Blog

So far this week, we have considered the following benefits of the Electoral College.

• Election disputes are contained within individual states;
• Presidents don’t control their own elections; and
• Most of the time, the Electoral College produces more decisive results.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of our state-by-state election process is the powerful incentive it creates against regionalism. This is always true, but easiest to see in the late 19th century. 

In 1888, incumbent President Grover Cleveland lost reelection despite receiving a popular vote plurality. This happened because he won big in the South. Cleveland’s national popular vote margin was 94,530, but he had won Texas by 146,461 votes. Altogether, he had won six states with margins greater than 30 percent, while only tiny Vermont had delivered with such zeal for Republican Benjamin Harrison.

The election showed that, because of the Electoral College, radical support in one region was not enough to win the White House. But Democrats already knew this. After the Civil War, and especially after the end of Reconstruction, the strength of the Party was in the South. Yet Democrats nominated no southerners for president or vice president between 1872 and 1928 (excluding West Virginia, which had joined the North during the war). Both Cleveland and his running mate were northerners. Yet they failed to win either of their home states. (Like Al Gore in 2000, if Cleveland had only won his own home state, he would have become president.)

Winning the presidency requires something more than a raw popular vote majority, it requires winning enough states to earn a majority in the Electoral College. Cleveland came back in 1892 to do just that. He actually received a smaller plurality of the popular vote (the Populist Party got 8.5 percent), but Cleveland won his home state of New York, his running mate’s home state of Illinois, and also picked up Indiana, Wisconsin and California. This geographically broader coalition gave them a resounding Electoral College majority.

And so it goes. Whether we see it or not, the Electoral College pushes parties and their presidential campaigns to build broad coalitions and then to focus on the most closely divided states.

This benefit has become a common attack on the system: swing states get a lot of attention, and other voters feel left out. Yet many more Americans today live in “safe” congressional districts than in “safe states.” And the very legitimacy of a political party rests on safe states—places with majorities of voters that already support the party and thus allow it to reach farther out. 

Some say that the 2000 election all came down to Florida. There is a sense in which that’s true—the outcome there was so close that it was the last state to be declared, and the result there would tip the balance one way or the other. But the fact is that George W. Bush needed every state that he won—not just Florida—to become president. If Al Gore had simply won Tennessee or West Virginia, then he and not Bush would have taken office.

Every state matters, and every vote within a state matters—just as much as in elections for governor or senator that may sometimes be very close and other times totally one-sided. The Electoral College does put a premium on states that happen to be the most balanced in a particular election. But would we really prefer it if the path to the presidency was driving up the vote total in the deepest red or deepest blue states? Actually, that’s the topic for tomorrow’s installment on the benefits of the Electoral College.

This article is adapted from the Encounter Broadside book, Why We Must Defend the Electoral College, by Trent England. 

Learn more about the Electoral College at ElectoralCollege101.com.