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Here's why presidential candidates have to concentrate on a handful of swing states and why the winner of the popular vote doesn't always become president.
Most of us who follow politics have heard of the Electoral College and understand that it affects the presidential election, with candidates having to focus on so-called swing states that are key to the race. It’s been criticized for years, however, especially since it means the winner of the popular vote — like Hillary Clinton in 2016 — can lose the electoral vote and therefore not become president. Here’s how it came to be and how it works.
In 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention — all white men and relatively wealthy, of course — gathered in Philadelphia to create a new governing document to replace the Articles of Confederation, which had resulted in a weak and largely ineffective central government in the new United States of America. They crafted the U.S. Constitution, which became revered but had some shortcomings — it’s been amended 27 times, and thousands more amendments have been proposed.
There were several debates among delegates, one of which concerned whether voters should elect the president directly. Some of the delegates thought ordinary citizens weren’t qualified to pick the president (these ordinary citizens were all white, all male, and mostly property owners). So they devised a system under which electors, ostensibly more knowledgeable, would cast votes for president. At first state legislatures chose the electors, but as states, which had power over voting rights, expanded the franchise, electors came to be awarded by popular vote.
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But there was a racist rationale for the Electoral College as well. The framers of the Constitution had already agreed to count every enslaved person as three-fifths of a person in a state’s population for determining its representation in the U.S. Congress. People held in bondage didn’t have the right to vote, but their population helped give their states power, “increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent,” Wilfred Codrington III, a professor of constitutional law, wrote in The Atlantic in 2019.
“When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation,” Codrington continued. “The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.”
Under the Electoral College, each state’s number of electoral votes is determined by the size of its congressional delegation. Every state has two U.S. senators and at least one U.S. representative, so no state has fewer than three electors. By now, voters generally have no idea who their electors are; they simply vote for a presidential candidate, and the electors follow their lead, although Donald Trump and his minions promoted slates of “alternative” electors in 2020.
Most states have a winner-take-all policy for apportioning electoral votes, so the candidate who prevails in the race gets all of its electoral votes. But Maine and Nebraska split their electoral votes, with a system by which the state’s popular vote winner gets two of them, and the winner in each congressional district gets a vote from the district. There are 538 electoral votes in all, and a candidate must get 270 of them to win the presidency.
Some states can be relied upon to give their popular vote and therefore their electoral votes to the Democratic candidate, some to the Republican, and some are up for grabs. This has become more baked-in over the past few elections, as voters have dug in their heels for one party or the other. The reliably Democratic, or blue, states are mostly in the Northeast and on the West Coast, with a few in the Midwest (Illinois and Minnesota) and the Mountain West (New Mexico and Colorado). The Republican, or red, states, are in the South and the middle of the country. States that could go either way include North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada, while Georgia is now recognized as a swing state, having gone blue in 2020. So presidential candidates concentrate their campaigning in those states, ignoring three-quarters of the country.
But blue states weren’t always blue, and red states weren’t always red. California has gone for the Democratic candidate in every election since 1992, but it often favored the Republican before that. Also in 1992, Bill Clinton, the centrist Democrat who’d been governor of Arkansas, won his home state as well as Louisiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Florida, something he repeated in 1996. Those states are now usually shoo-ins for the GOP.
Before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, southern states were reliably Democratic, as southern Democrats opposed equal rights for Black residents and many other Democrats held their noses. Conversely, New England states were reliably Republican. Much changed in the ’60s when President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, pushed civil rights legislation through, and his successor, Richard M. Nixon, engineered a Republican appeal to white racism in the South. Johnson acknowledged that his actions would lose the Democrats the South for years, and he was mostly right, although the region did support one of its own, Jimmy Carter, a fairly liberal Democrat from Georgia, in 1976. And there were landslide elections in which almost every state went for the winner, like Franklin D. Roosevelt's reelection in 1936, Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984, Nixon’s reelection in 1972, and LBJ’s election in 1964 after he had become president upon John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
Few minor-party candidates have won any states in the Electoral College. The last to do so was segregationist George Wallace, who had been governor of Alabama as a Democrat and ran for president on the American Independent Party ticket in 1968. He won his home state plus Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Another southern segregationist, "Dixiecrat" Strom Thurmond, won four states in 1948. But in recent memory, minor-party candidates have influenced the outcome within states a few times. More about that in the next section.
There have been four elections in which the winner of the popular vote lost the Electoral College, so they didn’t become president. The first was in 1876, when Democrat Samuel B. Tilden won the popular vote over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by about 260,000. Tilden had 184 electoral votes — one less than the majority he needed — while Hayes had 165, and 19 electoral votes were disputed. A special commission eventually decided to give all the disputed votes to Hayes, influenced partly by Hayes’s promise to pull federal troops out of the South, where they were tasked with reinforcing the Reconstruction laws that protected newly freed Black citizens’ rights after Civil War. The Republicans were then the party of civil rights, but they were pretty much tired of Reconstruction, and southern Democrats were even more so and wanted to assert white power once again. The end of Reconstruction ushered in an era of oppression of Blacks in the South that lasted nearly 100 years.
Then in 1888, President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, sought reelection and won the popular vote over his Republican challenger, Benjamin Harrison, but lost the electoral vote. One of the major issues in the campaign was something we’ve heard about recently — tariffs. Cleveland wanted to reduce them, Harrison to increase them. There were several minor parties in the race, which cut into the vote for Cleveland in several states, so Harrison was able to win the Electoral College and become president.
Then there were two elections in recent memory. In 2000, Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s vice president, was the Democratic nominee, up against Republican George W. Bush, son of Clinton’s predecessor as president, George H.W. Bush. On the night of the election, it initially looked like Gore had won Florida, which put him over the top in the electoral vote. But then major media called the state for Bush. The next morning, it emerged that Bush’s margin over Gore was much smaller than it first appeared, so there was a series of recounts that introduced terms such as “hanging chad” to a wide audience — chad being the piece of paper to be punched out in a ballot, and if it was hanging, it wasn’t punched all the way through. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ended the recounts, and Bush had a win in Florida and the Electoral College, even though Gore won the popular vote by half a million. Some blamed Gore’s loss on Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, who attracted voters who thought Gore wasn’t liberal enough. Nader won enough votes in both Florida and New Hampshire to prevent Gore victories there. But Nader defenders said many other factors contributed to Gore’s loss.
Fast-forward to the election of 2016, which broke the hearts of many Democrats and undoubtedly some others. Hillary Clinton was widely expected to win the election and become the first woman president. But although she won nearly 3 million votes more than Donald Trump, he prevailed in the Electoral College, helped by winning swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Minor parties again played a role. In those states, Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s share of the vote was greater than Trump’s margin of victory. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, also made a difference. “If Johnson and Stein weren’t in the race, it’s also possible many of their supporters would have stayed home,” Eli Watkins wrote for CNN. “But if about half of Johnson’s supporters would have voted for Clinton over Trump, and if most of Stein’s supporters broke for the Democrats, the electoral map would have been decidedly different.”
The 2000 and 2016 elections have amplified calls to abolish the Electoral College and simply elect the president by direct popular vote. But since the Electoral College is in the Constitution, that would take a constitutional amendment, approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and ratified by three-quarters of the states. There have been more than 700 proposals to reform or eliminate the Electoral College over the past 200 years, according to the National Archives, but not one has been approved. So on Tuesday, we’ll all be waiting to see what happens in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other swing states.
