Blog

With both campaigns scrapping for voters, I thought it a good time to revisit a section of my book, “Why We Must Defend the Electoral College.” At conferences this summer, I’ve had many people ask why the Electoral College matters today. Some want to blame it for today’s divisiveness, but their case is just correlation: we have the Electoral College, and we have bitter political divisions.

That doesn’t explain why, after many previous eras of division, the nation has recovered. In fact, the Electoral College is a force pulling us together. History shows how this works.

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 of the country was not going to be 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 either president or vice president between 1872 and 1928 (excluding West Virginia, which had remained with the North during the war). Both Cleveland and his running mate were northerners, and just 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 that year 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 him 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 has become a popular attack on the system—swing states get a lot of attention, and other voters feel left out. Yet more Americans today live in highly partisan congressional districts than in “safe states.” And the very legitimacy of a political party rests on all those safe states—on places that the party has already won over, thus allowing it to reach farther out. In 2000, George W. Bush needed every state that he won—not just Florida—to become president.

Every state matters, and every vote within a state matters—at least as much as in elections for governor or senator that may sometimes be very close and other times hopelessly one-sided. The Electoral College does put a premium on states that happen to be the most balanced in a particular election. 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?

Consider one more quality of swing states: they are those most likely to have divided government. And if divided government is good for anything, it’s accountability. In other words, the way the Electoral College works out, when we do wind up with a razor-thin margin, at least it is likely to happen in a state where both parties have some power, rather than in a state where one party controls everything.

You can read more, of course, in my little book, “Why We Must Defend the Electoral College.” Or, if you’d rather watch a documentary, you can find similar information in “Safeguard: An Electoral College Story.”