The Conservative Case for Abolishing the Electoral College

How to help solve the human capital problem on the right

While I have done a good bit to draw attention to the right’s human capital problem, and even how to work around it, coming up with long term solutions is much more difficult. If my understanding of American politics is correct, then things can seem hopeless. The reason that conservative discourse is stupid and paranoid is because many people are stupid and paranoid, and the state of the right is simply a matter of supply meeting demand.

Grifters, liars, and conspiracy theorists succeed because there is a much larger audience for their content than there is for smarter ideas and analysis. Things may not have been as bad when educational polarization was less extreme and there was more gatekeeping in media. But now that the Gribbles are concentrated behind one party and everyone has a chance to make their voice heard through social media, the right is at best in an equilibrium state where it is the stupid party, though there’s a good chance that things haven’t bottomed out yet.

This is a bad position to be in and I don’t know how much can be done about it. Yet I believe there is one concrete policy step that can actually help move things in the right direction. It is not something that conservatives are likely to agree to because it goes against their short-term interests. But liberals themselves might do it, with the unintended consequence of creating a smarter political right. I’m talking about abolishing the electoral college.

Rural Privilege in American Governance

For most of American history, the electoral college hasn’t mattered all that much. From the founding of the country until 2000, the candidate who got the most votes ended up becoming president in all but two elections. But starting that year, the popular vote winner has been kept out of the White House two out of six times. It came very close to happening again in 2020, which means that we could’ve had an entire generation where the popular vote and electoral college outcomes diverged in half of presidential races, each time in favor of the Republican candidate.

The electoral college has become more important for two reasons: we now have much closer elections than has been the norm throughout most of history and there is more polarization between rural and urban areas. The exact method of counting votes is unlikely to matter in a world where one candidate dominates the race. No one was thinking about the electoral college in 1984, when Reagan beat Mondale by 18 percentage points. Of the 51 presidential elections held in American history between 1796 and 1996, excluding the two where George Washington ran unopposed, 14 of them, or 27%, had a margin of less than 5 points between the candidates finishing first and second in the popular vote. Yet if you look at elections from 2000 to 2020, you see that five out of six, or 83%, were that close. Razor-thin election margins used to be rare, but now they’re the norm, so we have to all think a lot about how votes are distributed.

The electoral college is also probably not going to change the results of many elections if Democrats and Republicans win a comparable number of sparsely populated states. But things are different in close elections where one party dominates all major urban areas and the other does better in exurbs and rural regions of the country. The chart below shows how the voting behavior of the largest and smallest counties have diverged over the last few decades.

Some MAGAs claim that electoral college bias is not some immutable law of politics, and point out that Democrats actually had a slight edge in 2004, 2008, and 2012. But 2020 saw the largest electoral college bias in over 70 years, and the Republican advantage in 2016 was likewise much larger than the boosts Democrats got during the Bush and Obama eras. Unless you expect the rural-urban divide to reverse some time soon, Republicans should have an edge indefinitely into the future. By chance, there might be a few years in which Democrats are slightly advantaged, but it’s difficult to imagine them getting anything like a four-point boost given the current compositions of the parties.

Source

The number of electoral votes in each state is determined by taking the total of its members in the House and Senate. While House seats are divided approximately proportionately, each state gets exactly two Senators, whether it’s California (39.5 million people) or Wyoming (600,000). The electoral college isn’t as tilted in favor of Republicans as the Senate, but the extreme bias of the latter still creates a Republican advantage in presidential races.

Naturally, Democrats do not like this state of affairs. States getting two senators each is guaranteed by the constitution, but they are free to create new rules for distributing electors. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an agreement among states to award all their electors to the candidate who wins the popular vote. So far, states representing 209 electoral votes have signed on, with the stipulation that it will only go into effect if enough states agree for that number to reach 270. At that point, the electoral college as we know it would be over and the popular vote would determine the outcomes of presidential elections. There are a lot of complicated constitutional questions involved in doing this, including whether it needs congressional approval and whether it is even constitutional.

My cynical take is that legal questions like these don’t have objectively correct answers, but get determined by the political preferences of the judges involved. If enough blue and purple states agree to the compact, I hope that perhaps this article and others taking up the arguments I put forward here can ensure that conservative judges don’t stand in the way because they see the potential benefits to their own side.

The Disenfranchisement of Blue State Conservatives

I googled “the conservative case for abolishing the electoral college” thinking someone must have written an article like this at some point. I didn’t get any results. Then I tried it without the quotation marks, and did find Henry Olsen in 2019 arguing for doing so as a concession to the left and on the grounds of maintaining democratic legitimacy. He mentions only in passing how it would change the Republican Party, but I think that this consideration deserves a lot more focus.

People usually think of the senate and electoral college in terms of how much voice they give to conservatives versus liberals, or rural versus urban residents. Yet these institutions also change the balance of power within our two major political tribes.

Consider that in 2020, the state that provided the most votes to Trump wasn’t Florida or Texas, but California. Trump got more votes in New York than Nebraska, Idaho, West Virginia, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Alaska combined.

The chart below shows the relationship between how many total votes Trump received in 2020 in each state plotted against his share of the vote.

Interestingly, the correlation here is negative (r = -0.15). The 200,000 Trump voters in Wyoming gave him three electors, while his over six million supporters in California weren’t able to send any to Washington.

Another way to visualize the data is to consider these two maps from The Washington Post.

As can be seen above, Trump got more votes in LA County in 2020 than 633 rural counties combined. There’s a kind of disconnect where so much of the intellectual and financial support for the right comes from highly educated, urban areas, while its voters are poorer and more rural. One of the organizations doing most to fight identity politics is called the Manhattan Institute, since that is where it is based, as are the Wall Street Journal, the most popular conservative newspaper in the country, and Fox News. In recent years, certain tech entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley have emerged as major donors and intellectual inspirations on the right. The Daily Wire started in Los Angeles before moving to Nashville in 2020.

Of course, the bulk of right-wing voters in blue states aren’t WSJ writers or tech visionaries but regular Americans who don’t want to ban abortion but dislike crime and wokeness and want lower taxes. It is they who are most disenfranchised by the electoral college, and the fact that Republicans don’t feel the need to appeal to them stops their numbers from expanding.

The Electoral College Is Anti-Democracy in a Bad Way

Since it helps them win elections, conservatives often feel the need to defend the electoral college. But their arguments tend to be quite silly, and there is no country in the world that picks its leaders in a similar way. You’ll sometimes hear conservatives ask why California and New York should get to decide for the whole country who is president, but the electoral college disenfranchises a lot more people, making the votes of whichever party happens to be in the minority in any particular state count for literally nothing.

One can make arguments against direct democracy or for more checks and balances in government. We might want judges to review laws, or different branches of government to check one another. We may even decide, like Aristotle, that the best form of government combines democratic, oligarchic, and monarchic aspects. But the electoral college doesn’t do anything like this. It simply decides that the votes of people in the suburbs of Milwaukee and not Los Angeles should matter for who gets to be president.

This isn’t really a check on democracy. You might as well determine that Americans who were born on Friday get to count more than Americans who were born on Wednesday. If anything, those skeptical of democracy on anti-egalitarian grounds should find the electoral college particularly offensive, as it gives disproportionate power to poorer and less educated parts of the country.

No one would defend this system if they didn’t derive a partisan advantage from it. Conservatives point out that liberals have similar motivations, only complaining about the electoral college because it hurts their side. This is absolutely correct, and if they were the ones who were able to win the presidency while losing the popular vote, I’m sure they wouldn’t be pushing for the NPVIC.

But in that case they would be wrong, just as how conservatives are now. The only side taking a position that has any logic to it at all are the ones calling for abolition. Even if you’re anti-democracy, supporting the electoral college is a stupid way to move us towards monarchy or some kind of mixed regime.

I don’t blame Republicans for acting in their own political interest, and it’s not their fault that this is how our system was set up, created through compromises made between the states at the founding. Yet I’d like to convince them that there are good reasons to abandon the electoral college if they care about the future of their movement.

Presidential Elections without the Electoral College

The way American presidential elections now work is that both candidates understand that most states are solidly in one camp or the other, so they focus on winning the few swing states that are up for grabs. States of course have moved in and out of different categories over time. In the last two decades, Colorado has gone from safe red to safe blue, while Ohio shifted from a swing state to being reliably Republican. Nonetheless, the basic idea of elections has been the same since Bush-Gore.

One thing that hasn’t changed over this time period, and surely won’t change for the foreseeable future as long as we have the electoral college, is that margins in California and New York don’t matter. Any Republican ticket this year would trade the votes of every conservative in LA County to motivate a few hundred individuals in rural Pennsylvania to make it to the polls. In 2000, Republicans lost California by 12 points, compared to 30 points in 2020. Because of the electoral college, this doesn’t matter. But it certainly would in a world where the popular vote decides who wins, since this represents a swing of millions of votes. The Trump era has seen Republicans not do very well in terms of overall vote share but present a candidate and a message that are very efficient from the perspective of winning the right states.

For that reason, in the short run, abolishing the electoral college would make life more difficult for Republicans. But the party would eventually adjust. Primary voters often worry about electability. Some in the Republican primaries this year tried to argue that Trump couldn’t win the general election, and they would’ve had a much stronger case to make if we picked presidents through the popular vote. That probably wouldn’t have mattered this year since I think the Trump cult is too strong to be dislodged and Republican primary voters are right now too detached from reality to be able to judge these things reasonably anyway, but in future elections the party would be forced to try to appeal to all American voters, rather than undecideds in a few swing states.

As the reputation of the party changes, Republicans might be able to start winning mayoral and other local elections in major urban areas again. I think that this has become nearly impossible over the last two decades because the national party has ruined the Republican brand in large metro regions of the country. If the presidential candidate at the top of the GOP ticket has to try and win more votes in places like Los Angeles and New York, this would probably make it more feasible for someone of the same party to be competitive in local races. The fact that Republicans have basically given up trying to win votes in urban areas has been a disaster for conservatism, as it gives the left monopoly control over the richest and most powerful parts of the country.

I think the outsized role that the Midwest now plays in our politics due to electoral college considerations has been a quite negative development. This is a region that is conservative in the worst sense. As the US deindustrialized, many people moved to areas with nicer weather and better economic opportunities. The ones who stayed in places like Michigan and Wisconsin are disproportionately passive and want to be taken care of. If there was no electoral college, then a citizen moving from Wisconsin to Texas doesn’t make his vote less valuable. But as things stand, he ceases to matter in presidential elections, and candidates continue to court his poorer and less ambitious brother who stayed home. Republicans in the Trump era have been losing ground in states that are younger and more dynamic like Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, and Virginia, which ironically grew in the first place due to a history of conservative economic policies, while gaining ground in the Midwest, turning former blue states into swing states (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania), and what were previously swing states reliably red (Ohio and Iowa). Florida is one major exception as a state that has done well while trending red instead of blue.

Earlier this year, Walt Bismarck wrote about being so repulsed by the small mindedness and parochialism of the Midwest that it turned him against white nationalism completely. There is something to this. This is an area of the country that people who are more agentic leave. Remaining behind are populations that are older, less educated, and less accepting of change. This is why both parties have become more anti-trade in recent years, and of course cutting entitlements is off the table. Recently I noticed that Harris and Walz talk a lot about the price of insulin, which seemed odd to me as that’s not an issue that is relevant to most people I know. But when you look at the demographics of the kinds of voters who determine elections, it makes a lot more sense. The Biden administration delaying and potentially blocking the sale of US Steel to a Japanese company in order to appease organized labor interests in Pennsylvania, despite the lack of any good economic rationale and or even legal justification for doing so, is a direct example of how incentives created by the electoral college distort our politics.

What I think has happened in the Trump era is that Republicans have been able to afford sticking by a guy who is extremely unpopular just because he happens to play relatively well in one particular part of the country. Mitt Romney actually got a higher share of the popular vote in 2012 than Trump did in 2016, albeit with a lower share of the two-party vote, but because Romney appealed more to college educated voters he lost and was arguably a worse candidate from the perspective of the electoral college.

Trying to win over wealthier and more educated parts of the country would help attract higher human capital, as business leaders, intellectuals, and journalists would no longer be ashamed to identify with the Republican Party. I think the culture of conservatism would change, as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and New York City bankers would find it a lot more motivating to be part of a movement that took up issues that could excite members of their own communities, rather than trying to intuit what non-college whites in a completely different part of the country are thinking and figuring out how to appeal to them. They may even be able to become players in local politics, eventually moving on to the national stage, the way that Ronald Reagan went from being governor of California to president. A Republican campaign that seeks to persuade and turnout Americans in the rural Midwest looks much different than one with a message that caters to the suburbs of LA, Orange County, which is larger than eight states, and the outer boroughs of New York.

Abolishing the electoral college would force Republicans to compete for votes where Americans actually live. Just as importantly, it would help craft a message that resonates in parts of the country where most of the brains, money, and ambition are concentrated. If conservatives don’t have enough of a sense of enlightened self-interest to do this themselves, they can at least get out of the way and let Democrats make their movement smarter.