Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen noted recently that President Donald Trump had come very close to winning reelection. “A flip of just some 73,700 votes in those three states (Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia) and Trump would be making plans for a second term — and we would all be talking about a ‘red wave,’” he wrote.
Thiessen’s point was that Trump’s near miss makes him a viable candidate in 2024. We draw a different lesson: It is alarming that a candidate came so close to winning while polling more than 5 million fewer votes than his opponent nationwide.
The Electoral College, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.
We write this with full awareness of the challenges of adopting a new system, with respect for many of the people who continue to argue against a switch, and with awareness that any change may have unintended consequences.
Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed.
All of that would have to change if the president were chosen based on the national vote count. Additionally, Electoral College math induces candidates to pay attention to voters in some small states who might otherwise be ignored.
But why should Iowa’s biofuel lobby get more of a hearing than, say, California’s artichoke lobby? Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million. We see no particular reason voters in purple states such as Wisconsin should be valued more than voters in red states such as Mississippi or blue states such as Washington.
There are worries that direct election might encourage regionalism or third parties at the extremes of political discourse. Any switch to a national system would rightly trigger debates over runoffs or ranked-choice voting to ensure majority rule. And we recognize that the constitutional amendment that would be required isn’t about to happen.
But it’s time to get serious about a change. Trump became president in 2016 despite earning 3 million fewer votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Now he has come close to winning reelection despite losing the popular vote by a far greater margin (though, by the time all the votes aren’t counted, it won’t be quite as close as when Thiessen wrote; Trump is now trailing in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania by more than 90,000).
We believe that Trump’s election was a sad event for the nation. His reelection would have been a calamity; we hope Thiessen is wrong about 2024. But we would be making this argument no matter which party seemed likely to benefit. If Democratic nominee John Kerry hadn’t lost Ohio by just 120,000 votes in 2004, he would have won an Electoral College victory despite trailing President George W. Bush by 3 million votes in the national count. That would have been a problem, too.
Americans are not going to be satisfied with leaders who have been rejected by a majority of voters, and they’re right not to be. It’s time to let majority rule.