Hamilton Designed a System to Stop Trump…It’s Called the Electoral College
In response to Donald Trump’s unexpected triumph over Hillary Clinton, in which he won the electoral yet lost the popular vote, many have taken to denouncing the electoral college as undemocratic. The frustration ranges from the New Republic’s fuming “How the Terrible, Skewed, Anachronistic Electoral College Gave Us Trump” to Vox’s petulant “Why the Electoral College is the Absolute Worst.” On the surface, this indignation makes sense. Indeed, intuitively it seems to go without saying that when it comes to an election, whoever gets the most votes should win. End of story. And yet, somehow, this wasn’t the case.
The knee-jerk reaction is of course to condemn the institution, to write it off as but another antiquated vestige dreamt up by powdered wig-wearers of another era. To insist that it has no relevance to contemporary politics, and that we should replace it with a more modern system, one that’s inherently more democratic and insures the integrity of the Presidency against populist whims and reckless demagoguery. However, to do so would be unnecessary. As it turns out, those wily wig wearers spent a great deal of time worrying about this very issue and, like with many contemporary problems, devised a system to account for it centuries ago. This system, is of course, the Electoral College.
The Founders Feared a The ‘Tyranny of the Masses’
Like most American political institutions, the Electoral College was designed to limit Democracy, not unleash it. It may come as a surprise to some to learn that the founders were not particularly fond of the D-word. Such a system was dismissed as far too radical and unstable; a stone’s throw from Anarchy. In the eyes of the elitist founders, the people were simply too unpredictable, uneducated, and unruly to be entrusted with such responsibility. Thus, they set out to build a system of government that filtered the passions of masses through the wisdom of the few — in other words, a Republic. We see this same dynamic between the equally representative Senate and the democratically proportional House, the former of which George Washington described as “a saucer into which we pour our legislation to cool it.” The Electoral College was designed in a similar vein. As a mechanism that sought to ensure stability by tempering fiery populism with cool-headed deliberation.
Hamilton’s Secret Weapon to Protect the Presidency
Nowhere is this thinking more plainly outlined than in Hamilton’s Federalist 68, one of a series of essays authored by Hamilton and his colleagues promoting the ratification of the Constitution. In it, Hamilton makes clear that while the overall “sense of the people,” should play a role in presidential elections, it should by no means have final say, to do so would make the Presidency vulnerable to the “heats and ferments” of populist passions. To protect against this, a system was devised wherein the people would not vote directly for the President, instead they would vote on a set of Electors, respected men “most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to [the presidency].” Ultimately, it would be this group of Electors, chosen by the people, that would elect the President. In summation, Hamilton assured the people that this intermediate Electoral College:
“Affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
The Irony of It All
The irony of the Electoral College, a system designed as a bulwark against inexperience and demagoguery, and its instrumental role in the election of Donald Trump, a political neophyte riding a wave of populist rage, is undoubtedly thick, but that does not mean we should simply dispose of a system that has served us for over 200 years. As with most things in American politics, there is always room for improvement, and there are methods by which to achieve it. Should states decide they want a more representative electoral process, they can reform how their votes are distributed — as both Maine and Nebraska have done — shifting from a winner-take-all method to a district-based proportional one.
Perhaps the greater irony, however, is that even without reform, there are ways in which the Electoral College continues to have the exact moderating effect it was intended to — even if not necessarily in the way Hamilton envisioned. In some ways, they got it right by mistake. Think for a minute what our election would look like if it were based solely on the popular vote. There would be no incentive for politicians to focus on the opinions and needs of moderate voters in geographically distributed states. Instead, the focus would be on aggressive efforts to turn out the base, not wooing moderates. Democrats would focus exclusively on urban areas across the coasts, while Republicans could do the same in Conservative bastions across the South. Red gets redder. Blue gets bluer. The echo chamber closes in. And the hope of finding a middle ground slips even further away.
Regardless of your opinion of the Electoral College, it is undeniable that Hamilton’s underlying concern still holds a great deal of relevance today. Amidst the “tumult and disorder” of American politics, it’s all too easy to fall victim to our feelings, to forget our better instincts and become emotionally reactionary. Which is why before we begin angrily lashing out at things as “the absolute worst” we should try to remember the importance of calm deliberation, serious examination, and selfless consideration; both in regards to the people we elect, and the institutions that elect them.
