Get rid of the Electoral College? Support to end it climbs to 10-year high, poll says
Support for abolishing the Electoral College reached its highest level in nearly ten years, according to a new poll.
A Gallup survey found 61% want to get rid of the Electoral College — similar to levels of support in 2011, 2004, and in 2000 after George W. Bush won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. The poll found 89% of Democrats and 29% of Republicans favor picking the president based on the popular vote.
The survey of 1,019 Americans was conducted from Aug. 31 to Sept. 13. and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Under the Electoral College, people in every state vote for their electors, of which 270 is needed to win the election. It’s possible for a presidential candidate to win the popular vote, meaning the most individual votes across the country, but not win the election due to not having enough support from the Electoral College. This happened in 2016 when President Donald Trump won the Electoral College with 304 electoral votes but lost the popular vote to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who received 48% of the votes compared to Trump’s 46%.
After the 2016 election, Democrats were four times more likely than Republicans to say the popular vote should be used to elect presidents, according to Gallup.
Trump, who called the Electoral College “a disaster for democracy” in Nov. 2012, later changed his opinion. He wrote on Twitter in Mar. 2019 that “the Electoral College is far better for the U.S.A.” because “smaller states” and “the entire Midwest would end up losing all power” if the country used the popular vote.
What would it take to abolish the Electoral College?
Abolishing the Electoral College would mean passing a Constitutional amendment, which requires support from two-thirds of the House of Representatives, three-fourths of the states and two-thirds of the Senate.
Such wide margins of support would be difficult to achieve in today’s divided government. Currently, the U.S. Senate has 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats (including two independents), while the U.S House of Representatives is comprised of 232 Democrats, 198 Republicans and one Libertarian.
A constitutional amendment hasn’t been passed since the 27th in 1993, and the last time it took a relatively short time to pass an amendment was the 26th in 1971, taking 100 days from proposing the legislation to ratification.
Several states have entered the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement that would give electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote. As of July 2020, 16 jurisdictions with 196 electoral votes have enacted the National Popular Vote Bill into law, including California, Massachusetts, Washington, and the District of Columbia. The bill will go into effect when states with another 74 electoral votes enact it into law.
