George Will’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post on the wisdom of the Electoral College is a must read. And with the electors meeting today to cast their votes to officially elect Donald Trump as the next president some people out there may need a reminder why the Electoral College is an essential component for a federal-state republic.
Will’s column can be summed up in the following line; “the electoral college shapes the character of majorities by helping to generate those that are neither geographically nor ideologically narrow, and that depict, more than the popular vote does, national decisiveness.” The column is linked here.
And when you factor in the size of our federal-state republic, both in terms of population and geography, the Electoral College becomes even more important in preventing, as Will puts it, narrow geographical pluralities from speaking for the whole country. Had the popular vote been the determining factor then Hillary Clinton’s win would have been from major cities, just 20 states, and from a plurality which fell short of a majority of the votes. That doesn’t sound like a win. Of course, had the rules been different then the way the campaigns went about attracting votes would have also been entirely different.
The Electoral College forces a candidate to be super-regional, and therefore diverse in platform. After all, the winner is the president of the whole country, not just the big cities and the wealthy suburbs.