Firing Line forum: Examining The Electoral College

- Is it time to abolish the Electoral College?

A special episode with a student audience this week on "Firing Line".

- George W. Bush of the state of Texas has received 271 votes.

- [Host] Twice in the last 25 years and five times in our nation's history, the person elected as the president of the United States lost the popular vote.

- Donald Trump has received 304 votes.

- [Host] Is that a flaw in our democracy?

Or is it exactly what the founders intended when they created the Electoral College?

A system where voters in each state choose electors, who then select the president.

The number of electors for each state is determined by adding the state's House and Senate seats, amplifying the influence of less populous states.

"Firing Line" is at Hofstra University to dive into this debate.

Making the case against the Electoral College and for a national popular vote, Jesse Wegman from The New York Times Editorial Board and author of the book, "Let the People Pick the President".

- The only way to actually recognize political equality is through majority rule.

- [Host] Making the case to preserve the Electoral College, Trent England, the founder and executive director of Save Our States and author of the book, "Why We Must Defend the Electoral College".

- It's not an undemocratic process, it's just a democratic process in stages.

- [Host] Plus, what do the students say?

- Black votes are still somewhat submerged in those states.

So I wanted to know, what ways could you change the Electoral College?

- [Host] A special forum at Hofstra University this week on "Firing Line".

[upbeat music] - [Announcer] "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, the Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, the Asness Family Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, the McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and by the following.

Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. and by Pfizer Inc. - Jesse Wegman and Trent England, welcome to "Firing Line".

- Thank you.

- Thanks.

- We're here at Hofstra University in front of a live student audience to discuss the arguments for and against the Electoral College.

But first I want to set the table.

Jesse, you are a member of The New York Times Editorial Board and you have written a book, "Let the People Pick the President".

Your position is for the abolition of the Electoral College.

Trent, you run an organization out of Oklahoma that argues against the abolition of the Electoral College.

Jesse, you go first.

- Sure.

First, I mean it's the right thing to do.

A modern representative democracy, the way that we understand that today is elections that are run by majority rule.

The person who gets the most votes wins.

And political equality which means all votes are treated as equal.

And I think that's how we all just instinctively understand how elections should run.

It's how every election in the country runs except the biggest one of all.

The Electoral College obviously doesn't do that.

So the handful of states, maybe half a dozen, effectively determine the outcome of the election for the rest of us.

What that means is 80% of the country is basically sitting on the sidelines.

And it's just a massively unfair and undemocratic way to run an election when a few thousand people in a few randomly assorted parts of the country decide an election for 330 million people.

And then the last argument I would make is, the entire history of the Electoral College is actually different than I think what many Americans believe.

The only arguable rationale on which the Electoral College was based was the idea that there would be this body of better educated, politically savvy men, only men of course, only white men of course, who would make this decision on behalf of the American people, many of whom might not be educated enough or just informed enough to make such a weighty decision.

Even if that was the principle, it was defunct in less than 10 years because something happened that none of the framers anticipated, which was the rise of national political parties.

And with that, this idea of these sort of all-knowing, all-wise electors making this decision in the best interest of the country falls apart.

And you end up with basically team sports, which is what happened in 1796 for the first time when George Washington was not on the ballot, and there were two parties fighting against each other.

And it's happening all the way up through today.

So I think all of those point strongly in favor of a national popular vote.

- Trent, what are your reasons for preserving the Electoral College?

- I think we should preserve the Electoral College because it makes our politics more national.

I think it also can make our politics more granular in ways that I think are beneficial, right?

It helps various groups to get better heard.

This is why civil rights leaders in the 1960s and 1970s were big defenders of the Electoral College.

Because they saw it as forcing the political parties, in particular the Democratic Coalition, to listen to minority voices.

And actually some of those who wanted to get rid of the Electoral College were whites in the South who wanted to do that explicitly so they didn't have to listen to minority voices.

So for those reasons, I think the Electoral College is well worth preserving.

- Trent, do you agree with the premise that it never really worked beyond George Washington's term?

Just on a basic historical analysis point, are you guys on the same page there?

- Not quite.

Because one of the core values that came out of the convention through the compromise there was that they weren't going to create a system where the biggest states, the biggest population centers could turn everybody else into serfs, right?

Could basically amass enough political power that they didn't have to listen to anybody else.

And you know, I think that still matters that we have a system that pushes political power outwards rather than allowing it to sort of regionalize.

- So let me stop you there just because you gotta explain that to me.

If we have 10 battleground states every election cycle, how is it not regionalized now?

- Well, I think what people miss, after the 2000 election people said only Florida mattered, but that's not really true, right?

Bush needed every state that he won.

The Democrats wouldn't be a credible national party if they didn't have California and New York, right?

Republicans wouldn't be a credible national party if they didn't have Texas and Florida.

Those states matter.

They just don't matter right at the end.

- I actually want to get to what seems to me to be at the heart of the disagreement, is the question of majority rule and whether the founders actually intended to have some kind of a break on majority rule.

And there's a conservative argument, actually, the founders didn't necessarily want majority rule.

That's why they came up with this arcane system.

Trent, is that your view?

- Sure, I think I put a little nuance in there, which is, when you look at the founders' debates and the Federalist Papers, it wasn't so much about majority rule.

It was, how do you create representative and responsible government?

- And that could be against the majority at times according to them.

- That's right.

Absolutely, I mean the parts of the Constitution we most revere are the ones that are flatly anti-majoritarian, right?

That's the Bill of Rights.

I mean, the Bill of Rights literally says, we don't care how big your majority is.

Here's a list of things you can't do through any democratic process.

And I think they also just recognized that having a direct election had these real downsides.

- Jesse, this majority rule was so self-evident to the founders.

Why didn't they just do it?

- So Trent's right that the Constitution is filled with anti-majoritarian elements, including the Bill of Rights, including the Supreme Court, including the Senate, most notably, I think.

And I'm not arguing that those things don't exist.

But I think why do we value majority rule so much, right?

We all instinctively value majority rule.

It's the way we resolve all of our disputes.

And why do we do that?

Majority rule is the only way of counting that counts everybody's votes as equal.

Any other system of counting by definition is going to treat certain votes as worth more than others.

And I think that reality and the growing acceptance of broad political equality in this country, which is where we've gotten to after 230-some-odd very difficult years, beginning with a time when obviously only a tiny fraction of the people were considered equal or considered political actors, white men usually with property.

I think that that just is an illustration of where we've come over the course of American history, is that we've gotten to a place where political equality is the loadstar.

And the only way to actually recognize political equality is through majority rule.

That's how we run every election.

And I think we need to run the biggest election in the country that way as well.

- One other point on history is the notion that because of the Three-Fifths Compromise, the slave-owning states got a boost in the Electoral College because of the population of slaves in their states who could not vote.

Jesse, for those who don't remember what the Three-Fifths Compromise is, what is the Three-Fifths Compromise?

- So this was this iniquitous deal struck in the middle of the convention between the slave-holding states and the non-slave-holding states over how they could count their enslaved Black populations.

And what they agreed on was that each Black person would count for three-fifths of a free white person for the purposes of allocating representation in the House of Representatives.

- Now, Jesse, you say it is an oversimplification to blame the Electoral College on slavery.

Help put this in context.

- Well, you're right.

The slave states wanted to protect the practice of slavery.

They were so jealous of that, of their practice of that that they threatened to walk out of the convention multiple times throughout the summer.

And the creation of the House of Representatives with the three-fifths clause in place gives the Southern states this boost, this extra political power based on their slave populations who obviously can't vote.

So it's not so simple as to say, slavery is what built the Electoral College, but the Electoral College with the three-fifths clause helped to preserve and expand the practice of slavery by electing slave-holding presidents, slave-holding chief justices, slave-holding speakers of the House all the way up into the Civil War.

And so I think you can't talk about the history without including that component of it.

And I think that's just another example of how this was a system built for a different time and a different place.

- Do you have any quibbles with Jesse's characterization?

- I think Jesse does a really good job describing that part of the history.

But I would throw in there, John Quincy Adams, the most clear beneficiary of the Electoral College in that time period, is the most anti-slavery president, at least up to Lincoln.

And then Lincoln is another beneficiary of the Electoral College.

I think those are important facts to consider in the history.

- What if we had a national popular vote?

Jesse, you posit that far more Americans would be involved.

Why?

- Well, we can see it right now.

So we've talked about these battleground states, right?

There's actually only about six this year, I think realistically.

And every four years, whichever states are the battleground states have increased turnout, increased participation, higher voting numbers, right?

And that's not some sort of strange phenomenon.

It's very obvious, when people know their vote matters, they're more likely to vote.

It's dramatically higher in those states on the order of like 10% higher turnout.

And so I think if you had a system in which everybody knew that their votes counted equally, and that the person who won the most votes in the country would be the winner, you then have that incentive throughout the country, rather than just in a few random states scattered around the country that happen to have this almost exact equal number of Democrats and Republicans, thus leading to their battleground status and all the attention from both parties.

- Trent, is it a misconception to say that under our current system, some votes just don't count?

- I mean, I live in a red state when I vote for governor or when I vote for presidential electors- - I mean for president.

- But the same thing happens, right?

When I go to the polls and I cast a vote for a US senator or governor or presidential electors, everybody knows what's going to happen.

I'm not disenfranchised when I vote for a gubernatorial candidate who's either a shoo-in or who's sure to lose, right?

But I also take issue with this idea that the whole country's going to be a swing state if we have a national popular vote.

- Why?

- Because "The New York Times" in 2016 helped Hillary Clinton lose the election by convincing her that there was no swinging that was going to happen.

She was a shoo-in.

Hillary Clinton was sure to win, right?

- We saw the little- - Trent's fighting words.

I think The New York Times Editorial Board needs to reply to that.

- Donald Trump thought the same thing.

- That's right.

I mean, the media was trying to convince Americans that the election was done and dusted in October.

And so the idea that if we had a national popular vote, the media would suddenly tell everyone, no, no, you should go out and vote.

Nobody knows what's going to happen.

Of course, that's not true.

The media is going to have their polling.

- Can we take the media out of it?

From the position of the media, let's take the media out of it.

If it is true, the statistic that Jesse shares, that in battleground states better participation is 10% higher.

- Well, I mean, a lot of those swing states have higher turnout in other elections too, right?

So it's not just about the presidential election.

- You have a higher participation.

- For all kinds of reasons.

- The debate over the Electoral College is not new.

William F. Buckley Jr. hosted a "Firing Line" conversation about the Electoral College and its value in 1976.

Here he is addressing the Electoral College with his guest, the writer and columnist Richard Reeves.

Take a look.

- No one would ever go into large stretches of this country if it were not for the Electoral College.

Nobody would ever go to Montana, Wyoming.

They wouldn't go to the Deep South.

- [William] Why not?

- It's a hackneyed argument.

In the end, I suppose it didn't change a lot.

But John Kennedy did go to West Virginia, and he saw things that he never in his life could have seen.

And I think that as bad as the campaigning process is and as encapsulated as it is, they do see things that they wouldn't.

- Trent, do you want to take that one?

- Yeah.

I think there's some truth to it.

I think it's an easy, sometimes overstated argument because all campaigns focus on some areas versus other areas, right?

So clearly if you switch from the Electoral College to a national popular vote, candidates are still going to travel.

They're still going to do events.

They're going to do them in different places.

You would see the campaigns shift to wherever the perceived cost of flipping votes is cheaper, which probably means places where there's a lot more people.

National popular vote just shifts that a lot more to the big cities.

- Jesse, take just the idea that if I'm a Democrat, why don't I just go drive up the participation of voters in urban areas where I know there are a ton of Democrats and skip the Oklahomas and the South Dakotas altogether?

- So I'm going to preface this with a somewhat tendentious comment, which is, so what?

So what if a lot of people live in the cities?

Everybody counts the same.

It doesn't matter where people live.

What matters is everybody's vote is equal.

- But with finite resources, a campaign could have a better bang for the buck in a densely populated area than having to go sweep up a bunch of votes in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana.

- The absence of the Electoral College would not stop them from visiting all those places.

They don't visit those places now.

Something like 96% of campaign visits and dollars, ad spending, all of that, all the strategizing goes into just the few swing states.

Everybody else is basically forgotten about.

And that has real policy implications.

Just to give you a quick example.

Donald Trump, as in so many ways, is a great civics lesson for us.

When he was president in 20, I think, 17 or 18, there were some horrible wildfires that swept through California killing dozens of people, destroying homes, destroying forests.

I mean, it was really an awful, awful catastrophe.

And he said openly, I'm paraphrasing here, but "why would I go help them?

That's a blue state.

They're not going to vote for me anyway."

- Well, let me ask the flip side of this question.

The Arab American population in Michigan is 3% of the state of Michigan.

They make up 240,000 Michiganders.

Joe Biden won that state by 150,000 votes in 2020.

He needs those votes if he's going to win Michigan as a battleground state in 2024.

And the Arab American population in Michigan is dissatisfied with Joe Biden's support for Israel and his perceived lack of sympathy for the plight of the Gazans in the current Israel-Hamas conflict.

Would Joe Biden have any incentive to listen to those Arab Americans as closely as he is now if Michigan were not a battleground state?

- No, right?

And this goes to my point about the Electoral College making our politics sometimes more granular.

Arab Americans in Michigan.

Hispanic voters in Texas, right?

Republicans, to make sure that they hold onto Texas, have gone to great lengths to recruit Hispanic candidates.

Right?

It's a good thing to have people thinking about those smaller groups of Americans rather than trying to just lump us into the biggest categories they can come up with, or looking at us by the biggest media markets that are available.

- Jesse, in a national popular vote, why wouldn't Joe Biden just go find 150,000 other votes from somewhere else in the country if the Arab American population in Michigan, he can't quite have a good enough answer for right now?

- This doesn't have to be an either-or, right?

The president should always pay attention to Americans everywhere and be concerned- - But if Arab Americans are 1% of the US population, why not just replace that 1% with a different group that's easier for him to answer to?

- I don't think that realistically happens.

So you look at gubernatorial races, right?

Trent brought up gubernatorial races a few minutes ago.

Everybody's vote is equal, and the person who gets the most votes wins, right?

So let's look at how do they actually campaign?

And the answer is, they go everywhere.

They talk to everybody, and they do it in basically rough proportion to where people live.

If 25% of the population of a state is in the urban areas, they spend about 25% of their time and focus on urban areas.

25% in rural areas, same thing there.

It's remarkable how good they are at doing this.

And it's also not a surprise.

This is their job.

Their job is to appeal to people, to show them that they care about what they're concerned about, and to get their votes.

- Okay.

We're going to hold it there, because we're going to go to student questions.

Please introduce yourself and ask your question.

- Hi, my name is Aruna, and I'm a junior here at Hofstra.

I'd like to address my question to Mr. England.

In light of the 2000 and 2016 elections, when the winner of the popular vote lost, many voters raised the concern that they felt that their vote simply did not matter.

Is it a legitimate fear that the continuation of the Electoral College could minimize the importance of the American right to vote, overall undermining democracy?

- So this is where Americans need to understand how our elections work and how our Constitution works, right?

We vote for president by voting for presidential electors in our states.

The presidential electors go on to vote for president.

We can debate whether we like the two-step democratic process.

But it is a democratic process, right?

It's not an undemocratic process, it's just a democratic process in stages.

- Jesse, do you want to reply?

- Let's talk about federalism.

The design of the American system of government, right?

You have two tiers.

You have the states, and then you have the federal government.

The federal government is supreme over the states.

That's the way it was designed.

And the leader of the federal government, the one person whose job it is to represent all Americans equally needs to be elected by all of those people voting together in one plebiscite, all votes counting equal, and the person who gets the most votes wins.

So I don't think a national popular vote is in any way going to undermine the system of federalism that characterizes our government.

In fact, it is just the proper way to elect the leader of the country, the one person who represents all Americans equally.

- We have one more student question.

Please introduce yourself and ask your question.

- I'm Christian David Harris.

I'm a drama/Mass Media senior here at Hofstra.

And my question actually is for Jesse, and it pertains to the Three-Fifths Compromise conversation you had earlier.

Even though, obviously, the Three-Fifths Compromise isn't here now, Black votes are still somewhat submerged in those Southern states.

So I wanted to know if the Electoral College were to not be abolished, what like strategies or ways could you change the Electoral College to avoid future submersion?

- I'm sorry, you're saying if the Electoral College weren't abolished.

- Yeah.

- Is there a reform to the Electoral College that could...?

- I mean, the short answer is no.

The reforms that would make any meaningful difference particularly for, say, the millions of Black voters in the South, the only way they would really make any meaningful difference on a national level would be if it happened nationally, right?

But I just want to point out, you raise a really good point there, which is, the three-fifths clause was bad enough.

But what people who study the history of this often like to say is that after the three-fifths clause, after the Civil War, and the Reconstruction Amendments were in place, we had what was effectively a five-fifths clause.

Because when Reconstruction fell apart and the federal government decided it wasn't going to protect Black voters in the South anymore, the Jim Crow begins basically disenfranchising for 80 more years the entire Black male population of those states, even though those states could now count those voters, those individuals as full people rather than 60% of a person, right?

So in fact, the South got even more power after the Civil War.

So we always have to be aware of how certain voters' voices and their existence is affected by the means by which our voting process happens.

And it's why it matters so much today when we debate voter suppression laws, or ways in which certain people are kept out of the ballot box and away from having political power.

So I think it's a great question, and there is no clean way to do it in the South particularly without getting rid of the Electoral College.

- Trent, do you want to add anything there?

- I mean, I think that Jesse's spot on with the history.

I mean, that's what we saw in the Jim Crow era where voters were counted but not allowed to participate.

- Listen, you two have demonstrated that coming from very different perspectives, you can sit down and engage in civil discourse.

So thank you for modeling that for us and for the students here.

But I think the final question I have for both of you is, being familiar with the other's body of work, is there an argument that they have made that you think is a particularly strong argument?

- Trent.

Jesse.

Who goes first?

- Well, I mean, I'll go.

I mean, I think a simpler, easier to understand election process, I think everything else being equal and obviously I don't think it is, but is superior, right?

And is more democratic in the sense that things are democratic if people can understand them.

And I think that's a legitimate concern about the Electoral College that I hear from Jesse.

- To be fair, Trent's focus on the states as discrete political units, really, I think I'm moved by that.

I agree that having this diversity of states and cultures and regions in this country is a huge strength to the American electorate and to the American people.

The only thing I don't agree with is that they should have any sort of equal footing.

I think they should be treated proportionately to their populations.

- Alright, well, with that, Trent England, Jesse Wegman, thank you for bringing your thoughts and your formulated opinions to this conversation.

And to the students of Hofstra University, thank you for joining us.

That's a wrap.

- Thank you.

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