The Journal. - Red, White and Who? An Electoral College Blowout?

Episode Date: November 1, 2024

Rachel Humphreys and Molly Ball share dispatches from two major campaign events with Ryan Knutson. Molly analyzes the closing arguments and outlines what to expect on election day. Plus, we finally answer listeners’ most asked question: What’s up with the electoral college?  Further Listening: - Red, White and Who? Playlist  - Red, White and Who? The Undecided Voters Who Could Decide The Election  - Red, White and Who? The Desperation Stage  Further Reading: - America Is Having a Panic Attack Over the Election  - Pennsylvania Has Already Become Ground Zero for Election-Fraud Claims  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, after a long, hard-fought year, we finally have a winner. Wasn't that an incredible game? I mean, I did not think the Dodgers were going to pull it out. I really thought we were headed for a Game 6. Yes, I'm glad that you picked up on where I was going with that. Yes, it was a very entertaining World Series. Congratulations to the LA Dodgers. And it was so satisfying to see the Yankees lose.

Just always. Oh, yeah. I'm not a Dodger fan, but I'm a Yankee hater. Oh, okay, okay. All right. I am going to stop you right there because there is another competition that of course is still undecided, and we have just four days to go until the election.

That is not very many days. It is terrifyingly close, although it may not actually be over. Right. Of course, we might not know on election night, which we will talk about later, but there is a lot to talk about today, so let's go. From the Journal, this is Red, White and Who. Our show about the road to the White House. I'm Ryan Knudsen. And I'm Molly Ball.

It's Friday, November 1st. Coming up on the show, an election roadmap, and what's the deal with the electoral college? You let him try violin because you love him. And if you love him that much, love him enough to make sure he's buckled up and in the back seat. Find out more at NHTSA.gov slash The Right Seat. Brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Ad Council Okay, so both candidates had big events this week first Donald Trump had his big event at the other famous New York sports venue not far from where the Yankees lost the World Series on Wednesday his was at Madison Square Garden where the Knicks play.

Our senior producer, Rachel Humphries, was there. Rachel, what was it like? You know, right, in many ways it wasn't that different from seeing a basketball game. You know, you had pretzels, you had beer, people wore their team colors, which was red. It was a sea of red MAGA hats. And it was loud and it was long.

Everyone is on their feet. People are screaming. My God, it's so loud in here. I was there for over eight hours on Sunday, and there was a lot of dark rhetoric from the speakers. We were shown videos about the dangers of illegal migration and gang crime, and the speakers told the crowd repeatedly

that Donald Trump is the only person who can save America. We're not going to take it anymore. Kamala, you're fired. Get out, get out. You're fired. And Molly, you were at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. to see Kamala Harris make her big closing argument. What was that event like? ellipse in Washington, D.C. to see Kamala Harris make her big closing argument. What was that event like?

Yeah, also, obviously, an evocative venue calling back to Trump's famous speech on the ellipse on January 6th, 2021, that of course preceded the Trump supporters marching to the to the Capitol and Capitol riot that occurred. So there was a sense that that was the argument she was trying to frame, that she was going to make her case about the threat to democracy, that she would argue that Trump poses.

America, this is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better. This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power. She described Trump as a petty tyrant calling back to the nation's founding,

but then she really went on to talk about her own proposals. This line that I think encapsulates the way she's trying to combine these two pitches is when she says, on January 20th, one of us is going to be in that Oval Office. Donald Trump would walk in with an enemies list. I'm going to walk in with a to-do list. So she's trying to simultaneously cast Trump

as a danger to democracy and remind people about his thirst for vengeance and grievance, while simultaneously talking about her being a pragmatic centrist, someone who's going to bring people together. So Trump and Harris made their closing arguments this week, but it seems like the thing that actually has gotten more attention is garbage.

And the comments that Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian made during Trump's event, where he said that Puerto Rico is a floating pile of garbage, that did not go over well outside the arena. There's been a lot of fallout from it. The Trump campaigns try to distance himself from it. Rachel, how do people react inside the arena when that joke was made?

They also didn't react that well inside the arena. The joke fell pretty flat. And the Trump campaign has distanced themselves from what Hinckley said. They said they didn't know he was going to make that joke. And they've released a statement saying his comments did, quote, not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.

And then the garbage stuff continued when Justice Harris was giving her speech in DC, President Biden responded to Hinckliffe's comments by saying that the only garbage that he sees are Trump supporters. He, of course, tried to walk that back and say he was just talking specifically about Hinchcliffe when he said that. But the Trump campaign has been running with this. Trump did an event in a Trump-branded garbage truck.

— She should never have let that happen. I hope you enjoyed this garbage truck. Thank you very much. — Thank you, guys. — Molly, which of these moments do you think will have a bigger impact on the election? Thank you very much. Thank you. Molly, which of these moments do you think will have a bigger impact on the election? I mean, you know, these final days of the campaign always devolve into silliness and bickering. But as we've said so many times on this show, in a race this close, absolutely anything

can swing it. This seems to have resonated pretty broadly in the Puerto Rican and Latino community. But you know, in both of these cases, it wasn't the candidate saying the thing. And so it's certainly possible that these comments have a resonance and that they activate something in the minds of whatever group of voters. We just don't know in what direction it's going to cut. But interestingly, one of the states with the largest population of Puerto Rican Americans is Pennsylvania. There is a large Puerto Rican community sort of concentrated in the Allentown

area where interestingly Trump went this week. And so that's the state where a lot of people think that this could have the biggest impact. Okay, so let's talk now about what Election Day itself could look like. To win the presidency, of course, a candidate needs 270 electoral votes. And because so many states are very clearly leaning Democrat or very clearly leaning Republican, each of the candidates sort of already have some votes projected to be in their column. How many electoral votes do we think each candidate sort of currently is projected to have, and what is still up for grabs?

So before any votes get counted, just based on what we think we know from which states we think are swing states, Kamala Harris starts out with 226 electoral votes. Donald Trump starts out with 219 electoral votes just based on the non-swing states. And then there's 93 electoral votes that are swing states. And part of the reason we talk about Pennsylvania so much is it's the biggest swing state. It has 19 electoral votes, whereas a state like

Nevada only has six electoral votes because they're based on population. So the candidates start out from this baseline of 200-odd electoral votes, and then they're going to add to that with each of the swing states that they win until one of them gets to 270. So if the election is, I mean, everybody keeps talking about this election is going to be

so close, it's so close, it's such a nail-biter. So does that mean that we're going to end up with a scenario where it's close in the electoral college? Like the winner just wins by a couple of electoral votes? It's possible, but I think it is probably more likely that one candidate actually runs away with the Electoral College. All of the swing states are very, very, very, very close. But because the Electoral College is almost entirely winner-take-all, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska...

Mm-hmm, as we've talked about. Nebraska! But because all of these swing states are winner-take-all, whichever candidate wins the state, even if they only win it by one vote, they get all of that state's electoral votes. And what tends to happen is all the swing states swing in sort of the same direction. That was what happened in 2020, right? Joe Biden ended up winning all of the swing states by very small margins and winning the

popular vote by a quite healthy margin, millions of votes. He won each of the swing states by a quite narrow margin, but because they're all winner take all, he won the electoral college in a blowout, over 300 electoral votes, because all of those swing states ended up swinging the same way.

So in campaigns we talk about, you know, undecideds tending to break the same way toward the end of the campaign. I think there's a strong possibility that that happens this time as well, that whoever ends up winning ends up sweeping all or most of the swing states. So interesting, so you think a blowout

in the electoral college is the most likely outcome? If I had to guess, I would say that it's more likely than not. But what I keep hearing is likely is that we're not gonna get the election results on Tuesday night. So why not? Well, the reason it would take a while to get a result is because these states are so close. You think about it, if someone is winning a state by only a few thousand votes, you

really have to count every ballot to know who wins. If someone is winning by 10 points, those last 10,000, 100,000, 200,000 votes aren't really going to matter because a candidate has basically already run away with it or compiled an insurmountable lead. So it's the fact that this election is so close that is going to cause potentially a delay in getting the result. So in 2020, Donald Trump claimed that he had won the election on election night. He gave that speech.

Do you have a sense from talking to his campaign as to whether that might happen again, even though results haven't finished coming in? I think we all expect him to do that again, to falsely claim that he's won if the early results favor him, even though the election hasn't been called and the votes haven't been counted. He's already setting up this narrative. He's already talking about Democrats

cheating and vote fraud and all of this. Right, I saw that Trump post on Truth Social this week claiming that Pennsylvania is cheating. Yeah, and he talked about it on the garbage truck this week, saying the only way that they can win is if they cheat. He's clearly seeding this really dangerous narrative that has really dealt a blow to Americans' confidence in elections. And that lack of confidence is really misplaced. All the experts have said that 2020 was probably our most secure election in history, and this one is also likely to be free and fair and secure, in part because there's so much scrutiny on it. There's so many people watching it.

There's so many people sending up flares the minute anything remotely suspicious happens anywhere. But yes, I think we do expect that Trump will try to make false claims about the election very quickly after the polls close. And I think everybody is sort of on guard for that. And that's part of the reason that I talk so much about this idea that the early returns don't tell you who's going to win. And it doesn't mean that anything nefarious is happening when you see who's leading change as the votes are being counted. Nobody's stuffing ballot boxes, nobody's

as the votes are being counted, nobody's stuffing ballot boxes, nobody's switching voting machines. They're just counting the votes in the order that they have, that they are counting them in. And depending on what batch of votes they're counting and where those votes are from, that's going to change who's in the lead, depending on how the votes are being counted.

All right, so we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we are going to talk about the subject that our listeners have had the most questions about. Let's do it. So as I was saying before, the number one question that we get from listeners is about the electoral college. Hi, Molly. I've always wanted to know how did we get the electoral college system? My question for you is where does the electoral college stand in all of this from now until

election day? Why is there such underwhelming support for reforms that make our presidential election process less complex and more standardized? Hi Molly and Ryan. I have to ask could there be a scenario this election where there's actually a tie in the Electoral College? All right let's start with that first question from Brittany Jones. Molly, how did we even end up with the Electoral College? What's the quick history here? Yeah, it's in the Constitution. There was a lively argument about this among the framers of the Constitution. There were some that wanted to have a national popular vote even in those days.

And so this was a rather haphazard compromise that was reached in the course of drafting the Constitution and in coming up with a system for deciding who would be the president. It also, as so many things in the framing of the Constitution did, it had to do with slavery and with the compromises that were made with the Southern states in the three-fifths compromise. So the Electoral College also, by giving, you know, three-fifths of a vote based on slave populations,

also did give an advantage to the southern states in the course of forging this compromise that brought those southern states into the union. There's a lot of arguments that I hear against the Electoral College. One, it feels like it makes a lot of voters feel like their votes don't matter. Someone like me, I grew up in Oregon and now I live in New York and those states have always been blue my entire life. So no matter who I vote for, that's what the state is gonna go for. So it doesn't really feel like my vote matters.

So what are the arguments in favor of this system? Well, there's a few. I mean, one is just that it's what the founders intended. I think there's a few rationales that you tend to hear. The one you hear the most is that it forces the candidates to campaign in a much more sort of geographically representative swath of the country. So I'm looking right now at a map of where the candidates have been campaigning. They've obviously spent a lot of time in all of the swing states, but people in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania,

Georgia, Arizona, these aren't the biggest states in the country. Would they really hear from the candidates at all in a national popular vote system? No, the candidates would probably park themselves in New York, California, and Texas and not go anywhere else because that's where such a huge amount of the population is concentrated.

The other argument is that, you know, the geography of America is quite vast and different geographies have different interests even if they are sparsely populated. So a state like Wyoming or say Nevada, where there is a lot of land with not a lot of people on it, they still have interests, and there are interests in that territory being represented,

its interests being heard, even if not as many people live there, and the Electoral College sort of empowers that. The other concern about the electoral college, though, is just this fact that you can have someone win the popular vote, the will of the majority of the people, and they'll lose in the electoral college. This is something that has only affected

Democrats in recent history. Al Gore won the popular vote, but not the presidency in 2000. Hillary Clinton the same in 2016. So what does that mean for democracy and Americans' confidence in our system if that becomes a thing that continues to happen? Yeah, this is the argument that I find the most persuasive, is that in an era when so many of our institutions are in question, and when so many people have lost faith

in our democracy, it's sort of a further blow to small-D democratic legitimacy. When the popular vote result, the person, the candidate that the majority or the plurality of Americans have selected is not the candidate who wins and becomes president. But a lot of people do see it as unfair. Pew did a, they asked this question pretty regularly, the Pew Research Center, they did

a poll just a couple of months ago, and most people do not support the electoral college. Only 35% said they want to keep the electoral college system and 63% said they would want to change to a national popular vote system. So it's not just Democrats, a pretty solid majority of Americans don't think that the electoral college system is fair and would like to see it changed. So that brings us nicely to this other point that was alluded to by one of our listeners,

Jeffrey Weingast. If so many Americans don't like this system, is there any chance that it might change? Yes and no. On the one hand, plenty have tried. In fact, there have been more resolutions submitted in Congress or introduced in Congress, essentially, to change the Electoral College than any other constitutional provision. But it's really hard to amend the Constitution, and that's what it would take. But the short answer is, yes, there have been a lot of efforts to reform it. Even got a fair amount of momentum in the 70s, but didn't quite get there. I know you said earlier that you think it'll most likely be a blowout in the Electoral College.

But as Janice Maxwell asked, is there a possibility that the election could end in an Electoral College tie? There is. Because there is an even number of electoral votes and because of the way they're all distributed, it is possible that each candidate gets 269 electoral votes and the electoral college vote ends in a tie. And there are some somewhat plausible

situations this year in which that could happen. For example, the situation in which Kamala Harris wins the three upper Midwest swing states, but none of the others. So it is not completely out of the realm of possibility that the Electoral College could end in a tie. And if it does end in a tie, then what happens? Well, the framers thought of this. So there is a procedure laid out in the Constitution for what would happen.

It's called a contingent election. It goes to the newly elected House of Representatives that has just been elected in the 2024 elections. And they then vote on this and each state's congressional delegation gets a single vote. So the candidate who gets the votes of the most states wins the election and becomes president. And since there are more red states than blue states, that would almost certainly mean that Trump wins the election.

Interestingly, the vice president is elected separately in the Senate. So they're not voting for the presidential ticket here, just the president. Whoa! So that means that it's possible that we might get like Donald Trump and Tim Walz? It's certainly possible and JD Vance? Although, you know, because each state gets one vote and because most red states are very red and blue states are very blue, you don't have a lot of states where the Senate delegation and the House delegation are out of sync in that way, so you would probably get the same result. So normally at the end of these episodes, I like to ask you what you're watching for over the next, you know, week until we talk again,

but I already know the answer. I am looking forward to Tuesday. You're looking forward to those results actually coming in. Especially when you're a political reporter, when you've been living and breathing this stuff for literally years, I cannot tell you how gratifying it is to just finally know the answer. Ah, I bet. Great, okay, well, I will see you next week.

See you soon, and hopefully with some answers. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] and hopefully with some answers. [♪ music playing and applause continues. Before we go, do you still need to vote? If so, we'd love it if you could record yourself after you've finished voting. Tell us what it felt like, and if you're up for it, who you voted for and why. Email us a voice note to thejournal at wsj.com. That's thejournal at wsj.com.

Red, White, and Who is part of The Journal, which is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Our senior producer is Rachel Humphries. Our producer is Piers Singie. Our editor is Catherine Whalen. I'm Ryan Knudson. Special thanks to Brittany Jones, Jeffrey Weingast, Daniel Moreno, and Janice Maxwell for your questions about the Electoral College. This episode was engineered by Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley and remixed by Peter Leonard. Additional music this week by, and you're not going to believe this, Peter Leonard. Fact-checking by Amelia Schoenbeck. Artwork by James Walton.

Special thanks to Kate Leimbach, Sarah Platt, Ben Pershing, and the whole Journal team. Thanks for listening. Red, White, and Who will be back next Wednesday morning. After election night. See you then.