The Truth about the Electoral College
By Tom Morel ‘23
As we gear up for a contentious 2020 election cycle, the oft-forgotten Electoral College makes its quadrennial appearance on the national stage. Poorly understood and the apparent enemy to Democrats, many of our liberal friends have argued for its removal, citing its alleged Republican bias. As we proceed through a divisive election, let’s sift through the Electoral College and understand it outside of America’s caustic political rhetoric.
The College was designed to moderate the power of large states, not silence them. In Federalist 68, Alexander Hamilton argued that the "sense of the people should operate in the choice" of the President, but offering the direct election up to the people could result in chaos. He trusted the people to make the right choice but understood that rash political winds could bend them. The same applies to large states: they still have a significant say in the elections (ask Democrats in California and Republicans in Texas) but are limited by the many small states. The Federalists put it best: the majority should not operate at the expense of the minority.
The Framers recognized the need for candidates to spend time in a variety of states. Today, we call these “swing states.” They are places that routinely hold close elections at the federal level (not gubernatorial races, which have little correlation to a state’s partisan lean). These states have constituents with a variety of different demands. The opioid crisis that is tragically ravaging Ohio requires candidates with solutions to tackle it, but those same candidates will also need to have ideas to help states like Florida adapt to global warming and sea-level rise. Quite simply, candidates are forced to diversify their base and build a coalition of voters. The math of achieving 270 votes to win requires victories in the South, the North, and the West. A Rust Belt candidate can’t just carry manufacturing states, and a Southerner can’t become president by piecing the Old South back together. The College and the Framers wanted more for the people.
Some of the left’s anger stems from their loss to a troubling candidate, Donald Trump. Despite winning the popular vote by two percentage points (a plurality), she lost the College by a whopping fourteen percentage points. That loss awakened the Democrat’s dismay for a system they largely embraced during the previous two elections. It seems distant, but a similar outcome happened four years earlier. Obama won the popular vote by four percent but dominated the Electoral College by nearly thirty-two percent.
To some Americans, it seems apparent that the College gives victories that don’t reflect the popular will, and therefore must be eliminated. However, this ignores that forty-eight of the states are winner-take-all, where the candidate with a plurality takes all of the states’ electoral votes. It favors those who win, in other words, and can win in a variety of states. Ohio is not like Florida, which is not like Arizona, which is not like North Carolina. Each state has a considerable number of electoral votes and are competitive for both parties. The Electoral College helps ensure that candidates can appeal to a myriad of states, not just run up their vote totals in a few populous states.
It is an indisputable fact that the last two times the Electoral College picked the loser of the popular vote, Republicans benefitted. Both George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the popular vote in their first election cycle and yet eked out victories in the College. At first blush, it would seem that it favors Republicans and that they support the Electoral College because it helps them at the ballot box. Those small states, like Wyoming and South Dakota, with six electoral votes between them, are “affirmative action” for the GOP, as our favorite Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would have us believe. However, this argument ignores states like Delaware, Rhode Island, Vermont, and other small Democratic states. Surely they don’t serve as “affirmative action” for Democrats? In recent elections, both parties are capable of winning in large and small states such as New York and Texas, as well as Idaho and Hawaii. It all depends on who can stitch together a broader and more populous base.
Currently, several states have passed laws that award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote, not necessarily the winner of the state. These states include Oregon, Colorado, California, Illinois, New Mexico, and Massachusetts. Only two of these states (New Mexico and Colorado) are remotely competitive in presidential elections, so it is doubtful that this law will have a practical and immediate consequence. However, these subnational usurpations undermine the Constitution. In particular, they undermine the tenth amendment, which states that: “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The power of governing the electoral college is in the Constitution as a federal power, not intended for the states to nullify. If we are to revise the Electoral College (a reasonable ambition), then that revision must be done at the national level. The moment we leave the College up to the states’ interpretation is the moment when we have fifty opinions on a subject that should have consensus.
Some point to “Trump Republicans” as the sole defenders of the Electoral College. Unfortunately for them, a few Democrats support it, like John Delaney (MD) and Tulsi Gabbard (HI), who would like to “reform” the system but not demolish it. Nor do you have to be a “Trump Republican” to believe that it is the best way to preserve the Republic. I am far from an ardent defender of the president. I support more practical leaders such as the iconic Ronald Reagan (CA), and well as legendary Senators Pete Domenici (NM), John McCain (AZ), Barry Goldwater (AZ), Paul Laxalt (NV), and others. We advocate for the Electoral College because it is an essential component of our republic and protects small states, red and blue. Rather than silence large or small states, we believe in the importance of coalitions, bringing the Rust Belt and Sun Belt together. James Madison said it best: “we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”