If you think it’s a problem that seven “swing” states get more attention from presidential campaigns than the other 43 states combined, don’t blame the Electoral College system. Blame the other 43 states.
Each state has the power, with simple legislation, to fix its status as a political afterthought. No approval is needed from anyone outside the state.
Even better, if a number of states make such changes in their own self-interest, the national good also will be served. The fix is relatively easy: Most states should jettison their winner-take-all systems of allocating electors. More on which, shortly.
First, start with a civics lesson. The Electoral College was designed as a wise hedge against a purely majoritarian republic. By emphasizing votes filtered through special “electors” chosen state by state rather than in a national plebiscite, the nation’s founders served several purposes. Two purposes are most important.
The Electoral College allows states to maintain robust sovereign identities and thus promote what is known as the principle of subsidiarity, which is desirable because social systems operate more effectively and more carefully at the most local, practicable level. Secondarily, the Electoral College protects against having an uber-powerful president of a vast nation elected by kowtowing to highly concentrated but geographically small population centers at the expense of the interests of the rest of the country.
Under the Constitution, each state chooses a special slate of “electors,” usually prominent citizens but not public officials, to choose the president. Each state receives a number of electors equal to the combined number of senators (two per state) and House members (allotted according to each state’s population) the state has in Congress. Thus, California, with two senators and 52 House members, gets 54 electors, while Delaware, with two senators and only one representative, gets three electors.
So far, that’s pretty straightforward. Here, though, is where there is play in the joints. The legislature in each state has total authority to choose how that state’s electors are allotted as long as the allocation system is in place before voting begins. If a state legislature wants to choose the electors on its own, it can. If it wants the governor to choose them, so be it. Of course, legislators who don’t let their constituents cast votes for president probably would not be reelected, so those first two options are merely theoretical possibilities. Each state obviously will let its citizens vote for president. The question is, how will the number of electors for each candidate be allocated?
Since the founding era, every state except two has migrated to “winner-take-all” systems. If one presidential candidate in California wins a plurality in that state by just a single vote, out of more than 17 million votes cast, the state appoints all 54 electors pledged to that candidate. Likewise, in tiny Delaware, a simple plurality earns a candidate all three of its electors.
The legislatures reasoned that by using the winner-take-all system, each state would be more alluring to the candidates. A 54-0 haul of electors from California means more to the winner than, say, a 30-24 split.
That approach, however, features a drawback. If a combination of polls and past voting behavior shows that one party has an insurmountable edge in a state, what is the point of spending any money there or paying attention to issues peculiar to that state? If Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats felt certain to win all of California’s 54 electors, or all 19 in Illinois, why would they bother campaigning there? If President-elect Donald Trump’s Republicans knew it would make no difference whether they earned 45% of California’s vote or 40% — either way, they still get zero electors — why bother competing there?
Therefore, states that aren’t closely competitive between the two major parties are taken for granted by both campaigns, which put campaign resources and campaign promises elsewhere. With a mobile public self-segregating more and more according to interest and outlook, 39 or 40 of the 50 states are not close to being competitive, and another three or four states are only barely competitive. Hence, only seven states remain that can readily “swing” back and forth between parties with the shift of only a small percentage of their internal votes.
In 2020, neither major candidate held even a single general election campaign event in giant California. But smallish Wisconsin attracted 18 major-candidate visits. Even farther back, in 2012, there were 38 states that earned not a single general election campaign visit.
Likewise for campaign spending, which can mean a lot to local economies. In 2020, out of just over a billion dollars of presidential TV ad spending through mid-October, more than $884 million of it went to six states. Wisconsin alone, with its mere 10 electoral votes, benefited from $100 million in TV ad spending from the presidential campaigns or from closely allied outside groups. Neighboring Illinois, then with 20 electors, received next to nothing.
Therefore, the winner-take-all systems in at least 38 states, and arguably in 43 of them, means all those states themselves become campaign losers.
The cure for being ignored is easy. One way or another, the noncompetitive states should abandon their winner-take-all approaches.
Nebraska and Maine, each with small populations, already do this. Each allocates two electors to the statewide winner, plus one elector each to the plurality winner in each congressional district. As it happens, each state has a district that is competitive even though the state as a whole is not. Nebraska overall votes solidly Republican, but one of its congressional districts tends to give a narrow win to the Democratic candidate. Maine is the reverse, being Democratic statewide but leaning Republican in one district.
The campaigns pay attention. In the 2020 race, in which neither campaign held an event in California, sparsely populated Maine attracted a major-candidate visit, and lightly peopled Nebraska attracted two.
More small states, those with six electoral votes or fewer, could and should follow suit. In a super tight election nationwide, each electoral vote is golden. If Montana, with its four electors, wants presidential candidates to promise lighter regulations on the sizable federal lands in the state, it is ignored because both parties know Republicans will win all four electors. But if it allocated an elector for a plurality vote in each congressional district, candidates might pay attention. Montana’s 1st District is reasonably competitive, meaning it could attract attention similar to Maine’s 2nd District and Nebraska’s 2nd.
Alas, the elector-per-congressional-district approach won’t work for larger states with big urban centers. Even with the two “bonus” electors for winning statewide, it would be too easy to have the anomaly of a statewide winner still receiving fewer electoral votes than the statewide loser merely by winning some of 60%-40% districts while losing several 90%-10% districts. If closely contested Georgia had given a plurality to Harris this year, for example, based largely on overwhelming majorities in Atlanta, the winner-by-congressional-district system still would have given Trump nine of the state’s 16 electoral votes, thus rewarding the statewide loser more than the statewide winner. Perish the thought.
Still, legislatures in non-swing states can be as creative as they want. Here’s what they could do:
First, definitely award the two Senate-equivalent electors to the statewide plurality winner. That’s the tiebreaker that makes it worthwhile for a candidate to “win” the state as a whole. For the rest of a state’s electors, though, create a 55% threshold. A candidate who wins 55% of the statewide vote would receive all the state’s electors. But if a candidate wins a mere plurality or less than 55% majority, he would get only 75%, or the nearest upward equivalent, of the state’s other electors, with the second-place candidate receiving the rest.
Consider New Jersey. A relatively populous state, it nonetheless earned not a single major-candidate visit in 2020 because both campaigns were sure all its 14 electors would be awarded to Joe Biden.
If it used the 55% threshold, though, suddenly, New Jersey would have become a political prize worth fighting for. Even without Trump contesting it in 2020, Biden was held to 57.33% of the vote there. This year, Trump made a tiny play there and, at last count, had held Harris to 51.7%. In the first case, Trump might have poured resources into the state to earn three delegates and hold Biden to 11 rather than letting Biden have all 14. And this year, Trump absolutely would have won those three, unless Harris poured her own resources into it to boost her percentage to 55.
In other words, New Jersey would have been contested, not an afterthought.
Using 2020 (because not all the numbers are in from 2024 yet) as an example, Biden won 12 non-swing states with between 53% and 60% of the vote. Trump also won 12 states in that percentage range. Rather than being essentially ignored, all 24 of those states would have been hotly contested, with each “losing” candidate working and spending mightily there to keep his opponent under 55%.
When was the last time both campaigns put solidly Republican South Carolina in play, for example? Under the threshold system, though, Biden would have been within 11-100ths of a percent of earning an elector there, even without fighting for it. Rather than ignoring the Palmetto State, he might have fought for that 11-100ths, and Trump would have fought to keep it. South Carolina’s issues and interests, too, would have earned greater attention.
The threshold system obviously would offer advantages, then, to otherwise non-swing states.
Better yet, the national interest also would benefit.
The complaint has rung out repeatedly in recent years that the nation is too polarized. The winner-take-all system exacerbates this problem. Where state-level political parties see little hope of winning and little benefit to keeping the margin even somewhat close, they grow moribund. Where they grow moribund, their remaining supporters get disaffected, their participation levels drop, their voices aren’t even raised, much less heard, and each side retreats to its own corner, one party in abject defeat and the other in self-satisfied ease, with neither seeing advantage in persuading the middle, much less any still-persuadable people on the “other” side.
Put 43, or even 24, more states in play at the presidential level, though, and the added attention from the national campaigns can reenergize political participation on both sides, encourage more vibrant civic debates and discussions, and create an enlivened and, one hopes, more enlightened public square in general. Incentivized to compete and persuade, all sides would need to learn again to listen and understand other points of view. And if the perpetually losing side in a state, in the course of those efforts, learned how to do a better job at listening, reasoning, and proselytizing, it might eventually figure out again how to win.
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Meanwhile, the candidates themselves would need to move to more middle ground, or more unifying territory, to earn those extra electors, state by state by state.
One way or another, then, whether by congressional district or by threshold system or by some other stratagem, state legislatures across the country should consider abandoning their winner-take-all electoral systems and creatively find ways to make their states again electorally relevant.