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Electoral College

7 min read

Part of Elections and politics.

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Every episode (4)

Who argued it

Ned Foley · William Howell · Terry Moe · Ray Haynes · Peter Wallison

Constitutional Law · Federalism · Donald Trump · Populism · Executive Power · Administrative State

Background

Origins and design

Peter Wallison dates the Electoral College to the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, when the United States held roughly three million people scattered along the East Coast and communication moved at the speed of a horse. Many people, he says, being farmers separated from towns, would not have known who should be president. The founders’ idea, in his account, was to find people likely to be connected to one another across the thirteen colonies, who kept in touch by writing and visiting, and who could identify the best people in the country to serve as president. These were the electors. They were not designated by name; each state was told it could have a number of electors equal to its representatives in Congress plus two senators. The electors would gather and select the people who would then run for president and vice president. Wallison says the College narrowed the number of potential candidates for the highest office and let people vote for a limited group instead of a massive group of unknown people. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)

Bob Zadek frames the same design in modern terms: the electors were, in 21st-century jargon, the elites, the wise men, comparable to how the Senate was thought of in colonial times. Voters, he says, had the right to vote for president but did so indirectly, voting for people who would vote for the president. Direct election, he adds, was not seriously considered during the debate over the Constitution, those four and a half months in 1787. He calls the system a compromise designed to accomplish a number of goals and establish the country on a sustainable political footing, and notes that the United States in 1787 invented the concept of president, which had not existed on Earth. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)

Wallison says there was no serious opposition to the Electoral College during ratification, though many other issues were controversial. One reason, he suggests, is that nobody really conceived of what it meant to have a president, since the powers were expected to be held by Congress. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)

The modern debate

Zadek dates the current argument’s seriousness to the Bush v. Gore election in 2000, and says there have been five instances in which the president elected through the Electoral College got less than a majority of the popular vote, the first being John Quincy Adams in 1824, elected by the House of Representatives without an electoral majority. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)

Wallison calls the strongest argument against the College the democratic one: if we really have a democracy, why aren’t we electing the president with a simple majority of the popular vote, rather than through what amounts to 50 separate presidential elections brought together through the Electoral College. He calls that notion very powerful at a time when we are sensitive to the importance of a democracy. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)

His own strongest argument in support is stability. He contends that the two-party system exists because of the Electoral College: a candidate must get a majority of the Electoral College to win, and two parties are the only way one party can be assured of winning. Eliminate the College, he says, and there will not be two parties but ten or twelve, including a Right to Life party, a Choice party, an anti-immigrant party, a pro-immigrant party, and pro-gun and anti-gun parties, plus wealthy people like Michael Bloomberg who can run their own campaigns. The winner would probably have 20% of the vote, which he says is worse than less than 50%. He cites the 1992 election, in which Clinton, Bush and a third candidate ran and Clinton got 43% of the vote, yet there was never a question about whether he was validly elected. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)

On campaigning, Wallison says that under a straight popular election the easiest strategy is to go into the cities of the largest states and harvest votes there, because advertising and travel are least costly, and smaller states would mostly be ignored. The Electoral College, he says, encourages candidates to go to as many states as they think they can win, because smaller states have a fair amount of power in the system that they would not have in a popular vote. Zadek adds that a resident of a small-population state would feel totally disenfranchised, and that in California, New York and Massachusetts voters lose interest because the outcome is predetermined. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)

Winner-takes-all and the battleground state

Ray Haynes draws a distinction between the Electoral College itself and the method states use to implement the constitutional mandate to appoint electors, quoting Article II, Section 1: each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors. The winner-takes-all law in effect in 48 of the 50 states, he says, has been the chosen method of almost all states since basically 1856, and nobody has really taken a look at it. What’s Wrong with “Winner Takes All”? Another Look at the Electoral College (2020)

Winner-takes-all, Haynes explains, means that if you win the vote within a state, you get all of the electors from that state. It was devised in the 1800 election by Virginia for the specific purpose of helping Thomas Jefferson become president; in 1800 Virginia was the only state that did it, while other states had a congressional district system, and some legislatures simply appointed the electors. Winner-takes-all started in 1800, twelve years after the constitutional convention. The problem, he says, is not the Electoral College but the method states have chosen, which created what he calls the problem of the battleground state. What’s Wrong with “Winner Takes All”? Another Look at the Electoral College (2020)

Haynes ties policy to that problem: Florida gets attention because it is a key battleground state, and for Republicans, if they don’t win Florida, they don’t win the election. He asks why we have the ethanol mandate and answers that Iowa has been a key battleground state over the years. He recalls Obama saying his favorite presidential pork allocation was to a cheese factory in Ohio, because Ohio is a battleground state, and contrasts Trump’s sympathetic response to California’s forest fires with a major disaster declaration after a kitchen fire in Pennsylvania. In that year’s map, he says, 75% of presidential spending and campaign visits had been in five states. What’s Wrong with “Winner Takes All”? Another Look at the Electoral College (2020)

Across episodes

The topic recurs across the episodes. Wallison defends the College as a stabilizing force and warns that a popular vote would multiply parties; Haynes accepts the College but blames winner-takes-all for the battleground-state distortions; William Howell, asked whether he would support a national popular vote, says yes, calling the College a relic inherited from the Constitution that no other country has seen fit to replicate and that clearly needs to go. Zadek’s own position, stated in the later episode, is that electors should be distributed proportionately based on the popular vote in each state rather than winner-takes-all, which he says would fix the problem. Populism After Trump (2021)

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