Better Election System: Popular Vote or Electoral College?

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The American presidential election process incorporates not only democratic principles, but also federalist ones. Perhaps the best way of demonstrating the benefits of America’s federalist system is to compare it to a world in which the system does not exist.

As the system operates today, all but two states award their electors in a winner-take-all fashion. Thus, presidential candidates have no incentive to poll large margins in any one state. For instance, Barack Obama knows that obtaining the votes of 100% of Californians is no better than winning the votes of 51% of Californians. Either way, he wins the entire slate of California electors. It’s thus unproductive for him to waste too much time in any one state—even a big, friendly state such as California. His best strategy is to tour the nation, campaigning in all states and seeking to build a national coalition of voters that will enable him to win in a majority of states. He cannot focus on one or a handful of states to the exclusion of others.

Now imagine a world in which Presidents are elected by a nationwide popular vote. In this new world, winning 100% of voters in a state suddenly becomes infinitely preferable to winning 51% of voters. Obama would find it easy and profitable to camp out in a populous and friendly state, such as California. The result? Presidential candidates would campaign in friendly territory, promising anything and everything to the regions in which they are strong, ignoring the needs of the rest of the country. Large cities would be focused on almost exclusively as the candidates seek to turn-out as many votes as possible in “their” region of the country. Small states, rural areas and sparsely populated regions would find themselves with little to no voice in presidential selection. Presidents elected under such a system would not serve as representatives for the entire nation, as they do now. Instead, they would represent isolated regions, special interest groups, and large urban centers.

Many dispute this description, arguing that presidential candidates don’t tour the nation so much as they focus on mid-sized “swing” states. There is some truth to this observation, but the situation is not as extreme as many critics allege. Instead, to the degree that safe states don’t receive a proportionate amount of attention during a particular campaign, the logical conclusion is that those states, by and large, must already feel that one of the candidates represents their interests fairly well. When a candidate ceases to adequately understand and represent one of “his” state’s interests, the discontent in that state is usually expressed pretty quickly. Indeed, if the full history of states’ voting is studied, we see that there is no such thing as a permanently "safe" or "swing" state. Remember that California voted consistently Republican as recently as 1988. Texas used to be a safe Democratic state, as was West Virginia until George W. Bush won it in 2000 and 2004.