If presidential elections were decided by popular vote instead of the Electoral College, Al Gore would have been elected president in 2000. How we choose a president profoundly impacts how campaigns are run, the importance of swing states and an election’s outcome. It’s certainly no surprise that the Electoral College vs. popular vote controversy has sparked considerable debate. As the issue surfaces heading into November, is it time to graduate from the Founding Father's Electoral College concept, or are popularity contests no way to choose a president?
While some have predicted that a national popular election would focus only on big cities, it is clear that this would not be the case.
Contests for Governor or U.S. Senator provide ample evidence of how popular elections lead to campaigning in all demographic groups. When candidates run for Governor or Senator of states with big cities, these cities do not receive all the attention and they do not control the outcome. Three of the last four Governors of California have been Republicans, for example, despite the fact that Democratic candidates have carried Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area. There are hundreds of examples of Governors and U.S. Senators who were elected without carrying the big cities or metropolitan areas of their respective states.
Evidence as to how a nationwide presidential campaign would be run can be found by examining the way presidential candidates currently campaign inside battleground states. Inside Ohio or Pennsylvania, candidate visit big cities, suburbs, ex-urbs, and rural towns. Because every vote is equal inside current battleground stats, the big cities don’t receive all the attention or determine the results. The itineraries of presidential candidates in battleground states (and their allocation of other campaign resources) demonstrate what every gubernatorial or senatorial candidate in every state already knows—namely that when every vote matters, the campaign must be run in every part of the state.
The five biggest cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Philadelphia) only make up six percent of the U.S. population, and the voters in these cities of course do not all vote for the same presidential candidate. The top fifty cities combined only comprise about 18 percent of the population, so even in the unlikely event where one candidate wins all those cities by overwhelming margins of 60% they would still need to win most of their votes from the rest of the country to be elected under a national popular vote.
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