Recalculating the Electoral College
If you came to this post hoping for a diatribe about the evils of indirect election, you came to the wrong place. Rather, I want to explore the impact of one curious feature of the Electoral College: US States can cast as many votes for president as they have House and Senate members combined.
Now, House membership is roughly proportional to population, with some lag time, and the guarantee that all states get at least 1. But still; it’s roughly proportional. Senators, however, are not, with each state guaranteed 2 Senators. As such, the minimum Electoral College vote per state is 3: 1 minimum House member, 2 Senators.
This means that, to win, a candidate must not only secure majorities in states with a majority of the population (which is not the same as securing a majority of the entire population), but must also secure majorities in enough states to run up a good tally of Senatorial Electoral College votes. In practice, this means candidates are at least nudged towards running a slightly more geographically broad-based race than would otherwise be the case.
Over the country’s history, likewise, we have seen changes in how electoral votes are awarded. Here’s a graph of how states have selected Presidential electors over time:
You’ll notice that, for quite a long time, the Electoral College involved many different methods for selecting Presidential electors, including appointment by the state legislature, a kind of internal “state level” electoral college based on counties (Tennessee), a system where popular voting narrowed the field of electors and then the legislature made the final choice (Massachusetts), direct election via electoral districts, and of course the system used today by Nebraska and Maine, where Senatorial electors are allocated statewide, while House electors are allocated at the House district level.
Crucially, that means that 24 of the 57 presidential elections to-date have occurred where at least one state did not operate on a Winner-Take-All basis. So whenever someone tells you that the “Electoral College” requires Winner-Take-All, smack them. It doesn’t. Winner-Take-All is a choice made by state legislatures. The Electoral College doesn’t even require popular voting let alone Winner-Take-All. Curiously, no state of which I’m aware has ever selected Electors on a proportional-vote basis, despite this method being entirely constitutionally acceptable. But really let me emphasize again:
Winner-Take-All is not the Electoral College’s fault: it is your state legislature’s fault.
If you want proportional representation, just lobby your statehouse.
Okay, so, now that we know a little about how electors are selected, let’s look at what effect Senatorial electors have had.
Consider a hypothetical election where there are 2 candidates. One candidate wins 290 electors and 37 states. This is an extremely implausible result (honestly I’m not even sure if it’s mathematically possible), but just roll with me for the sake of learning together.
The other candidate, thus, wins 14 states (or 13 and DC if you prefer), and gets 248 Electoral College votes.
By the rules of the College, Candidate A wins, having got over the 270 threshold.
But what if we deduct Senatorial electors? That is, we see that Candidate A won 37 states, which means a whopping 74 Senatorial electoral votes. Meanwhile, Candidate B won just 14 states, scoring just 28 Electoral Votes. In other words, Candidate B ran up the score in a few, high-population states, while Candidate A managed to sweep toooons of tiny states.
If we deduct the 74 Senatorial Electors from Candidate A and the 28 from Candidate B, we get 216 Electors for Candidate A… and 220 for Candidate B! Candidate B now has over 50% of the Electoral College votes cast. In other words, Candidate B won the “House” EC vote, but lost overall because Candidate A won the “Senate” EC vote in a landslide.
This example is extreme. But, conveniently, we can go back through all previous elections and figure out when and where Senatorial electors tipped the scales, and who would have won if the Senate were not included in the Electoral College; i.e. what Presidential candidates got shafted by the Framers’ desire to boost small-state power in the Electoral College?
(there’s a big blank space below this graph; I don’t know why Datawrapper insists on creating that big blank space, but know that after the blank space I have more writing)
Excluding Senatorial electors changes a grand total of 4 elections. Just four. Personally, I’m surprised it’s that few, and a bit disappointed. With just 4 elections tipped this way, that suggests the Framers’ intention of pushing candidates to seek to win small states has had a very limited effect. Turns out, small states are often homogenous states, and homogenous states are states where it’s hard to convince enough people to change their vote to win the whole state, and with widespread Winner-Take-All, there’s no point campaigning in a state you can’t win.
To be clear, the lynchpin in that line of reasoning, and the thing that would be easiest to change, is not the structure of the EC or the persuadability of small-staters. It’s the state laws establishing Winner-Take-All. Those laws can be changed with relative ease. So if you want to fix the system, be aware that there are state laws that could be low-hanging-fruit.
But anyways, 4 elections were decided by Senatorial electors.
UPDATE: I said this originally, but I misread the candidates in 1796. Leaving here to show I’m sloppy sometimes. Put correctly, Jefferson would have won in 1796 without Senatorial votes. I stand by the “First Party System woulda shook out differently” stance all the same.
In 1796, if we drop the Senate, Aaron Burr, sir, would narrowly defeat John Adams, who was, after all, obnoxious and disliked. (For the record, that second referenced musical is far superior to the first referenced musical.) With a Democratiic-Republican in office and Adams out of leadership of the Federalists, it seems likely that the First Party System would have developed in an extremely different way, and, who knows, maybe we never would have had a President Jefferson. It seems plausible that the 12th amendment would have been passed anyways, however, as the original system for Electoral College voting was simply untenable in the long run.
After Aaron Burr, the Senatorial Electors don’t flip another election until 1876, when the southern-preferred Samual J. Tilden would have won. Of course, the big policy change Tilden wanted, the end of Reconstruction, happened anyways as part of the brokered settlement that resolved the disputed election of 1876.
Next up, in 1916, on the eve of U.S. entrance into WWI, Charles E. Hughes would have bested Woodrow Wilson for President. It’s not clear how much difference this would have made, however. Wilson won partly because he was perceived as being more anti-war than Hughes… but Wilson nonetheless brought the US into WWI. Hughes may have been more likely to roll back some of the new government programs the Progressives had instituted… but that happened anyways under Republicans in the 1920s.
Finally, the last election tipped by Senatorial Electors was, of course, the election of 2000. Had states not been given Senatorial Electors, Al Gore would have won 224–211 instead of lost 271–266. I’ll let you decide what that might have meant for history.
All in all, it seems like the Electoral College’s bonus for small states has had an extremely small impact on election results. Rather, the establishment of state-level electors at all, which raises the possibility of EC-Popular Vote differences, has had a much larger effect than inclusion of Senatorial votes, while the use of state-level Winner-Take-All has also probably had a more decisive effect in tipping elections than Senatorial Electors have. Indeed, Winner-Take-All also serves to dissuade candidates from running. As long as Winner-Take-All was less common, the number of candidates who ran and received major popular and electoral vote tallies was much larger. As Winner-Take-All spread, the candidate field thinned out.
This has been a digression from my usual migration and economics fare, but I hope you’ve enjoyed the historical trivia. And remember kids: Winner-Take-All is the boot heel that stomps on the face of humanity forever.
Check out my Podcast about the history of American migration.
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I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.
