The polls must be looking bad for Democrats because they appear to be restarting their campaign to abolish the Electoral College.
A few left-wing journalists have whined about the Electoral Collegeduring the presidential campaign this year. But now Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, finally has decided to publicly air his grievance against the way we choose presidents.
“I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go. We need, we need national popular vote, but that’s not the world we live in,” Walz said Tuesday at a fundraiser with California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Is there any part of our constitutional system Democrats like? In just the past few months we’ve had Walz trash the Electoral College, the Biden-Harris administration threaten to pack the Supreme Court, and former Secretary of State John Kerry grumble about the existence of the First Amendment.
I’ve written extensively over the years about the Electoral College and why it works so well for the United States. Here’s a quick summary:
The Electoral College is an integral, time-tested system of selecting American presidents. It preserves the federal nature of our system while not being wholly undemocratic. It’s one of the cornerstones of our remarkably stable republic.
Every state relies on a popular vote to determine who wins their electors, and each has done so since the early 19th century.
The states are free to allocate the votes or award them in a winner-take-all system. Most have chosen the latter because that approach is slightly more appealing to presidential candidates. But that’s not set in stone.
By allocating presidential votes by combining the number of a state’s congressional representatives and the number of senators, the Electoral College ensures that the states with the largest population have the most votes. But that voting power is somewhat limited. It means that candidates still have to win over voters in small states and can’t focus only on the most populous ones.
Our presidential elections are therefore more likely to reflect the diverse viewpoints of this country and not just the highly populated urban areas.
There is no reason to think that switching to a national popular vote would be better for America, nor have proponents of abolishing the Electoral College ever really made the argument that it would.
They’ve always just gone with buzzwords about the popular vote being more “democratic,” but it’s clear that what they care about most is that the popular vote leads to more Democrats being elected. No surprise there.
However, getting rid of the Electoral College wouldn’t just be bad for Republicans—after all, there are plenty of small blue states too—it would be bad for the country.
In some ways it’s fitting that Walz decided to bash the Electoral College in California. Most Americans don’t want a one-party state with one of the sloppiest election systems in the country to have all the say in picking our presidents.
Also, it’s not a great sign for a presidential campaign when it complains about rules that have been in effect for two centuries on the figurative eve of the Nov. 5 election. That’s like a football team whining about touchdowns being the primary way of scoring before a championship football game.
The Harris-Walz campaign probably realized this.
“Gov. Walz believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket,” a spokesman for the campaign told Politico. “He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes.”
I’ll translate the PR-speak for you: The Harris-Walz campaign is saying that Walz was just being a “knucklehead” again, so pay no attention to what he just said to donors.
I don’t find the backtracking to be convincing. For years, prominent Democrats and left-wing organizations have been trying to abolish the Electoral College. Their efforts become more fervent, of course, when they lose an election or think they will lose one.
Walz clearly wants to abolish the Electoral College, regardless of what the campaign says. The Minnesota governor signed legislation last year that would tie his state’s Electoral College votes to the national popular vote.
The so-called National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is almost certainly unconstitutional, but that didn’t stop Walz from signing the bill.
Frankly, it’s shameful that he did so. The attacks on the Electoral College are an irresponsible, short-sighted attempt to accrue partisan power. If Walz and his political allies want to get rid of it, they would have to pass a constitutional amendment.
They know that won’t happen, so they are instead trying to undermine the system’s legitimacy in the minds of the American people.
Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Reproduced with permission. Original here.
