Keep the Electoral College

National Review Online

Friday, December 20, 2024

 

Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, and Peter Welch of Vermont, with the endorsement of New York governor Kathy Hochul, have introduced a constitutional amendment to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote. The senators should be careful what they wish for. Schatz complains that “no one’s vote should count for more based on where they live.” In the 2024 election, Hawaii and Vermont cast a combined 0.6 percent of the vote but counted for 1.3 percent of the electoral votes — nearly twice their popular weight. They and other small, hard-to-reach states would be further marginalized in a pure popular-vote system. Maybe Schatz and Welch should serve the interests of the people who elected them.

 

Our system is worth defending for those two most conservative of reasons: because it works, and because it is ours.

 

The stability of the American political system, designed in the summer of 1787, is a wonder of the world. Since it was tweaked by the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, our system for electing presidents has remained constitutionally unchanged. It has evolved only in practice within the long-settled rules. Nearly none of the world’s democratic systems existed in 1804. That stability, in and of itself, counsels against discarding the presidential election system for any but the most compelling of reasons.

 

What reasons are offered? Durbin says that the current system “disenfranchises millions of Americans,” but every state counts in the balance, and the voters of any state can attract great and immediate attention simply by signaling that the state is newly competitive. Ask the people of formerly safe states such as Georgia, Arizona, or Michigan. New York was once the nation’s preeminent swing state. California decided the 1916 election. Mississippi was a key swing state in 1976. By contrast, the voters of uncompetitive states who are more concerned with promoting the prospects of their favored party than with their local interests can do their ticket the favor of saving it time and money in the state. That, too, is a voice.

 

Schatz says that “in an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It’s that simple,” and anything else is “undemocratic.” But in reality, very few advanced democracies choose their chief executive by a pure national popular vote (France and Ireland being prominent exceptions), and none of those are remotely comparable in geographic size and demographic diversity to the United States — unless one admires the electoral system of Russia. Yet, we do not consider it “undemocratic” that Justin Trudeau was twice chosen as prime minister of Canada in elections where his party did not get the most votes. Recognizing this reality, neither these senators nor other critics of the Electoral College tend to talk much about how other nations choose leaders. Our system may be unique, but the proposed replacement would be novel as well.

 

The United States has held 50 presidential elections since the dawn of mass popular voting in 1828. In 32 of those, one party won a popular majority, and in 31 of 32 cases, an Electoral College majority followed. The lone exception, in 1876, was an election so marred by terrorism and fraud that nobody takes its popular count very seriously. The Electoral College is thus likely to be decisive only when neither side can command a majority. The Democrats who won the popular vote but lost the election in 2016, 2000, and 1888 all fell below 49 percent of the vote. In such cases, geographically broad support is the next-best thing. Donald Trump won seven of the ten largest states in 2016 and 2024. He won just four in 2020. That alone is sufficient to explain why he won twice and lost once.

 

Tradition is one good reason to keep the existing system. Not only has it produced a remarkably durable democratic regime, but the very longstanding nature of the system is a boon to public confidence — which has been much under strain of late. Moreover, the thick layer of folkways and practices that have grown up around American presidential contests have taken root around the current rules. When our parties began choosing nominees by popular primaries in the 1970s, they naturally turned to state-based primary elections and caucuses conducted under a patchwork of local rules, rather than a single national vote. To change those folkways is to turn our backs on two centuries of our own history, for uncertain gain.

 

The existing system also promotes political moderation. Even with modern communications and media, America is a huge land of different people who live differently. In such a broad, diverse republic, we should not be ruled by the lopsided politics of any one region or faction. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won popular majorities in states holding an electoral majority. But ten of the eleven slaveholding states that seceded in 1861 gave him zero votes (the exception, Virginia, gave him 1.13 percent). Should their regional veto have overridden the majority in states containing a majority of the voting population?

 

As Yuval Levin has written, the Electoral College is a moderating force: “Where a direct popular vote for chief executive would encourage each of the two major parties to focus on getting out its most devoted voters in the least politically competitive parts of the country, the Electoral College means there is little advantage to winning by an even wider margin in the safest states and that candidates, instead, have to focus on voters in the most competitive states, which tend to fall near the ideological middle. This is good for both national unity and the competitiveness of our politics.”

 

With Trump having won the popular vote in 2024, the real grievance of progressives is that the Electoral College forced the campaigns to focus more on the moderate politics of swing states and disincentivized them to drive up turnout in the most ideologically polarized precincts of the country. But Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Nevada composed a good crossroads of America’s populace and sentiment in 2024. A party capable of winning none of them does not deserve national leadership, no matter how hated its opponents may be in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and D.C.

 

There are also ample practical reasons to prefer the Electoral College. One reason why the January 6 riot at the Capitol was doomed to failure was that the decisive decisions were made in state capitals dotted across the map. To steal, or to overturn, an American presidential election requires a vastly geographically dispersed effort, in states run by different parties, elected in different years, conducting their votes under different rules, with different systems of courts and elections administrators. A unitary national vote would either give disproportionate power to the vote-counters of the nation’s most partisan precincts or (what the progressives may prefer) also require junking our whole current state-based electoral system in favor of a federally administered, uniform election regime. Otherwise, imagine not just the chaos of a national recount but an entire national election turning on California, which did not finish the first count of its votes this year until December 4.

 

Most Americans today trust how votes are counted in their own jurisdiction but grow increasingly conspiratorial when asked how votes are counted in further-off or more politically opposed corners of the country. By placing each state’s votes in a separate silo, the Framers of the Constitution wisely limited the vote-counting power of any local faction or machine to the capture of one set of electors.

 

That has proven especially important when a predominant local party abuses the voting rights of a minority, either by suppression or by fraud. In 1888, Grover Cleveland won 63 percent of the vote in the former Confederate states, largely on the back of mass suppression of the Republican-leaning votes of black Americans in the South. Had that election turned on the national popular vote, that would have given him the victory. But the concentration of his votes in the South doomed his campaign when he lost New York and Indiana, where Jim Crow did not rule the roost.

 

Finally, the urgent desire for a president chosen by pure national plebiscite reflects the inflated view that modern politics gives to the presidency. We elect senators by state, and the House by intra-state districts. To say that presidents should have a national democratic mandate uniquely untethered from the states is to give the president a symbolic advantage over Congress that the presidency does not deserve. Tocqueville, in writing the French constitution of 1848, worried that a popularly elected executive at the head of a vast administrative bureaucracy would overpower the legislature; three years later, the first man so elected made himself dictator.

 

The Electoral College was good enough to give us Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan. It has seen us through good times and bad, and through many different regional and demographic coalitions. It is not a perfect system, but men are not angels: No perfect system exists for the imperfect politics of imperfect people. It is our system, and it works. That should be enough.