It seems that in every presidential election, the results come down to just a few so-called swing states. Why does that keep happening? The answer dates back to the 18th century.
Our Founding Fathers established the Electoral College as part of a Constitutional compromise between the more populous states in the North and the less populous but richer states in the South, which worried they would always be overruled. Each state was assigned a number of “electors” who would vote according to the state’s direction, and the number was based on the number of people (and ⅗ the number of slaves, as a further compromise with the plantation South) in each state. The electors vote in a “winner takes all” manner – whoever wins the state gets all of the state’s electoral votes.
However, as the nation continues to grow and change, the Electoral College becomes more and more controversial.
Electoral College Controversies
Electoral > People
In our nation’s history, only five presidents have won the presidency but lost the popular vote. Most recently, Al Gore had .5% more votes than President George W. Bush in 2000, and in 2016, Hillary Clinton had 2% more votes than Donald Trump. Even when that doesn’t happen, the Electoral College results are often significantly skewed from the popular vote results. In the 2024 General Election, President-Elect Donald Trump won the popular vote by 2.5% but amassed 58% of the Electoral College votes.
Two-Party > Third-Party
The Electoral College also locks third-party candidates out of being able to gain significant traction in an election, even with a strong popular vote. The last third-party candidate to win significant numbers of electoral votes was Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Voter Disenfranchment
State legislators allot electors, and states have often abused this power to give power to some areas – and some populations – over others. California, Tennessee, Vermont, and Georgia have a history of allotting too many electors to rural areas and not enough to urban ones, giving rural voters more power. This was often used to disenfranchise the Black vote. In Tennessee in the 1960s, for example, there was one representative for every 3,800 rural voters in the Eastern part of the state and one representative for every 70,000 voters in cities like Nashville and Memphis.
Swing States
The Electoral College ensures that only states with 50/50 Republican and Democratic populations are in contention in the election, effectively silencing the minority votes of states where that is not the case. That’s why every election seems to come down to just a handful of “swing states.”
Can we Change the Electoral College?
There have been more than 700 attempts to amend or abolish the Electoral College.
To amend or abolish the Electoral College would take a change to the Constitution – requiring two-thirds of Congress must approve the proposal, or two-thirds of states must call for a convention to put forth the proposal. Then three-fourths of state legislatures must ratify the amendment. In today’s age of polarized politics, getting three-fourths of states to do anything is unlikely, and the party in power is disincentivized to make the change.
In 1969, the U.S. House of Representatives proposed a Constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College. That amendment was stopped by a filibuster in the Senate.
We Can Make Change!
Currently, 17 states (including California) representing 209 electoral votes have passed a National Popular Vote bill supporting this effort. The bill requires 61 more electoral votes – in other words, several more states – to take effect.
There is another, more likely path to nullifying the Electoral College, and Nebraska and Maine have already shown the way.
Rather than the “winner take all” of the electoral votes, the electors in Nebraska and Maine vote the way their districts do, allowing the state to apportion the electoral votes according to how the state votes. Both Maine and Nebraska split their electoral votes in 2020.
Allocating the electoral votes based on the popular vote in the state is a much more representative way of casting electoral votes. If every state adopted such a policy, it would in effect nullify the issues of swing states and “winner takes all” and bring our nation closer to a representative democracy.