Today, Explained - Electoral College dropout

Episode Date: March 21, 2019

Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg are calling to abolish the Electoral College and a dozen states have signed on to a plan that would subvert it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every four years, we have a conversation about the Electoral College. A debate, really. It happens around a presidential election, and then gently fades away, and we move on. But just like everything else about this next presidential election, the conversation about the Electoral College is ramping up early. Elizabeth Warren said she wants to get rid of it at a CNN town hall this week. We can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College. Mayor Pete's on the same page. The Electoral College needs to go because it's made our society less and less democratic.

Kamala Harris, she's not crazy about it either. The popular vote has been diminished in terms of making the final decision about who's the president of the United States. And we need to deal with that. Andy Rudalevich knows more about the Electoral College than most. The Electoral College is basically a mechanism for having separate elections that add up to one national election. He's a professor of government at Bowdoin College. There's one elector per state for every member of Congress,

so you wind up with 535 people, right? 100 senators, 435 representatives, and then we add on three more for the District of Congress. So you wind up with 535 people, right? 100 senators, 435 representatives, and then we add on three more for the District of Columbia. 538 party loyalists, 270 is the magic number to win. So that when we vote for a president, we're not voting for the president directly, but in fact, for a slate of electors in our state who will then vote for the president. Which is confusing. You know, if we think of democracy as purely one person, one vote, this violates that philosophical tenet. But, you know, it starts out as a compromise at the

Constitutional Convention between those who wanted a popular vote for the president and those who wanted the Congress to choose the president. And that, you know, is a short-term political choice that's had very long-term institutional ramifications for the country. So can we hop into a horse and carriage and go back to that history and find out exactly how this happened? Sure. Hmm.

When our founding fathers created America, I wonder what it used to be like in those days. In those days. In those days. In those days. In those days. In those days. What are you doing? I'm trying to have a flashback. No, you just have to study. No, no, no. I've seen his work before. Give me a second. I wonder what life would have been like back then. Take yourself back to downtown Philadelphia, 1787. It's a summer. It's hot. You've got 50-plus guys in wigs gathered together in a stifling hall where they've closed the windows because they want their deliberations to be secret. The delegates at the Constitutional Convention had lots of problems they're trying to

solve. How should you elect the president? How long should the president serve? Should the president be eligible for re-election? What kind of powers should the office have? They wanted to be sure that the president did have the independent authority to check the legislature, but that he, someday she, would not be so powerful as to be able to become a new King George, a new Emperor Nero or Caligula, right? These are the kinds of analogies that are being thrown around at the convention. And so you have factions in the convention who want to have a popular vote. I think that's the only way to make sure that this is really someone who is independent of legislative domination. But then you have people who are very nervous about having a popular vote, who want to ensure that the president

is going to be picked by people who have the education and information to determine who the best man in the country was. And of course, it would have been a man at that point. At this point too, so far. So far. Do we have any idea what specific arguments people were making at this point?

The argument for a legislative vote is the argument that the people in Congress will actually know who the different players are. They'll know who is a good leader. They'll have seen these people up close, whereas some farmer in New Hampshire might not know. Remember how terrible travel conditions are at this period and communications, right? It takes something like six days for the news of the death of George Washington to travel across the country. There's no universal public education. There's not universal literacy.

There's an argument for having this elite group make the choice. And in fact, George Mason, he says something to the effect that he'd rather have a blind man choose his clothes than let the people choose the president. Ouch. Which just sounds so antithetical to like our American idea of small d democracy. Yeah, but we don't have a small d democracy in lots of ways, right? If you think of the various things that are not democratically selected in the U.S. The only electoral body in the Constitution that's selected by the people originally is the House of Representatives. The Senate's chosen by state

legislatures, the president ultimately by the Electoral College. Judges are chosen by the president and the Senate working together. The House was thought to be by far the most powerful body and possibly the most dangerous body because it would reflect the people and what Madison and Hamilton and John Jay talk about in the federalist papers as the passions of the people, right? They're worried about popular passion. They want some kind of means to cool that off so that you don't have mob rule. And is there a sense that the states won't be on board with just, hey, the popular vote decides who the president is. We just count up the votes and there's your president? Yeah, because if you're in a small state,

if you're in Rhode Island, say, up in the north or, you know, South Carolina, you are a little nervous about a general popular vote because the sizes of the states varied quite a lot, as they do now, of course. And they did not want, you know, every president to be from New York or Virginia. You have an additional wrinkle down in the slave states because they may have a big population, but a lot of those people can't vote, in fact, aren't even considered people in the eyes of state law. And this is something that sort of hinges on defining slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of House representation. So once you've made that decision, right, it makes a lot of sense, certainly for the southern states,

but even for the smaller northern states to argue for some kind of legislative role in the selection of the president. Ultimately, the Electoral College is something you can sell back in your home state. And you can say, look, the legislature can choose the most elite men. But if you're in a state that likes a popular vote, you can go back and say, yeah, the electors are going to be selected by the people. So it allows a certain vagueness that is very helpful politically in the short term. How does this go in the very first election? Everybody in the world knows that George Washington is going to be the first president. Because of that, there's not a lot of choice. People know it's going to be

Washington. It's going to be Washington for as long as he wants to be president. Huh. So this electoral college is supposed to temper the passions of the people, you know, have smart people speak for the people. But right off the bat, it's just reflecting the country's vote. It's just sort of redistributing the national vote, even, I don't know, blunting it. Well, they didn't really think of it as a national vote back then. I mean, the state was an important political feature. You know, there's an interesting grammatical trivia point, right?

People used to talk about the United States as a plural noun, right? So if you talked about the United States as a plural noun, right? So if you talked about the United States, you'd say they are doing something. Here in Maine, you know, the idea of me knowing in real time what's happening in California or Washington State or Texas, right? That's crazy. So when exactly is it that people start to get upset about the Electoral College? Yeah, it's relatively new, right? I think it comes really out of the 1960s. The rise of civil rights, broadly speaking.

Obviously, you've had women's suffrage. But by the 1960s, you have the African-American civil rights movement and the demand for one person, one vote, the Voting Rights Act. There can and should be no argument. Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. The idea of the U.S. as a small democracy, I think, took hold in certain ways in the 1960s with the representation of groups that had been shut out of the process to that point. But even then, even though there are numerous resolutions in Congress put forward to amend the Constitution to get rid of the Electoral College, they don't

really get a lot of traction. Even after 2000, people talked about the Electoral College, but that dies out relatively quickly. It's really, it's now, right? It's 2016, and the very clear difference between Al Gore having a popular majority of half a million votes and Hillary Clinton having a majority of three million votes. That just seems, I think, different fundamentally, and of course, it gets folded into the broad, quote-unquote, resistance against the Trump administration as well. It is worth noting, though, that the

majority for Secretary Clinton was in California. She won California by about four million votes, and she lost the rest of the country by a million votes. And that does kind of get at the heart of, you know, why the Electoral College is up for debate. If you feel that just fundamentally it's illegitimate to have anything that does not reflect one person, one vote, then the Electoral College just can't stand. If you think there's still a role for regional coalition building,

and that, to put it bluntly, California shouldn't tell the rest of us what to do, then you might still favor the Electoral College. So you want to drop out of this college. A few blue states have a plan. I'm Sean Ramos for him. That's next on Today Explained. Hello? Dan Bashman?

Hey. Hey, Sean Ramos for him. How you doing, buddy? Good, good. Funny story, I, uh, you know, I have to do these ads every day, and today I look in my little folder that, uh, Irene, our EP, keeps for me with the ads, and I find that today's ad is an ad for your show, your podcast, The Sporkful. It says something like, The Sporkful special episode about hibachi in America is up now. It's funny,

thoughtful, and surprising. Subscribe to the Sporkful podcast today, wherever you listen. What are your thoughts, Dan? I think that's a great point, Sean. I couldn't agree more. I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey. We would go to hibachi. It was like a special occasion thing. I always thought it was really fun. I loved watching the chefs do all the tricks. I thought it was cool. And the last time I went out to hibashi with my kids, I got to be honest, it made me feel kind of uncomfortable. I had sort of an increased awareness of the fact that the chef was sort of like yucking up this very extreme, stereotypical Asian immigrant behavior, this sort of like stock stereotype character. You know, I was curious, like, what's the story with this? You know, am I the only person who's noticing this? Or

is it just this one hibachi restaurant or what? And so we set out to do this episode that sort of explores, like, how did hibachi get created? How Japanese even is it? How do they learn the tricks and do the tricks? And also, what's the sort of the racial history here with the way that Japanese culture is being presented? And how much of a problem is it? Dan, before we go, I'm here to ask hard questions. Do you make the best food podcast in the world? Well, that is a hard question. I'm very proud of my work, Sean.

You know, do you make the best daily news podcast? I think so. But what do you think? You know, I'm very proud of our work, Dan. Andy, this week, Colorado became the 12th state to sign on to what I guess would be an augmentation of the electoral college system to sort of hew it closer to the popular vote. It's something called the National Popular Vote Compact. What's that about? The National Popular Vote Compact is basically a promise between the states that their electors

are going to vote for whoever wins the National Popular vote, even if that person did not win in their own state. It goes into effect once states representing 270, a majority of the electoral college, have agreed to it. That's the theory. And it would work if enough states signed on, and if all the electors abided by it. And I'm guessing all the states that have signed on so far are blue states? To my knowledge, yeah. I mean, remember, blue and red states are not set in some kind of mystical law. You know, they shift around. Remember, California was a red state forever, if you believe the political science textbooks of the 1980s. Huh. I think I forgot slash maybe even never knew about that. Will a state that leans more heavily red right now sign on to what you think? I think no, not at the moment. Right now, the divergences between the popular vote and the Electoral College favor the Republican Party. And parties aren't stupid. Their job is to win

elections. That means that I think for you to have an actual repeal of the Electoral College, you would have to have a situation where the Electoral College hurt both parties. That makes it difficult to sell as a bipartisan arrangement in the short term. Okay, so this probably isn't happening anytime soon. Is there a silver lining to that? If we did one day change the system, could people be unpleasantly surprised? Yeah. If we think about a national popular election generally, we would wind up, I suspect, with many more than two real candidates. You could have a field of three or five or, I don't know, 10 candidates, none of whom would get anything close to 50% of the vote. Right. Is it better for the country to have somebody who won 28% of the popular vote become president vis-a-vis whoever would have won the electoral college with, I don't know, 46% of the popular vote? Do you have a runoff election? Do you have some kind of cutoff? You

have to get a certain amount of the popular vote in order to win. Do you have rank choice voting like we've introduced here in Maine? These are questions that I don't think have been really pushed very hard. So there's different possibilities, but I'm not sure that second stage, right, where you wind up with a candidate who is actually liked by even fewer people than the current system winds up as president. Are there other arguments to keep it? Well, I think the arguments to keep it largely are driven by whether you think there is a value to sort of giving a bonus to candidates who can build a broader geographic coalition. On the other hand, right, if you think that geography really doesn't matter, then this is never going to work for you, right? You've got to have votes represented equally as a person rather than as a person who

happens to reside somewhere. We don't get the Voting Rights Act till 1965. You talk about building geographic coalitions. I wonder about racial coalitions. And now that the Voting Rights Act has been sort of stymied by the Supreme Court, how does the Electoral College help or hurt disenfranchisement? It depends on what states are up for grabs in a given election. I think that can change over time. Back in 1948, you know, when Harry Truman was, you know, almost certainly going to lose the election, some scholars argue that his victory actually was owed to northern black voters, right, in the cities who had migrated up from the South during World War II and now suddenly could vote. The Democratic Party, you know, started moving towards civil rights in 1948. Hubert Humphrey's famous speech at the convention of that year helps to define that.

In fact, driving out the so-called Dixiecrats. We've made great progress in the South. We've made it in the West, in the North, and in the East. And Democrats have been pining for, you know, the new American majority, as they see it for some time now. I wonder, Andy, I mean, do you do you have a dog in this fight? You know more about this than most. Do you think the Electoral College is a good thing? I worry about the unintended consequences of significant change. The Electoral College is a known quantity, and it's not as if a Democratic candidate cannot win under that system. I guess what I would counsel is sort of a wait-and-see attitude. It may be that the national demographics will drive a popular vote that is further and further away from the Electoral College. And I think at some point, you could have a breaking point there. And I actually add one more point there. Congress was designed, especially in the House, to represent the people. But over time, you know, Congress has become less good at representing the national interest, I think. Partisan polarization, you know, gerrymandering makes it perhaps more

justifiable to think about making sure there is one institution that does represent the national majority in some sense. I just wonder if it's dangerous to sort of play the wait and see game here. I mean, I get the feeling that if President Trump had lost the Electoral College but won the popular vote, we'd never hear the end of that. You know, I mean, is there a danger in letting this system that subverts the will of the people, you know, stay in place for years to come as the demographics of this country are radically changing? It depends on what you mean by the people. The original founding assumption was that,

yes, we were now a unified government, but still, you know, in some ways, you know, we had loyalties that could be summed up by state. And again, that depended on a, you know, a different era of history. But, you know, again, I'm a little loathe to say that there's nothing to the idea of geography in a country as large as the United States. Is the problem here just that we're a different country than we think we are? Well, I would love to make a pitch for more civics education here. We are a country that has certain assumptions about the way we work. And then you find out that in certain places or

even across the country, it doesn't work that way. I mean, I think people ought to know more about how their government works. By the way, I would say that at all levels of government. I mean, one of the things about our federalist system is that you have the ability to take action at all levels of government. There are freedoms as well as frustrations in a federal republic. Andy Rudilevich teaches about the Electoral College at Bowdoin College. In beautiful Brunswick, Maine. And just in case this whole time you've been wondering, what does Andy look like? If you go to the Bowdoin website, there's a video series called Founding Principles. Everything you need to know about American government in 15 short episodes. Thank you.