It has been fun living in a swing state at presidential election time. The two major candidates have made multiple visits and held major rallies in the state. Television commercials for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have been playing on your TV set. Family members of candidates have shown up.
For political activists, living in one of the 10 or so swing states can be rewarding. You can show your partisan support for your candidate by attending one of those rallies and shouting on his or her behalf. You get that emotional charge that comes from being part of a large public gathering exuding love and commitment for a presidential candidate. There must be something to it, because strong party supporters will stand in line and wait in their seats for hours to see the candidate and be part of the throng.
In some cases you get to stand along a rope line and shake the candidate’s hand and say a few words to him or her. Who knows? You may have just chatted with the next president of the United States.
Not everyone enjoys living in a swing state. Those TV commercials can get boring, particularly the fourth or fifth time you have seen one, and the commercials seem unusually negative and nasty this year. And who wants to get caught in a traffic jam because a presidential candidate is in your city and transiting to and from a speaking venue?
But, the fact is, if TV commercials are not playing and candidates are not coming to your state to speak and hold rallies, your state in many ways is not having a presidential election. You are living in a state that is safe for one party, which means your state is so committed to one candidate or the other that there is no point in a candidate trying to get more votes there.
Colorado just recently shifted from being a swing state to a safe Democratic state. According to calculations especially based on the FiveThirtyEight blog’s multiple-polls data, only Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida remain as true swing states. Nevada, Missouri and Georgia are close to falling into the swing category from being safe Republican states.
In addition, in two states that split their electoral votes, a Maine congressional district and a Nebraska congressional district are in the swing category. Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, previously viewed as competitive states, are now viewed as safe Democratic states.
Thus only eight of the 50 states and two congressional districts are having a “real” presidential election at the present time. That leaves more than 40 states out of the competition. That means, for 80 percent or more of American voters, there are no candidate speeches and rallies, minimal television commercials, and no getting to meet potential White House occupants in a rope line.
Is this really the right way for a constitutional democracy to function?
The cause is the Electoral College, the intentionally “rigged” method of electing U.S. presidents required by the U.S. Constitution. The presidency is not won by votes alone, but by electoral votes piled up in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
To get to the White House for the next four years, a presidential candidate has to win a majority (270) of the electoral votes, not the popular vote. A state’s electoral votes are equal to the state’s number of U.S. senators (two) and the number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives (one or more). The more populous a state is, the larger its electoral vote. In 48 of the 50 states, the presidential candidate that wins a majority of the popular vote in a state gets all of that state’s electoral votes.
And there’s the problem. Once a candidate has 55 percent or more of the vote in a state, based on past election data and polling, there is little point in campaigning there. The candidate is going to get all of that state’s electoral votes no matter how many more votes he or she may win there.
Reformers call for amending the Constitution to add 102 to the 538 electoral votes in the Electoral College. These 102 additional votes would be allocated to the national winner in the popular vote. With that many electoral votes riding on the national popular vote, presidential candidates would be encouraged to win the popular vote and thus would campaign in more than just the swing states. Voters in all 50 states would be incentivized to vote in the presidential election.
The public has little understanding of how the Electoral College works and how it leaves so many Americans out of presidential campaigns.
We are not going to abolish the Electoral College, nor are we going to adopt this ingenious reform. Still, we deserve a system which encourages everyone in every state to vote and be interested in the presidential election.
Thomas E. Cronin and Robert D. Loevy are political scientists at Colorado College and co-authors of “Colorado Politics and Policy: Governing a Purple State.”
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