Electoral College Bias: Weighing the Pros and Cons

The Electoral College is a deeply debated topic in American politics. Some consider it a safeguard for smaller states and a promoter of national unity. Others view it as an outdated system that undermines the principle of one person, one vote. This article explores the arguments for and against the Electoral College, examining its potential biases and its impact on presidential elections.

Introduction to the Electoral College

The Electoral College is an indirect system used to elect the President and Vice President of the United States. When Americans vote in a presidential election every four years, they are actually participating in an indirect vote. Instead of directly electing the president, they are voting for a slate of electors who then cast the actual votes for president.

The Electoral College allocates a number of electors based on how many senators and representatives each state has in Congress (plus three electors for the District of Columbia, for a total of 538). A candidate must win a majority of the 538 electoral votes to become president.

Nebraska and Maine have a different approach, allocating two electoral votes to the candidate who wins the most votes statewide and one to the winner of each congressional district. Some Republicans have been pressing to change Nebraska’s rules so that the statewide winner gets all five of its electoral votes.

The Electoral College in Public Discourse

The debate over the Electoral College remains a prominent issue in American politics. Critics argue that the Electoral College can lead to outcomes where the presidency is secured without winning the popular vote. This is the case for many Democrats and their supporters. According to the Pew Research Center, 80% “favor replacing the Electoral College with a popular vote system.” This concern stems from the 2000 and 2016 elections, where Democratic candidates won the popular vote but lost the presidency due to the Electoral College system. As a result, critics say that this mechanism disproportionately amplifies the influence of less populous states and swing states, and effectively sidelines the majority’s choice.

The Pew Research Center says that Republicans and Republican supporters are more evenly divided, with 53% in favor of keeping the Electoral College, and 46% wanting to replace it. Those in favor of the Electoral College say that it ensures all regions of the country are involved in selecting the president and prevents candidates from focusing solely on populous urban areas. Additionally, they argue that this system encourages presidential hopefuls to campaign nationwide, addressing diverse interests across states.

Arguments in Favor of the Electoral College

The Electoral College has a number of pros and cons, depending on where you fall on the political spectrum. While it prevents an easy-to-understand election that would draw from a popular vote, it was originally enacted to give every state its fair say in who gets elected to the highest office in the country. Here are the most relevant benefits:

1. Attention to Smaller States

If only the popular vote mattered, candidates might concentrate their energies on densely populated metro areas like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. One reason that some analysts support the electoral college is that it encourages candidates to pay attention to small states and not just get out the vote in big, populous states and cities. It would mean candidates would have little reason to consider, say, the state of farming in Iowa or the opiate crisis in New Hampshire. The electoral college gives small states more weight in the political process than their population would otherwise confer.

2. Clear Election Ending

There’s no need for a national recount when you have an electoral college. The electoral college helps make presidential elections less contentious by providing a clear ending. If one state has voting issues, you can just do a recount in that state rather than creating national upheaval. And to win, a candidate must garner the support of voters in a variety of regions. That means whoever wins the presidency must build a truly national coalition. This, in turn, helps promote national cohesion and the peaceful transfer of power between presidents and helps keep the nation’s political system stable.

3. Easier Campaigning

The fact that certain states and their electoral votes are safely in the column of one party or the other makes it easier and cheaper for candidates to campaign successfully. They can focus their energies on the battleground states. If you’re a Democrat running for president, you don’t have to spend too much time or money wooing voters in left-leaning California. The same goes for Republican candidates and right-leaning Texas. Some argue that getting rid of the electoral college could make American presidential elections even more expensive than they already are, exacerbating what some see as America’s campaign finance problem.

4. Federalism and State Autonomy

Defenders of the Electoral College also claim that it supports the underlying value of federalism. Having the states play an autonomous role in presidential elections, it is said, reinforces the division of governing authority between the nation and the states. Explaining exactly how it does this remains a mystery. Having a state-based system for electing both houses of Congress should be adequate to that task. Presidential elections have little if anything to do with the subject, even when some candidates claim to be “running against Washington.”

5. Two-Party System

The electoral college helps keep the two-party system strong. What would happen to the two-party system if we decide to eliminate the electoral college? It’s hard to say. There’s a movement to encourage states to split their electors in proportion to the percentage of the state vote that each candidate gets. While that wouldn’t eliminate the electoral college, it would change the winner-take-all nature of our system and the way candidates think about state campaigns.

Arguments Against the Electoral College

In politics, there are very few things that make everyone happy. The electoral college is no different as there are a few cons that need to be considered. Here are the most important cons to the electoral college.

1. Disenfranchisement

In the electoral college, it’s true that not every vote matters. It can make people feel like their votes don’t matter. A Democrat in California who gets stuck in traffic and doesn’t make it to the polls probably shouldn’t beat themselves up. Voter participation rates are already quite low. Some argue that eliminating the electoral college would be an easy way to raise them and boost Americans’ engagement in the political process.

2. Focus on Swing States

If you don’t live in a swing state like Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and more, you probably won’t see as many ads, have as many canvassers come to your door, or get polled as frequently. The electoral college means that swing states - which aren’t necessarily the most representative of the country as a whole - get most of the attention. If you don’t live in a swing state, you might find yourself grumbling that some voters get all the attention. And even within swing states, certain counties are more competitive than others. That means voters in those counties are courted particularly hard. If that offends your sense of fairness and you think that candidates should fight for the votes of all Americans, you may oppose the electoral college. In fact, this result has ended up creating the same thing that the electoral college is supposed to prevent, which is candidates focusing on a few specific areas.

3. Conflict with Popular Vote

Remember the 2000 election when Al Gore won the popular vote, but lost the electoral college, and therefore the presidency? The potential for the electoral college to conflict with the result of the popular vote is one of the most commonly cited arguments against the electoral college. If the United States eliminates the electoral college, that scenario would never happen again.

4. Rogue Electors

Many states have no law requiring electors to vote the way their state has voted. Electors in these states are “unbound.” Therefore, the electoral college is based on a set of traditions that electors vote the way their state votes. There remains the possibility of “Rogue Electors”. However, there’s always the possibility of “rogue” or “faithless” electors who could give a vote to a candidate who didn’t win the elector’s state. This also worries critics of the electoral college.

5. Distortion of Democratic Value

A national popular vote would conform to the dominant democratic value that has prevailed in American politics ever since the one-person, one-vote reapportionment rulings of the early 1960s. Our votes would count the same wherever they were cast. No other mode of presidential elections would be fully consistent with our underlying commitment to the equality of all citizens.

6. Delegitimization of Presidential Authority

A national election might provide a cure for the delegitimation of presidential authority that has afflicted the last three presidencies. It is no secret that the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all suffered, from the outset, from efforts to imply that there was something improper and unworthy or even suspicious in their elections. That same view will doubtless color the 2016 election as well. This perception is reinforced by the red- and blue-state imagery that controls our view of the electoral process. Having an election in which victory went to a candidate carrying a single national constituency might not wholly cure this problem, but it might well work to mitigate it.

Potential for Electoral College Bias

The Electoral College is often seen as an unfair institution that can deny the presidency to the popular vote winner, a circumstance sometimes called an electoral “inversion.” Some argue that the Electoral College is biased in favor of small states on the grounds that their Electoral College allotments always include two extra votes representing the two senators that the state elects regardless of its population. Others claim that the bias actually favors more populous states because the winner takes all feature gives them excess pivotal power. The possible distortion that gets the most attention is that the Electoral College, for some combination of reasons, has favored the Republican party historically. Trump’s 2016 victory with a lesser share of the vote fuels that narrative.

Analysis of Electoral College Bias in Past Elections

Over the nine presidential elections leading up to 2016, the Electoral College presented little bias, even as it offers some threat of overturning the popular vote winner. Given the configuration of the relative vote divisions across the states, the popular vote winner could sometimes have been denied victory if the vote margin had turned out to be a very close election. However, despite common perceptions, there was no systematic distortion favoring one party over another.

To measure Electoral College bias in past elections, our tool is the uniform swing (1, 2). For any past election, we move every state’s Democratic (or Republican) vote share of the two-party vote by a constant amount. For instance, in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost in the Electoral College with 51.10% of the two-party vote. We apply the uniform swing rule to add 0.41-percentage points more of the vote to Clinton in every state, making the popular vote 51.51% Democratic.

The wider the bar in Fig. Estimating the possibility of electoral inversions via uniform swing. The bars represent the range of the national popular vote for which one party would win the Electoral College without a popular vote plurality.

Fig. 1 shows ranges of the national two-party popular vote (scaled as percentage Democratic) in which the popular vote winner would have lost the Electoral College vote, calculated according to the aforementioned procedure.

Over the 10 elections from 1980 to 2016, there was no obvious systematic bias tilting the Electoral College playing field in favor of one party or the other. In fact, the three presidential elections leading up to 2016 all showed the Electoral College working slightly in the Democrats’ favor. Although it has not granted either party a persistent historical advantage, the Electoral College has offered a mild, seemingly random, perturbation to the outcome, which matters in close elections. The Electoral College’s tilt toward Trump in 2016 stands out for its absolute magnitude, with the largest gap out of all elections.

Forecasting Electoral College Bias

To predict the relative positions of the states on the partisan continuum in terms of presidential voting in election year t, the one useful predictor is the set of state vote divisions in the previous election in year t − 4. The state voting in earlier election years (t − 8, t − 12,…) does not seem to matter. Statistically speaking, state presidential voting behaves as an autoregressive model of order 1.

The α term is a separate constant for each election year from 1980 to 2016 (“year effects”). The parameter β is the regression coefficient for the lagged vote at time t − 4 and is very close to 1 in our estimates: 0.98. The u term is random and has a normal probability distribution with mean zero; it is the prediction error: the shock from new sources of the vote in year t with an estimated SD (σ) of 3.5%.

For 2016, the same prediction model goes haywire. Fig. 2A shows the range of predictions assuming Clinton’s popular vote “victory” of 51.10% in the national popular vote, modified Eq. 1, and state voting in 2012 as the baseline for prediction. Clinton would seem very likely to be the Electoral College victor, winning 83.04% of the simulations. If Clinton’s popular vote margin had been known in advance, her anticipated chance of winning the Electoral College should have been slightly more than four chances in five. What happened? Donald Trump got lucky with the variation of the simulated shocks to the 2012 vote. The 2012 to 2016 vote shifts were more Democratic than average in the two largest states (California and Texas) without affecting the state winner. At the same time, these shifts were more Republican than average in three pivotal states (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin), allowing Trump to narrowly win there. If these five states had voted exactly as predicted by our Eq.

Each outcome can be seen as a draw from the simulated distribution of likely outcomes. The previews from previous elections allow the predictions for 2020 to be gauged as follows. For the nine sets of simulations in Fig. 2, the mean SD is 23.89 electoral votes. For comparison, the mean of the nine deviations of the actual Electoral College vote from the simulation mean is a similar 21.12 Electoral College votes.

Fig. Simulated and actual electoral votes, 1984 to 2016. The dashed lines represent one SD above or under the mean. The color of bars indicates whether the Democrat would win (blue), the Republican would win (red), or the two parties would tie (white), with the exception that the actual result is marked in yellow. The height of each bar represents the proportion of the 10,000 simulations that yield the corresponding value. Panels A-I each present one corresponding year's simulated and actual results, from the latest, 2016 election, to the earliest, 1984 election.

Implications for Future Elections

The simulations of 2020 suggest once again a Republican bias, although less than in 2016. If Democrat Biden was to obtain 51.10% of the popular vote, he would have a 46.14% chance of winning the Electoral College.

Fig. Simulated electoral votes, 2020. In this graph, we assume that the popular vote margin is the same as in 2016: 51.10% Democrat and 48.90% Republican.

If the popular vote would end in a virtual tie in 2020, the simulations would assign only a 12.00% chance of Trump losing. If the popular vote was 52 to 48 in favor of Biden, Biden would face a similar probability of losing.

Fig. Probable Electoral College winner, 2020, as function of the national (two-party) popular vote.

Our findings are robust to alternative models of the data-generating process, the results of which we include in SI Appendix. SI Appendix considers alternative models taking into account the states’ vote lagged two elections, year-to-year variations in estimated β, statistical error in the estimate of β, and the variability of the estimated SD of the errors, σ. Overall, we have very similar results: the answer always leads to the likely dividing line between Democrats and Republicans being favored in the Electoral College at about a 51 to 49 popular vote split, although to some degree, the degree of Republican bias in 2020 can be slightly influenced by the variance in u, the state-level shocks.

Reforming the Presidential Nomination Process

The great problems with our presidential selection system today stem from the haphazard way we choose the two major party presidential candidates. This year is the poster child for the need for reform. The two parties have chosen the same year in which to nominate a person whom large numbers of Americans, probably a majority, regard as unfit (though not for the same reason). Generally, we count on the Republican and Democratic parties to nominate not the best people, but candidates who combine a degree of popular support with the experience and temperament to govern. Not this year.

We need to think hard, and quickly, about how to reform three aspects of the presidential nomination process: the debates, the primary elections, and the conventions. The current system is weighted too heavily in favor of celebrity appeal, demagogic displays, and appeals to narrow special interests. The party structures-which, for all their faults, have a vested interest in candidates from the moderate middle who are able to work with Congress and other officials to govern-have been sidelined.

For almost the first half century of the republic, presidential candidates were chosen by the caucuses of the two parties in the House and the Senate. That system worked well until the two-party system briefly died with the Federalist Party. It was replaced by party conventions, which eventually were replaced (almost) with strings of single or multiple state primaries and caucuses. It seems to me that the original system may have been superior to what we now have. The elected officials of both parties have incentives to choose candidates with an eye toward popular electability and governing skill. Interestingly, the congressional caucus system is very close to the system the British used to replace Prime Minister David Cameron. equivalent of Theresa May instead of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

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