American politicians love to boast that the United States is the greatest democracy in the world. But a little humility is in order. The way the U.S. elects presidents is not the method any self-respecting democracy should use to select its head of state, as our Electoral College system holds us hostage to the whims of a shrinking portion of the electorate.
A new Washington Post report tracing the modern trajectory of the Electoral College has the latest sobering data and finds that the 2024 White House race is “likely to target a smaller share of Americans than at any point in the modern era, despite massive increases in spending due to online fundraising.”
The overwhelming majority of American voters are being made into spectators in their own republic.
But a quick refresher on our election system before we dig into just how bad those numbers are: Under the Electoral College, American voters do not directly elect the president but instead choose a set of state-specific electors to represent their vote. The distribution of electors is not fully proportional to state populations and greatly overrepresents the voting power of citizens in small states. And due to the winner-take-all system for electors in every state except Maine and Nebraska, presidential candidates view states that consistently skew heavily toward one party as not worth engaging with.
Before our polarized era, this resulted in White House hopefuls ignoring a bunch of the citizenry, but still engaging with quite a lot of it: As the Post explains, political scientists Daron R. Shaw, Scott Althaus and Costas Panagopoulos have found that between 1952 and 1980, presidents targeted 26 states on average during their campaigns. That number has plunged since then, and during the last election Republicans and Democrats running for president focused on merely 10 states and two congressional districts. In that first era, presidential campaigns targeted areas that covered about 3 in 4 Americans, but by 2020 that had fallen to 1 in 4. And it’s likely to get worse: “If the major parties do not contest Florida in 2024, as is widely expected, only 18 percent of Americans would live in battlegrounds,” the Post reports.
That’s a bleak statistic. The overwhelming majority of American voters are being made into spectators in their own republic. How can we call ourselves a great democracy — or even a functional one — when less than a fifth of voters live in areas where their individual vote plays a decisive role in a presidential election and thus counts more than so many others’ votes? Can we call ourselves a democracy at all if this same system allows for the popular vote to be overridden by the non-representative distribution of electors, as has happened twice in the last six elections?
In addition to being anti-democratic, our system also narrows our policy horizons. A handful of states, disproportionately located in the Midwest, become central to the policy calculations of presidential candidates. The idiosyncratic demographic, political and economic characteristics of states like Wisconsin or Michigan disproportionately shape what kind of policy pitches White House hopefuls make, even though they only represent a small slice of the American experience. (All the pablum about noncoastal states exclusively representing “Real America” wouldn’t fly if we had a real one-vote-per-person system.) Democrats’ concern with winning the Rust Belt tends to make them more cautious about certain progressive policy proposals than they would be if states like California and New York had electoral representation that matched their populations. In other words, our idiosyncratic electoral system is sabotaging the Democrats' capacity to pitch some of the biggest ideas for solving our social problems.
There are a number of explanations for the historical design of the Electoral College system, including a suspicion of popular democracy and successful lobbying by slave states to boost their influence among the national electorate. Whatever its origins, it’s clear that today it’s an obstacle to the expression of the popular will. Americans should demand that the system be scrapped in favor of a properly democratic voting system.