Donald Trump got pretty worked up on election night when it dawned on him that the next president would lose the popular vote and yet win in the Electoral College. “We should have a revolution in this country!” he tweeted. The election was “a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!”
But the year was 2012, not 2016. Trump fired off those tweets during a brief election-night spell when it looked as though Mitt Romney would win the popular vote and still lose to President Barack Obama (he didn’t in the end).
Today, as Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote lead over Trump surpasses 1 million—roughly twice Al Gore’s lead over George W. Bush in 2000—the president-elect’s views about the Electoral College have become more conflicted. “I would rather see it where you went with simple votes,” Trump told CBS News’ Leslie Stahl in an interview aired Sunday. “You know, you get 100 million votes and somebody else gets 90 million votes and you win.” But in a Tuesday morning tweet, as Clinton’s popular-vote lead swelled, Trump wrote that “the Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play.”
In truth, Trump was on to something the first time. The Electoral College is a creaky anachronism. And it's hardly surprising that Democrats in particular are incensed, given that two of the last three presidents (well, one president and one president-elect) lost the popular vote.
Let’s stipulate that Trump won the presidency fair and square. The two candidates focused on winning in the Electoral College, not the popular vote, because those were the rules. The (considerable) misgivings that Trump’s impending presidency provokes in any sensible person do not justify questioning its legitimacy. Put those “not my president” signs away. That sentiment was anti-democratic back when then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey hurled it at Bill Clinton in the 1990s, and it’s no less so today.
But to resign yourself to President Trump is not to resign yourself to the Electoral College.
The Electoral College would likely have been jettisoned long ago were it not for the fact that, prior to the 21st century, the winner lost the popular vote only three times, all of them way back in the 19th century. During the past 16 years, though, it’s happened twice, with only Obama sandwiched in between. That makes this constitutional kink harder to ignore, especially when you remember that the country averted only narrowly a split between the popular vote and the Electoral College majority in 1960, 1968, 1976, 1992, 2004 and 2012.
The sample is less than scientific, but one can’t help noticing that popular-vote losers make subpar presidents. The 19th-century crop (John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison) did not, historians tend to agree, rank high in achievement. In this century, George W. Bush—denied a popular-vote victory until his second term—launched an ill-considered war in Iraq (his own brother had a famously difficult time defending it) and presided over the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We don’t yet know what kind of president Trump will be, but even many within his own party judge him unfit for office.
How did we end up with such a screwy system? Blame slavery. It’s considered bad manners in Washington ever to suggest that anything might be wrong with the U.S. Constitution, but any document premised on the legality of slavery is going to have a few glitches in it. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, but slavery’s previous existence continued to warp Article II, which established the election of presidents indirectly through the allocation of state electors. There were several reasons for this, but the most urgent was that choosing a president by popular vote threatened to disadvantage the South because so much of its population consisted of slaves (who, being “property,” were not permitted to vote).
The founders fixed that by creating middlemen—electors—whose number matched the number of representatives a given state sent to Congress. House members were allocated to each state based on population, counting slaves (appallingly) as three-fifths of a person. To even up Electoral College representation just a bit among states, two bonus electors were awarded per state, to match the number of senators in each. By this tortured workaround did one peculiar institution beget another.
Remember, too, that the founders were less committed to direct democracy than we are today, for reasons both practical (information travelled slowly) and philosophical. Initially most states restricted the franchise to white male landowners, and even they couldn’t choose U.S. senators directly until 1913; state legislatures chose them instead. African-Americans weren’t guaranteed the franchise until ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870, and nearly a century would pass before Congress passed a law to enforce that right. Women couldn’t vote until 1920. Young adults aged 18, 19 and 20 couldn’t vote until 1971.
Democracy took two centuries to bloom. But even after 227 years, U.S. citizens remain ineligible to elect the president directly. Only states can do that, acting through electors.
Inertia is the main reason the Electoral College was never amended out of existence, combined with perceived partisan advantage. Republicans were presumed to have a “lock” on the Electoral College from 1980 until 1992, when Democrat Bill Clinton was elected to the first of two terms. Democrats were thought to have an Electoral-College lock (or “blue wall”) from 2008 until … last Tuesday. In truth, neither party can count on maintaining an electoral lock for very long.
To judge from his Tuesday-morning tweet, Trump now appears to believe the oft-repeated chestnut that the Electoral College minimizes the impact of two demographic changes that favor Democrats: urbanization and immigration. But that ignores an important advantage that the Electoral College confers on more populous, urban and immigrant-rich states like California and New York: winner-take-all allocation of electors.
Forty-eight of the 50 states choose to allocate all their electors to their popular-vote winner. That maximizes a state’s collective influence over who becomes president—but it effectively disenfranchises any voters who favored the losers. Only Maine and Nebraska do the reverse. Those states allocate their electors among the candidates proportionally according to the vote. (Well, mostly proportionally. The winner automatically receives two electors. The others are allocated according to who won in each congressional district.) In rejecting winner-take-all, Maine and Nebraska diminish their collective influence over who becomes president—it’s fairly puny anyway, given that they have only four and five electors, respectively—and increase the clout of individual voters.
Winner-take-all makes populous blue states like California and New York more influential, not less, over who becomes president. California gave all 55 of its electors and New York all its 29 to Hillary Clinton, even though Trump won about a third of the vote in each state. If we elected presidents by popular vote, the votes of those Trump voters would mean something. Not in this particular election—Trump, remember, lost the popular vote—but in another those votes might conceivably have put him over the top. (There was, in fact, some speculation before Election Day that Trump might win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College to Clinton. He wouldn’t have taken that well.)
In truth, the Electoral College confers some advantage on rural states (because every state gets two electors in addition to those awarded based on population) but an even bigger one on the big, populous ones (because of winner-take-all). It’s the middle-sized states that get screwed.
For all that, candidates spend little time campaigning in most big and little states. They skip rural states because those two extra electors don’t equalize the numbers enough to make farm country worth visiting. They skip big bustling states because they’re usually so predictably Democratic (or, in the case of Texas, Republican) that campaigning in them is either superfluous or futile. Instead, candidates spend much of their time in a small number of swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. If we elected presidents by popular vote, candidates would have to campaign wherever votes could be found. That covers a lot more territory.
Some people justify the Electoral College by arguing that it manufactures or exaggerates majorities, creating an illusion of greater consensus than really exists. Bill Clinton was twice elected president with mere pluralities. George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012 were elected with wimpy majorities of only about 51 percent. Look at those numbers for any length of time and you’re liable to conclude the U.S. has a very narrowly-divided electorate.
But the Electoral College, thanks to the 48 winner-take-all states, produces more robust-looking majorities that translate into a mandate for a new president’s policies. Never mind that the mandate is an illusion. The Electoral College is like the blue pill in The Matrix that keeps you from finding out you’re a human battery. Why not take the red pill and face up to the fact that we are a narrowly-divided electorate? That would seem an especially useful truth for President-elect Trump to ponder.
Granted, choosing presidents by popular vote could, in a crowded general-election field, yield winners supported by less than 30 percent of the electorate. But that could always be fixed with runoff elections.
A weak but oft-repeated argument for keeping the Electoral College is “50 Floridas.” Thus Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in 2004, argued that had the president been chosen by popular vote four years earlier, its narrowness (about 500,000) would have inspired recounts in all 50 states instead of just one, Florida. But when you’re assembling one big count the likelihood of an excruciatingly narrow popular-vote difference diminishes, because the numbers are bigger. The possibility that recounting any state’s popular vote would make much difference would be much smaller.
One solution would be to eliminate the Electoral College with a constitutional amendment. Proposing amendments to the constitution tends to get you branded a nut in contemporary discourse, but constitutional amendments used to be socially acceptable; five have been ratified in my lifetime, most recently in 1992, and I’m considerably younger than Trump.
Still, if constitutional amendments scare you, consider the National Popular Vote Plan. This is an ingenious compact already adopted by 10 states and the District of Columbia—all solidly Democratic, alas—that takes maximum advantage of the absurd latitude Article II gives states in allocating presidential electors (“in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”). States that sign on to the compact agree to award all their electors to whichever presidential candidate wins the national popular vote—though not until there are enough state signatories to decide the election. That takes 270 electors (out of 538 total). The compact is already more than halfway there, with 165.
However it’s achieved, the Electoral College plainly has outlived whatever usefulness it once had. And perhaps the mood is shifting after November 8. Michael Dukakis, who lost to George H.W. Bush in 1988, is now on board,, and on Tuesday outgoing California Sen. Barbara Boxer filed a bill that would eliminate the Electoral College. Hillary Clinton also suggested the Electoral College should be abolished after Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but still lost to Bush. Bob Dole made similar comments after he and Gerald Ford nearly won the popular vote in 1976 while still losing the Electoral College to Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.
Then there’s Trump. He’s against the Electoral College, too—at least some of the time.