Peter Augustine Lawler: The Electoral College: Top 10 Stengths & Weaknesses
[Peter Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College in Georgia. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Postmodernism Rightly Understood, Stuck With Virtue, Aliens in America, and Homeless and at Home in America.]
1. A big reason third-party candidates don’t fare well in America is that they’re usually not really competitive for winning electors. Perot got 19% of the popular vote in 1992. But he didn’t win any electors because he didn’t win the plurality of the vote in any particular state. Perot’s vote was probably significantly depressed by voter perception that it’s a waste to vote for a candidate who can’t possibly win the electors in your state. That was certainly the explanation for the rapid decline of support in the last weeks of the campaign for independent candidate John Anderson in 1980. Ralph Nader also experienced a last-minute loss of support in 2000. From Gore’s standpoint, Nader didn’t suffer quite enough of a collapse; the votes allegedly wasted on Nader were the real reason Gore fell just short of winning the electors of the crucial state of Florida.
2. A strength of the Electoral College: Every ambitious man and woman has a powerful incentive to find a home in one of the two major parties. Doing what’s required to win a major party’s nomination can’t help but have a moderating effect on candidates with extreme views. No moderation, in fact, usually means no nomination. That’s why neither the Rev. Pat Robertson nor the Rev. Jesse Jackson emerged as his party’s nominee. A weakness of the Electoral College: It’s very hard to bring real change through starting a new party. In the midst of our economic crisis, lots of Americans probably wish they could choose a third-party alternative such as Mayor Bloomberg.
3. The fact that it’s obviously pointless to vote for a candidate who’s not competitive for your state’s electoral vote actually points to the main weakness of the Electoral College. Voters have little incentive to turn out in non-competitive (non-Battleground) states. It makes no difference at all whether Obama gets 28% or 41% of the vote in Utah; he’s getting no electors either way. And the same thing could be said about McCain in Massachusetts. The campaigns, knowing this, usually focus most of their time, effort, and money in relatively few states, virtually ignoring a majority of the country’s voters.
4. A strength of the Electoral College: It forces candidates to campaign on a state-by-state basis. A weakness: It keeps them from having any reason to wage genuinely national campaigns aimed equally at each American voter.
5. The main reason there won’t be any Electoral College reform any time soon is that our present system actually tends to favor the Democratic candidate. New York and California are both solidly Democratic states, and so the Republican candidate starts way behind.
6. The election of 2000—with the Republican Bush narrowly winning the electoral vote and narrowly losing the popular vote—was a bit of a fluke. And if you believe that Gore really carried Florida, it wasn’t even that.
7. 2004 was more revealing. Bush won the popular vote by something like three million votes. But his electoral vote victory depended on his very narrow margin in Ohio. If something like thirty thousand Ohio voters had voted for Kerry instead of Bush, Kerry would have won the election while suffering a significant defeat in the popular vote.
8. The main weakness of one candidate winning the popular vote and the other the electoral vote is the effect such a result can have on the presidency. A considerable part of the president’s power comes from the mandate he or she receives through popular election. At least these days, a president without a mandate can easily lack the energy to govern effectively. Consider, for example, how President Bush languished until 9/11–the crisis that energized him, no doubt for both good and bad. Also consider how weak President McCain would be if he got elected the way Bush did.
9. It seems that the big danger posed by the Electoral College this year would be Obama winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote. The resulting racial animosity would make that result seem especially illegitimate.
10. But a very close popular vote this year might cause us to be reminded of a virtue of the Electoral College. The electors might still give us a clear winner. In 1960, the popular vote was a virtual tie, but Kennedy’s electoral vote majority was decisive enough. The worst-case scenario would be controversial recounts in a couple of exceedingly close states. The whole nation wouldn’t have to be recounted. That, in fact, would be mission impossible, and allegations of voter fraud would run amok on both sides.
In any case, the most cogent argument against just about every proposal to reform or eliminate the Electoral College is that each would require the nationalization of our election laws. That would be a major change in the way we conduct our democracy, with all sorts of unexpected consequences. Right now, strictly or legally speaking, there is no national “popular vote,” but only fifty state results that are unofficially aggregated by the media. All in all, we don’t have enough evidence that the Electoral College is broke enough to need fixing.
Read entire article at Britannica Blog
1. A big reason third-party candidates don’t fare well in America is that they’re usually not really competitive for winning electors. Perot got 19% of the popular vote in 1992. But he didn’t win any electors because he didn’t win the plurality of the vote in any particular state. Perot’s vote was probably significantly depressed by voter perception that it’s a waste to vote for a candidate who can’t possibly win the electors in your state. That was certainly the explanation for the rapid decline of support in the last weeks of the campaign for independent candidate John Anderson in 1980. Ralph Nader also experienced a last-minute loss of support in 2000. From Gore’s standpoint, Nader didn’t suffer quite enough of a collapse; the votes allegedly wasted on Nader were the real reason Gore fell just short of winning the electors of the crucial state of Florida.
2. A strength of the Electoral College: Every ambitious man and woman has a powerful incentive to find a home in one of the two major parties. Doing what’s required to win a major party’s nomination can’t help but have a moderating effect on candidates with extreme views. No moderation, in fact, usually means no nomination. That’s why neither the Rev. Pat Robertson nor the Rev. Jesse Jackson emerged as his party’s nominee. A weakness of the Electoral College: It’s very hard to bring real change through starting a new party. In the midst of our economic crisis, lots of Americans probably wish they could choose a third-party alternative such as Mayor Bloomberg.
3. The fact that it’s obviously pointless to vote for a candidate who’s not competitive for your state’s electoral vote actually points to the main weakness of the Electoral College. Voters have little incentive to turn out in non-competitive (non-Battleground) states. It makes no difference at all whether Obama gets 28% or 41% of the vote in Utah; he’s getting no electors either way. And the same thing could be said about McCain in Massachusetts. The campaigns, knowing this, usually focus most of their time, effort, and money in relatively few states, virtually ignoring a majority of the country’s voters.
4. A strength of the Electoral College: It forces candidates to campaign on a state-by-state basis. A weakness: It keeps them from having any reason to wage genuinely national campaigns aimed equally at each American voter.
5. The main reason there won’t be any Electoral College reform any time soon is that our present system actually tends to favor the Democratic candidate. New York and California are both solidly Democratic states, and so the Republican candidate starts way behind.
6. The election of 2000—with the Republican Bush narrowly winning the electoral vote and narrowly losing the popular vote—was a bit of a fluke. And if you believe that Gore really carried Florida, it wasn’t even that.
7. 2004 was more revealing. Bush won the popular vote by something like three million votes. But his electoral vote victory depended on his very narrow margin in Ohio. If something like thirty thousand Ohio voters had voted for Kerry instead of Bush, Kerry would have won the election while suffering a significant defeat in the popular vote.
8. The main weakness of one candidate winning the popular vote and the other the electoral vote is the effect such a result can have on the presidency. A considerable part of the president’s power comes from the mandate he or she receives through popular election. At least these days, a president without a mandate can easily lack the energy to govern effectively. Consider, for example, how President Bush languished until 9/11–the crisis that energized him, no doubt for both good and bad. Also consider how weak President McCain would be if he got elected the way Bush did.
9. It seems that the big danger posed by the Electoral College this year would be Obama winning the popular vote but losing the electoral vote. The resulting racial animosity would make that result seem especially illegitimate.
10. But a very close popular vote this year might cause us to be reminded of a virtue of the Electoral College. The electors might still give us a clear winner. In 1960, the popular vote was a virtual tie, but Kennedy’s electoral vote majority was decisive enough. The worst-case scenario would be controversial recounts in a couple of exceedingly close states. The whole nation wouldn’t have to be recounted. That, in fact, would be mission impossible, and allegations of voter fraud would run amok on both sides.
In any case, the most cogent argument against just about every proposal to reform or eliminate the Electoral College is that each would require the nationalization of our election laws. That would be a major change in the way we conduct our democracy, with all sorts of unexpected consequences. Right now, strictly or legally speaking, there is no national “popular vote,” but only fifty state results that are unofficially aggregated by the media. All in all, we don’t have enough evidence that the Electoral College is broke enough to need fixing.