Liberals: The Electoral College Is Not Your Enemy

That Donald Trump managed to win both the electoral vote and the popular vote has finally provided Democrats and liberals with the chance to correct a deeply ingrained misconception: the reflexive meme that the Electoral College is a structural barrier that systematically stacks the national electoral playing field against them. Factually, that grievance may have seemed correct in 2016, but historically, it is very wrong. Functionally, the Electoral College bugaboo serves as a self-serving excuse for liberals to avoid facing up to their real problem—resistance by increasingly dominant, comparatively well-heeled, college-educated culture warriors to piercing their bubbles, empathetically recognizing flyover working- and middle-class constituencies’ concerns and interests, and accommodating them enough to win back a meaningful slice of those constituencies.

Make no mistake: It is worthwhile to devise and hoist institutional electoral reform banners. But there are better alternatives to a national majority vote amendment. In particular, one such alternative would be enlarging the number of members of the House of Representatives, frozen at 435 since 1910, when the nation’s population was barely more than a quarter of its current 336 million. Such a change would bring large states’ electoral clout more in line with their share of the population, but requires only legislation, not a constitutional amendment. It also could be more palatable politically, and is better tailored to address the real-world societal and constitutional interests actually at stake.

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.)

In other words, the much-lambasted winner-take-all electoral count “system” exists because all states big and small voluntarily see it in their respective best interests to adopt it. It is not hard to understand why. For large states, winner-take-all materially boosts the extent to which the national government and national political candidates must pay attention to their interests. For small states, the advantage is largely symbolic; having three or four of 535 electors, rather than, say, one, rarely if ever boosts an individual state’s impact on the outcome of a presidential election in any material way.

At the founding, most states assigned their legislatures to select electors. But in 1800, Virginia, then the most populous state, switched to popular winner-take-all, to ensure that all its votes went to its favored candidate, Virginia’s own Thomas Jefferson; other states gradually followed suit, likewise to increase their national clout. By 1836, all states but one—South Carolina—used popular majority procedures to select presidential electors. In 1872, every state opted for popular vote majority winner-take-all.

For Democrats and liberals to make a major election reform proposal a high priority, devoting to it major resources and high visibility, any such proposal must meet three threshold criteria. First, it must be feasible: There must be a credible path to enactment, however challenging or long-term. Next, it should be of some benefit, or at least not harm their own interests, policy goals, values, or political infrastructure; in other words a level playing field on which to play. Finally, it must benefit the public interest—that is, it should enhance the Constitution’s core goal of an effective, durable democratic republic.

This means a national government that’s ultimately accountable to popular majorities but equipped with the broad powers necessary to attain the Framers’ carefully chosen policy goals—“to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Further, as a republic, the Constitution hems in the expansive powers of Congress and, especially, the president, with institutional checks and balances—separation of powers within the federal government and devolution of powers to states, vesting them with meaningful legal and political autonomy.

Replacing the Electoral College with a national majority vote for presidents plainly flunks the first two tests—feasibility and advancing liberal policy and political agendas. As for the third requisite—ensuring that populist majoritarianism cannot, in the name of democracy, eviscerate constitutional republic-friendly checks and balances—a national majority vote for president could, in theory, be compatible. But in practice, such a change would surely raise the risks of an Orbán/Erdoğan–style top-down coup, by their admirer, the president-elect, and any subsequent wannabe authoritarians, such as his vice president-elect.

So, should Democrats and liberals make a high priority the cause of amending the Constitution to replace the Electoral College with a national popular majority process? No, they should not. For three reasons:

Reason one is straightforward: It’s not feasible. To be sure, on occasion, hugely consequential amendments have mustered the two-thirds vote in each house of Congress, and by legislatures of three-quarters of the states, required by Article 5 of the Constitution. But in these times, it is difficult to imagine ratification of an amendment to prescribe a national popular vote system for choosing presidents.

Reason two is that by far the surest, fastest, most efficient—and most necessary—path for Democrats and liberals to regain a strong presidential election infrastructure is to play the politics better, not embark on a fruitless campaign for constitutional reform, and certainly not hallucinate about all but literally impossible constitutional amendments. 

Wallowing and wishing for longed-for but impossible solutions to apply themselves retroactively is the hallmark of the defeated. For this reason, Democrats would do well to get past their postelection defeatism quickly and spend less time and energy on Electoral College reform. This was a narrow loss, and it’s probably the case that Democrats overperformed, given some substantial headwinds—of Biden hanging on, inflation that legitimately troubled people below the top 30 percent of earners, and concern about illegal immigration spiking in the polls. As bad as the board looked on election night, Harris closed her gap considerably and her party actually lowered the Republicans’ already close to unworkable margin in the House. Meanwhile their party’s policy priorities actually enjoy majority, bipartisan support. Democrats have failed to persuade voters that they are those ideas’ authors and avatars.

Trump will make miscues, which in turn will provide ample opportunities to show former Democratic everyday American voters that his top policy priorities—tariffs, tax cuts for the rich, destruction of agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—belie his protestations to represent middle- and lower-income American interests, and that it is Democrats who have their back.

To capitalize on those prospects, Democrats must revamp the party’s profile to engage formerly supportive middle- and working-class constituencies where they are. This is doable, as demonstrated by downballot Democrats who won in purple and even red states and districts.

Finally, there are alternative institutional electoral reform concepts that would be better for Democrats and liberals to spotlight than a national majority vote amendment. In particular, one such approach appears more attainable and tailored to address the real-world shortcomings of the current regime. This approach is expanding the membership of the House of Representatives.

The real problem with the status quo is not the abstract principle that state-by-state winner-take-all presidential elections have the potential—however rare in practice—to trump electoral majorities. Nor is the problem the even more abstract notion that voters in thinly populated states have a greater individual say about which presidential candidate their state’s electors pick. The problem is the scale of those differences—orders of magnitude greater than could have been foreseen in 1789. In 2021 individual Wyoming voters held 70 times the power of California voters.

Respecting the preference of a majority of individual voters nationwide is, for sure, a fundamental goal of the Constitution’s plan for our democratic republic. But it is not the only goal. In this vast, widely diversified nation, ensuring due regard for regional interests is also such a goal and an appropriate, even essential one. After the 2016 election, Democrats brandished, as if it were unanswerable, the fact that Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by (approximately) 2.9 million votes. But another way of framing that outcome would be that, outside of California, which she won by approximately 4.2 million votes, Clinton trailed Trump’s popular vote by 1.3 million votes. Outside of California and New York—the latter of which she carried by 1.7 million votes—she trailed by three million votes. Giving some weight to intercoastal regions is a legitimate instrument for reinforcing all major constituencies’ stake in nationhood—especially in view of the coasts’ economic and cultural prominence. Some weight—but not today’s 700 percent difference between citizens of the least and most populous states.

That mind-boggling discrepancy is of course due to the fact that Wyoming and California both have two senators, and the number of senators is part of the constitutional formula for allocating electors among states. But that formula specifies that the “number” of each state’s electors must be “equal to the whole Number of Senators and representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” The number of senators in that formula can’t be changed without a constitutional amendment all but literally impossible to adopt. But the number of representatives requires only legislation to change.

For over a century, since 1910, that number has been fixed at 435. But at the founding, the Framers expected the number of House members to increase as their states’ populations increased. And, indeed, until 1910 Congress increased the number of its members 13 times, from 105 in 1790 to 142 in 1800, 292 in 1870, and finally 435 in 1910 through the present. In 1790 each congressional district had 34,000 constituents. In 1910 each district had 211,000 constituents. In 2020, the representatives from each of the 435 districts, frozen in number for 110 years, were obliged to meet the needs of 762,000 constituents—a 360 percent increase over what the 435 number was designed to serve when it was set. Those numbers are projected to grow to 874,000 and 41 percent by 2040.

At this juncture, House expansion is on virtually no one’s radar. But there are reasons to think it should be—and could. To begin with, the idea has been thoroughly and credibly vetted. In 2021, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences published an in-depth study, “The Case for Enlarging the House of Representatives.” The study was conducted by a quartet with impeccably bipartisan and expert credentials: conservative scholar Yuval Levin and liberal congressional expert Norman Ornstein, both of the American Enterprise Institute; widely published political scientist Lee Drutman of the New America think tank; and the American Academy’s Jonathan Cohen.

Though exhaustively researched, in its published report, the study was boiled down to a readily digestible 28-page pamphlet, elaborating on the societal costs of shriveled member accessibility from the over threefold increase in the average number of district constituents since 1910. Further, it shows that U.S. House members represent far more constituents than their counterparts in other populous democracies and that “the United States is the only Western democracy that does not regularly adjust the size of its lower legislative chamber.” Finally—and critical for the idea’s political plausibity—the study demonstrated that “increasing the size of the House has no partisan impact on the Electoral College” and, specifically, that “increasing membership to 585 would not have changed the outcome of any of the last twelve presidential elections, other than the highly contentious 2000 election.” (Emphasis mine.) 

The original Framers “intended an elastic and flexible” House membership, as noted in 2022 by Harvard political scientist Danielle Allen, who observed that at this point House enlargement would make for a “better Electoral College” and “put representatives back in closer proximity to those whom they represent.”

Finally, a legislative vehicle exists for pursuing House enlargement in Congress. On November 14, Washington (state) Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Maine Representative Jared Golden, both Democrats, introduced a joint resolution to establish a “Select Committee on Electoral Reform.” As reason for establishing such a committee, the resolution noted that the 1929 law fixing membership at 435 was “a departure from the earlier practice of adding members after each census to reflect the Nation’s growing population.” One hundred seventy-five scholars, including Professor Allen and other similarly prominent experts, signed a letter prepared by the advocacy group Protect Democracy supporting the Perez-Golden resolution.

In sum, legislation expanding the House may be a more manageable vehicle for justly enhancing big state citizens’ proportion of electors than a constitutional amendment replacing state-by-state winner-take-all with a national majority vote. But no institutional reform proposal can supplant the political imperative Democrats must shoulder. As George Washington University professor Matthew Dallek told New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall on December 11, Democrats cannot prevail solely as “a party whose base consists of culturally liberal, largely well-educated white Americans and a shrinking share of voters of color.” 

The Trump administration will surely provide opportunities for Democrats to recruit allies among independents and Republicans who prioritize constitutional fidelity. But capitalizing on that prospect will require “changes that subordinate moral posturing to the task of building a new majority,” as Brookings scholar William Galston observed in the same Edsall column. Whether the party’s often strong-willed factions are up to that challenge remains to be seen.