Let's talk about the electoral college

It would take a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Electoral College. Amendments must be ratified by three-fourths of the states, and so an amendment abolishing the Electoral College is unlikely to happen as long as voters in small states falsely believe the system gives them more political power than they would have otherwise.

That’s why it’s so important to push back on the false narratives that are being spread about how the Electoral College functions. It does not give voters from small states more of a voice. Instead, it only gives voters from relatively large states an inflated voice if their state happens to have just enough voters from both parties at any particular political moment. In this election cycle, the Electoral College favors Pennsylvania and Georgia. Just a few cycles ago, those battlegrounds were Florida and Ohio. In the future, the battlegrounds might be Texas or California.

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The idea that the Electoral College protects small states and rural voters is the biggest modern lie about what the system does. The EC doesn’t force politicians to give a damn about whether or not a state is “rural”; it forces them to care about whether the margin of victory is close enough in the state to make it worthwhile to campaign there.

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[T]he idea of a “rural” state is largely a myth. According to the 2020 Census, 80 percent of Americans live in “urban” areas. In only four states—Maine, Mississippi, Vermont, and West Virginia—does a majority of the population live outside of urban areas, and nobody with a straight face would argue that the Electoral College encourages presidential candidates to spend a lot of time and resources in those places.

Of the states that are Electoral College “battlegrounds,” Wisconsin and North Carolina are the only ones where as much as a third of their populations live in rural areas. In all the other battleground states, more than 70 percent of the population lives in urban areas.

We are an urbanized nation. That’s why, even when politicians go to slightly more rural states like Georgia or Michigan, they go to the major cities in those states. They go to where people actually live.

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Why do so many people believe the Electoral College protects “rural” interests when it demonstrably does not? I believe what’s happening is that these people are using “rural” as a euphemism for “white,” and “urban” as a euphemism for “Black.” The Electoral College protects white interests and sensibilities from being overrun by the emerging non-white majority in this country, and the people who defend the EC are desperate to keep it that way.

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The most insidious way the Electoral College warps our political process is that, in almost all cases, it awards the full slate of electors to whichever candidate wins a state, even if the margin of victory is only one vote. That functionally disenfranchises entire coalitions of voters, rendering their votes meaningless if they happen to live in a state that is likely to go the other way. Republicans in California have almost no presidential political power, even though there are more Republicans in California than anywhere else, while Democrats in Texas or (latterly) Florida may as well not exist for the purposes of the presidential election.

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The Electoral College is agnostic as to which states have the power; it just requires that the people themselves are treated unfairly and unequally.

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Unfortunately, it will be with us as long as Republicans rightly perceive that it is the only way for them to win power for their demonstrably unpopular agenda.

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But there will be a moment, someday in the future, when the political calculation will flip. A Democrat will tap into the still-unrealized political power of Black folks living in former Confederate states and win narrow victories in not just Georgia but places like Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. White folks in Wisconsin and Minnesota will strenuously object, but it won’t matter because of the Electoral College. As soon as a Democrat loses the popular vote but wins an Electoral College victory thanks to the support of Black and brown people in currently red states, Republican white folks will suddenly become very interested in getting rid of the Electoral College.

  The Nation

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.