Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren recently told an audience in Jackson, Mississippi that she supports doing away with the Electoral College. At least two other 2020 contenders, Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Robert Francis O’Rourke, have also signaled their potential support for replacing the Electoral College (EC) system with a national popular vote. What is the real motive here, and what would future general elections look like without the Electoral College system?
Left-wing politicians have an amazing ability to earnestly make the argument that their policy proposals will solve certain perceived problems, even when logic alone demonstrates that the exact opposite is true. In keeping with this bizarre practice, Warren told her supporters in Jackson that using the national popular vote to elect a president would mean that every vote counts equally. She also suggested that campaigning to win the national popular vote would force candidates to take their campaigns to states that, like Mississippi, are mostly overlooked in the race to gain 270 EC votes.
Elizabeth Warren
Flaws in the Argument
The Democratic argument starts to take shape, then: The candidates will focus their attention only on that handful of states that command significant numbers of potentially undecided EC votes. Supporters of the national popular vote also argue that the opinions of Mississippi Democrats are worth little since the state will inevitably go to the Republican candidate. Likewise, New York Republicans are all but wasting their time even casting a vote for president.
Did the ballots marked by these Mississippi Democrats and New York Republicans really have no worth, though? They did get to vote, but they are simply outnumbered in their respective states. So, at the most basic level, the argument against the Electoral College is that those who backed the losing candidate were somehow disenfranchised; their choices meant nothing because most voters in their states are affiliated with the other party.
The national popular vote does not really solve that problem. In this political system dominated by two increasingly polarized parties, there is always going to be a majority who gets the candidate they want and a minority who does not. In theory, a full 49% of the voting public could claim that they are not represented because the other 51% outvoted them. Ultimately – under both the Electoral College system and the national popular vote – if the candidate one chooses does not win, one feels as though his or her vote was meaningless.
In fact, the national popular vote system would permanently disenfranchise a significant portion of the U.S. population. Rural America would simply have no further say in the election of future presidents. Overwhelmingly, rural America votes Republican. Perhaps there is a connection.
Campaigning for president is an expensive business and everyone who takes a shot at it must consider where their dollars will go the furthest. Getting to 270 EC votes requires those running to fight over four or five crucial states – those that have enough EC votes to swing an election but have politically divided populations. Florida and Ohio are prime examples.
States upon which a candidate can rely for its EC votes get less attention, as do those that are known to be beyond reach. Reliably red Mississippi, for example, probably won’t get many visits from the Republican candidate who can count on the state’s votes while the Democratic candidate is unlikely to spend time in this state, knowing he or she will not get those EC votes.
Would Mississippians receive more attention from candidates who need a popular vote majority to win the White House? Unlikely. The bulk of the campaigning would take place in the most populous states. There are 23 with populations of over five million, and another ten with between four and five million. Mississippi falls just shy of three million. How many candidates would spend time there when they have those 33 most populous states to attract?
Consider, also, that the 13 most populous U.S. cities, combined, have a population greater than that of the 17 least populous states, combined. Where are candidates going to spend their time and campaign dollars, then?
Democracy and the Popular Vote
The problem with a democratic electoral system is that it almost always leads to the election of someone who the majority did not vote for but who just happened to gain a plurality of votes. In 2016, for example, Hillary Clinton received 65.8 million votes (rounded down) while more than 69 million Americans voted for someone else – either Donald Trump or one of the three other candidates. In effect, then – if the 2016 election had been decided by national popular vote – Clinton would have become president even though most people who voted did not choose her.
It seems, then, that unless a candidate would be required to win an absolute majority of the votes cast, the national popular vote would be no fairer than the Electoral College. While advocates of the popular vote can argue that the winning candidate should be the one with the most votes, opponents of the idea could make the same argument. Hillary Clinton did not receive the majority of votes cast in 2016, so why should she have been elected president?
The greatest threat posed by the national popular vote, however, is the dismantling of the republic. A national popular vote for president would, by definition, require federal control over the electoral process nationwide. States could not simply maintain their own rules and procedures and the federal government would impose national rules covering every aspect of electioneering and voting practices.
The Real Goal: One-Party Rule
Elizabeth Warren and her Democratic Party colleagues are not pushing this change to create a more equitable system; they are pushing it because they believe it is the surest path to perpetual one-party rule. In about two-thirds of American states, voters register by party affiliation and registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by around 12 million across those states.
Though Democratic politicians are making a mistake by using this statistic as proof of electoral advantage, they are doing just that and see the national popular vote as a guaranteed win for them. Once they – as the party in power – bring national voting under their control, they will never lose another election. The republic will be gone, genuine popular representation will be gone, and the United States will be a virtual dictatorship.
