Going to College

It could happen again. It happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and it could happen to Kamala Harris in 2024, once again benefitting Donald Trump.

It's possible for Harris to win the popular vote and lose the presidential election thanks to the Electoral College, and every time the winner of the popular vote comes up short in the electoral vote, it always seems to be a Democrat holding onto the short end of the stick, thanks nowadays in part to Republicans dominating Texas, Florida, and a multitude of less populated states in the nation's midsection.

The reason for the Electoral College in the Constitution is usually given as slavery, mainly due to the slave states wanting an increased role in selecting the President and Vice President.  The constitutional clause basing the number of electors for each state on how many House and Senate members a state sends to Congress - at a time when slave states could count every five slaves as the equivalent of three citizens for the number of representatives they would send to the House -  certainly lends a great deal of truth to that, but it is hardly the only reason.  Another reason, according to Alexander Hamilton, was to ensure that the President and Vice President were chosen by private citizens who would vote on behalf or the people and who also could make sound judgments based on their better education and their deeper knowledge of the candidates.  In other words, Hamilton - and many of the other framers - didn't trust the judgment of the masses and and wanted people who knew the presidential candidates more intimately than the hoi polloi.  Each elector would vote for a first choice and a second choice, he runner-up in the election would be elected Vice President, and a bare majority of electoral votes - 35 in the first presidential election of 1789 - were needed to win, else the House would elect the President.

The plan worked perfectly - and then it didn't.  The states were left to decide how electors would be chosen, and most of them decided to have their legislatures choose them.  At the start, everyone agreed that George Washington should be President.  All of the electors voted for him in the first two elections, and John Adams, as the runner-up in each case, was twice elected Vice President.  Then, as parties formed, inconsistencies and difficulties started screwing things up.  Electors became more partisan, and the election of 1796 resulted in Adams, a Federalist Party member, being elected President and Thomas Jefferson, the leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, ending up as Vice President. When 138 electors were chosen in the election of 1800, 73 of them were Democratic-Republican electors, and they voted for Jefferson and Aaron Burr, resulting in a tie - the electors had intended for Burr to be Vice President, but there was no way to indicate that on the ballot.   The tie was broken in the House in favor of Jefferson, and the Constitution was amended in advance of the 1804 election to have electors specify and indicate their choice for President and their choice for Vice President (and it gave the Senate the power to choose a Vice President of no vice presidential candidate got a majority.

With the two-party system firmly established by the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans and the evolution of popularly chosen electors, the participating parties changing until settling into the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as of 1856, the Electoral College turned into a mere formality where the electors - once meant to be independent thinkers with educated choices based on sound judgment - became mere echoes of the popular choice.   While some states allow electors to vote their conscience, in many if not most states electors are expected to choose the nominee of their party.  For all intents and purposes, the Electoral College have mostly ratified the choice of the masses since 1828, when Andrew Jackson became the first popularly elected President.  In some states, as in New Jersey, the people vote for a whole slate of electors without even knowing their names.  That's how irrelevant the Electoral College has largely become.  This was fine, as long as it reflected the will of the people.

And after the disputed election of 1876, in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tilden by the barest electoral margin despite losing the popular vote, and the election of 1888, when President Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the Presidency to former GOP Senator Benjamin Harrison in the electoral vote, the Electoral College did, for quite a long time, reflect the will of the people. Franklin D. Roosevelt won four presidential elections in huge landslides - especially in 1936, when he won 46 out of 48 states - and John F. Kennedy won a close race in 1960 that could have been closer if he'd lost Illinois. (Kennedy won by an electoral vote of 303 to Richard M. Nixon's 219. Without Illinois, Kennedy still would have won, 276 to 246.) With the more recent examples of Democratic popular-vote winners losing the White House in the Electoral College, there are calls to abolish the Electoral College and let the President and Vice President be chosen directly by the people.

Be careful what you wish for.  The Electoral College has been beneficial in many cases where the parties broke down and split apart in attempting to choose a presidential ticket.  The Electoral College may have saved the Union. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln came in first in the popular vote in a four-man race with two Democratic candidates, Stephen Douglas and John C. Breckinridge - the Democratic party splitting over slavery - and a centrist candidate from what was left of the old Whig Party.  However, Lincoln only won 39 percent of the popular vote because an overwhelming aversion to him from over six out of ten voters. In New York State, which ultimately decided the election, the Democrats ran a fusion ticket to block Lincoln and to split the electoral votes between different candidates. If 25,000 votes had gone the other way, Douglas or Breckinridge might have become President of the United States because Lincoln would have won only 145 electoral votes - seven short of a majority - and the election would have been submitted to the House, where Lincoln would have lost because the Democrats controlled that chamber. (Lincoln won New York and the election with 180 electoral votes.)  Similarly, in 1912, the split between President William H. Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt caused a great fissure in the Republican Party that led to Roosevelt forming a rival party and standing for the Presidency.  The Democratic candidate, New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson, whose liberal policy proposals were similar to Roosevelt's came in first in the popular vote with Roosevelt finishing second.  But Wilson was a minority President, winning only 41 percent of the vote, and his solid win in the electoral vote - 435 votes with 266 needed to win - sanctified his victory.

So how would we reform the presidential selection process, especially when the Electoral College increasingly relies on a handful of swing states as many states become less bipartisan?  Have the President and Vice President popular elected and have a runoff between the top two presidential tickets if no one gets a majority?  Sure, let's make the already interminable electoral process even longer!  If we're going to have a system like that, perhaps the best thing to do would be to reform the nomination process.  Since the mid-1970s, the presidential nomination process has mirrored the presidential election process, with party members voting for delegates pledged to vote for their choice for the presidential nomination and the convention delegates voting in a predetermined roll call just like the electors voting in December.  Before the modern primary and caucus system, though, the parties vetted the potential candidates for their presidential nominations with little input from the rank-and-file.  Women and people of color may complain about how this system was dominated by white men, but this system gave us Franklin D. Roosevelt (nominated on the fourth ballot in 1932),  Harry S. Truman (nominated for Vice President on the second ballot in 1944, when most party insiders knew that FDR could not survive a fourth presidential term), Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. The parties must once again vet the presidential candidates if the electors will not or cannot do so.     

In fact, the Democratic Party just did use this system to nominate Kamala D. Harris.  And the Republicans, counting on the will of the rank-and-file party members, renominated Donald J. Trump.

(Below is the current allotment of electors based on the 2020 census.)