The Electoral College and the American Union › American Greatness
Anthony Esolen
Every few years, we in the United States endure something like the sweats of malaria while certain people, devoted to “democracy,” call to abolish the Electoral College, now merely a counting system whereby each state is assigned an electoral weight based on its representation in Congress—the sum of its senators and representatives. There are two main lines of the argument.
The first is that because of the College, a president can be elected without a majority or a plurality of the vote. In elections involving two main candidates, this has happened three times: 1888 (Harrison over Cleveland), 2000 (Bush over Gore), and 2016 (Trump over Clinton). In two of those cases, the plurality held by the losing candidate (not a majority) was minuscule. In the third case, 2016, the 2.1 percent edge in Hillary Clinton’s plurality was more than covered by her popularity in California alone. I do not believe that most Americans wish to be governed by the woolly ways of that state, which have gone, in my lifetime, from an energetic experiment in self-rule to utter dysfunction.
But why should the winner of the popular vote not win the election, regardless of where the votes come from? Here I note that in winner-take-all systems, the winner will rarely possess a majority, since such systems favor a proliferation of parties and candidates, enabling a candidate—sometimes a madman—with strong support among a minority to win, while more conventional candidates split the rest of the vote. This sort of thing also happens when, as in Canada and the United Kingdom, the executive is the leader of the party that wins a majority of the seats in Parliament. Keir Starmer is the prime minister of the United Kingdom because he leads the Labour Party, which won 411 of the 650 seats in the 2024 election, a huge majority, yet the party received only 33.7 percent of the popular vote. Sometimes, as has happened in Italy, the executive emerges from an alliance of parties, none of them holding a majority of seats. In such situations, the facade of democracy is as thin as lingerie. Backroom deals become the order of the day, a brew of compromise, political imagination, treachery, blackmail, and bribery.
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https://amgreatness.com/2026/05/19/the-electoral-college-and-the-american-union/
