Since Trump won the Electoral College but not the popular vote, liberals have been plotting the Electoral College’s demise (some of the plotting goes back to the 2000 election). There’s a petition to end the Electoral College. There’s a plan to have states controlling a majority of the Electoral College pledge their votes to the winner of the popular vote. There’s even a plan to use the Electoral College to prevent Trump from becoming president.
None of these plans will have any effect. The Electoral College is silly, and I too wish it would go away, but destroying it would require some states acting against their political best interest, which they will not do. The good news is that the Republican Electoral College advantage is by no means permanent.
The difference between the Electoral College vote and the popular vote has two sources. The first is that the Electoral College overweights rural states. Each state gets a number of EC votes equal to the number of Senators they have plus the number of Representatives they have. The Representatives are allocated roughly proportional to population. But every state has two Senators, which gives lower population states more EC votes per individual vote than higher population states. For instance, Wyoming has about 3.6 times the EC votes per person that California has.
This advantage is annoying, unfair to heavily populated states, and systematically favors Republicans, who have an advantage with rural voters. It’s also not that big of an advantage. Trump won 30 states (for all these calculations, I’m ceding Michigan to Trump, although CNN still lists it as gray). Clinton won 20, plus the District of Columbia. Trump won 306 EC votes, to Clinton’s 232. Subtract two of Trump’s EC votes for each of the states that he won, and do the same for Clinton — that leaves you with just the part of the EC votes that is allocated according to population. Trump still wins, 246–190. His share of the EC votes only goes down by .46%, from 56.88% to 56.42%.
So why did Clinton lose the EC by so much when she won the popular vote? The reason is that (almost all) states give all of their EC votes to one candidate, regardless of the margin of victory. Doesn’t matter whether you win California by one point or thirty points, you get 55 EC votes. This gives an advantage to a candidate who wins a lot of states by a small margin, and loses a few by a big margin.
Imagine a country with three states, each with 100 voters. Overall, there are 180 voters who vote Red, and 120 who vote Blue. Should be an easy win for the Red team, right? Not if you have 100 Red voters in state A, 40 in state B, and 40 in state C. Then Red loses, 2–1. They won one state bigly, but lost two states narrowly. Again, if you have an EC advantage, as Blue does in this example, then it must be the case that you are winning many states narrowly.
This is how Trump won. He won a lot of states by small margins, especially throughout the Rust Belt. Clinton improved on Obama’s margins in states Democrats always win huge like California. She also did better than Obama in Republican strongholds like Texas and Georgia. Neither of those achievements changed the number of EC votes she got from CA, TX, and GA. Trump did a few percentage points better than Romney in PA and WI and it won him a whole passel of EC votes.
But here’s the thing about winning a lot of states by small margins: they could easily reverse themselves in the next election. Close elections are uncertain elections. A few months ago Democrats were sure they had an Electoral College advantage because they would narrowly carry PA and WI. They shouldn’t have been so sure. You can’t count on a narrow margin. Likewise, Republicans do not now have an entrenched EC advantage (other than the small rural one I described above). Their narrow margins in the decisive state could just as easily tip to Democrats in the next election.
The Electoral College is stupid and adds randomness to our presidential elections for no good reason. But the randomness does not particularly favor one side or another. Democrats do not need to end the Electoral College in order to win another presidential election, which is good because the Electoral College is not going anywhere. Signing petitions is fine and feels good, but your political activism would be better directed towards another cause. Organize instead for lifting of voting restrictions, for getting out the Democratic vote, and spread awareness of the devastation on American civic life that Trump has wrought and will continue to wreak over the next four years.
