A casual look at 2024 election polling might lead to the mistaken conclusion that the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be determined by who wins the most votes across the country.
After all, many sources have recently circulated headlines showing which candidate is ahead in nationwide polls – and by how much.
A Thursday FOX News poll showed Harris leading by two points nationally – well within the poll’s margin of error.
A Florida Atlantic University poll the same day showed Harris with a five-point lead.
A Rasmussen poll conducted during the same week showed Trump with a two-point lead among likely voters nationwide.
None of these polls paints the full picture of the race.
While national polls are useful to judge the overall momentum of the campaign, polling in the six or seven closest battleground states will almost always give voters a better idea of who is really ahead and behind in the weeks leading up to Election Day.
Why?
Because, simply put, the United States does not elect presidents based on who wins the greatest number of votes (the popular vote). Instead, the country chooses the president based on whoever wins a majority of electoral votes from the Electoral College – a system as old as the American presidency itself.
What is the Electoral College?
In 1787, the Framers first outlined the process for electing presidents using the Electoral College in Article II, Section 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution.
Then, in 1804, the Twelfth Amendment updated this process – which has been virtually unchanged since.
The key to understanding the Electoral College is understanding that the nation is a united federal republic composed of states, each with its own government.
This concept, known as “federalism,” is an integral factor in not just the United States’ voting system, but in what fundamentally sets the nation and its government apart from every other country in the world.
Essentially, every four years, each one of the country’s 50 states has its own vote for president.
Each state has a certain number of electoral votes allotted based on its population – ranging from three electoral votes for each of the six least populous states and Washington D.C. to 54 electoral votes for the most populous state, California. These numbers are updated with each census every 10 years.
In the case of every state except for two, each state awards all of its electoral votes to the candidate that wins the popular vote statewide.
Maine and Nebraska are the only states that do not use this “winner take all” formula – and instead split their electoral votes based on the candidate that carries each of its congressional districts.
In the event that no candidate wins a majority of electoral votes (including a tie), the election is decided by the House. The last time this happened was 200 years ago in the election of 1824.
Why have the Electoral College?
Alabama Supreme Court Associate Justice Will Sellers recounted how and why the Framers decided to institute this system as opposed to others.
“Important questions necessarily arose during the Constitutional Convention concerning the process of electing the president,” Sellers wrote in a piece for City Journal published on Election Day 2020 titled “In Defense of the Electoral College.”
“Some advocated for election to take place in the House of Representatives, or in the Senate, or even in the several states,” Sellers outlined:
The obvious problem with these proposals is that they would create an axis between the president and the electing body. If the states elected the president, then the larger, wealthier, and more populous states would receive greater attention and more favorable treatment by the executive branch than would the smaller, less populous states. A similar imbalance of power would occur were the president chosen by the House or the Senate.
“Thus, the mechanics of electing the chief executive required balancing various interests to give the executive branch the requisite independence from other political bodies, while maintaining co-equality,” the jurist stressed.
Furthermore, the Heritage Foundation detailed some of the benefits of using the Electoral College, as opposed to a national popular vote or parliamentary system, in its project “The Essential Electoral College.”
“The Electoral College preserves the principles of federalism that are essential to our constitutional republic,” the think tank explained.
Heritage also emphasized the fundamental reality that the county is a union of 50 states “coming together to form the federal government,” noting “it is important that the system to elect the President fairly represent[s]” all of the states.
“By allocating electoral votes by the total number of representatives in a given state, the Electoral College allows more states to have an impact on the choice of the President,” Heritage indicated.
A better way to conduct elections
The system the United States uses to conduct its presidential elections is far from perfect, but it is still a lot better than virtually all of the alternatives.
A system that simply uses the national popular vote – in which the candidate that gets the most votes nationwide becomes president – is the system almost always floated by critics of the Electoral College.
If American voters were to select our presidents this way, presidential elections would be completely different from how they are now. It would, for starters, no longer be necessary for candidates to campaign in a host of states.
Instead, under a national popular vote system candidates could theoretically spend the vast majority of their time running up the score in massive states such as California or New York – and completely ignore the entire part of the nation colloquially referred to as “flyover country.”
As Heritage stated: “The Electoral College prevents presidential candidates from winning an election by focusing solely on high-population urban centers and dense media markets, forcing them to seek the support of a larger cross-section of the American electorate.”
“This addresses the Founders’ fears of a ‘tyranny of the majority,’ which has the potential to marginalize sizeable portions of the population, particularly in rural and more remote areas of the country,” the think tank elaborated:
Large cities like New York City and Los Angeles should not get to unilaterally dictate policies that affect more rural states, like North Dakota and Indiana, which have very different needs. These states may be smaller, but their values still matter—they should have a say in who becomes President.
In essence, the Electoral College forces “presidential candidates to address all Americans during their campaigns, not just those in large cities,” Heritage’s project pointed out.
As a result, making sure that the president is elected by as many distinct regions of the country as possible is, more often or not, a benefit for the less radical candidate in the race, Heritage noted.
But is it undemocratic?
Even after defenders of the Electoral College point out all of the ways the institution makes American elections fairer and more representative of more of the country, detractors almost unanimously fire back: “But, the Electoral College is undemocratic.”
In reality, the Electoral College is arguably the most democratic of all the ways to elect a country’s head of government currently in use around the world.
Those calling the Framers’ vision “undemocratic” usually point to the fact that under the Electoral College, an election’s winner is often not the candidate who wins the most votes cast directly from the people.
A candidate receiving the most ballots but still not making it to the White House might sound unfair on the surface level. After all, this exact situation has happened five times (8% of all presidential elections) in American history: in 1824, 1876, 1888 – and twice in the last quarter-century – 2000 and 2016.
However, a deeper dive into those specific elections tells a starkly different story.
First, it is worth noting that there has only been one time when a presidential candidate won a majority of the popular vote but still failed to win the presidency – the election of 1876, undoubtedly the most controversial election in American history.
In 1888, 2000, and 2016, the candidate who came in first place in the popular vote received between 48.2% and 48.6% of ballots nationwide – meaning a majority of the voting public actually voted against them.
The 1824 election was a unique four-way race in which no candidate won a majority of electoral votes and the House elected John Quincy Adams, who came in second in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, over Andrew Jackson (who came in first via both methods).
In 1876, Democratic nominee Samuel J. Tilden won 50.9% of the popular vote to his Republican opponent Rutherford B. Hayes’ 47.9%. However, Hayes won the Electoral College, and hence the presidency, by one electoral vote.
Historians widely consider the outcome of this contest to have been influenced by massive voter fraud and a “corrupt bargain.”
However, the election, which happened just over a decade after the Civil War concluded, is not the one cited by proponents of the national popular vote method. They instead mostly turn to 2016, and in some cases the 2000 race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.
2016: a case study
Failed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton herself has implied that the election was “stolen” from her. In 2019, she even referred to Trump, who defeated her in a relative electoral landslide, as an “illegitimate president.”
In what is among the greatest electoral upsets in modern political history, Trump bested Clinton by over 70 electoral votes, winning the electoral college by a 14-point margin.
Heading into election night, The New York Times’ “Upshot” gave Clinton a staggering 85% chance of winning the presidency, compared to Trump’s meager 15% chance.
At the same time, the Democrat, bolstered by her strong support in urban areas, eked out a 2.1% plurality of the popular vote over Trump, with 48.2% to his 46.1%.
A pair of right-leaning third-party candidates, Gary Johnson and Evan McMullin, received a combined 3.8% of the popular vote – nearly double the margin separating Clinton and Trump.
As a testament to how much Clinton’s votes were concentrated in a few populous states, excluding the votes cast in the state of California, Trump would have won the popular vote by 1.4 million.
Interestingly, Clinton won the popular vote by just over double that margin – meaning there was a swing of over 4.2 million votes to her from California alone.
Therefore, it is not surprising that before California’s results fully came in on election night 2016, it appeared that Trump was going to win the popular vote.
However, the main reason Trump was able to pull off such a stunning upset was that he and his team knew full well that winning the popular vote is not how the game is played in American presidential elections.
Trump instead approached the race strategically, and as The Washington Post explained the day after the election, he “redrew the electoral map, from sea to shining sea.”
“Clinton won in urban counties, while Trump won everywhere else,” the Post’s report detailed:
Clinton won almost 90 percent of urban cores, while Trump won the vast majority – between 75 and 90 percent – of suburbs, small cities and rural areas. Though these latter geographies are more sparsely populated, they were home to the majority of voters this election.
Observers at the time also said that Trump tore down the “blue wall” – a term popularly used to describe a group of swing states – including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – that consecutively voted for the Democratic nominee in the six presidential elections prior to 2016.
Trump carried all three of those states, all by less than one percent of the vote each. Added up, they netted him a total of 46 additional electoral votes.
If Clinton had instead won this trio of states, she, not Trump, would have become the nation’s 45th president.
So, what happened?
Observers attributed Trump’s success in the “blue wall” states to several factors, including his stances on economic issues, in particular trade, many of which were unconventional for a Republican at the time.
However, Trump’s policy positions only got him so far. It was his decision to campaign in these states – previously regarded as a lost cause for Republicans – that put him over the top.
Clinton, meanwhile, took her party’s repeated success in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin for granted.
Critics widely regarded her decision not to visit Wisconsin as a major campaign blunder and a tell-tale sign in her upset loss.
It is also worth mentioning that, according to Pew Research, Trump bested Clinton by seven points among Catholic voters nationwide in 2016. The “blue wall” states, in particular Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are known to have a sizable Catholic population.
Trump specifically performed well among heavily Catholic and ancestrally Democratic Polish-American voters, who form significant communities in these states.
All of this combined conveys a clear picture. Simply put, Trump’s campaign outsmarted Clinton’s.
While Trump and his team got to work “redrawing” the map, the Democrat seemed to rest on her laurels and focus on turning out more voters than him across the country.
The Republican on the other hand won 30 states across all of the country’s regions – to Clinton’s 20, the majority of which were clustered in the northeast or the west coast.
Sure, Clinton succeeded at winning more of the popular vote. But this would be as useful as a baseball team focusing on scoring more total runs instead of winning games.
Imagine one team in the World Series wins three games by absolute blowouts. However, they lose the other four by one run each.
No one would dispute that the team that won four games in the seven-game series is the rightful World Champion – even though they scored significantly fewer total runs.
No, the Electoral College did not give Trump an unfair advantage. He just played the game in front of him better than his opponent did and came out on top.
What about other countries?
Another objection frequently raised by opponents of the Electoral College is that no other country in the world uses a system exactly like it.
While our exact Electoral College – like many of the time-honored institutions of our republic – is uniquely American, it is frankly wrong to say most other countries with democratically elected governments use a national popular vote system.
Yes, there are a handful of countries, such as Indonesia, Turkey, Argentina, and Brazil, that currently elect their heads of government this way. National popular vote is also, on paper at least, Venezuela’s official system for choosing their president.
It is clear that almost all of the countries that use a national popular vote system to pick their heads of government – largely developing countries in Latin America or Africa – are not exactly known to be “beacons of democracy.”
In contrast, practically every Western country does not use this simple “most votes wins” system.
So, what do most European countries, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, use to elect their respective heads of government?
The answer is that they use a parliamentary system – a framework that is by every metric far less democratic than our Electoral College.
To explain, let’s take a look at the most recent elections in Canada and the United Kingdom – two countries that both use this system, and are arguably the closest in culture and share a common heritage with the United States.
Lessons from across the pond and to the North
The most recent United Kingdom general election – ironically held on the Fourth of July – saw Keir Starmer’s Labour Party sweep to power in a massive landslide, winning 411 of the 650 seats in Parliament (63%).
At the same time, Starmer’s party only received a seemingly dismal 33.7% of the popular vote. While this was still the greatest share of any party, it barely justified the sweeping mandate Labour was awarded.
So, even though two-thirds of British voters voted against Labour, the party still won a near-supermajority government, with just shy of two-thirds of the country’s parliamentary seats.
Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s upstart Reform Party won 14.3% of the popular vote in the same election – yet this only translated into five seats in Parliament.
Parliamentary systems routinely produce lopsided results like this. In addition, America’s northern neighbor is no exception.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Truedau has been deeply unpopular for a large portion of his premiership.
In the past two Canadian federal elections (2019 and 2021), Trudeau’s Liberal Party came in second in the popular vote. In both cases, the opposition Conservatives won the largest share of support among Canadian voters.
However, due to how parliamentary elections work, Trudeau was able to form plurality governments and stay in power after each election.
In 2019, the Liberals won 33.12% of the Canadian popular vote compared to 34.34% for the Conservatives. In 2021, the percentages were 32.62% and 33.74% respectively. Still, Trudeau’s party won dozens more seats than his rivals in both elections.
Americans who blast the Electoral College for being “undemocratic” are oddly silent about these vastly skewed results in the United Kingdom and Canada.
Maybe it’s no coincidence that, in both nations, the country’s current voting system has recently benefited left-of-center parties.
In conclusion, the American Electoral College is one of the countless traditions that make the United States the greatest country in the world.
And if we are to remain great, we must conserve this Constitutional tradition at all costs.