If you look at the actual history of this, the electoral college was a compromise between Congress appointing a President, and direct popular election of one. The biggest problem with the electoral college method right now, is "winner take all." If electors were proportioned by congressional district or popular vote percentages by state much of the issues with a "popular vote" would be eliminated.
The problem with such a system is--and the Democrats recognize it--is the Democrats would almost always lose presidential elections. They want the alternate to this by being able to spread their often-higher national vote total out to cover the otherwise state by state losses they'd suffer. The problem with that system is it makes all but a handful of high-population states irrelevant to selection of a president.
Every four years, Americans cast their ballots for president, but the winner isn’t always the candidate who gets the most votes. ContentsWhat Is the National Popular Vote?What Is the Electoral College?How the Electoral College Works: Step by StepWhy the Electoral College Exists: Historical...
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Of these various systems, the congressional appointment one is a non-starter, while using a popular national vote is an absurd foray into tyranny of the masses.
Basically, the Electoral College
is the genius compromise the Founders built to keep the Executive branch independent of the Legislature while still giving the people a real voice. They explicitly rejected two bad ideas at the Constitutional Convention:
First idea: Letting Congress pick the President (that would make the Executive a puppet of the Legislature).
and B. A straight national popular vote (they feared "tyranny of the masses" and regional factions, Madison wrote about this in Federalist 10, and Hamilton explained the EC solution in Federalist 68)....
Instead, they created a system where
each state chooses electors equal to its total congressional delegation (House reps + 2 Senators). That’s exactly why it’s 538 today (435 House + 100 Senate + 3 for DC via the 23rd Amendment). The electors meet
in their own states and vote. It’s not Congress picking the President, and it’s not a raw national head-count. Hamilton called it “excellent” because it blends the sense of the people with safeguards against cabals, intrigue, and mob rule.
There is
no such thing as “the national popular vote.” It’s just an after-the-fact aggregate of 51 separate state (and DC) elections. Campaigns are run, ads are bought, and turnout is driven by the Electoral College rules we actually have. Pretending otherwise is like complaining that a football game’s final score would be different if they’d played basketball rules.
TA Gardner is right that
winner-take-all (used in 48 states) is the biggest practical friction point today. Maine and Nebraska already prove a district-based system can work without blowing up the whole republic. But switching to a true national popular vote wouldn’t “fix” anything—it would
destroy the federal balance the Founders deliberately created.
Here’s why a national popular vote is insane in practice:
CA + NYC (and a handful of other mega-population centers) really would decide everything. The top 10 states already hold roughly 51% of the U.S. population. Under a national popular vote, candidates would campaign almost exclusively in the biggest media markets and urban corridors. Flyover country, rural states, the Mountain West, the Plains, the South outside a few big cities,
all irrelevant. Why spend time or money in Wyoming, Montana, or West Virginia when you can rack up millions in LA, New York, Chicago, and Houston? The Founders designed the EC precisely to prevent coastal or urban elites from steamrolling the rest of the country. Candidates would never leave these states, they would simply not care about the vote from any other group of states.
It would make most states spectators. Right now, even “safe” states still matter because their electoral votes are in play in the broader strategy. Under popular vote, 40+ states become electoral wastelands. Turnout in those places would crater.
Democrats know this math. Their strongest margins come from huge, deep-blue population centers (look at 2016: Clinton won California alone by
over 4.27 million votes, more than her entire national popular-vote margin). Spreading those urban piles nationwide lets them paper over losses in the other 40 states. TA Gardner nailed it: proportional or district allocation would expose that geographic weakness, so they push the popular-vote alternative instead.
The Electoral College forces candidates to build
broad geographic coalitions across diverse regions, economies, and cultures. That’s not a bug, it’s the feature that has kept the republic stable for 235+ years with peaceful power transfers almost every time. The handful of times the EC and national totals diverged (5 times total) didn’t break the country; they reflected the system working as designed.
Bottom line: the Founders weren’t idiots. They gave us a republic, not a pure democracy, for very good reasons. Scrapping the Electoral College for a raw popular vote would turn the United States into a country run by whichever side can max out turnout in the biggest cities. That’s not fairness, that’s just trading one set of swing states for permanent coastal dominance. The system we have is still the fairest way to elect a President in a continental republic of 50 sovereign states.
