Hillary Clinton’s “win” over Donald Trump in the (uncontested) popular vote this year has renewed the periodic debate over whether the electoral college system for electing our presidents should be changed to election based on the nationwide popular vote. A recent article by former White House Counsel Peter Wallison adds important context to this debate.
Clinton did not win an outright majority of the popular vote but she bested Trump by well over two million votes and counting. Of course, this year’s presidential election (like all others) was conducted under the state-by-state, winner-take-all electoral college process in which the nationwide popular vote is irrelevant except perhaps for “bragging rights.” If the election had instead been about the popular vote, there is no telling whether Clinton would have come out on top. Under this fundamentally different approach, both presidential campaigns would have pursued very different strategies. The behavior of voters, particularly potential minority party voters in deep blue or deep red states, also probably would have been different.
Wallison’s article points out that an election based on the popular vote would have had even far greater differences than these. Specifically, Clinton and Trump likely would have faced a host of third-party candidates instead of just two. This is because a popular vote election would balkanize our two-party system by attracting many outside candidates seeking merely to win a plurality of the vote. Wallison notes:
“If we abandoned the Electoral College, and adopted a system in which a person could win the presidency with only a plurality of the popular votes we would be swamped with candidates. Every group with an ideological or major policy interest would field a candidate, hoping that their candidate would win a plurality and become the president.
“There would candidates of the pro-life and pro-choice parties; free trade and anti-trade parties; pro-immigration and anti-immigration parties; and parties favoring or opposing gun control—just to use the hot issues of today as examples.
“We see this effect in parliamentary systems, where the party with the most votes after an election has to put together a coalition of many parties in order to create a governing majority in the Parliament. Unless we were to scrap the constitutional system we have today and adopt a parliamentary structure, we could easily end up with a president elected with only 20 percent-25 percent of the vote.
“Of course, we could graft a run-off system onto our Constitution; the two top candidates in, say, a 10-person race, would then run against one another for the presidency. But that could easily mean that the American people would have a choice between a candidate of the pro-choice party and a candidate of the pro-gun party. If you thought the choice was bad this year, it could be far worse.”
Food for thought as the debate proceeds under the caveat “be careful what you wish for.”