November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College III Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:10 AM EST John Steele Gordon raises a reasonable objection to my argument in favor of ditching the Electoral College: “In a race determined only be the national popular vote, much of ‘fly-over country,’ as coastal elites call it, would be ignored, and the race would be fought in the great media centers . . . and the major cities. That would not be a good thing. The Electoral College forces candidates to consider each of the 50 states and to spend time and resources in those that seem possible to win, no matter how small. Without it, they would ignore the Vermonts and the Idahos.” There are a few problems with this statement. First of all, on the level of broad principles, I’m not sure why the United States is necessarily better off with an electoral system that theoretically favors small, rural states over big, urban centers. There are arguments for promoting such a system, but it doesn’t strike me as an absolute political good. Second, and more important, the system we currently have doesn’t actually favor small states very much in practice. Mr. Gordon’s statement that abolishing the Electoral College would lead to candidates’ ignoring “the Vermonts and the Idahos” would be a good point—except for the fact that candidates already ignore Vermont and Idaho. Presidential elections are fought in big, politically divided states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida. The practical impact of the Electoral College isn’t to favor small states; it’s to favor certain kinds of big states. I’ve never actually heard a “coastal elite” use the term “flyover country,” but if some do, the Electoral College isn’t doing much to discourage them. Mr. Gordon makes an additional point that the Electoral College tends to establish more decisive winners than the popular vote, and suggests that this is a good thing because “clear winners are always better than unclear ones, and the great virtue of the Electoral College is that it always produces clear winners.” I’m not sure that Al Gore or Samuel Tilden would agree about the consistent clarity of the Electoral College, but I actually think there’s an argument to be made that the apparent clarity of Electoral College results is a bad thing. In 1992 Bill Clinton won by a clear Electoral College vote but took office with less than 50 percent support from the public. He proceeded to try and ram health-care reform through Congress as though he’d won an overwhelming mandate. A similar thing happened with George Bush and Social Security reform after the 2004 election. Both Presidents overestimated the public’s support for their administration, and both suffered gravely as a result. I doubt this kind of hubris would occur so easily if we didn’t have an Electoral College to disguise and distort the results of close elections. Finally, Mr. Gordon suggests a counterfactual: “Imagine a squeaker election . . . without the Electoral College. In 2000, because of the college, the messy, divisive legal battle was fought only in Florida, and it still took over a month to sort out. But without the college it would have been fought in all 50 states, because each and every vote would have been precious.” On this last point, I’ll note that the idea that each and every vote is precious is sort of the point of a democracy. As for Mr. Gordon’s larger thought experiment, to paraphrase The Princess Bride, I do not think it means what he thinks it means. If the 2000 election had been settled without the Electoral College, there would not have been a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. In fact, there would not have been a “messy, divisive legal battle” at all. The outcome would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.
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