Nope. There’s Really Zero Justification for the Electoral College. Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Nope. There’s Really Zero Justification for the Electoral College.

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 6h

Republicans have had a growing electoral college advantage for some thirty years. It’s been acutely visible since the 2000 election and there are reasons to believe that President Trump’s electoral college advantage will be greater in 2020 than it was in 2016. (Why? A surge in younger, more diverse voters in blue and red states rather than in key swing states.) This pattern has sparked a renewed effort among Republicans to make increasingly strained arguments for the electoral college’s continued existence. This Twitter thread from AEI/NRO’s Jay Cost shows just how strained those arguments have become. Certainly among Democrats the electoral college has few real defenders. The case against it is considered a given, even if the prospects of abolishing it seem distant. But it is worth discussing just how weak the claims in favor of the electoral college are even compared to those on behalf of other structural advantages for the right in the House and especially the Senate. The entire electoral college is truly a historical accident with more or less no present justification or argument to support it.

The entire federal government is wired in favor of non-urban areas and small states where the current GOP has its particular strength. Partisan divisions were not always so tightly lined up with this structural dynamic underlying the federal government. But today it is, which means that in the current party system the entire federal government has a steep built-in advantage for the GOP.

In the House and the Senate, we are dealing with structural decisions which are deeply embedded in the structure of the system. In theory states could opt for at-large districts rather than territorial districts which tend to cluster Democrats in major cities. That would make the House much more representative. But district representation is deeply embedded in the American system. If you live in one geographical region of a state you want one Rep who represents you and your area rather than the whole state. It is not only deeply embedded. But there are strong positive arguments in favor of territorial districts.

I’m not saying this is how it should be or that that district representation necessarily counts for much. I’m saying it’s deeply embedded in the system and because people are used to it it would be very hard to change.

The Senate is even more the case. The idea that Wyoming’s 600,000 people get as much representation in the Senate as California’s 40 million offends every part of our democratic sensibilities, especially if you live in California or another large state. In theory a constitutional amendment could change this. But having two houses is a core part of our federal system. And if you’re going to switch the upper house from representation by states, what do you switch it to?

Again, I’m not saying this means we should keep the Senate as is, just that this system is down very deep in the foundation of the federal system. And, significantly, the actual practice of government relies heavily on it. Certainly small states rely on it to a profound degree. Could it be changed? Of course. But there are deep and powerful constituencies which rely on it (not just small states) and changing its representational nature would unravel lots of other parts of the federal system.

The electoral college is fundamentally different. The original idea of the electoral college was that every four years you elected what amounted to a one-off Congress specifically chosen to, in turn, elect a President. Just as with Congress, members weren’t elected bound to some particular vote or position. The whole point was that they’d make up their minds independently after they were seated. In theory this is still the case. In practice we absolutely assume that electors will cast votes for the specific candidate they pledged to. Not to do so completely violates the logic of how the system has operated for almost two centuries since it congealed into the present system and process in the 1820s.

Andrew Jackson now has a remarkably bad press, for a number of pretty good reasons: he was a slaveholder, a major force in expulsions of Indian tribes in the Southeast and conducted his presidency with aggressive assertions of presidential power. He was also a major supporter for military expansionism, especially after he retired from the presidency. It’s hard to think of an American President who has fallen more rapidly in public esteem. Arthur Schlesinger’s 1946 Age of Jackson cast Jackson’s era as a pre-history of the Democratic party’s New Deal ascendency. As recently as 1984, Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic cast Jackson as the avatar if not necessarily personally the driver of the wave of democratization that washed over the country in the 1820s and 1830s. The factor that Jackson was an ardent unionist and stood down, with military threats, the first rumblings of the secessionist slave power gets much less attention.

For present purposes what is notable about Jackson is his early role in articulating a vision of the presidency as a tribune of national democracy. Jackson consistently justified his use of presidential powers by arguing that the president alone, of all the officeholders and stakeholders in the federal system, was elected by “the people” as a whole. The Senate was the creature of the states – at the time with state legislatures appointing Senators. The House is an assembly of representatives of various localities or districts. Only the President is elected by all “the people.”

Jackson came to this belief in part out of democratic idealism but also personal experience. He was the plurality winner of the electoral and the popular votes in 1824 but found himself denied the presidency in favor of John Quincy Adams in what he successfully labeled the “corrupt bargain.” Jackson’s language about “the people” is rooted in a democratic romanticism that doesn’t stand up to more modern critical scrutiny. But his concept of the presidency, as rooted in a national, popular electorate shaped thinking about the presidency for all who came after. Lincoln picked up much of the same thinking and rhetoric and it became even more deeply ingrained as the office of the presidency assumed increasing centrality over the course of the 20th century.

Indeed, if you look back over the scope of American history, you can see that the legitimacy and expectedness of majority rules popular, democratic elections of the President took hold and deepened during a long swath of more than a century of history when the popular vote and the electoral college never diverged. Critically, this was also a period in which the centrality and power of the President grew rapidly. The fact that the popular vote was technically irrelevant didn’t matter that much because in practice the two never diverged. Before the 2000 election you have to go back to the late 19th century for another example when, technically, it happened twice in relatively rapid succession: first in 1876 and then again twelve years later in 1888.

In practice, only the latter is really a clear example. The 1876 election was hopelessly marred by terroristic violence against freedmen voters in the South. The contest was eventually decided by a compromise in which the South and the Democratic party acquiesced in the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for withdrawing remaining federal troops from the South and ending Reconstruction. In essence, in exchange for allowing Hayes to become President, the South was allowed to have white state governments deal with their African-American citizens as they chose. Jim Crow was fully in place within about twenty years. That is a whole topic in itself, obviously. For present purposes what is relevant is that the situation on the ground in the South made it next to impossible to know who really got the most votes. And the final outcome was determined neither by popular votes or by electoral votes but rather by a sectional compromise that put the electoral votes into the Republican column.

The mechanisms of the electoral college itself have entirely been superseded – the selection of individual people who are supposed to do anything more than immediately and ceremonially cast votes for the person who they pledged when they became electors. (It is a bizarre footnote of the American political system that despite the candidate name we check or push a button for we’re technically voting for a slate of electors none of us have ever heard of.) Even the supposed arguments – that small states would never get any focus in a formalized national vote system – turn out to be nonsense on their own terms whatever their merits in theory. Name literally any time a presidential candidate of either party has set foot in Vermont or Idaho or either one of the barely populated Dakotas at any time in recent memory. At present the electoral college does far more to drive turnout efforts in Philadelphia and Detroit and Milwaukee and Las Vegas than even the most trivial attention to small states or rural communities. (This is quite contrary to the Senate which really does provide real and thoroughgoing sway to small states.) The need for geographically broad coalitions, as Jay Cost noted above claims? Please, that makes no sense. People not acres count in government and New York and Texas and California is just as ‘broad’ as any assemblage of states in the intermountain west.

There are various features of the federal system which are imperfectly democratic by modern standards. But they’re deeply rooted in our system of government – not without some justification and definitely entrenched enough to be all but impossible to root out. Neither applies to the electoral college. It is an historical accident, an idea that never worked but basically never mattered because in practice it failed to deliver anti-democratic outcomes until very recently.

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