Dump the Electoral College

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Gov. Tim Walz is right. So is former President Donald Trump. The Democratic vice presidential candidate wants to get rid of the antique Electoral College and the Republican ticket leader is going to campaign in dependably Democratic New York, at Madison Square Garden, which is better for democracy, even if it doesn’t help in the Electoral College math.

Without the Electoral College, which pushes what should be a national contest for the White House into a few wavering states, candidates would campaign everywhere. Walz and Vice President Kamala Harris would be looking for votes in Texas and Florida, while Trump and his running mate JD Vance would be stumping in California as well as here. And the same goes for every state, as a vote anywhere is a vote worth wooing.

The Electoral College also produces minority presidents: Electoral College victors who lost the popular vote. It happened in 2000 and again in 2016. While the beneficiaries both years were Republican and the popular plurality losers were Democrats, it could be the other way.

Harris and Trump are polling neck and neck nationally. If she wins the key swing states, while he picks up votes spread across the country to gain the popular plurality, Harris will be the president and Trump will not be, giving him even more reason to not accept the results.

Both campaigns are now pursuing the exact same seven-state strategy: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin along the Great Lakes; North Carolina and Georgia down South, and Nevada and Arizona out West.

Once there was a 50-state strategy. In the election of 1960, the first after statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, Richard Nixon pledged to visit every state. He did, making it to Alaska in the final weekend, but he lost the election to Jack Kennedy. Spending time and money in states you are sure to win or sure to lose isn’t a good way to allocate both resources, which are limited.

An extreme case was in 1988, when Democrat Mike Dukakis was trailing Republican George Bush (the father) in mid-October and he came up with an 18-state strategy, just enough to capture an Electoral College majority. Dukakis won 10 of them (plus D.C.) and some of the eight he lost were quite close, like Pennsylvania and Illinois. But say that he had managed to squeeze victories in all of his eight missing states (the others being Connecticut, Vermont, Maryland, California, Ohio and Michigan) with the combined switch of 1,451,533 votes.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s only 1.6% of the 90.6 million votes cast for the two major contenders. So instead of losing by 7 million votes (8 percentage points), Dukakis would have lost by 4.2 million votes (5 percentage points), but he still would have had enough in the Electoral College to become president.

A much closer example was in 2004, when if Democrat John Kerry had another 118,601 votes in Ohio over George W. Bush (the son), Kerry would have won the state and the White House despite having 3 million fewer votes than Bush nationally.

So for both parties, it’s better for everyone to leave the 18th century behind.

One remedy for the Electoral College is to amend the Constitution, which is very difficult, but in this instance there’s a faster method: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. So far, 17 states, including New York and Minnesota, have joined. If four or five more join, the popular vote winner will always win the White House.