Just about every national poll released over the last month has shown Kamala Harris with modest leads over Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race. And if the race were going to be decided by the will of the American electorate, those results would bolster Democratic hopes about the outcome.
But that’s not how the system works.
In congressional, gubernatorial and state legislative races, the candidates who win the most votes get to take office, just as elections work in democracies around the planet. But at the presidential level, there’s an Electoral College, and in this system, candidates who receive fewer votes can — and occasionally do — take office, while candidates who receive more support end up with nothing but disappointment.
In American history, the presidential candidate who received less public support was declared the winner in five presidential elections, and two of the five instances have happened in the 21st century. It’s easy to imagine it could happen again this year.
With this in mind, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently noted, “I really feel duty-bound to keep pointing out to people that the Electoral College is an insane, unworkable mess and creates wild distortions in the single-most important election in the country that literally don’t exist in any other election.”
Evidently, the Democratic vice presidential nominee is thinking along the same lines. The New York Times reported:
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Tuesday called for abolishing the Electoral College as a means of electing American presidents, reiterating a position he has articulated in the past while he and Vice President Kamala Harris are in the heat of a campaign for the White House. Twice during campaign fund-raisers on the West Coast, Mr. Walz said he would prefer that presidential candidates did not have to focus on a few political battlegrounds and could instead focus on winning votes from across the country.
“I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go,” the Minnesotan said at a fundraising event. “We need a national popular vote.”
As it turns out, the Democratic campaign walked that back a day later. “Governor 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 Harris campaign spokesperson clarified. “He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes. And, he was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts.”
In other words, Walz was just sharing a passing thought, not announcing a new position on the part of the Democratic ticket.
But the party shouldn’t be too quick to discard the governor’s comments. After all, much of the public agrees with Walz’s sentiment. It was just a couple of weeks ago when the Pew Research Center released a report on its latest national survey, which found, “More than six-in-ten Americans (63%) would instead prefer to see the winner of the presidential election be the person who wins the most votes nationally.” The same Pew report showed public support for the Electoral College going back nearly 25 years, and in each instance, most Americans said they preferred a system in which the candidate who gets more votes is the winner. What’s more, there’s no reason to see this as necessarily partisan or ideological. Even Donald Trump — who’s lost the popular vote twice and might very well lose it again in 2024 — is on the record saying he’d prefer a popular-vote system. The Republican went so far as to argue, “The Electoral College is a disaster for a democracy.” If this is a point of bipartisan agreement, perhaps it deserves a more robust public conversation?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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