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By Suzanne Blake
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In what might be no surprise, a growing majority of Americans are unhappy with politics in 2023, but many are looking to abolish the existing Electoral College system altogether.
If the Electoral College was disbanded, experts say it could significantly hurt the chances of a Republican candidate winning the presidency each year.
According to a new Pew Research survey, a majority of Americans were in favor of removing the Electoral College altogether.
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While 65 percent of U.S. adults said the way the president is elected should be based on popular vote, only a third of respondents indicated they supported keeping the current Electoral College system.
Due to how the Electoral College is set up, candidates can sometimes claim the presidency despite not winning the highest number of individual votes nationwide.
In recent years, this saw Hillary Clinton lose to former President Donald Trump even as she had nearly 2.9 million more votes than he did, according to the Associated Press.
And more than two decades back, in 2000, Republican George W. Bush beat Democrat candidate Al Gore in the presidential race despite Gore claiming 540,000 more votes across the country.
Support for Popular Vote Grows
Support for using the popular vote over the Electoral College has steadily increased in recent years.
While Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents were more likely to favor a presidency decided based on popular vote than Republicans by a rate of 82 percent to 47 percent, a growing number of Republicans are in favor of the change as well.
In the days following the 2016 election, only 27 percent supported abolishing the Electoral System, indicating a jump of 20 percent over the span of seven years.
Even within the Republican party, ideological differences could account for the shift. Around 63 percent of conservative Republicans support keeping the Electoral College while the same percent of moderate and liberal Republicans would opt for banning the system and moving toward the popular vote.
No matter the party, younger Americans are leading the way when it comes to support for the popular vote.
Seven in ten Americans under 50 would prefer to choose the president by popular vote alone compared to just six in ten Americans aged 65 and older.
Why Banning the Electoral College Would Hurt Republicans
In both modern cases in which the selected president lost the popular vote, the Republican party benefited.
The reasons stem from the fact that smaller-sized states tend to lean conservative, and small states inherently benefit under the existing system.
"The Electoral College does mean a small number of states have undue weight in the outcome of our elections and that smaller manipulations can have broad national consequences," Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, told NPR.
And the partisan bias toward Republicans from the Electoral College is only increasing today.
According to David Shor, the head of data science at Blue Rose Research and a leading Democrat data analyst, Democrats are against stark odds—they have to win 52 percent of the vote just to have a 50/50 chance of winning the presidency.
Even the 2020 election, which saw President Joe Biden win the election and secure around 7 million more popular votes than Trump, could have been in jeopardy for Democrats if just 43,000 Biden voters didn't show up at the polls in the states of Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin.
History of the Electoral College
Ever since the Electoral College was first uttered into existence, it's received pushback from some who do not view it as a fair tool of true democracy.
Originally built with the idea of ensuring smaller states would still retain some authority in presidential elections despite their low population sizes, it in practice means some votes count more than others.
Instead of just counting up the number of votes for each candidate and letting that decide the winner, the Electoral College stipulates that state electors chosen by political parties at the state level vote in a way that indicates the local results of the popular vote.
But since each state gets electors based on their House and Senate representation, small states are inherently favored, meaning some Americans' votes in effect do count more than others.
Because 48 states use a winner-take-all policy, certain states will nearly automatically go in one party's favor.
That brings the stakes of the election down to just a few battleground 'purple' states, which could swing to the Republican or Democrat party.
"Despite what you may have learned in school, it was not the product of careful design by brilliant men," said Jesse Wegman, author of the book Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, in a New York Times op-ed.
"Thrown together at the last minute by the country's founders, it almost immediately stopped functioning as they thought it would. And yet we have generally accepted it for centuries on the assumption it serves an important purpose."
Even early political leaders doubted the merits of the Electoral College, with President James Madison calling it a "string of beads" that didn't reflect true state votes.
Today, popular vote is typically decided by a few key large states, namely California and New York, which contain roughly 60 million people out of the United States' total population of roughly 332 million.
Meanwhile, states like Florida, Georgia and Iowa tend to retain more power in the Electoral College even if their population sizes don't reflect a large majority of the popular vote.
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