partisan arguments that go against one of the most fundamental elements of democratic elections: The candidate who gets the most votes is supposed to win.
As you know, the Electoral College system is embedded in the Constitution. And every state has electoral votes equal to its U.S. House delegation, plus two more electoral votes representing the two Senate seats. This makes the Electoral College even more undemocratic because it inflates the leverage of the small states. For example, at present, the most populous state, California, has more than 60 times the population of the least populous, Wyoming. But because of the two bonus electoral votes that do not reflect population, California’s Electoral College vote is only 18 times as large as Wyoming, thus disproportionately advantaging the Cowboy State.
Presumably, the framers of the Constitution thought this undemocratic overrepresentation of the small states was necessary to get the small states to ratify the new document and allay their fears of being overwhelmed by the bigs. But now, two and a half centuries later, it just means that Wyoming has about three times the power over the election of presidents as it would deserve based on population, and the big population states have less leverage than they deserve on a per capita basis. I can think of no real justification for this that’s consistent with the principle of one-person, one-vote.
Amending the Constitution to address that anti-democratic feature or to do (almost) anything else to change the Electoral College system would require an enormous and durable consensus involving two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states. In other words, just thirteen states can block an amendment. Republicans control well more than that, so fixing the Electoral College problem by constitutional amendment is not a promising path.
So what about that “elegant fix” I mentioned? It’s been around for several years and I’ve written about it before: It’s called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It’s basically a workaround of the amendment process.
By signing this compact into state law, a state pledges to deliver its electoral votes to whichever ticket wins the most popular votes nationwide. But because of Republican opposition, it has little chance in red states. So far, 15 (all solid Democratic) states plus the (solid Democratic) District of Columbia have legislatively signed onto the interstate compact. In Minnesota, the proposal has passed in previous sessions of the state House, but not the state Senate. Versions of it were introduced in both houses of the Legislature in 2021, but it appears not to have advanced. No new states have signed on for three years.
It’s a lovely idea and I hope it eventually works, or, even better, that the whole country gets sick of the many ways the Electoral College system distorts presidential elections before pigs fly. Me, I’m sick to death of the way “swing state” logic dominates presidential elections. With NPV, every vote in the country would count equally, rather than only swing votes in swing states, and America would be guaranteed a president who actually got more votes than his opponent. Quaint, eh?
What I would like to know is what would have happened if Donald Trump had been able to overturn the election in the electoral college. Would the country have accepted that result? What would it mean if the country didn’t accept the result.
In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s name was not on the ballot anywhere in the south. Despite that he did win the popular vote, and did win a majority of the votes in the electoral college. Even so, his election set off a series of events which quickly resulted in secession and the Civil War. What would happen if a president tried to assume, or in Mr. Trump’s case, continue in office despite losing both the popular vote and the electoral college?
Works for me, but I grew up in a country where minority rule – if flagrant enough – was thought to be a bad thing. Not so, today’s Republicans.
The appalling electoral college is a blight upon the Constitution, and is indeed the principal reason that the Constitution (and country) are failing in the disastrous 21st Century.
To the extent the Constitution now operates successfully, it does so in spite of itself. What this means is that even though the college “elects” the president, Americans since the late 19th Century understood that it would be a huge political problem to have another Rutherford B Hayes. They did not celebrate, applaud and defend the EC as the “Genius of the Framers”. They knew that having a president that lost the popular vote meant that that president wouldn’t be accepted by the people as having democratic legitimacy. Hell, Rutherford B Hayes knew it and governed accordingly!
Why? Because in democratic elections the person who gets the most votes wins. That’s how such leaders obtain political legitimacy. That’s how the rest of the world’s democracies operate in the Modern Post WWII Era, because the will of the people is to be respected. And in countries with an educated and literate populace with reasonably functioning media, I’d even argue that the majority (or plurality) vote should be respected because it’s very likely to have picked the better candidate.
This was the state of political thought in America until 2000. Then, a largely unqualified Texas-via-Maine “conservative” Repub ran against one of the most qualified candidates in American history. Late polling seemed to indicate Repub Bush Jr would win the popular vote, but that Dem Gore might nevertheless win the electoral college (gasp), even though such a thing had never happened before. In reality, Gore won the popular vote (and also the electoral vote, since there is no doubt whatever that more Floridians thought they had cast ballots for Gore than thought they had cast ballots for Bush).
At this point, Team Bush knew it had to defend the “wisdom” of the electoral college and kick to the curb the idea that it would be a huge political problem for the country to have a president that actually lost the popular vote. So we started to see inanities about how many more square miles of America “voted” for Bush, and how many more counties “voted” for Bush. Hell, Bush/Cheney and Team Conservative boldly claimed they had a “mandate” based on such nonsense! So that was the end of the “conservative” movement’s subscription to the modern conventional wisdom about the electoral college.
The result for Bush/Cheney? Well, exactly what Americans of the post-RB Hayes Era thought would happen: Bush/Cheney were (quite sensibly) not seen as democratically legitimate leaders by a great many who voted for the actual winner. And that illegitimacy dogged his failed presidency from its very first days.
So what did the “conservative” movement learn from the Stolen Election of 2000? To move to an actual plan of happily running candidates that don’t have the slightest chance of winning the popular vote! The monstrous Trump never had any chance of winning the popular vote in 2016, and he didn’t make the slightest pretense that he could win it in 2020. Nor will he when he runs in 2024. Nor do ANY of the Trumpite hopefuls in the wings imagine they could possibly win the national popular vote, from DeSantis to Hawley to Cruz. They can’t, so the electoral college has to become the critical beam in the whole “conservative” minority rule governing structure.
So this means that none of their future electoral presidents will have any democratic legitimacy, either. Unfortunately, another thing they can rely upon is that neither the Dem party or the corporate media will begin to call a spade a spade and tell the country that presidents that lose the popular vote (by millions!) not only cannot have a mandate, they cannot (and will not) be considered democratically-legitimate by the supporters of the candidate that REALLY won the elections.
And this is the future that the EC consigns us to. The Genius of the Framers, indeed…
“The appalling electoral college is a blight upon the Constitution, and is indeed the principal reason that the Constitution (and country) are failing in the disastrous 21st Century.”
The electoral college is a symptom. The problem is the disproportional representation of the senate. The 2 senators per state gives small states overbroad influence in both the senate and EC.
Oh, I get that there is dysfunctional overlap between the the senate and EC in that they both unfairly privilege voters from low population rural states. But the two anti-democratic mechanisms each have their own massive problems quite independent of each other, and I have to say I can’t really say which provision of the failed constitution is more disastrous.
Over the longer term, the senate has stalled and blocked most needful progress for the nation, while in the short term the EC has created bigger problems by handing the all-powerful executive to democratically-illegitimate and incompetent “conservative” presidents who can wreck the entire government over the course of 4 years, as both Trump and Cheney did. And as I argued, utter lack of concern over losing the popular vote is now the electoral strategy of the “conservative” movement from here on out; they will never win the popular vote again. And this will turn out to be an even bigger problem for the country than the disastrous minoritarian senate, in my view.
The Congress is already totally broken, and has been for decades. The executive branch still functions.
There’s a fair chance this gets fixed after 2024. Because, in 2024, there’s a fair chance we’ll have electors that don’t follow the will of voters in their state. Or a putsch that replaces “elected” electors with appointed ones that disregard the will of the voters. It will come to a head and we’ll fix it. Maybe we’ll be lucky and do so without violence, but that is unlikely.
BAH BAH BAH. Electoral College is very good. It kept out Gore and crushed Hillary. Two positives right there.
I guess it’s understandable to applaud minority rule when one is in the minority!
It’s a nice anti-democratic set-up for the “conservative” movement….
It was SCOTUS that gave Florida’s electoral votes to Bush II and “kept out Gore”.
And yet Bush was reelected
Not to get off topic, but you think starting a war had anything to do with it? You know the one built on a pile of lies, that cost us what ~ $3T! It just rings so republican.
And yet Trump wasn’t.
Non-sequiters are fun!
Deception, cheating, lying, fraud, hypocrisy, all standard Republican historic defaults which comfort them and which they will not change.
Is “ranked choice voting” an attack on our democracy?
No, it guarantees that the ultimate winner is someone acceptable to the greatest number of voters, even if they are no one’s first choice. Under our system, the winner is often someone who the majority of voters dislike, but their votes are split giving a plurality to the democratic unacceptable.
For a good review of the use of RCV, see:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiP-7q2nOX3AhVUOH0KHb2CALQQFnoECB8QAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fairvote.org%2Fwhere_is_ranked_choice_voting_used&usg=AOvVaw3c213qxPtLXD4SRbNyrvTC.
Under RCV it is possible for the candidate who gets the most votes to lose.
That is what you call an attack on our democracy.
Reread my post above.
Electing a candidate that the majority of voters do not want to be President is NOT democracy.
Not a rant. Voters in Wyoming’s ballots should not have 40 times the weight of those in California.
Here is the ideal. Ranked choice voting. 90%+ voting participation. National balloting rules. Election Day is a national holiday every two years. We honor states with the highest turnout and voters who vote every opportunity over extended periods (20+ years). Those elected officials who block legitimate voters from voting face election fraud charges. Political boundaries are not drawn by politicians, given their clear conflict of interest. All campaign contributions and public and reported. There is a generous overall limit on campaign contributions in one election cycle – $5 million for an individual, $10 million for a couple and for a company,no more than 5% of net income for the prior year. We are talking constitutional amendment to get there. What we have isn’t working.
Other points:
Many other countries patterned their constitutions on ours — none of them included an electoral college.
The 1619 Project (yes, I know it has its biases, but by and large it is solid history) documents the role of getting the southern states to join the union in setting up a mechanism that would give them disproportionate control.
Finally, note that the term United STATES in its original sense referred to a union of independent nations, not simply subunits of a single federation.
The electoral college is doing exactly the job it was supposed to do. Prevent mob rule. You can whine about all you want, maybe we can get 30-40 more articles about it? But in the end the constitution has to be changes, and that isn’t going to ever happen.
The fact that the EC didn’t prevent an obviously unqualified and demented demagogue from obtaining the office in 2016 most definitely shows that it’s not “doing exactly the job it was supposed to do”. And it hasn’t operated as it was envisioned by the Framers for about 200 years. So much for your theory of the case.
And minority rule is superior to majority rule how and why, exactly?
I bought you were talking about 25th amendment joe in 2020?
What?
Great attempt at “conservative” humor, Ron, but whatever the Rightwing Noise Machine may say to the contrary, Biden was perhaps the most qualified presidential candidate in over 150 years, based on his past experience, anyway. Sad, but true!
Nor does he seem much of a demagogue.
Most recently, “preventing mob rule” gave us a President who never had popular support. He was also supremely unqualified to hold office (just the kind of person the Founders thought would be screened out by the EC).
“Prevent mob rule” Could you please explain that? Sounds like what Jan 6, 2021!
You either believe in federalism or you don’t. I approve of the EC for the same reason I applauded the SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe. And the angry Left opposes both because they oppose federalism. We are not a direct democracy for a good reason. Like Europe, every state has it’s own values, culture, and governing philosophy. And just like it would be wrong to expect Europeans to agree on a president of Europe, it would be unfair to ask the 350 million individuals from 50 states to agree to be led by consensus. Representative democracy is a good compromise.
Sorry, but it’s simply absurd to think that “every state has its own values, culture and governing philosophy.” The most that can be said on that front is that there are several distinct regions of the country, and even that is a stretch. The states of the US are merely fortuitous geographic constructs that arose out of the days of control by the British Empire and its monarchs. Their borders are essentially meaningless, based on once-wilderness river lines and royal “charters”. The idea that they were “sovereign” is archaic, and nothing but reactionary apologetics today.
And to compare the states of the US with actual nation states, with linguistic boundaries, ruling dynasties and actual histories independent of neighboring nations is beyond the bounds of reason.
100% agreed, the thought that you drive across the St. Croix into Wisconsin and your values and perspective changes to match the other side of the river is a bit beyond absurd!
A perfect example of an utterly meaningless, fortuitous geographic boundary separating two supposedly “sovereign” states!
Minnesota’s entire eastern border is simply water-based. The edge of the undeveloped wilderness at the time; nothing more, then or now.
Further, most nations of Europe (to use your example) are made up of areas that the residents consider to have distinct “values, culture and governing philosophy”. Indeed, I’d say those differences are greater than anything in America. Yet, as modern democracies, those nations still have national leaders they elect by majority rule.
Only “conservatives” in the US refuse to be governed by democratic means, with a democratically-elected national leader.
“Like Europe, every state has it’s own values, culture, and governing philosophy.”
That may have been true when the Constitution was ratified. The uptight Puritans of New England had an entirely different way of life from the louche Cavalier wannabes of Virginia.
That was, however, an entirely different world. In those days, a trip from Boston to Richmond might well have been the subject of a travel book rather than something accomplished in under 90 minutes. Americans are bound together culturally in ways they never were in the 18th century. A citizen of California has more in common with a citizen of Maine than a person in France has with a person in Bulgaria.
Economically and politically, the country is also closely knit. The idea of building a highway that crosses state lines no longer requires constitutional hair-splitting to justify itself. The ratification of the 14th Amendment also made it clear that US citizenship takes primacy over state citizenship.
The electoral college doesn’t matter for 2022, and probably won’t for 2024. What matters for 2022 is inflation, CRT and Trans theory taught to little kids, inflation, a cratering economy, a proxy war that we are being dragged into whether we want it or not or whether it is good for anything, food shortages and hyper-inflation because of fertilizer shortages, baby formula shortages, inflation, diesel shortages, inflation and control freak Covid Policy.
And I forgot…increasing violence.
https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/frey-denounces-violence-against-minneapolis-city-workers-as-threatening-flyer-surfaces/
The people we elect this year will be the people who make the decisions in 2024. The next presidential election must be an issue in this year’s campaign.
Given that a mob came very close to ruling on January 6th, it seems to me that the electoral college has been successful in preventing mob rule. Whatever it’s other merits might be, the electoral college has a very serious defect, one that threatens to bring down our entire political system. That is, the EC system allows a candidate who received fewer votes than the other candidate to become president. It manufactures illegitimate presidents.
Imagine how the US electoral system would look if it were described as belonging to, say, a third-world country:
“Although the country’s constitution allows voters to cast votes for President, those votes may be overruled by a panel of ‘Electors.’ These electors are selected through a process that is, at best, murky, and whose identities are generally kept secret. Electors are accountable to no one.”
Government by the consent of the governed — that’s as basic and as American as it gets. Defenders of the EC may be counting too much on tolerance of minority rule by the majority lasting for decades. We would become a breeding ground for revolution or civil war. When the next Putin comes along and it’s time for democratic nations to rally around democracy, one Uncle Sam will surely go missing.
Sure, it’s time to waste our energy on yet another futile pseudo-analysis of the electoral college. Let’s see if we can find another way to either confirm or reject the fact that candidates need to win elections by popular margins rather than squeeze in by dint of imaginary blue or red walls. Let’s see if we can keep pretending that “popular” candidates are a threat to democracy while Fascists rigging elections and Democrats “fighting” for the margins are the champions of the people. Let’s put the most unpopular candidates we can find on the ballot and then complain about the how hard it is to win elections with the electoral college. Let’s wallow in “moderate” failure and see how long it takes Fascists to tear up our democracy.
Or… we could stop whining about the EC and confront our challenges aggressively. We could grab any of a dozen popular and hugely effective liberal policies off the shelf and run on them aggressively and effectively. We could win elections by wide margins and restore civil rights and voting rights. Forget all that… let’s come back again in a few months and talk about the electoral college again.
Yeah, I suppose one answer is to increase the country’s polarization! Not sure how that works. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/10/23/the-political-divide-in-the-united-states-animated/
Stop whining? Never heard a Dem that didn’t whine.
“We could grab any of a dozen popular and hugely effective liberal policies off the shelf and run on them aggressively and effectively”
Hugely effective? Such as?
Dennis and Gerry,
Obviously incremental “centrism” rather than liberalism has yield the polarization your complaining about, therefore more of the same will promote more polarization. Resolving crises, solving problems, and improving the lives of millions will NOT further polarize the nation, no the contrary.
Gerry, the fact is that several liberal policies from universal health care, to living wages, and even abortion rights carry a clear majority of popular support. We’re just stuck with a political class that refuses to pursue those agendas because they’re too disruptive to the benefactors that both Parties rely on.
Speaking of benefactors, it’s really important to understand that the entire “polarization” narrative is actually a false narrative that essentially serves the status quo. The reality is that a majority of American’s are coalescing around a variety of policy initiatives ranging from civil rights to global warming. The “polarized” narrative pretends that right wing extremism represents an equal force or percentage of the population in order to just ongoing political paralysis. THAT paralysis serves the existing economic/political class by suppressing disruption.