CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten wrote that while it’s
“[p]retty clear that [Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala] Harris is
ahead nationally right now… [h]er advantage in the battlegrounds is basically
nil. Average it all, Harris’[s] chance of winning the popular vote is 70%. Her
chance of winning the electoral college is 50%.”
Two days later, on September 18, Senator Lindsey Graham
(R-SC) skipped votes in the Senate to travel to Nebraska, where he tried to
convince state legislators to switch the state’s system of allotting electoral
votes by district to a winner-take-all system. That effort so far appears unsuccessful.
In a country of 50 states and Washington, D.C.—a country of
more than 330 million people—presidential elections are decided in just a
handful of states, and it is possible for someone who loses the popular vote to
become president. We got to this place thanks to the Electoral College, and to
two major changes made to it since the ratification of the Constitution.
The men who debated how to elect a president in 1787 worried
terribly about making sure there were hedges around the strong executive they
were creating so that he could not become a king.
Some of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted
Congress to choose the president, but this horrified others who believed that a
leader and Congress would collude to take over the government permanently.
Others liked the idea of direct election of the president, but this worried
delegates from smaller states, who thought that big states would simply be able
to name their own favorite sons.
It also worried those who pointed out that most voters would
have no idea which were the leading men in other states, leaving a national
institution, like the organization of Revolutionary War officers called the
Society of the Cincinnati, the power to get its members to support their own
leader, thus finding a different way to create a dictator.
Ultimately, the framers came up with the election of a
president by a group of men well known in their states but not currently
officeholders, who would meet somewhere other than the seat of government and
would disband as soon as the election was over. Each elector in this so-called
Electoral College would cast two votes for president.
The man with the most votes would be president, and the man
with the second number of votes would be vice president (a system that the
Twelfth Amendment ended in 1804). The number of electors would be equal to the
number of senators and representatives allotted to each state in Congress. If
no candidate earned a majority, the House of Representatives would choose the
president, with each state delegation casting a single vote.
In the first two presidential elections—in 1788–1789 and
1792—none of this mattered very much, since the electors cast their ballots
unanimously for George Washington. But when Washington stepped down, leaders of
the newly formed political parties contended for the presidency.
In the election of 1796, Federalist John Adams won, but
Thomas Jefferson, who led the Democratic-Republicans (which were not the same
as today’s Democrats or Republicans) was keenly aware that had Virginia
given him all its electoral votes, rather than splitting them between him and
Adams, he would have been president.
On January 12, 1800, Jefferson wrote to the governor of
Virginia, James Monroe, urging him to back a winner-take-all system that
awarded all Virginia’s electoral votes to the person who won the majority of
the vote in the state.
He admitted that dividing electoral votes by district “would
be more likely to be an exact representation of [voters’] diversified
sentiments” but, defending his belief that he was the true popular choice in
the country in 1796, said voting by districts “would give a result very
different from what would be the sentiment of the whole people of the US. were
they assembled together.”
Virginia made the switch. Alarmed, the Federalists in
Massachusetts followed suit to make sure Adams got all their votes, and by
1836, every state but South Carolina, where the legislature continued to choose
electors until 1860, had switched to winner-take-all.
This change horrified the so-called Father of the
Constitution, James Madison, who worried that the new system would divide the
nation geographically and encourage sectional tensions. He wrote in 1823 that
voting by district, rather than winner-take-all, “was mostly, if not
exclusively in view when the Constitution was framed and adopted.” He proposed
a constitutional amendment to end winner-take-all.
But almost immediately, the Electoral College caused a
different crisis. In 1824, electors split their votes among four
candidates—Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and William
Crawford—and none won a majority in the Electoral College.
Although Jackson won the most popular votes and the most
electoral votes, when the election went to the House, the state delegations
chose Adams, the son of former president John Adams.
Furious Jackson supporters thought a developing elite had
stolen the election, and after they elected Jackson outright in 1828, the new
president on December 8, 1829, implored Congress to amend the Constitution
to elect presidents by popular vote.
“To the people belongs the right of electing their Chief
Magistrate,” he wrote, “it was never designed that their choice should in any
case be defeated, either by the intervention of electoral colleges or…the House
of Representatives.”
Jackson warned that an election in the House could be
corrupted by money or power or ignorance. He also warned that “under the
present mode of election a minority may…elect a President,” and such a
president could not claim legitimacy. He urged Congress “to amend our system
that the office of Chief Magistrate may not be conferred upon any citizen but
in pursuance of a fair expression of the will of the majority.”
But by the 1830s, the population of the North was exploding
while the South’s was falling behind. The Constitution counted enslaved
Americans as three fifths of a person for the purposes of representation, and
direct election of the president would erase that advantage slave states had in
the Electoral College. Their leaders were not about to throw that advantage
away.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery (except as
punishment for a crime) and scratched out the three-fifths clause, meaning that
after the 1870 census the southern states would have more power in the
Electoral College than they did before the war.
In 1876, Republicans lost the popular vote by about 250,000
votes out of 8.3 million cast, but kept control of the White House through the
Electoral College. As Jackson had warned, furious Democrats threatened
rebellion. They never considered Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, whom they
called “Rutherfraud,” a legitimate president.
In 1888 it happened again. Incumbent Democratic president
Grover Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes out of 11 million
cast, but Republican candidate Benjamin Harrison took the White House thanks to
the 36 electoral votes from New York, a state Harrison won by fewer than 15,000
votes out of more than 1.3 million cast. Once in office, he and his team set
out to skew the Electoral College permanently in their favor.
Over twelve months in 1889–1890, they added six new, sparsely
populated states to the Union, splitting the territory of Dakota in two and
adding North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming
while cutting out New Mexico and Arizona, whose inhabitants they expected would
vote for Democrats.
The twentieth century brought another wrench to the Electoral
College. The growth of cities made possible thanks to modern
industry—including the steel that supported skyscrapers—and transportation and
sanitation, created increasing population differences among the different
states.
The Constitution’s framers worried that individual states
might try to grab too much power in the House by creating dozens and dozens of
congressional districts, so they specified that a district could not be smaller
than 30,000 people.
But they put no upper limit on district sizes. After the 1920
census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, the House in
1929 capped its numbers at 435 to keep power away from those urban dwellers,
including immigrants, that lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the
Electoral College in favor of rural America.
Today the average congressional district includes
761,169 individuals—more than the entire population of Wyoming, Vermont, or
Alaska—which weakens the power of larger states.
In the twenty-first century the earlier problems with the
Electoral College have grown until they threaten to establish permanent
minority rule. A Republican president hasn’t won the popular vote since voters
reelected George W. Bush in 2004, when his popularity was high in the midst of
a war.
The last Republican who won the popular vote in a normal
election cycle was Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988, 36 years and nine
cycles ago. And yet, Republicans who lost the popular vote won in the Electoral
College in 2000—George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore, who won the popular vote
by about a half a million votes—and in 2016, when Democrat Hillary Clinton won
the popular vote by about 3 million votes but lost in the Electoral College to
Donald Trump.
In our history, four presidents—all Republicans—have lost the
popular vote and won the White House through the Electoral College. Trump’s
2024 campaign strategy appears to be to do it again (or to create such chaos
that the election goes to the House of Representatives, where there will likely
be more Republican-dominated delegations than Democratic ones).
In the 2024 election, Trump has shown little interest in
courting voters. Instead, the campaign has thrown its efforts into legal
challenges to voting and, apparently, into eking out a win in the Electoral
College. The number of electoral votes equals the number of senators and
representatives to which each state is entitled (100 + 435) plus three
electoral votes for Washington, D.C., for a total of 538. A winning candidate
must get a majority of those votes: 270.
Winner-take-all means that presidential elections are won in
so-called swing or battleground states. Those are states with election margins
of less than 3 points, so close they could be won by either party.
The patterns of 2020 suggest that the states most likely to
be in contention in 2024 are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North
Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, although the Harris-Walz campaign has
opened up the map, suggesting its internal numbers show that states like
Florida might also be in contention. Candidates and their political action
committees focus on those few swing states—touring, giving speeches and
rallies, and pouring money into advertising and ground operations.
But in 2024 there is a new wrinkle. The Constitution’s
framers agreed on a census every ten years so that representation in Congress
could be reapportioned according to demographic changes. As usual, the 2020
census shifted representation, and so the pathway to 270 electoral votes
shifted slightly.
Those shifts mean that it is possible the election will come
down to one electoral vote. Awarding Trump the one electoral vote Nebraska is
expected to deliver to Harris could be enough to keep her from becoming
president.
Rather than trying to win a majority of voters, just 49 days
before the presidential election, Trump supporters—including Senator Graham—are
making a desperate effort to use the Electoral College to keep Harris from
reaching the requisite 270 electoral votes to win.
It is unusual for a senator from one state to interfere in
the election processes in another state, but Graham similarly pressured
officials in Georgia to swing the vote there toward Trump in 2020.
—Heather Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://usafacts.org/articles/what-are-the-current-swing-states-and-how-have-they-changed-over-time/
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-31-02-0256
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/04-03-02-0109
https://fairvote.org/how-the-electoral-college-became-winner-take-all/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-3
https://www.axios.com/2024/09/19/lindsey-graham-electoral-vote-change-nebraska
X:
metzgov/status/1836773273230594425
ForecasterEnten/status/1835674434033590289
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.