Origins and design
Peter Wallison told Bob Zadek that the Electoral College was established while the Constitution was drafted and ratified, when the United States held roughly three million people scattered along the East Coast and communication moved at the speed of a horse. Many people, he said, being farmers separated from towns, would not have known who should be president. The founders’ idea, in his account, was to find people connected to one another across the thirteen colonies, who kept in touch by writing and visiting, and who could identify the best people in the country to serve as president. These were the electors. Each state was told it could have a number of electors equal to its representatives in Congress plus two senators. The electors would gather and select the people who would run for president and vice president, narrowing the field of candidates and letting voters choose among a limited group rather than a massive group of unknown people. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Zadek framed the electors in twenty-first-century terms as the elites, the wise men, comparable to the Senate as it was thought of in colonial times, and said voters were in effect outsourcing the decision to people with more information. He noted that direct election was not seriously considered during the four and a half months of debate over the Constitution in 1787, and that the system was a compromise like most important provisions of the Constitution. He also emphasized that the United States in 1787 invented the concept of president, which had not existed on Earth, and that the office today results from the founders’ considerations. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Wallison said there was no serious opposition to the Electoral College during ratification. Many controversial issues were before the public, but the Electoral College was not among them, partly because nobody really conceived of what it meant to have a president: the powers, as people saw them in the drafted Constitution, would be held by Congress, so the presidency was important but not as important as the elected people making the laws. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
The modern debate
Zadek dated the serious modern debate to the Bush v. Gore election in 2000 and elections before it, and said there had been five instances in which the president elected through the Electoral College received less than a majority of the popular vote, the first being John Quincy Adams in 1824, elected by the House of Representatives without an electoral majority. He said Bush v. Gore started in earnest an examination by thoughtful people of whether the Electoral College was anachronistic, anti-small-d democratic, and a vestige of entitled white men’s vision of government 240 years ago. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Wallison called the strongest argument against the Electoral College the claim that if we really have a democracy, the president should be elected by a simple majority of the popular vote rather than through what amounts to fifty separate presidential elections brought together through the Electoral College. He said that notion is very powerful at a time when we are sensitive to the importance of a democracy. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Wallison said the advantages of the Electoral College have not been fully considered, and that the National Popular Vote is a very partisan issue: only the Democrats have pushed for it, and no state controlled by the Republicans has voted to participate. He said states with 196 electoral votes had voted through their legislatures to send all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, even if their particular state did not vote for that person. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Stability and the two-party system
Wallison’s strongest argument in support of the Electoral College was that it has created a stability in our politics that exists nowhere else and could exist nowhere else. He said supporters of the National Popular Vote seem to believe two political parties would survive its adoption, and that this is not true: there are two parties now because of the Electoral College, since a party must get a majority of the Electoral College to elect the president, and two parties are the only way one party can be assured of winning. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Without the Electoral College, Wallison predicted, there would not be two parties but ten or twelve, including a Right to Life party, a Choice party, an anti-immigrant party, a pro-immigrant party, a pro-gun party and an anti-gun party, plus wealthy people like Michael Bloomberg who could run their own campaigns. The winner would probably have 20% of the vote, which he said is much worse than less than 50%, and such a president could not speak for the American people the way the winner of the Electoral College has been able to. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
He cited the election of Bill Clinton, in which three candidates ran and Clinton got 43% of the vote, way below 50%, yet there was never a question about whether he was validly elected and could speak for the American people. Wallison said the American people think that when someone wins a majority in the Electoral College, he or she has won something very close to the popular vote, at least according to the legal processes set up by the Constitution, and that the College assures us the winner takes office with the approval of almost all of the American people. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Campaigning and the battleground-state problem
Zadek asked how campaigning would differ under a national popular vote, noting that battleground states are mostly in the Midwest while New York, Texas, California and Massachusetts are non-battleground states where the outcome is all but assured and candidates do not bother to campaign. Wallison answered that most of the population is on the two coasts, and that the easiest way to campaign in a popular election is to go into the cities of the largest states and harvest votes there, because advertising and travel are least costly; smaller states with fewer people would mostly be ignored. The Electoral College, he said, encourages people to go to all the states, or as many as they think they can win, because smaller states have a fair amount of power in the Electoral College system that they would not have in a popular vote. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Zadek said that if he lived in a small-population state he would feel totally disenfranchised, like living in California or New York where the outcome is predetermined, and that a huge segment of the country losing interest would be incredibly unhealthy for people’s relationship to their country. Will We Know Who the President Is on November 4? (2020)
Ray Haynes drew a distinction between the Electoral College itself and the method states use to implement the constitutional mandate to appoint electors. He quoted Article II, Section 1: each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors. The winner-takes-all law in effect in 48 of the 50 states, he said, has been the chosen method of almost all states since basically 1856, and nobody has really taken a look at it. What’s Wrong with “Winner Takes All”? Another Look at the Electoral College (2020)
Haynes explained winner-takes-all as meaning that if you win the vote within a state, you get all of the electors from that state. He said it was devised in the 1800 election by Virginia for the specific purpose of helping Thomas Jefferson become president, and that in 1800 Virginia was the only state that did it; other states had a congressional district system, and some legislatures simply appointed the electors. Winner-takes-all started in 1800, twelve years after the constitutional convention, and Haynes said the problem is not the Electoral College but the method the states have chosen to implement it, which created what he called the problem of the battleground state. What’s Wrong with “Winner Takes All”? Another Look at the Electoral College (2020)
Haynes described the policy implications of that problem: Florida gets attention for everything because it is a key battleground state, and for Republicans, if they do not win Florida they do not win the election. He asked why there is an ethanol mandate, answering that Iowa has been a key battleground state over the years. He recalled that Obama once said his favorite presidential pork allocation was to a cheese factory in Ohio, because Ohio is a battleground state, and contrasted the response to California forest fires with a kitchen fire in Pennsylvania receiving a major disaster declaration. He said that in the current year’s map, 75% of presidential spending and campaign visits had been in five states. What’s Wrong with “Winner Takes All”? Another Look at the Electoral College (2020)
Abolition and proportionate alternatives
In a later episode, Zadek told William Howell that he did not like the Electoral College because it is small-d democratic, and asked whether Howell would support a national popular vote for president. Howell answered yes, saying it was not born of the specific argument built in the book but that the Electoral College is a relic inherited from commitments in the Constitution that make no sense for the modern era and that no other country has seen fit to replicate when writing their own constitutions, and that this one clearly needs to go. Populism After Trump (2021)
Zadek said he had done a few shows on the Electoral College and that in his view we should have proportionate distribution of electors based upon the popular vote in each state, so it is not winner-take-all, which would fix the problem. He deferred to other shows of his for more on the Electoral College. Populism After Trump (2021)
Across episodes
The topic recurs across three episodes. In the September 2020 episode, Peter Wallison defended the Electoral College as a stabilizing force and described the National Popular Vote movement as partisan; in the October 2020 episode, Ray Haynes shifted the focus from the College itself to the winner-takes-all method states use, tracing it to Virginia in 1800 and describing the policy distortions it produces in battleground states; in the January 2021 episode, William Howell called the Electoral College a relic that needs to go, and Zadek proposed proportionate distribution of electors based on each state’s popular vote. The excerpts show the argument moving from defense of the institution to criticism of the state method to outright abolition, but they do not show the participants responding to one another’s specific claims.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the mechanics of how electors are selected or bound, nor the precise operation of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact beyond the count of 196 electoral votes. They do not state which amendment or constitutional clause governs the counting of electoral votes, nor the outcome of any specific election beyond the five instances Zadek mentions and the 1992 Clinton election. The excerpts also do not cover proposals other than winner-takes-all, the National Popular Vote, and Zadek’s proportionate-distribution idea.