While the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is still too close to call according to the latest polls, the most popular US presidential candidate can still end up losing the election anyway. Here’s why.
Whether it’s former president Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, the most popular US presidential candidate could actually end up losing.
Unlike many other countries, presidential elections in the US are not decided by the overall popular vote.
Instead, the votes of individual states determine the outcome via a controversial, winner-takes-all system: the Electoral College.
How does it work?
The Electoral College is a group of people — electors — who collectively represent each of the 50 states. It is they, not the voters, who technically elect the president.
In total, there are 538 electors, corresponding to the number of US representatives (435) plus the number of US Senators (100) plus three additional electors for Washington, DC.
Each state is assigned a number of electors based on the size of its Congressional delegation, which in turn is allocated by population. California, for example, has 54, while Wyoming has three.
While electors are technically able to vote as they wish, they overwhelmingly back whichever candidate wins the most votes in their state.
That means whoever wins the popular vote in California will almost certainly get 54 electoral college votes to add to his or her tally.
Swing states
There are only two main political parties in the US: the centre-left Democratic Party and the conservative Republican Party.
Most states consistently vote one way or the other, and many of them by reliably hefty margins. This leaves just a handful of swing states where the vote can go either way. Candidates tend to focus the majority of their campaigning on these key areas.
There are typically just six or seven swing states in any given election year. This time around, the most frequently mentioned are Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. In 2020, Biden won these states by a slim margin.
However, since Harris became the Democratic candidate, polls have shown she may be in with a fighting chance of winning North Carolina and even electoral vote behemoth Florida — both of which previously voted for Barack Obama.
What’s the controversy?
The electoral college gives “small states much more power in selecting the president than their population warrants compared to large states,” David Redlawsk, a professor of political science at the University of Delaware, told Euronews during the last election.
For instance, while California has 54 electoral votes to Wyoming’s three, the population of the former is roughly 67 times that of the latter.
Additionally, all but two states award electoral votes in a “winner-takes-all” format, which means that “anybody who votes for the candidate who doesn’t win the state is essentially unrepresented,” said Redlawsk.
That’s why a candidate can win the popular vote but lose the election, something that occurred in 2000 when George W Bush received 271 electoral votes even as Al Gore got 500,000 more votes nationally.
Had the US Supreme Court decided differently in the notorious Bush v Gore case pertaining to the count in Florida, that state might have gone Gore’s way, thus reversing the outcome of the election.
And in 2016, Donald Trump triumphed with 304 electoral votes while Hillary Clinton won nearly three million more votes than him nationwide. His victory effectively rested on 100,000 votes spread across three states: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
These outcomes explain why the Republican Party has elected three presidents since the start of the 21st Century despite having won the national popular vote once since 1988, in 2004.
How did the electoral college system come about?
When the US founders assembled the country’s Constitution in 1787, they paid particular attention to the selection of the president and vice president.
Having fought and won a war of independence from the British monarchy, they were acutely concerned that the executive could end up with too much power.
Historians say that the founders were also distrustful of direct democracy and concerned about how to balance the interests of the individual states.
“Some people wanted Congress to select the president. Others wanted it to be independent of Congress,” said Redlawsk in 2020.
“The Constitutional Convention was near the end, the delegates were tired. They ultimately came up with a compromise that meant that the states elected the president, not Congress.”
Many historians also trace the system’s roots back to slavery.
A convention compromise allowed Southern states to add three-fifths of their expansive slave population to their total population in order to get more electoral votes and seats in Congress.
The electoral college was amended after the contested election of 1800, which saw the House of Representatives decide a tie between presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson and vice-presidential candidate Aaron Burr.
The 12th amendment to the constitution, ratified in 1804, built the system that’s used today where electors vote for president and vice president, so multiple candidates cannot win a majority of presidential electoral votes.
“It wasn’t really carefully thought out,” explained Redlawsk, “and it was done in a time before there were political parties. So nobody foresaw what would happen with political parties and the electoral college.”
Despite being unpopular among US voters, however, the system is unlikely to change. For that to happen, Congress would have to amend the Constitution, and two-thirds of both chambers of Congress would have to agree for that to happen.
However, there are efforts underway at the state level to change things. Several states have signed an agreement called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a deal under which they would default to allocating their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner regardless of the statewide vote.
The compact, whose legality is not fully clear, would only take effect when enough states signed it to make it decisive at the national level. Among the states that have signed it is Minnesota — currently governed by Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz.
A version of this article was first published on 4 November 2020.
