The electoral college was not built for politics like this

Like so many institutions of American power, the Electoral College is based on the understanding that politicians will ultimately stand up for what is right and not for what is convenient for them. It is probably worth remembering that when the Constitution was written, American political parties functionally did not exist, so the notion of political factions pulling levers when convenient did not widely exist. When the Supreme Court had a vacancy, the president would simply appoint the best man for the job, the Senate would surely approve the nomination, and everybody would continue as normal.

There has always been an artificial imbalance between the Electoral College and popular sentiment around individual elections, even when the two do tend to strongly correlate. The insistence of the American South that disenfranchised Black voters, owned as property at the time, should count as citizens for the purpose of representation led to the absurd compromise, built on the premise that the truth must always be somewhere in the middle even if one party is barely pretending to act in good faith, that the enslaved would count as three-fifths of a person. Even setting aside the tilting of the scale that counting both proportional representatives and disproportional senators (again, the truth must be somewhere in the middle) towards the Electoral College causes, this created white electorates in Slave States wielding disproportionate individual power. This was arguably exacerbated in the period between Reconstruction and the 1960s, when Black voters were functionally kept from voting but they still counted when determining how many electoral votes the white majority received when they inevitably voted for those who would maintain the status quo.

The Electoral College has never been necessary, though it has rarely had a major effect on the results of presidential elections—between 1888 and 2000, every Electoral College winner also won the national popular vote. In 2000, the absurdity of the system came into full view for the American people when the result came down to the 25 electoral votes in Florida. Much has been written in great depth about irregularities and political corruption around the state, but two things are rarely disputed: the margin of victory in Florida was extremely narrow, and Al Gore won the national popular vote. The final tally in Florida was 537, less than a tenth of the margin of victory for Gore in Wisconsin. Had 538 of Gore’s Wisconsin voters moved to Florida, Al Gore would’ve won the election. Had all 5,708 of Al Gore’s margin of victory plus one moved from Wisconsin to Florida, Al Gore would’ve won the election.

For all of George W. Bush’s many flaws as a president, his 2000 campaign was a relatively moderate one—he cited the need for education reform in poorer areas and stressed the virtues of immigration. But the 2000 election marked a turning point in American politics not only because of how absurdly close the final tally was, but because of how much focus there was on the electoral map itself, a color-coded representation of electoral vote distribution with Democrats represented in blue and Republicans represented in red, a random color choice (uncalled states were white—red, white, and blue) that alternated every year and in this particular case contrasted with typical western color conventions which mark left-wing parties in red and conservative parties in blue. Because of the attention paid to Florida, these colors would become permanent fixtures. At the very first major party primary after the 2000 election, the 2004 Democratic National Convention, then-little-known Illinois state senator Barack Obama referred (with animosity to political divisions) to red states and blue states and everybody watching the convention at Boston’s FleetCenter and across the nation knew what he was referencing.

2000 exposed the anti-democratic (small d very intentional) nature of the Electoral College, but it did little to impact George W. Bush’s governance. The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was not an attack on a blue state—it was an attack on America. In the most notable case of George W. Bush being accused of political favoritism, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, it was regarding damage in a state that had voted for George W. Bush twice. Although residents of rural America, which mostly did not vote for him, would often accuse Barack Obama of elitism, this rarely manifested in concrete policy favoritism towards blue cities.

And then came Donald Trump.

On an organizational level, going beyond Trump’s own base impulses, the strategy for the Republican Party in 2016 gravitated around swing states, those which may have been won by narrow margins by Barack Obama but might flip from blue to red on the political map with a less popular Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, heading the presidential ticket. I do not begrudge the team for doing this—they were simply playing the game they had been tasked to play. And while Donald Trump has falsely claimed voter fraud is the reason he lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, there is something to the idea that by focusing on swing states, such as Michigan or Wisconsin, he neglected to campaign in larger states where he could have padded his popular vote total. But this was the first time in modern history where a candidate truly and decisively won the popular vote—a 2.1% margin was barely smaller than the margin by which George W. Bush won re-election in 2004—and failed to win the presidency.

The problem, not in terms of political races but in terms of political execution, is that Donald Trump did ally himself primarily with states that had helped him win. When wildfires ran rampant in California, a state which Trump had decisively lost, Trump withheld federal aid until it was explained to him that more people had voted for him in Orange County, California than had voted for him in Iowa. When Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, a territory which is home to over three million Americans but zero electoral votes, Donald Trump withheld aid for months. When the COVID-19 pandemic first struck down in the United States, primarily in Democratic-leaning coastal states such as Washington and New York, many Trump surrogates framed the virus as confined to blue cities and thus less consequential.

In the 2020 presidential election, 81,283,501 people voted for Joe Biden. 74,223,975 people voted for Donald Trump. 66,208,929 people, more than had voted for any prior presidential candidate aside from 2008 Barack Obama, voted for a candidate who did not win their home state. The state in which Donald Trump received the most votes was the aforementioned, neglected California. The states in which Joe Biden received the second and third-most votes were Florida and Texas, both of which were won by Donald Trump and are expected to be won by Trump again in 2024.

In addition to the fact that each state, regardless of size, has two senators, imbalance in the electoral college is caused by population shifts over the course of the decade in which electoral votes are assigned. In Florida, there was one electoral vote for every 381,636.41 voters; in Alaska and Wyoming (Trump states) and the District of Columbia (a Biden territory), there was one electoral vote for less than every 120,000 voters.

Supporters of the Electoral College have long advocated that without it, large states would control elections and small states would be absorbed into the electoral stew. But consider the gap in attention paid to Arizona, a narrowly decided Biden state with 11 electoral votes, and Tennessee, a state with 11 electoral votes that swung more heavily for Trump than any other state. Arizona was a major prize, highly coveted by both parties—in 2024, Senator Mark Kelly was frequently cited as a potential Kamala Harris running mate based largely on his ability to win voters in Arizona. Meanwhile, Tennessee was effectively ignored; neither Tennessee senators Marsha Blackburn nor Bill Hagerty received any serious consideration to be Donald Trump’s running mate in 2024 partially because it made no tactical political sense.

That the Republican Party hosted a rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden, in the heart of Manhattan, was much-mocked by political journalists who noted that New York, particularly New York City, is not considered up for grabs in 2024. These pundits are not incorrect from a tactical perspective, but this is a referendum on the political system that campaigning in a city with over eight million people is considered a tactical misfire. More residents in New York City voted for Donald Trump than did residents of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming combined. Both Brooklyn and Queens had more Trump voters than Wyoming or Alaska. Only two “red states”—Texas and Florida—had more Republican voters than the state of New York.

And because New York does not matter from a political standpoint in 2024, where Kamala Harris will almost certainly sail to victory—although the state party has been in disarray of late, Biden’s 23.13% margin of victory should be a bridge too far one election later—Republicans are comfortable dismissing the people who live there. In addition to, most notably, the residents of Puerto Rico, the nearly 600,000 New York City residents of Puerto Rican heritage are so disposable to them that the Republicans can trot out a comedian to open for their presidential candidate, refer to the island as a pile of trash, and reasonably expect the political consequences to be negligible.

The American Electoral College is functionally a game, giving a handful of relatively small states the nation’s political power. By placing all of a state’s electors to one candidate, there is great incentive to win that state, but not great incentive to increase one’s margin in that state. Ironically, two otherwise small, fairly partisan states have given themselves disproportionate political power by eschewing the winner-take-all model—Nebraska and Maine. Although Nebraska is a blood-red state as a whole, the city of Omaha is a liberal bastion and while its suburbs and exurbs give its congressional district a more purple hue, Nebraska’s second congressional district will receive far more attention from political candidates than any of, say, Missouri’s congressional districts will receive at the presidential level. Conversely, while Maine as a whole tends to vote Democratic at the presidential level, its second district, the more rural of the state’s two, has a more Republican lean.

The idea that Wyoming would be ignored if elections were determined by a national popular vote is not itself incorrect, but the idea that it would be any more ignored does not carry much weight. With a national popular vote, 66,208,929 people whose votes were not a part of the 2020 election would be included. The Electoral College is a system whose very existence is based on precedent—if we had a national popular vote and somebody proposed a system in which census data up to a decade old influences a mostly-but-not-exactly system of representation, they would be laughed out of the room.

The reason that this stupid system continues to exist is because it does have a partisan lean—Republicans have particularly sought out less densely populated states, and with the exceptions of Florida and North Carolina, the eight states in the top ten of least proportionally represented voted for Joe Biden. One of the more openly cynical arguments made by Mitch McConnell in his mostly admirable case against challenging certain states in the 2020 election was that he expected his fellow Republicans to stand by these results because he understands that while these results do not assure Republican victory, they make one considerably more likely.

What is the road forward? Well, if Texas—slowly but surely becoming a little bit more progressive every year—is narrowly won by a Democrat in the near future, it is within the realm of possibility that a Democrat could win the Electoral College but not the popular vote (though Republicans have only won the popular vote one time since I was born in 1989). In theory, states can break up their electoral college votes like Maine and Nebraska (which functionally offset each other), but the Democratic majority in California or New York is not going to sign off on a system in which they receive a majority-but-not-all of the votes when Republican-led states will still give all of their votes to a Republican candidate.

The Electoral College is a textbook example of the prisoner’s dilemma. It would take collective action to upend this system, and it would benefit American democracy to do so, but if one side relents, they acquiesce to the other side. But in the meantime, we see a political system where the parties, especially the Republicans, have gamed it enough that anti-democratic results are inevitable.