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How do you get rid of the Electoral College? The easiest path is for both parties to suffer an Electoral College inversion — to win more popular votes nationwide but lose the election — in proximity to each other. That way everyone experiences the unfairness of the system, providing the necessary momentum for constitutional change.
Unfortunately, the Democrats have been on the short end of all Electoral College inversions in the country’s history and twice in this century alone, which is why many people think the debate over how we choose our president is unavoidably partisan. It isn’t.
As Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst of The Times, explained in his Friday newsletter, current polling and demographic trends suggest that Donald Trump could plausibly win more popular votes than Kamala Harris next month and yet lose in the Electoral College.
This scenario is not particularly likely for a number of reasons Cohn lays out, but neither is it remote. As he noted, even though the Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections, under slightly different circumstances the outcome in a few of those elections could have been reversed.
If there is an overriding theme of the 2024 election so far, it’s that nothing is likely and anything is possible. So let’s take this opportunity to engage in a fun mental exercise: What if Trump prevails in the popular vote and still loses the Electoral College? One thing we can say with certainty is that Republicans, despite their consistent defenses of the college, will be hopping mad.
How can we be so sure? Because they’ve already told us. Most people forget that in the weeks leading up to the 2000 election, there were warnings that the Electoral College and the popular vote would diverge — in Al Gore’s favor. George W. Bush’s team was not going to take that lying down. Inside the Bush campaign, there was talk of a P.R. blitz to remind Americans of the Electoral College’s “essential unfairness.” In an article in The New York Daily News days before the election, an unnamed Bush aide was quoted as predicting a popular uprising “because the will of the people will have been thwarted.” It didn’t work out that way, of course. But even the possibility was enough to get the right’s engines running.
Then there was Election Day 2012, when early returns suggested Mitt Romney might prevail in the popular vote but lose the Electoral College to President Barack Obama. Donald Trump, a private citizen at the time who supported Romney, tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.”
To this I can only say, amen. As the rest of us have been arguing for decades, it is wrong for a representative democracy to reject majority rule in the biggest election of all. Alas, as Republicans never tire of pointing out, these are the rules of the game. If Kamala Harris wins the Electoral College with fewer popular votes, she will be the president no less than Donald Trump was in 2016 or George W. Bush was in 2000.
Then, perhaps, we could have a real conversation about ending this absurd, antidemocratic system once and for all.
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