Opinion: Why Elizabeth Warren is wrong about the Electoral College
Elizabeth Warren, the pointy end of the spear of Democratic radicalism, has called for the end of the Electoral College.
The disproportion of this effort is notable. In 2016, Democrats rigged their nomination process in favor of a radioactive candidate who was uninterested in appealing to white working-class voters and operated on a deeply flawed view of the electoral map—and yet they blame her loss on a mechanism for electing presidents that has existed, with slight modification, since the adoption of the Constitution.
The case against the Electoral College is, first, as Elizabeth Warren said, that it supposedly ensures that some votes don’t matter: In heavily blue or red states, voters on the other side are effectively disenfranchised. Another argument is that the Electoral College bears the moral stain of slavery. But the debate over how to select the president that took place at the Constitutional Convention—whether to do it by popular vote, or via Congress, or another method—was between the large and small states. Slavery wasn’t mentioned, except in an ambiguous remark by James Madison.
The 84 electoral votes of automatically blue California and New York are an enormous step toward Electoral College victory. It takes 19 small states to almost equal the electoral vote haul of those behemoths. Indeed, it’s theoretically possible via a coalition of big states alone to get to 270 electoral votes, while losing 39 smaller states and the District of Columbia.
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