Democrats Have Bigger Problems Than the Electoral College

If the current constitutional structure frequently
yielded electoral count victors who lost the national majority vote, then
indeed, the Constitution should be amended, and liberals should support such an
amendment. But that’s not what’s
happened. In the 235 years since the Constitution was first ratified, popular-majority winners have lost the electoral count a mere five times—in 1824, 1876,
1888, 2000, and 2016.
In the same vein, if the current constitutional procedure
systematically disadvantages liberals or Democrats, they should absolutely favor
junking it. But that widely believed fact is also incorrect. While it’s true
that the electoral count provisions of the Constitution give individual voters
in thinly populated states more sway over their states’ electoral vote winners
than individual voters in densely populated states, the real-world partisan
impact of that abstract defect is negligible or nonexistent. Historically, the
left-right tilt of virtually all states, big and small, has shifted often and
will surely shift again. Even the “solid South” included exceptions not too
long ago, e.g., in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee. And now Georgia and North Carolina are
competitive. At present, as Timothy Noah points
out, of the 10 smallest states, those with three or four electoral votes,
only half tilt red.
In actuality, the Electoral College is a phantom target. What
its critics actually have in mind is the “winner-take-all” arrangement
that governs the choice of electors in all but two small states—Maine and
Nebraska. But that arrangement, despite
its near-universality, is not mandated by the Constitution at all. The Constitution merely requires that, every 10 years, the federal government must conduct a national census, on the basis
of which each state is allotted a percentage of the total number of electors
proportionate to its share of the national population. But how states choose to select their
electors is entirely up to each state. For at least a century, states’ electors
have been slates picked by majorities of eligible voters. Hence, the Electoral College set up by the Constitution has long functioned as a mere pass-through
for state-wide popular majorities. (Eligibility, of course, has not always
encompassed all appropriate residents or even citizens.)