There was serious confusion among my extended family after Election Day in 2016. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton clearly gained more individual votes than Republican nominee Donald Trump — nearly 3 million more. But Trump clearly, and with room to spare, won the only vote total that mattered: the Electoral College.
“I thought the person who the most people voted for was president,” one family member who voted for Trump told me.
Fast forward to today: It all could happen again. The national polls tend to give a slight advantage to Vice President Kamala Harris. Yet the states needed to win slightly favor the former president. And with the underpolling of Trump voters in past cycles, it would be reasonable to give him the edge.
Much discussion about the Electoral College’s merits rests on thinly veiled partisan hopes. Democrats harbor frustration at the prospect of winning more popular votes than Republicans in a loss for the third time in 25 years. Republicans know the Electoral College tends to favor them and wish the system to go on to maintain that advantage.
But we should consider the less partisan arguments for and against how we select our president.
Those opposing the Electoral College in favor of a national popular vote have a simple and powerful point. Our country is based on the principle of equality, which requires the consent of the governed, especially through voting. A system that treats each person’s vote equally conforms to our principles. A system that weights those votes based on geography violates our commitment to equality.
Those supporting the Electoral College have another problem. They cannot simply point to the intent of the Constitution’s framers. If you read Federalist 68’s defense of the Electoral College, it looks almost nothing like how our system works today. The Founders envisioned the college as a body of respected citizens, chosen by voters, to deliberate and freely choose who they thought should occupy the presidential office. Today, electors mostly do and usually legally must merely parrot the popular vote outcomes of their states.
Yet good reasons remain for keeping our Electoral College system in place.
The Electoral College protects certain principles of just and good governance. It still mostly tracks the popular vote. But the framers recognized that who would get the most votes isn’t all that matters. What also matters is having a system more likely to select better candidates and privilege more just outcomes. Our entire constitutional system consistently rejects pure democracy for republicanism aware of and trying to limit its own vices.
The Electoral College, while not complete itself, helps on these fronts. It maintains an important place for the states and thus maintains something of our battered and weak federalism. Candidates and campaigns must think of states as individual body politics rather than merely of mass interest groups composed of individual voters.
The system’s greatest contribution, though, comes in the moderation of our politics. It fosters this moderation by requiring candidates to build coalitions of voters well beyond their hardcore base.
First, the Electoral College requires a majority of its votes, not just a plurality. Neither Trump nor Harris can hope to win outright by just getting the most progressive or MAGA-dedicated voters to show up.
Second, building this majority requires appealing to voters geographically outside your core constituency. Trump cannot merely run up vote totals in the South or Harris on the coasts. To win, Trump must make some appeals to suburban and urban voters. Harris, too, cannot entirely ignore rural voters, as Clinton did in 2016.
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Third, this last point means that presidential candidates do have to pay attention to voters who live in sparsely populated regions of contested states and those places with less cultural and economic clout. The forgotten Americans have and can again tip the scales for those who pay attention to them and against those who ignore them.
These points push presidential campaigns to build a broader tent to win the necessary 270 electoral votes. We need this push more now than ever. The separation of our society geographically and online has bred less conversation, less common understanding, and more extreme ideologies. We should keep the Electoral College as one means to get healthier politics.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor at Ashland University.