NEW YORK (TNS) — Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice president, recently said that he thinks that the Electoral College “needs to go” and that the president should be chosen by a national popular vote.
Walz quickly backtracked, but there’s been a decades-long drumbeat against the Electoral College. The chatter always amps up when a Republican wins the White House via the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, as we saw in 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.
One of the shibboleths of the anti-Electoral College argument is that the institution was created solely out of racism and to boost slaveholders in the South.
That’s due to the notorious “Three-Fifths Clause,” which for purposes of congressional apportionment counted each of the enslaved as three-fifths of a person.
That did benefit the southern states, who gained more representation in Congress and more pull in the Electoral College, the votes of which are based the number of congressional seats in each state.
It was a vital if unsavory compromise that helped ensure that there would actually be a United States in the first place.
But the clause was also used for purposes of federal taxation of the states, which put the Southern states at a disadvantage.
It’s also a fallacy to say that it was the South alone that stood in the way of a popular vote for president.
A popular vote model was soundly rejected at constitutional conventions. The Founding Fathers didn’t trust everyday Americans (men only at the time) with that kind of political power.
So when it came to electing the president, the choice was between an Electoral College or having the Congress pick the chief executive.
The Electoral College eventually won out. Two Southern states, North Carolina and South Carolina, actually voted against the Electoral College, despite its supposed benefits to them. Georgia had initially done so as well but later supported it.
By the way, slavery still existed in many states of the North when the Constitution was adopted, so those states also benefited to some degree from the three-fifths compromise when it came to the Electoral College.
And when you talk about choosing a president by popular vote, do you mean that the candidate has to win a majority of the vote or just a plurality?
If it’s the former, then Abraham Lincoln, who got just under 40% of the popular vote in 1860, would have lost that election.
Think about how that would have affected the course of slavery in this country. Thankfully, Lincoln scored a clear victory in, yes, the Electoral College.
And even if the Electoral College was founded when slavery was legal, whatever advantage the South may have gained because of that is long gone. The institution’s origins can’t be used to abolish it. Where would the historical revisionism end?
A popular vote puts lower-population states at a huge disadvantage when it comes to electing the president. They frankly may as well not vote at all.
But if the Electoral College can elect a Trump, then the Democrats must eliminate it. So instead of changing hearts and minds, they would seek to destroy an American institution that has served us well for centuries, including as recently as 2020.
It’s the same as when Democrats talk about expanding the Supreme Court.
Liberals don’t like that Roe v. Wade got overturned. So now they want to put more justices on the court.
Conservatives didn’t like that Roe was decided in the first place. So they worked for half a century to put more conservatives in the federal courts. That effort came to fruition with the overturn of Roe.
But the Democrats would instead undermine the court. And the Electoral College. All in an effort to ensure themselves a permanent hold on power.
That’s a real threat to democracy. That’s a real Project 2025 playbook.
As a New York City resident, I already live in a one-party state and a one-party city. I don’t want to live in a one-party country as well.
(Tom Wrobleski is a columnist for the Staten Island Advance.)
