ELECTORS: WHEN THEY SUPERSEDE
The closing hours of November 8, 2016, found jaws agape in millions of living rooms and local watering holes. Democrats and Republicans alike were stunned to learn that Donald J. Trump would be the nation’s next president. True, given a large and varied nation, we cannot sense how the rest of the country might be tilting. Sadly, polls are about all we have; and every reputable sounding had forecast a sweep by Hillary Clinton.
Equally confounding was that Trump would enter the Oval Office despite having ended with 2,868,509 fewer votes. At that moment, even honors students began trying to recall how the Electoral College actually operates. (Like, who are its members, and do they assemble at a single location?)
In the great majority of cases, the candidate with the most popular votes glides into the White House. In particular, of fifty-four of the fifty-eight elections between 1788 and 2016, the electors simply affirmed the public tally. That’s 93 percent.
The system, as installed in 1791 and amended in 1804, can still supersede the majority’s will. Currently, the country is being governed by one of the four outliers.
As we all know, there was a foretaste in 2000. George W. Bush managed a single-digit edge in the Electoral College, despite drawing 530,893 fewer votes than Albert Gore. Its abiding impact was a full-scale Iraq incursion, which detonated an entire region, with no end in sight. It seems a safe surmise that had the popular tally prevailed, today’s Middle East would be a far less embattled place.
Another consequence of 2000 was that the Supreme Court of the day, at that time an unabashed Republican redoubt, swiftly assumed jurisdiction. Indeed, its five Republican members were well aware that ambiguous ballots (“hanging chads”) were still under recount in Florida. Without a trice of hesitation or reflection, the party’s justices promptly gave the presidency to their slate’s nominee. Showing a trace of chagrin, they counseled that their Bush v. Gore decision should not be recorded as a precedent.
The table below summarizes the statistics and scenarios of the occasions when second-count contenders were certified. The first noteworthy fact is that in all four of the years—1876, 1888, 2000, 2016—it was Republicans who got the nod. It’s worth inquiring if something in the system induces this bias.
The Electoral College is a cousin of the Senate, in that states get two extra seats regardless of their size. This emerges most graphically among those allocated only one at-large seat in the House of Representatives. Thus Wyoming, Vermont, and other small states are accorded three electoral votes, which automatically triples their power in the presidential stakes. And true, this helps Republicans, to a point. Of the eight with only one House member, five were Republican (Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, both Dakotas) and three were Democratic (Vermont, Delaware, District of Columbia). At that level, Republicans at best get four extra Electoral College votes.1
| 2016 | ||
| 65,853,625 (48.0%) | Hillary Clinton (D) | 227 (42.2%) |
| 62,985,106 (45.9%) | Donald Trump (R) | 304 (56.5%) |
| 2000 | ||
| 51,009,810 (48.4%) | Albert Gore (D) | 266 (49.4%) |
| 50,642,412 (47.9%) | George Bush (R) | 271 (50.4%) |
| 1888 | ||
| 5,534,488 (48.6%) | Grover Cleveland (D) | 168 (41.9%) |
| 5,443,892 (47.8%) | Benjamin Harrison (R) | 233 (58.1%) |
| 1876 | ||
| 4,288,546 (50.9%) | Samuel Tilden (D) | 184 (49.1%) |
| 4,034,311 (47.9%) | Rutherford Hayes (R) | 185 (50.1%) |
In 1876 and 2000, Rutherford Hayes and George Bush had tenuous electoral showings, so they needed bonus votes to get over the top. (Bush had fifty-eight of them to Gore’s forty-four, because he carried more smaller states.)
However, Benjamin Harrison and Donald Trump, in 1888 and 2016, would have won even were the added votes not available. As Trump ceaselessly tweets, he shouldn’t be called a minority president, since he drew seventy-seven more electors than his opponent. In fact, Harrison did even better. His edge of sixty-five electors was in a considerably smaller Electoral College.
Except for Nebraska and Maine, in forty-eight states and the District of Columbia, it only takes one ballot to swing an entire electoral slate to a candidate. While so miniscule an edge has never occurred, some have been close. For example, in 2016, the 2,279,543 Republican votes cast in Michigan gave Trump a 10,703 edge over Clinton, giving him all of the state’s sixteen electoral votes.
Now let’s glance at New Jersey, a somewhat smaller but generally comparable state. There the Democrats’ 2,148,279 votes gave them a massive victory over a diminished GOP. The downside was that fully 546,344 of the Democrats’ harvest weren’t needed to carry the state. I’ll be calling them excess or surplus votes. While it’s always wise to have a safety margin, well over what’s required is a misuse of resources. In a Democratic dream, some of their New Jersey surplus might have been shipped to Michigan, where their 10,703 shortfall lost them the state.
Nationally, more Democratic votes are clustered in states with high excess quotients. Of Clinton’s popular tally, an outsized 11,702,190 were in the surplus category. It was why she ended with only twenty states and the District of Columbia, and their 227 electoral yield. Trump’s excess was visibly smaller, at 8,357,672. This tells us that his supporters were more widely dispersed, and could carry competitive states, even if not by crushing margins. Hence he ended with thirty states in his column, and his 304 electoral win. It’s not that he had a strategy staff that deployed his 62,692,411 adherents where they could do the most good. Rather, political demography and cartography combined to favor his party.
The story’s not over. There’s a lot to be learned from the previous presidential race. So let’s start with the surplus vote situation in 2012. In fact, Barack Obama had 11,802,492 excess votes, almost identical to Hillary Clinton’s. Across the aisle, Mitt Romney had 6,800,670, measurably under Donald Trump’s. Thus in theory, more of Romney’s votes were strategically spread. Why did Obama win and Clinton lose?
Obama’s win was decisive, with the electors giving him 332 of their votes, fully 105 more than Hillary Clinton’s 227. Nor was this due to Barack Obama’s incumbency. That’s not an automatic advantage. Ask Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover, and William Howard Taft.
So the question is how a Democrat can avoid the Electoral College trap. After all, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter each did it, with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama managing it twice. Let’s return to Obama in 2012 for his formula. We’ll start with his popular total.
On paper, Obama got 65,752,017 votes in 2012, which seems almost identical with Clinton’s 65,853,652. But if we attune their tallies to a growing electorate, we need to raise Obama’s figure by 3.8 percent. For our purposes, an equivalent count for him becomes 67,724,458.
What we’ve learned is that Clinton’s count was actually 2,147,288 behind Obama’s. That’s not a small number. (Trump was only 286,763 below Romney.) Had Clinton managed to match Obama’s 2012 count, that popular total would have given her an easy win via the Electoral College.
Here’s how and why. True, the added 2,527,838 for the Democrats would be spread across the nation. Even so, that total would have included more than enough leverage to shift the outcomes in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which Trump carried by only 77,744. Indeed, such an infusion might have brought her Ohio, Iowa, and Florida as well. After all, Obama won them.
So the lesson is straightforward. If Democrats are to avoid the Electoral College snare, they must assemble an outsized popular tally.2 All those surplus votes in safe states may provide a warm feeling. But the presidency can only be won nationally, which requires building battalions in equivocal terrain. It’s what Obama did, and why he won. Think Florida and Iowa. It’s how 2018 saw local Democrats turning seats in Kansas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. The message for 2020 should be obvious. Democrats won’t win the White House via California, even with its huge electoral total. It will only happen by mobilizing in states that the party too often views as inhospitable terrain.