Since the 2000 presidential election, when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore despite losing the popular vote, the left has insisted that the Electoral College is undemocratic and structurally biased in favor of the GOP — never mind that it was enshrined in the Constitution two generations before the Republican Party was founded.
The notion that Trump enjoys an intrinsic Electoral College advantage is just BS.
Calls to abolish or reform the Electoral College have become particularly shrill since Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential race with fewer popular votes than Hillary Clinton received. The latest “evidence” cited by those who would change the way we elect our presidents involves the relatively small number of genuinely competitive states.
As Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote in a recent column, “There are really only three states that will decide the presidential election: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia.” This is nonsense, yet Martin offers it as evidence that the Electoral College favors the GOP.
It’s true that, if Trump wins these states plus every other state he won in 2020, he will reach 270. But this isn’t about structural bias in the electoral system. It’s about Trump’s polling compared to the last election. In 2020 he consistently trailed Biden by 5-10 points. Now, the RCP average shows Harris struggling to rise above a 2-point national lead and a virtual tie in the swing states. Thus Martin’s obsession with Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia:
It’s the most obvious route for the former president and a reminder of the advantage the Electoral College can confer on a Republican. Should Trump defeat Harris in Pennsylvania, a state President Joe Biden spent much of his childhood in and still only carried by about 80,000 votes, her hopes then hinge on a pair of slightly right-of-center states Democrats have carried once each in this century: North Carolina (won by Barack Obama in 2008) and Georgia, which lined up with Biden in 2020.
Martin never explains how the Electoral College “confers” an advantage to Trump, of course. Like most critics of that much-maligned feature of our constitutional structure, he simply asserts that it is somehow biased in favor of Republicans as if the validity of the claim is self-evident.
The purveyors of this nonsense never bother to explain how voters “trapped” in such an unfair electoral system managed to produce a roughly equal number of Democratic (17) and Republican (19) presidents. In reality, that unlikely balance is directly attributable to the Electoral College, and the most probable result of meddling with it will be heavy-handed rule by a small cadre of powerful politicians from the high-population states.
Nonetheless, a decades-long drumbeat of Democratic propaganda seems to have convinced a majority of Americans that the Electoral College should be replaced with a system whereby the President is directly elected by a nationwide popular vote.
According to a survey conducted by the “nonpartisan” Pew Research Center, “More than six-in-ten Americans (63 percent) would instead prefer to see the winner of the presidential election be the person who wins the most votes nationally. Roughly a third (35 percent) favors retaining the Electoral College system.” Fortunately, a constitutional amendment is required to make such a change in the way we elect presidents. But, as CBS reports, there is a movement to bypass the amendment process:
For two decades, there’s been an effort to change the way the U.S. has always elected its presidents by creating a workaround to the Electoral College, the indirect popular election process that’s been used in every American presidential election.… Under the nonpartisan National Popular Vote Compact, the most prominent of the Electoral College reform proposals, states would agree to give their electoral votes to the national winner of the popular vote, even if it doesn’t match the outcome in their state.
For a sense of how “nonpartisan” this movement is, a list of states that have agreed to this end run around the Constitution is instructive: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.
Can anyone guess what is missing from this catalogue of collusion? It contains precisely zero Republican-controlled states. According to the proponents of the National Popular Vote Compact, it cannot go into effect until the states that have signed on possess a collective total of 270 electoral votes. In reality, if they ever reach that number, the whole project will be deep-sixed by the Supreme Court.
This will force the Democrats to search for yet another way to avoid the pesky constitutional guardrails that protect the Electoral College. And they do seem to possess an aptitude for getting around the rules. Meanwhile, the upcoming election will be conducted — more or less — in accordance with the vision of the Framers. Does this mean that Donald Trump and the Republicans have an unfair electoral advantage as November looms?
Only in the sense that they are attempting to win by convincing voters their policies lead to peace and prosperity. The notion that Trump enjoys an intrinsic Electoral College advantage is just BS.
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