Changing or Abolishing The Electoral College is a VERY Hard Thing to do
by Duane N. Burghard
©2019
OK, so here's a topic that's both ripped from today's headlines AND perfect for this blog.
Yesterday the New York Times (among MANY other media organizations) reported that United States Senator (and one of the (at last count) 12 million Democratic Presidential hopefuls) Elizabeth Warren was at a town hall meeting at Jackson State University where she proposed eliminating the Electoral College. Specifically, she said:
“Every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College.”
The comment was one of her biggest "applause lines" of the night. I was disappointed. Why? Because while irrelevant grandstanding and/or the throwing of red meat to a disgruntled crowd of people who apparently don't adequately understand how our system works has absolutely been the calling card of Democrats on the far left side of the party, Senator Warren has only recently joined this group. She used to be better than this.
Let's face some cold, hard facts from the Radical Center.
FACT #1: The Electoral College is embodied in the Constitution of the United States (Article 2, Section 1 ... also in the 12th Amendment). To be hyper-accurate, the term "Electoral College" is not actually used, however, the electors who choose the President were, at the time, called a college (hence the term as we know it today).
FACT #2: Because the Electoral College is embodied in the Constitution, abolishing or amending it requires changing the Constitution.
FACT #3: Changing the Constitution is very, VERY difficult (also, that's on purpose and, in my opinion, a good thing).
How hard is it to amend the Constitution? Well, we're Radical Centrists who like science and math, so let's do the math! COUNTLESS Amendments to our Constitution have been proposed by American politicians over the course of American history (no one knows exactly how many, but it's a BIG number). Of those, just over 1,000 proposed Amendments to our Constitution have actually made it to the floor of the US House of Representatives for a vote. Of those, just 33 have made it through Congress and been sent out to the states for ratification. Of those, just 27 have been ratified (and over a third of those were basically all at once (the Bill Of Rights)).
In 232 years.
In case the math doesn't get you yet, here's some more.
In order to get a proposed Amendment through Congress, you need "super majorities" in both Houses of Congress (note: yes, I'm aware that an amendment can also come via a national Convention called by Congress or from the State Legislatures ... which has literally NEVER happened, so we're not even going to even address those as rational possibilities). That means you would need 292 US House Members and 67 US Senators to agree to abolish or amend the Electoral College ... oh, and they'd all have to agree on exactly what to replace it with! There is NO indication that this kind of bipartisan consensus exists. Further, there's NO evidence that the Democrats, who could (and frankly should) expand on their electoral gains in 2018 during the 2020 cycle, are going to have anywhere NEAR that level of support even after the 2020 elections.
Put as plainly as possible, even if the Democrats all magically agreed (and magic IS the only way that's going to happen) on what to do to amend or abolish the Electoral College, there's no remotely realistic projection that shows they will have 292 votes in the House or 67 in the Senate for that proposal.
It's not going to happen. At all.
As a result, discussing it in a nationally televised town hall forum is as I described above: irrelevant grandstanding about an issue that the candidate in question has absolutely no realistic expectation of EVER being able to deliver on. Making statements like Senator Warren's regarding issues like the Electoral College is problematic for a number of reasons, but chief among them is this: setting completely unrealistic expectations may be great for generating excitement and even votes in the short term, but it also creates a MUCH higher probability of longer term disappointment and disillusionment. We're dealing with a significantly under-educated electorate that doesn't seem to "get" how difficult such things are. Such people are then FAR more likely to end up disengaging and becoming cynical, declaring that "government just doesn't work" because the pollyanna promise they voted for doesn't magically happen. And that is EXACTLY how populists like Donald Trump gain support.
Now, just so I'm clear about my views on the issue of the Electoral College, I would completely agree that the Electoral College system is in need of reform (though I don't particularly support destroying it). The Electoral College was, like so many other parts of our Constitution, an imperfect, pragmatic compromise. It was added to the Constitution in order to make it easier for the legislatures in smaller states to ratify it. It is one of the MANY "least worst" solutions that are an integral and critical part of making diverse Republics such as ours function. In this particular case, the idea was to provide a buffer against the "tyranny of the majority" (i.e. direct democracy ... which, please remember we do NOT now live in, nor have we ever lived in, this is a Republic). The Electoral College solution promised to provide (and in fact did provide) a check to the electoral power of larger states (e.g. in colonial times, the people in Rhode Island were terrified that the will of Virginians would determine their lives). Finally, the Electoral College vote tended to provide a unifying and validating effect to most elections (since, in general, the Electoral College victories are greater in percentage than the popular vote ones ... do people remember that just an 11% shift in votes in 1984 from Reagan to Mondale would have meant that Mondale would have been President, or do they remember that Reagan won re-election in the greatest Electoral College blowout in American history?). And, for the most part, until about 20 years ago, it worked pretty well.
Let's think about that for a second before we just start trashing our institutions willy nilly (a tragically favorite pastime of both the far left and far right). A bunch of people in the late EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, when the nation consisted of just 13 states and about 3.9 million people (1790 census ... close enough) came up with an idea that overwhelmingly worked for OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS.
For the record, I think we should be pretty f-ing impressed by that.
But with that said, I DO also agree that it's not working now ... and FAR worse, it's obvious to me (and anyone else who studies the numbers at places like "538") that it's VERY likely to continue to not work (and get worse) in the foreseeable future. There are a series of reasons for this which can best be drilled down to unprecedented geopolitical homogenization and concentration (aka blue states getting bigger and bluer, red states getting smaller and redder). I also feel the need to note that these changes are NOT anything which could have been remotely foreseen by our nation's founders (again, 13 states, less than 4 million people ... compared to 50 states and nearly 400 million people and over 200 years passing ... it is irrational in the extreme to not expect that some things are going to go a bit wonky).
So I agree that it isn't working ... HOWEVER, I'm not going to stand on a street corner and scream to throw out the electoral college baby with its Constitutional bathwater. Look, the fact is that maintaining Democratic Republics is HARD work. It takes an engaged, active, informed (educated) electorate ... all of which are areas we're getting progressively WORSE at (and THAT, by the way, is a MUCH bigger problem than the Electoral College). Fixing the big and hard problems takes TIME and prolonged, concentrated, pragmatic, effort. Progress, in our society, almost always happens in baby steps (which is why the vast bulk of legislation passed by Congress each year is changes to previously passed imperfect laws (that are hopefully then made slightly less imperfect) as opposed to new legislation.
Bottom line: I think it's completely fine to begin discussing how to reform (or even replace) the Electoral College, but you'd better have a VERY specific idea of what to replace it with (and we haven't heard that yet), AND you need to be ready to pragmatically compromise and modify that idea over time in order to get to something that will pass and ratify. Finally, you need to be realistic with people about the size, scope and difficulty of the challenge ... because if you're not doing that, you're just another bullshit artist, and we've got PLENTY of those.
OK, so here's a topic that's both ripped from today's headlines AND perfect for this blog.
Yesterday the New York Times (among MANY other media organizations) reported that United States Senator (and one of the (at last count) 12 million Democratic Presidential hopefuls) Elizabeth Warren was at a town hall meeting at Jackson State University where she proposed eliminating the Electoral College. Specifically, she said:
“Every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College.”
The comment was one of her biggest "applause lines" of the night. I was disappointed. Why? Because while irrelevant grandstanding and/or the throwing of red meat to a disgruntled crowd of people who apparently don't adequately understand how our system works has absolutely been the calling card of Democrats on the far left side of the party, Senator Warren has only recently joined this group. She used to be better than this.
Let's face some cold, hard facts from the Radical Center.
FACT #1: The Electoral College is embodied in the Constitution of the United States (Article 2, Section 1 ... also in the 12th Amendment). To be hyper-accurate, the term "Electoral College" is not actually used, however, the electors who choose the President were, at the time, called a college (hence the term as we know it today).
FACT #2: Because the Electoral College is embodied in the Constitution, abolishing or amending it requires changing the Constitution.
FACT #3: Changing the Constitution is very, VERY difficult (also, that's on purpose and, in my opinion, a good thing).
How hard is it to amend the Constitution? Well, we're Radical Centrists who like science and math, so let's do the math! COUNTLESS Amendments to our Constitution have been proposed by American politicians over the course of American history (no one knows exactly how many, but it's a BIG number). Of those, just over 1,000 proposed Amendments to our Constitution have actually made it to the floor of the US House of Representatives for a vote. Of those, just 33 have made it through Congress and been sent out to the states for ratification. Of those, just 27 have been ratified (and over a third of those were basically all at once (the Bill Of Rights)).
In 232 years.
In case the math doesn't get you yet, here's some more.
In order to get a proposed Amendment through Congress, you need "super majorities" in both Houses of Congress (note: yes, I'm aware that an amendment can also come via a national Convention called by Congress or from the State Legislatures ... which has literally NEVER happened, so we're not even going to even address those as rational possibilities). That means you would need 292 US House Members and 67 US Senators to agree to abolish or amend the Electoral College ... oh, and they'd all have to agree on exactly what to replace it with! There is NO indication that this kind of bipartisan consensus exists. Further, there's NO evidence that the Democrats, who could (and frankly should) expand on their electoral gains in 2018 during the 2020 cycle, are going to have anywhere NEAR that level of support even after the 2020 elections.
Put as plainly as possible, even if the Democrats all magically agreed (and magic IS the only way that's going to happen) on what to do to amend or abolish the Electoral College, there's no remotely realistic projection that shows they will have 292 votes in the House or 67 in the Senate for that proposal.
It's not going to happen. At all.
As a result, discussing it in a nationally televised town hall forum is as I described above: irrelevant grandstanding about an issue that the candidate in question has absolutely no realistic expectation of EVER being able to deliver on. Making statements like Senator Warren's regarding issues like the Electoral College is problematic for a number of reasons, but chief among them is this: setting completely unrealistic expectations may be great for generating excitement and even votes in the short term, but it also creates a MUCH higher probability of longer term disappointment and disillusionment. We're dealing with a significantly under-educated electorate that doesn't seem to "get" how difficult such things are. Such people are then FAR more likely to end up disengaging and becoming cynical, declaring that "government just doesn't work" because the pollyanna promise they voted for doesn't magically happen. And that is EXACTLY how populists like Donald Trump gain support.
Now, just so I'm clear about my views on the issue of the Electoral College, I would completely agree that the Electoral College system is in need of reform (though I don't particularly support destroying it). The Electoral College was, like so many other parts of our Constitution, an imperfect, pragmatic compromise. It was added to the Constitution in order to make it easier for the legislatures in smaller states to ratify it. It is one of the MANY "least worst" solutions that are an integral and critical part of making diverse Republics such as ours function. In this particular case, the idea was to provide a buffer against the "tyranny of the majority" (i.e. direct democracy ... which, please remember we do NOT now live in, nor have we ever lived in, this is a Republic). The Electoral College solution promised to provide (and in fact did provide) a check to the electoral power of larger states (e.g. in colonial times, the people in Rhode Island were terrified that the will of Virginians would determine their lives). Finally, the Electoral College vote tended to provide a unifying and validating effect to most elections (since, in general, the Electoral College victories are greater in percentage than the popular vote ones ... do people remember that just an 11% shift in votes in 1984 from Reagan to Mondale would have meant that Mondale would have been President, or do they remember that Reagan won re-election in the greatest Electoral College blowout in American history?). And, for the most part, until about 20 years ago, it worked pretty well.
Let's think about that for a second before we just start trashing our institutions willy nilly (a tragically favorite pastime of both the far left and far right). A bunch of people in the late EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, when the nation consisted of just 13 states and about 3.9 million people (1790 census ... close enough) came up with an idea that overwhelmingly worked for OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS.
For the record, I think we should be pretty f-ing impressed by that.
But with that said, I DO also agree that it's not working now ... and FAR worse, it's obvious to me (and anyone else who studies the numbers at places like "538") that it's VERY likely to continue to not work (and get worse) in the foreseeable future. There are a series of reasons for this which can best be drilled down to unprecedented geopolitical homogenization and concentration (aka blue states getting bigger and bluer, red states getting smaller and redder). I also feel the need to note that these changes are NOT anything which could have been remotely foreseen by our nation's founders (again, 13 states, less than 4 million people ... compared to 50 states and nearly 400 million people and over 200 years passing ... it is irrational in the extreme to not expect that some things are going to go a bit wonky).
So I agree that it isn't working ... HOWEVER, I'm not going to stand on a street corner and scream to throw out the electoral college baby with its Constitutional bathwater. Look, the fact is that maintaining Democratic Republics is HARD work. It takes an engaged, active, informed (educated) electorate ... all of which are areas we're getting progressively WORSE at (and THAT, by the way, is a MUCH bigger problem than the Electoral College). Fixing the big and hard problems takes TIME and prolonged, concentrated, pragmatic, effort. Progress, in our society, almost always happens in baby steps (which is why the vast bulk of legislation passed by Congress each year is changes to previously passed imperfect laws (that are hopefully then made slightly less imperfect) as opposed to new legislation.
Bottom line: I think it's completely fine to begin discussing how to reform (or even replace) the Electoral College, but you'd better have a VERY specific idea of what to replace it with (and we haven't heard that yet), AND you need to be ready to pragmatically compromise and modify that idea over time in order to get to something that will pass and ratify. Finally, you need to be realistic with people about the size, scope and difficulty of the challenge ... because if you're not doing that, you're just another bullshit artist, and we've got PLENTY of those.
