THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE: AN INTERNET AGE DINOSAUR (Part 3)
Earlier posts in this series showed that the Electoral College is not only anti-democratic; it is also potentially dangerous to America’s future. This post discusses another reason to abolish the Electoral College that will appeal to many citizens: it artificially protects the dominant political position of the two major political parties. Many people believe that as coalitions of strange bedfellows, those parties have lacked coherent ideas for decades. An important reason they still survive is the strong protection against competition they receive from the Electoral College. It permanently prevents the rise of serious national third-party candidacies. This protection is so obvious that some political scientists have even described it as one of the benefits that justifies the College’s continued use.[1] Here is how that protection works.
Throughout America’s history, presidential candidates with strong regional appeal have periodically arisen, such as South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond in 1948 or Alabama Governor George C. Wallace in 1968. There have also been a smaller number of truly national third-party candidacies such as that of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. The Electoral College affects these regional and national third-party insurgencies in distinctly different ways. As two political scientists who studied the system extensively conclude: “The Electoral College system is quite clear in its bias: it favors third parties with a sectional orientation, and it discriminates against those with a national orientation.”[2] As a result, strong sectional third party candidacies such as the Wallace candidacy might sometimes be able to throw presidential elections into the House of Representatives by denying either major party candidate a majority of the Electoral College vote.[3] In that event, there will be some bargaining for the votes of Congressmen from states supporting the third party candidacy which may in turn influence national policy, but the third party candidate is highly unlikely to win the election and become president. And national third-party candidates are unlikely to ever win either.
National third-party candidacies are seriously impaired by the effects of the “unit rule” (statewide winner-take-all voting for the Electoral College electors) and the need to compete in party stronghold states where the dominant major party is protected by that rule.[4] The unit rule helps Republicans who are in control in some states boost the chances of Republican candidates there, and it helps Democrats who control other states to do the same thing for Democratic candidates. But in both cases it leaves minority voters in those states without any voice. In 1992, for example, businessman Ross Perot received more than 19.7 million votes—18.9 percent of the total vote cast—and did not receive a single vote in the Electoral College.[5] In the 1992 presidential election, George H.W. Bush won all twenty-five of the electoral votes of Florida even though he received only 41 percent of the vote there, as opposed to the 59 percent of the vote received by Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. On the other hand, Bill Clinton won all fifty-four of the electoral votes of California, though he received only 46 percent of the votes there.
Third-party candidates with national popular appeal—such as Ross Perot or Theodore Roosevelt—can draw votes away from the major parties across the country. In those parts of the country where one major party is politically dominant (so-called “Red” or “Blue” states), even the votes lost to a nationally significant third-party candidate are likely to leave the dominant major party with a plurality, so it will still receive all of the Electoral College votes. It is possible, though, that a third-party candidacy will change the outcome that would otherwise occur between the two major parties by drawing votes away from the leading major party candidate (as an example, Ralph Nader’s 97,000-plus votes in Florida vs. the state’s loss by Vice-President Albert Gore to George W. Bush in the 2000 election by 537 votes).[6]
But the national third-party candidacy would need to be exceptionally strong before it would change the outcome so much that the third-party would win. Under the Electoral College, the third-party candidate will normally be shut out entirely or receive an electoral vote far smaller than its popular vote. This is what happened to Theodore Roosevelt, probably the most popular third-party candidate of the twentieth century, when he ran in 1912. Roosevelt won 27 percent of the popular vote, or nearly 70 percent of Woodrow Wilson’s popular vote total. Roosevelt received only 20 percent as many Electoral College votes as Wilson, however.
In the presidential elections from 1992 through 2012, more than half of all states have been won consistently by one major party or the other, and these states have a total of more than 344 electoral votes (more than sixty percent of the Electoral College total vote).[7] This means that to win, a third-party candidacy must be strong enough either to seriously challenge one of the two major parties in its stronghold states by winning a plurality of votes in some or all of those states, and that it must also win a plurality in all of the states that shift allegiances from election to election. This level of electoral success is a tall order, a heavy burden imposed entirely by the Electoral College, since a strong national third-party candidacy like Theodore Roosevelt’s might well survive in a system that used a national runoff. Roosevelt, after all, came in second to Wilson in 1912 in the popular vote. So the College serves as a formidable barrier to third-party candidacies.
The long and short of it is this: if you like one or both of the the two major parties, and think that they’re just the right folks to lead America into the future, you should want to keep the Electoral College. If, on the other hand, you think that they’re both pretty much bankrupt and would like to see some real political competition for a change, you should favor getting rid of it for this reason as well.
Notes
[1] Larry Sabato, A More Perfect Constitution (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 138-39.
[2] Lawrence D. Longley and Alan G. Braun, The Politics of Electoral College Reform, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 9.
[3] In 1968, Wallace carried five states and received 46 electoral votes. By May, 1972, he had already won three state primaries, including Florida, and was favored to win two additional primaries and expected to have at least ten percent of the total votes at the Democratic convention when an assassination attempt left him permanently paralyzed. See William Greider, “Wallace Is Shot, Legs Paralyzed; Suspect Seized at Laurel Rally”. Washington Post, May 16, 1972 (accessed 12/28/2014).
[4] Although the use of the “unit rule” is not required in allocating state electoral votes, at present it is used in forty-eight states. In 1800, when Thomas Jefferson was elected, it was used in two states. In any two-party system where the unit rule is a permissible option, there are strong incentives to adopt it, so it’s fair to think of the unit rule as part of our Electoral College system.
[5] Joseph A. Pika and John Anthony Maltese, The Politics of the Presidency, 6th ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2004), 68.
[6] Ralph Nader denied that his candidacy had had a “spoiler” effect, but it is clear that there will be elections where a third-party candidate will actually change the election result. This is an important reason why major parties periodically engage in surreptitious support for third-party candidates, hoping to draw votes from an opponent.
[[7] Dan Balz, “The Republican Party’s uphill path to 270 electoral votes in 2016 elections,” Washington Post, January 18, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-gops-uphill-path-to-270-in-2016/2014/01/18/9404eb06-7fcf-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html (accessed 12/28/2014).
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