By George Will
Saturday, December 17, 2016
Political mildness is scarce nowadays, so it has been
pleasantly surprising that post-election denunciations of the Electoral College
have been tepid. This, even though the winner of the presidential election lost
the popular vote by perhaps 2.8 million votes, more than five times the 537,179
votes by which Al Gore outpolled George W. Bush in 2000.
In California, where Democrats effortlessly harvest 55
electoral votes (more than one-fifth of 270), this year’s presidential winner
was never in doubt. There was no gubernatorial election to excite voters. And
thanks to a “reform,” whereby the top two finishers in a multi-party primary
face off in the general election, the contest for the U.S. Senate seat was
between two Democrats representing faintly variant flavors of liberalism. These
factors depressed turnout in the state with one-eighth of the nation’s
population. If there had been more excitement, increased turnout in this
heavily Democratic state might have pushed Hillary Clinton’s nationwide
popular-vote margin over 3 million. And this still would not really matter.
Political hypochondriacs say, with more indignation than
precision, that the nation’s 58th presidential election was the fifth in which
the winner lost the popular vote. In 1824, however, before the emergence of the
party system, none of the four candidates received a majority of the electoral
votes, and the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams even though
Andrew Jackson won more popular votes — 38,149 more, although only about
350,000 of the approximately 4 million white males eligible to vote did so. All
four candidates had been together on the ballots in only six of the 24 states,
and another six states, including the most populous, New York, had no elections
— their legislatures picked the presidential electors.
In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won the electoral vote even
though Samuel J. Tilden won 254,694 more of the 8,411,618 popular votes cast.
(With 51 percent, Tilden is the only presidential loser to win a majority of
the popular vote.) In 1888, Benjamin Harrison won the electoral vote 233–168
even though President Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by 89,293 out of
11,395,083 votes cast. In both years, however, exuberant fraud on both sides
probably involved more votes than the victory margins.
So, two of the five 21st-century elections (2000 and
2016) are the only clear and pertinent instances, since the emergence of the
party system in 1828, of the winner of the popular vote losing the presidency.
Two is 40 percent of five elections, which scandalizes only those who make a
fetish of simpleminded majoritarianism.
Those who demand direct popular election of the president
should be advised that this is what we have — in 51 jurisdictions (the states
and the District of Columbia). And the electoral-vote system quarantines
electoral disputes. Imagine the 1960 election under direct popular election:
John Kennedy’s popular-vote margin over Richard Nixon was just 118,574. If all
68,838,219 popular votes had been poured into a single national bucket, there
would have been powerful incentives to challenge the results in many of the
nation’s 170,000 precincts.
Far from being an unchanged anachronism, frozen like a
fly in 18th-century amber, the Electoral College has evolved, shaping and
shaped by the party system. American majorities are not spontaneous growths,
like dandelions. They are built by a two-party system that assembles them in
accordance with the Electoral College’s distribution incentive for geographical
breadth in a coalition of states. So, the Electoral College shapes the
character of majorities by helping to generate those that are neither
geographically nor ideologically narrow, and that depict, more than the popular
vote does, national decisiveness. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson won just 41.8 percent
of the popular vote but conducted a strong presidency based on 81.9 percent of
the electoral votes. Eighty years later, Bill Clinton won 43 percent of the
popular vote but 68.8 percent of the electoral votes. In 2008, Barack Obama won
52.9 percent of the popular vote but 67.8 percent of the electoral vote.
The 48 elections since 1824 have produced 18 presidents
that received less than 50 percent of the popular vote. The greatest of them,
Abraham Lincoln, received 39.9 percent in 1860. So, on December 19, when the
electors cast their votes in their respective states, actually making Donald
Trump the president-elect, remember: Do not blame the excellent electoral-vote
system for the 2016 choice that was the result of other, and seriously
defective, aspects of America’s political process.
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