Imagine that an American born in 1889 had lived to the extremely unlikely age of 110. That man or woman would have never seen a single election in which someone was elected President while losing the popular vote.
That’s how reliable the Electoral College was till the turn of this century. Mostly, the Electoral College worked to increase the margin, and thus the legitimacy, of the winner.
For example, the first George Bush got a little more than 53 percent of the vote against Michael Dukakis in 1988. But he got 79 percent of the electoral vote. Twenty years ago, I was a strong defender of the Electoral College, for all its faults.
Among the things I liked about it was this: If we didn’t have it, you can bet presidential nominees would only campaign in major cities, where they would go to raise money.
Mostly, they would just campaign on TV. New Hampshire, which has a mere four electoral votes, would never see a candidate after its famous primary.
But New Hampshire gets plenty of attention because it is now a swing state, in an era when the electorate is closely divided and most states are safe for one party or the other.
Just in case you’ve forgotten, the Electoral College is a lot like a board game. Each state has a number based on its population, but which can’t be lower than three. For example, Michigan has 16, Vermont 3, and California 55, the most of any state.
With the exception of Maine and Nebraska, it is a winner-take-all system. Win Iowa by a single popular vote, for example, and you get all of Iowa’s six electoral votes.
Win it by half a million, and you still get six votes. What you’ve got to do is win enough states to get to 270. Though it has always been possible to do that while losing the popular vote, it never happened for more than a century, till George W. Bush was elected.
That, however, was rightly seen as a fluke. Bush ended up winning 271 electoral votes to 267 for Al Gore, while Gore won the popular vote by less than one half of one percent. And of course, Bush only won after the U.S. Supreme Court essentially stopped the Florida recount.
What happened two years ago was a much more troubling breakdown of the system. Hillary Clinton got nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump, beating him 48 to 46 percent. But Trump won 306 electoral votes to mere 232 for Clinton.
That wasn’t, by the way, the actual electoral vote. Five “faithless electors,” three of Clinton’s and two of Trump’s, refused to vote for the candidate to whom they were pledged.
But when it comes to the current system, Republicans tend to like this “Electoral Dysfunction” just fine, because they’ve gotten two presidents they otherwise wouldn’t have had. But they forget that John Kerry came close to winning Ohio in 2004. Had he done so, he would have been president even though George Bush had a solid popular vote majority.
The movement to get a National Popular Vote interstate compact that would always elect the popular vote winner is the only realistic way to do anything about this.
It would take years to amend the Constitution, even if that were politically possible, and it’s not. I’m not completely convinced we should scrap the Electoral College.
But every system needs a safety valve – and this could be it.
