Can Anything Be Done to Get Control of Our Country Again?
Of all the institutions in American politics, the Balloter College is surely the strangest. Information technology never worked as its designers intended, and for more 200 years, generations of aspiring reformers have lambasted its distortions and mounted heroic campaigns to replace information technology. And all the same it still stands, simply slightly modified, in all its Rube Goldberg marvel. Which begs the obvious question that titles the Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar'south new book, Why Do We Even so Have the Electoral College?
The curt answer is that the constitution is actually hard to amend, and virtually impossible when more a third of senators or representatives think their states would do worse under new rules. And this has always been the case, for reasons ranging from preserving partisan advantages to preventing racial integration. As a result, our 18th-century peculiarity persists.
past Alexander Keyssar
Harvard University Printing, 544 pp.
To fully explain how hard the Balloter College is to dislodge, Keyssar chronicles more two centuries of well-nigh-constant disputation and boxing. On four occasions one sleeping accommodation of Congress approved a constitutional amendment, only to see it autumn short in the other. All of these came during times in which parties were ideologically dislocated and politics was uncertain enough to make fifty-fifty curt-term advantages unclear—
opportune times for constitutional modify.
Today's reformers have found what they hope is a workaround: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, nether which states pass legislation that binds their electors to support the national popular vote winner. For the compact to take effect, states would have to collectively represent at least 270 Electoral College votes, the blank minimum necessary to win. As of this writing, 16 states, representing 196 electoral votes, accept signed on.
It'southward a clever approach. Simply the Balloter Higher is a slippery target. In most political constituencies, opposition to the institution is fluid; with every elimination effort, the battle lines change. In each fight, critics of the institution earnestly phone call out its capricious distortions, and trumpet broad democratic norms of fairness and equality. But those distortions give some states and some constituencies more than power than they'd otherwise accept, and they are unwilling to give it up. Opponents always find some plausible principle—the value of federalism, a vague alert almost some unintended consequence—on which to hang a defense. The Road Runner always gets away, despite Wile Eastward. Coyote'due south cleverest schemes.
Keyssar begins in the summer of 1787, as the Framers were struggling mightily over how to elect a president. Some plans had the legislature picking the president, for a single term. Others favored a straight election, eager to run across a more independent executive with closer ties to the people. After months of reversals and oscillations, the Balloter College emerged as "an eleventh-60 minutes compromise by gifted but tired men who had difficulty figuring out how to elect a president and had to bring their work to a close."
The system was fraught from the beginning. Motivated by the prize of executive power, partisan land governments continually changed the rules for distributing Balloter College votes to advantage their ain political party. Sometimes, they distributed electors by congressional commune. At other times, they gave them all to the statewide popular vote winner. Occasionally, the legislature simply decided whom to engage.
These partisan yo-yos, Keyssar writes, "transformed the long electoral entrada into a procedural free-for-all." Predictably, this attracted reformers. Every bit early as 1800, Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party advocated for a constitutional amendment that would require states to allocate electors by congressional district. Commune elections were widely considered fairer than winner-have-all elections, since they were more proportional. By nationalizing the rules, district elections would keep states from capriciously refashioning their processes to suit changing partisan whims.
The Democratic-Republicans also felt disadvantaged by winner-take-all elections, compared to the then-ascendant Federalists. While a few prominent Federalists, including Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris, joined Jefferson'due south cause, their party was more often than not in favor of the status quo, making any reform impossible.
Jefferson might accept had a chance to modify the organisation when his party won a supermajority of Firm seats in the 1802 midterms. Simply subsequently their awe-inspiring victory, the Democratic-Republicans felt more confident in their ability to win outright majorities and backed off their earlier back up for mandatory district elections, which they now thought would help Federalists. Instead, they put all their effort into what became the 12th Amendment, in which electors cast separate votes for president and vice president, to assistance increase Jefferson'south chances of re-election in 1804.
The partisan dorsum-and-along connected. In the heated 1812 campaign, the New Jersey legislature canceled voting but days before the election and threw its support to the Federalist candidate, DeWitt Clinton. The North Carolina legislature appointed electors to ensure that James Madison got its votes, lest its land'due south voters prefer Clinton.
These "blatantly unprincipled" maneuvers, Keyssar writes, forth with the full general drift toward winner-accept-all rules, reanimated the cause of a district ballot amendment in the 1810s. That era's reformers used linguistic communication that today'due south reformers would notice familiar: They complained that the system's rules deprived political minorities of a voice in state elections, and made partisan politics nastier past raising the stakes, peculiarly in large states. And they outlined how a well-placed minority that formed a majority in a majority of states could rule.
The Electoral College is a slippery target. In most political constituencies, opposition to the establishment is fluid; with every elimination effort, the battle lines alter.
Between 1813 and 1826, Congress devoted considerable time and energy to this contend, with reformers making steady gains. In the 16th Congress (1819–21), more than ii-thirds of senators and 63 percent of House members (only short of the requisite 2-thirds) supported district elections—the closest Congress ever came to abolishing the winner-accept-all Electoral Higher. Only information technology wasn't enough. Equally they would for some other two centuries, the institution's defenders argued for the primacy of states' rights and for fealty to the delicate compromises of 1787. (It was as well possible that state legislatures would gerrymander districts for partisan proceeds, thus distorting results in a different way.)
The 1824 election, a four-way contest ultimately decided in the House, reignited the case for reform. In 1826, 73 percent of representatives supported a commune elections amendment. Simply reform failed this time in the Senate, every bit southern states grew worried about what might happen if reformers overturned the original rules, which had given slave states more balloter influence than their voting population merited.
Calls for reform picked up during the pro-democracy stirrings of Reconstruction, and gained urgency after the disputed, fraud-ridden election of 1876, in which Rutherford Hayes became president despite losing the popular vote. But as politics became more polarized, reform became more unlikely. Interest in reforming the Electoral Higher slowed.
In 1948, Strom Thurmond mounted a successful third-party Dixiecrat entrada, winning four southern states, and ane faithless elector in Tennessee. His candidacy raised the unwelcome specter of the House again deciding a presidential contest, with a splinter regional party playing kingmaker. Afterwards the ballot, the unlikely duo of liberal Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Guild and bourgeois Texas Democratic Congressman Ed Lee Gossett teamed upwards on a new proposal: Allocate states' electoral votes proportionally, co-ordinate to the percent of votes.
Social club liked this proposal because information technology solved the faithless-elector problem and the proportionality ensured that campaigns could no longer ignore "sure" states while focusing on "doubtful" ones. The approach would also solve the problem of gerrymandering inherent in whatever district-based elector organisation. Gossett liked information technology because he thought that black voters, who were key swing constituencies in big swing states, had too much ability under the current organization. The Senate voted in favor of the proposal, 64–29, in 1950, clearing the two-thirds hurdle. But the conservative argument that worked in the Senate—proportional elections would weaken the influence of black
voters—flopped in the more liberal Firm, where large "pivotal" states too had more representatives. Whatever the obvious defects of the Balloter College, this proved as well much.
Debate continued through the 1950s. The close election of 1960 revived concerns about faithless electors (there were xv in 1960), and with George Wallace's 3rd-party candidacy in 1968 it was again possible that the House would decide the outcome. Reformers kicked back into gear, advocating for getting rid of the Electoral College entirely and simply electing presidents through a national popular vote.
The Electoral College, Keyssar writes, emerged every bit "an eleventh-hour compromise past gifted but tired men who had difficulty figuring out how to elect a president and had to bring their work to a close."
Hubert Humphrey had been championing this solution since the 1940s, comparing the Balloter College to a "human appendix" ("useless, unpredictable, and a possible center of inflammation"). He won the support of influential Indiana Senator Birch Bayh, who held countless hearings, building on pro-commonwealth energy from the Voting Rights Act and the one-person, 1-vote Supreme Court rulings. In 1969, both Humphrey and his main opponent, Richard Nixon, endorsed eliminating the establishment. The House voted overwhelmingly in favor of a national popular vote subpoena, 338–70. With strong bipartisan support and, in 1 poll, 81 pct of Americans supporting the amendment, it looked like the time had finally come.
Simply progress slowed in the Senate, where southern senators from states that at present voted overwhelmingly Republican for president had more power, and could use more dilatory tactics. These senators had grown extremely wary of more federal involvement in elections, and feared that they would lose more than power to big, liberal states with high turnouts. As a consequence, they had become proponents of the Electoral College. After two failed cloture votes, reformers surrendered.
The close 1976 election offered yet some other springboard for reform, with Jimmy Carter championing enthusiastic support for a national popular vote. Only over again, the more than conservative, modest-state-heavy Senate prevailed, and the 51–48 Senate vote savage well short of the two-thirds majority needed. Reform free energy drained away as the country shifted in a more than bourgeois direction.
All of this history may seem dispiriting to the latest attempts to renegotiate that strange compromise of 1787. If the Electoral College has stood for this long, despite constant attack, why would this fourth dimension be unlike? Indeed, the constitutional amendments that came closest to passage set sail when both parties were split and neither saw a clear advantage to maintaining the institution. Today, the country is hyperpolarized, and Republicans take a clear Balloter Higher edge.
This hasn't stopped activists from pushing, and since the 2016 election, interest in abolishing the institution has been rising once over again. In addition to its prominent identify in the 2020 Democratic presidential debates, the Electoral College has featured in multiple prominent recent books, including Keyssar's exhaustive work. The New York Times editorial author Jesse Wegman'south persuasive Let the People Pick the President is the go-to volume for the slam-douse example for the Electoral College's democratic pathologies. The Ohio State University police professor Edward Foley'due south thoughtful Presidential Elections and Majority Rule offers a good mix of history and reform proposals.
Those proposals include the National Popular Vote Interstate Meaty. In some respects, it's the most promising scheme notwithstanding: Getting states representing 270 electoral votes to sign on is a much lower bulwark than passing a constitutional amendment. It's hard to imagine two-thirds of either the House or the Senate agreeing on it, and the compact would cut Congress completely out.
But underneath the institutional shortcut, the same obstacles concur. With the possible exception of Colorado, all of the current compact members lean solidly Democratic. Republican states are unlikely to undermine a system that has helped Republicans gain the White House despite losing the pop vote in two of the last v elections. And since near swing states take legislatures that are either divided or completely controlled by the GOP, Democrats who might support such a measure can't overcome Republican opposition. To abolish the Balloter Higher under the compact, Democrats would demand a sweeping nationwide victory that gives them unified control of far more than states than they run now.
Such a landslide isn't impossible, merely it's unlikely. And every bit Keyssar'south history shows, even if that victory did come, Democrats might no longer be interested in eliminating the institution. Like Jefferson's political party in 1804, they could quickly decide that eliminating the Electoral Higher would only undermine their newfound dominance. They would probably exist better off pursuing easier-to-brand, harder-to-contrary changes, like increasing the size of the Firm, which would add to the Electoral Higher votes of larger states.
Still, Keyssar attempts to muster some optimism: "The tale told hither is a history of increasingly widespread democratic beliefs. . . . An undercurrent of democratic progress courses through the trail of legislative defeats." This is a dainty sentiment, just in a moment of democratic backsliding and hyperpolarization, we shouldn't accept false hope. Large reforms may nevertheless exist possible, but to succeed they will demand to scramble 2-political party partisanship. Right now, it's difficult to see that happening without bigger changes happening beginning.
Source: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/07/06/can-anything-dislodge-the-electoral-college/
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