Democrats have once again begun agitating for the abolition of the Electoral College and for the election of the President of the United States by direct popular vote. But what they dislike the most about the Electoral College is exactly why it will never be abolished. Both Democrats and Republicans would be well advised to stop wasting time debating the Electoral College. Rather, each party must think of how to improve its respective messages and messengers in order to remain competitive in presidential elections.
Last week the Electoral College, which under our Constitution has the sole legal authority to choose our President, officially elected Donald Trump to be our 47th President of the United States. You may not have read or heard much about our official presidential election since nothing out of the ordinary really happened. True, each state’s electors met in their respective states’ capitals and dutifully cast their votes for the candidates they were pledged to support by the terms of their state’s respective popular vote totals. But there were no mutterings about Russian collusion to help Trump or widespread voter fraud to throw the election to Harris. The pompous, self-righteous celebrities who presumed to lecture Republican electors on the need to violate their pledges to vote for Trump did everyone a big favor and kept their yaps shut, for a change. The Electoral College selected the popular vote winner, as it usually does. Nothing to see here.
But the casting of the electoral vote nonetheless inspired Democrats, among whom the most prominent was New York Governor Kathy Hochul, to renew their periodic demands for the Electoral College’s abolition and the adoption of the direct popular vote to select our President. Their reasons for favoring the popular vote over the electoral vote to select a president are perfectly understandable. The Democrats have won the popular vote in 7 of the last 9 presidential elections, and it’s only natural to desire a means of election which is most likely than not to produce a victory. Moreover, while the electoral vote winner has also won the popular vote in 39 of the 43 elections held since the Republicans first squared off against the Democrats in 1856, the Electoral College sent a Republican to the White House in 4 instances—1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016–even though the Democrats won the popular vote. But in no instance has a Republican ever won the popular vote while the Democrat has won the electoral vote. No wonder the Democrats dislike (and the Republicans like) the Electoral College. It has a built-in pro-Republican bias—smaller states are overrepresented in the Electoral College, and smaller states are more likely to be Republican.
Small state overrepresentation comes from the determination of each state’s electoral vote, which is equal to the number of senators plus the number of representatives it may elect to Congress. Thus Texas, with 2 senators and 38 representatives, has an electoral vote of 40. Although each state, no matter how small, is guaranteed at least one representative, the number of representatives a state may elect is based mainly on its population. Thus there is a rough equivalence between a state’s percentage of the national population and its percentage of seats in the House of Representatives—51% of America’s national population lives in 9 states, which have a total of 221 out of 435 seats in the House, or 51%. But since each state, regardless of its population, gets only 2 senators, these same 9 states together have only 18 out of 100 seats in the Senate. And it’s the use of the number of senators in addition to the number of representatives a state has which produces small state overrepresentation: The 9 largest states together command only 45% of the electoral vote.
All this suits the GOP just fine. The smaller the state, the more likely its population is white, rural, Protestant—and Republican. To be certain, there are some small Democratic states as well—Rhode Island, Hawaii, Vermont, and a few other states as well. But they’re outnumbered by the small Republican states which have such oversized representation in the Electoral College that they produced victories for presidents such as Trump in 2016 and Bush 2000, even though neither was the people’s choice for president.
So should the Democrats pursue the elimination of the Electoral College in favor of presidential election by direct popular vote? Only if they want to waste time, money, and energy on a lost cause.
To make the changes the Democrats want requires a constitutional amendment. But all constitutional amendments, whether produced by Congress or by a new constitutional convention, must be approved by 38 states to go into effect, and the chances that an amendment to replace the electoral vote with the popular vote for presidential selection purposes would win the approval of 38 states is basically zero. After all, the 13 smallest states have about 5% of America’s total population, but more than 9% of the electoral vote. It is simply unrealistic to expect these states to voluntarily exchange their greater power in the Electoral College for less influence in an election decided by popular vote. Indeed, whether even a simple majority of states would support the abolition of the Electoral College is problematic.
So Democrats, if they want to win more elections should stop wasting their resources pursuing Electoral College abolition and rather spend more resources developing better messages and messengers to win public approval in future elections. And so, too, should Republicans. They should not allow last month’s victory to obscure the fact that they, too, are in greater need of improvement than they probably think. In next week’s column, I’ll explore the work that both parties need to do on themselves for future successes.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville since 1987 and taught politics and government at Tarleton for 36 years, retiring in 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990-2024). He was Mayor pro-tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Stephenville
Economic Development Authority since 2018 and as chair of the Erath County Appraisal District’s Appraisal Review Board since 2015. He is also a member of the Stephenville Rotary Club, the Board of Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the Executive Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Pecan Valley District. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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