New Hampshire is a diminutive state with about 1.3 million residents. California has eight counties with larger populations. But in presidential campaigns, size doesn’t matter.
Donald Trump and Barack Obama will be in New Hampshire on Monday. California’s 39 million residents can only watch from a distance.
In most political races, candidates spend the most time where they can get the most votes. But in presidential campaigns, they often seem to avoid places where vast numbers of votes are cast. California, Texas, and New York are the states with the largest populations. But given the number of candidates they’ve seen lately, they might as well be Siberia.
The reason for this strange pattern is a strange institution, the Electoral College, which we actually operate to elect presidents. Each state has as many votes as it has members of Congress, and the 48 states are a winner-take-all system. Whoever gets 270 electoral votes becomes president.
This unusual formula has the effect of steering candidates away from vast states that are strongly supported by one party or the other. Lose by one vote or a million votes in most places and you get the same electoral yield: nothing. Nobody campaigns in California, with its 55 electoral votes, because it is a Democratic haven. Nobody wastes time in Texas, with its 38 electoral votes, because Republicans can hardly lose.
New Hampshire could go either way. So it’s worth fighting for, despite the meager prize: four electoral votes.
A few massive states, like Florida and Ohio, are flooded with candidates and TV ads every four years because no party can take them for granted. But in other vote-rich places, it’s almost straightforward to forget there’s an election. The worst performers of all are low-population states that are reliably red or blue.
Democrats turned on the Electoral College in 2000 when they discovered that you could win the popular vote but lose the election. They could have predicted it. In the 1980s, Republicans were said to have an Electoral College lock because they had a clear advantage in 39 states that accounted for 441 electoral votes. Democrats wondered if they would ever overcome that obstacle.
They do. These days, Republicans face an almost impregnable electoral stronghold. The 17 states that voted for the Democratic candidate in each of the last four presidential elections have 242 electoral votes. The 22 that voted Republican each time have only 180.
That’s why we keep hearing about Trump’s “narrow path to victory.” He needs to pick up a handful of states that Mitt Romney lost in 2012 to win, including Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada and, yes, New Hampshire. Hillary Clinton needs to hold just one of those to be virtually certain of victory.
The Electoral College tilt means she likely would have lost the popular vote and still taken the oath of office on Jan. 20. Trump couldn’t. NPR calculated that in 2012 it was possible to win the presidency with 23 percent of the popular vote.
It’s a strange mechanism that we accept only because it so rarely affects the outcome. The winner of the popular vote almost always wins the electoral vote. But as President Al Gore can attest, there are glaring exceptions to the rule.
The sole reason for the long legal battle after the 2000 election over Florida’s vote count was the Electoral College. Without it, Palm Beach County’s hanging quarters would be a insignificant curiosity—since Gore won nearly 544,000 more votes nationwide than George W. Bush.
Traditionalists view the Electoral College as a sacred work of the Founding Fathers, whose genius should be respected. But the framers of the Constitution really had only the vaguest idea of what they were doing.
Historian Carl Becker wrote in 1945 that “their grasp of political realities, usually so sure, failed them in this case. Of all the provisions of the federal constitution, the electoral college system was the most unrealistic—the only provision not based solidly on practical experience and precedent.”
Practical experience has shown that the only possible function of the Electoral College is to hand the presidency to someone the American people have rejected. Democrats would love to abolish it. What would it take for Republicans to agree? Something that could happen on Tuesday.
