US Presidential Elections and the Electoral College

With the upcoming election on my mind, I decided to take a little bit of time to learn more about the history of U.S. Presidential Elections - mostly focusing on margins of victory in the popular vote and electoral college since 1860 (1860 was the election of Abraham Lincoln, which was essentially the start of the modern two party Democrat/Republican system). Here's a link to the Excel analysis.

Before getting to the electoral college and popular vote discussion, here are some interesting statistics:

- Gerald Ford is the only person in US history to have served both as Vice President and President without being elected to either position.  He became Vice President when Spiro Agnew resigned as VP after pleading no contest to tax evasion and money laundering. Ford then became President when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 after the Watergate scandal.

- There have been twelve Presidents since 1860 to serve more than one term. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the only president to serve more than two terms; he served four terms, which is no longer allowed following the 22nd Amendment.

- Seven incumbent presidents since 1860 have lost their re-election bids. Grover Cleveland lost his re-election bid in 1888 despite winning the popular vote and then four years later became the only president to win a non-consecutive second term.

- William J. Bryan has the most nominations by a major political party without winning an election.

- Five US Presidents have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016). All have been Republican.

-Since 1860, 24 elections have been won by Republicans and 16 by Democrats

- The largest popular vote victory since 1860 was 62.5% of the total vote won by FDR in 1936. This was also the largest electoral college victory with 98% of the electoral college vote (only lost Maine and Vermont, or 8 electoral votes)

- The largest Republican popular vote victory since 1860 was Richard Nixon in 1972 with 61.8% of the popular vote and 97% of the electoral college vote (only lost Massachusetts and D.C). In 1984, Ronald Reagan also won the popular vote with 59% of the total vote or 98% of the electoral college (only lost Minnesota and D.C)

- Three U.S. Presidents have been impeached (charged with crimes) - Andrew Johnson (1868), Bill Clinton (1998), and Donald Trump (2019). None has been removed from office as a result of impeachment, though Richard Nixon also resigned before facing potential impeachment.

- Eight U.S. Presidents have died in office - four from natural causes and four from assassination

Electoral College

The Electoral College came about as a compromise between those of the Founding Fathers who believed the President of the United States should be elected by popular vote and those who believed it should be by congressional appointment. Instead of either of these options, the President is chosen by a slate of electors from each state with each state given a number of electors equal to its congressional representation (2 senators plus congressional representatives from the House of Representatives). Currently, 270 electoral votes are required to win an election.  In the event of a 269-269 tie, the election would be in the hands of the House of Representatives where each state delegation gets one vote. The closest an election has come to an electoral tie was a 185-184 vote in favor of Rutherford Hayes (R) in 1876 (his opponent Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote by a 3% margin).

There is nothing in the US Constitution or federal law which specifies how states determine their electors or how each elector is required to vote.  Until around 1824, the state legislatures mostly decided the proportion of electors from their state that would be pledged to each candidate.  Around this time, some states started adopting rules to favor their preferred political candidate by moving toward a winner-take-all system (i.e. the winner of the state popular vote determines the entire slate of electors for that state even if the election was won by a single vote). In response, other states started to do the same to balance out the impact. Today, all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) have winner-take-all rules in place for their electors.

Faithless Electors

As noted above, the US Constitution does not define how electors are required to vote, but states have enacted rules and laws which pledge the electors' votes to a certain candidate, usually on a winner-take-all basis based on the state popular vote. The Supreme Court has upheld state laws regarding pledging of electors.  Usually, the actual individuals chosen to be electors for each party are individuals who have demonstrated a high level of loyalty to their political party, so their actual vote is mostly just a formality, but there have been a handful of cases where an elector has voted for someone other than their pledged candidate, referred to as "faithless electors." Thirty-three states have laws against faithless electors, but many of these laws have no enforcement mechanism (some through fines, others through voiding their vote).

In 2016, for example, there were a total of ten "faithless" electors, of which three were voided and reallocated to the candidate who won the state. Of the remaining seven faithless electors, five defected from the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, and two defected from the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, resulting in official electoral college votes for Colin Powell, Faith Spotted Eagle, Bernie Sanders, John Kasich and Ron Paul.  This was the highest number of faithless electors since 1872, where there were 63 "faithless electors" - but this was because the Democratic candidate died between the election and the electoral college vote and as such was not eligible for electoral college votes.  The vast majority of other faithless electors have voted for third-party or write-in candidates rather than for the other main candidate - more of a political statement than an effort to sway the election. For example, in 2000, one elector from D.C. cast a blank vote as a protest against D.C.'s lack of voting representation in Congress. In 2004, one elector from Minnesota seemingly made a mistake and voted for "John Ewards" [sic] for both president and vice-president. No faithless elector has ever decided an election.

Arguments in Favor of the Electoral College

The Founding Fathers apparently were wary of the concept of a directly democratic popular vote for president because they feared that a tyrant could use his influence or political power to unduly persuade an uneducated populous. I don't have much to say regarding this argument other than the famous quotation attributed to Winston Churchill, "the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."  While there may be some truth to that argument, it's also a highly pessimistic view which I don't fully support.

One of the primary arguments given today in favor of the electoral college is that it gives rural communities more representation and makes it so that presidential candidates are compelled to campaign in rural states and not just large urban population centers such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston or New York.  It is true that rural states are disproportionately favored. The reality for presidential campaigns, however, is that with the winner-take-all state rules, candidates are primarily focused on the state races that are close, the "swing" states such as Pennsylvania or Florida and they almost completely disregard the rest of the nation, including most of rural America.  Other than fundraising events, the campaigns also almost completely disregard the states with the largest populations - California, New York and Texas (although Texas has been considered by some as somewhat of a "swing state" in 2020). 

Arguments Against the Electoral College

Perhaps the most compelling argument against the electoral college is simply that each individual vote should count equally in a national election. If the President is truly the national president - the President of the United States and not the President of the Swing States or President of the Red States, then each individual vote should be equally represented and each individual's interests should be considered by the presidential candidates. This is not the case with the current electoral college system which by its design creates division among states (red states vs. blue states) and underrepresents minority political affiliations in almost every state.  The reality is that a conservative voter in upstate New York or rural California has absolutely zero impact on who is elected president and therefore is not represented in the national vote. The same is true of a liberal vote in Idaho or Kansas.  This may be part of why more than a third of the population does not generally vote in Presidential elections - they think their vote doesn't count and many of them are actually right. 

The electoral college disproportionately favors smaller states. For example, California has 55 electoral votes with a population of 39.51 million people meaning each elector represents 718,000 people, whereas Montana has 3 electoral votes with a population of 1.069 million people, or 356,000 people per elector. In other words, a vote in Montana is worth two votes in California from an electoral college perspective. So then the question becomes why should some people's votes count for more than others? Why should someone's vote count less in the national election because they moved from Florida to California or from Pennsylvania to Kansas?

Another argument against the electoral college system is that it distorts the margin of victory and makes relatively close elections seem like landslide victories, giving the winning candidate a sense that they have a "mandate" to enact their policies. In 1980, for example, Ronald Reagan won approximately 51% of the popular vote but received 91% of the electoral college votes. In 1984, he carried a larger 59% of the popular vote and 98% of the electoral vote (he carried all but one state in the electoral college - the home state of his opponent Walter Mondale). This means between 40% and 49% of the popular vote received less than 10% of the electoral college representation. On average, since 1860, the margin of victory in the electoral college has been 35% higher than the margin of victory in the popular vote.

There have also been five instances where the winner of the popular vote has lost the electoral college vote (which is also a very real possibility for 2020). Since 2000, Democrats have won 4 out of 5 popular votes and only won the presidency twice. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over 2% of 2.8 million votes and lost the electoral college by 14%. Understandably a lot of Democrats are concerned with the way the electoral college has been implemented and played out recently and Republicans are largely in favor of preserving their advantage.

The third significant argument for electoral college reform is from third party candidates who are underrepresented in the electoral college. In 1992, for example, third-party candidate Ross Perot received 19% of the popular vote and no electoral college votes. In 2016, 5% of the population voted for third-party candidates, none of whom received an electoral vote (other than faithless electors who cast their votes for individuals that were not on the ballots). A third-party candidate has not received electoral votes since 1968 and that is unlikely to change any time soon with our winner-take-all system.

In the end, I don't know what is a perfect solution to the electoral college dilemma.  Abolishing it entirely would be almost impossible as it would require a constitutional amendment and may have unintended consequences. I suspect this will continue to be a hot topic for discussion particularly if the upcoming election results in another electoral college/popular vote split. I do think that there is significant room for discussion in terms of additional laws regarding faithless electors or considering moving away from winner-take-all electoral pledges such as has been done in Maine and Nebraska.