End the Electoral College

As of this writing, we know who the next president of the United States will be, even as it remains unclear which candidate— Kamala Harris or Donald Trump— will ultimately win the most votes. That fact highlights the problems with the way we elect a president, which puts virtually all the electoral power in the hands of a relative handful of voters, primarily swing voters in swing states.
A voter in Minnesota, which has the bluest track record in the country in presidential elections over the past half century, is of little interest to presidential candidates. Ditto for voters in the Dakotas, or Illinois, or California— places candidates never bother to visit anymore. It seems we’ve become the United States of Pennsylvania, since as far as campaigns judged this election season, voters in the Keystone State were the only ones who mattered. Sure, they visited the other swing states, most notably Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, and Wisconsin, but they all decided fairly early that the election would be decided by the residents of Pennsylvania.
This is not how it works in any other democracy and with good reason. When the public is led to believe they live in a democratic system, anti-democratic processes like the Electoral College undermine support for that system.
Most years, the electoral vote totals match the popular vote so the public is allowed to forget the undemocratic nature of our presidential selection process. Yet, increasingly, the Electoral College is diverging from the will of the American people. Out of the six most recent elections (not including 2024), the popular vote winner did not win the White House on two occasions because of the Electoral College. In other words, the person who the American people actually wanted to serve as president was denied that victory in one out of three elections.
It’s worth noting that, but for the Electoral College, it’s almost certain that Democrats would have controlled the White House continuously for the past 32 years, ever since Bill Clinton’s election in 1992. (While Republican G.W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004, he would not have been the incumbent at the time if not for the Electoral College). Indeed, were it not for the Electoral College, we would have a U.S. Supreme Court that was much more in line with the views of the majority of Americans.
Since the formation of the Republican Party in 1854, every instance when the Electoral College superseded the popular vote, it worked to the advantage of the GOP candidate. And that’s no fluke, since it was the GOP, in the late 1800s, that strategically used the rapid admission of a large number of Western states with very small populations (but well-established Republican political machines), to hold onto power in both the Senate and the White House even as their popularity in the country at large was declining with their ever-increasing fealty to that era’s Robber Barons. Dividing the Dakota Territory into North and South Dakota, or adding states like Idaho and Wyoming, which had almost no population at the time of admission, gave the Republicans additional seats in Congress and a systemic advantage in the Electoral College.
Likewise, the GOP has fought tooth and nail to block statehood for the District of Columbia (which has a larger population than Wyoming), and Puerto Rico, which has a population of about 3.3 million, roughly the same as Utah or Connecticut. While D.C. is allocated three electoral votes, it has no representation in Congress. Puerto Rico has no voting representation in Congress, nor is it allocated any electoral votes. The admission of these two places as states would add five electoral votes and four new senators (almost certainly favoring the Democrats).
When statehood is even suggested, Republicans accuse Democrats of playing power politics, but denying statehood to these places is exactly the kind of disenfranchisement of Americans that Republicans have been known for. It’s exactly the same reason that Republicans denied the admission of Democratic-leaning New Mexico to the union until 1912, despite the fact that the state had substantially greater population than most other Western states at the time. Wyoming was admitted to the union in 1890 with a population of 62,000, while efforts by Democrats to add New Mexico, with 160,000 residents as of 1890, were routinely blocked by Republicans.
While they like to point fingers at their opponents, it is the GOP that has been rigging our electoral system for more than a century, by elevating the power of lightly populated Republican-leaning states, while keeping Democratic voters in places like New Mexico, D.C. and Puerto Rico disenfranchised. Should the Democrats ever gain power again in Washington, they should use it to bring an end to the stacked deck the GOP has created.