The assumption was that the math of the Electoral College would continue to favor the Republican party and disadvantage the Democrats. But the main theme as we move toward the 2024 presidential election seems to be “expect the unexpected.” Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump remain frustratingly close in poll after poll, opening the door to a world in which he wins the popular vote but still loses the Electoral College and the presidency.
If that were to happen, it would overturn years of assumptions about the shape of American democracy. It is the Democrats who have been calling the loudest to finally remove the vestigial body, the Electoral College, from the Constitution. But even if Harris only wins thanks to a mysterious formula devised more than 200 years ago, there is still no valid reason to maintain such an undemocratic institution.
Harris and Trump are statistically deadlocked in many vital swing states, with neither holding a clear lead outside the margin of error in most polls. But the eight states considered crucial in the final days of the race are not important because they are the most populous. Rather, the reason places like Georgia and Pennsylvania have such great significance is that they are competitive enough to tilt the Electoral College toward one candidate or the other.
We’ve already recently seen Democrats outperform in the national popular vote versus the final Electoral College results – twice. When Trump won in 2016, it was with a narrow victory in the Electoral College, but without a popular mandate; his 2020 loss was also a national blow, but intensely close in the swing states that pushed President Joe Biden over the edge. To wit: Trump won Wisconsin by just under 23,000 votes in 2016 and lost it by about 21,000 votes in 2020.
All indications are that this year will be just as close – but what if it didn’t all come down to just a handful of voters in less than 20% of states in the union? I have long argued that the Electoral College has gone far beyond the original intentions of the framers of the Constitution. As I wrote after the 2020 election, the version of the Electoral College that Alexander Hamilton envisioned is one in which “there will be a constant probability that the post will be filled with characters uniquely suited to ability and virtue.” ‘, in fact never functioned as designed.”
Instead, the rise of political parties gave way to the current system. Voters on Election Day actually select Democratic or Republican electors who have pledged to cast their ballots their vote for their respective party’s nominee. It is a complicated practice that adds an unnecessary layer between the people and the presidency. Moreover, as Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a 2022 interview, “there are so many winding byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief.”
Trump tried to exploit these quirks in his failed bid to stay in office after his 2020 loss. But as a result, there has been no real wave of energy to abolish the Electoral College. In fact, the closest the country came to that was in 1970, after Richard Nixon ran away with the electoral vote but won the popular vote by less than 1% of the national total. The resulting constitutional amendment was passed by the House of Representatives but was approved in the Senate, a situation in which an antidemocratic institution could only be maintained through an antidemocratic process.
With the electoral system still firmly in place for next week’s elections, it will take very specific circumstances for Harris to prevail while losing the popular vote to Trump. As Nate Cohn of The New York Times explained last month, Trump’s lead in the Electoral College is fading as the gap between Harris’ lead in the national polls and the so-called “tipping point” state has narrowed. This is possible because Harris is doing well in the northern battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while Trump has eaten away at the margins in uncompetitive states like New York.
The fact that we even have to do these kinds of calculations to try to determine who could win the presidency is absurd. Current mechanisms disenfranchise both urban conservatives and rural liberals, replacing geography with political agency. A world in which the direct popular vote were decisive would force candidates to compete for every vote in every state. It would be another much-needed step in America’s century-long transformation from an amalgamation of independent states to a single national entity.
The question would then become whether Harris would run a different campaign than now, without the hyperfocus on swing states. And given her shift to the center and her intense focus on peeling away moderate Republicans, I can’t say she would. Nor would Trump be particularly inclined to choose the middle in that situation – not that he would have won in 2016 without the help of the Electoral College.
And the idea that Trump could win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College at the same time should not be a deterrent to its abolition. If that is truly the will of the American people, let it be directly on their heads that he is returned to the White House. Let it have been a real race for the hearts and minds of the entire electorate that ended the American experiment with democracy, and not the clinging to the scribbles of aristocrats who feared the power of their countrymen.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
