Why Do We Have the Electoral College? CNN's John King Explains the 'Compromise' That Got Us Here (Exclusive)
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10/28/2024 12:13 PM
The veteran political reporter tells PEOPLE about the arguments for and against the United States' controversial Electoral College system
Courtesy of CNN
Five hundred and thirty-eight Electoral College votes will soon be divided between this year's presidential nominees, and for CNN's John King, the countdown is on.
The network's chief national correspondent, 61, operates CNN's groundbreaking "Magic Wall" touchscreen that helps viewers visualize polling data as results are returned. He has covered 10 presidential election cycles in his career, learning the ins and outs of the nation's unique electoral process.
In the United States, the presidential candidate with the most votes does not necessarily win the election. To secure a victory, a candidate must earn more than half of the support of the Electoral College, which requires 270 electoral votes. Each state is allotted a certain number of votes in the Electoral College, based on population, and whoever wins the state's popular vote wins its electoral votes.
The Electoral College system is controversial, giving a few battleground states disproportionate power in determining the next president. This year, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have spent the bulk of their time in the seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — working hard to court their support.
With the election drawing to a close, PEOPLE checked in with King — who is, at this point, an electoral map expert — to discuss the history of the Electoral College, how it impacts political campaigning, and whether it could ever get abolished. Read on for our conversation, which was edited for length and clarity.
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CNN anchor John King works the "Magic Wall" at the 2008 Democratic National ConventionWhy does the Electoral College exist? What was the rationale for how we ended up with it in the first place?
The Electoral College was founded because the founders — the guys in wigs — couldn't agree on how to elect a president. And because we were coming out of King George and the monarchy and the oppressive British rule and the authoritarian king, they were afraid to let the popular vote carry the election because they thought that an angry populist would come along and sway the masses and the people would make a mistake. And so they were abandoning a monarchy, but they didn't fully trust democracy. And that's how we got the Electoral College a long, long time ago.
What are the arguments for keeping the Electoral College in this modern era?
The argument for keeping it is that if the nation switched to a pure, popular vote, a candidate would just go to California and New York and Texas and Illinois and stack their 50 states by population. In the old days, you'd have to actually do math on the campaign trail. Now you would feed it into a computer and you would ask your AI engine, 'How do I get to 50-plus-one in the popular vote? Where are they?'
So the argument against getting rid of the Electoral College is that people would only campaign in the big population centers, and that rural America or small-town America — even within a big state — maybe the small towns would get ignored. Or think of a place like Texas: a presidential candidate, they'd only go to Dallas and to Houston. I get that.
There is a very legitimate point about, "Would parts of the country be left out of the conversation and ignored by the candidates?" Because if you just look at a map and study geography, we have giant population centers, then we have medium population centers, which tend to be close to the giant population centers. The cities and the suburbs would control America and the rural areas, the less populated areas, would have less sway than they have now.
Related: Everything You Need to Know About the Electoral College as Electors Cast Their Votes
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Former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Tucson, Ariz., on Sept. 12, 2024And what is the argument for abandoning the Electoral College?
The argument for the other side, to eliminate the Electoral College, is seeking democracy in its purest form. But there's no such thing as a democracy in its purest form, really, in terms of big countries. The Electoral College was a compromise, and how we pick a president will probably always have to be a compromise.
The thing that's fascinating to me is that our politics are so polarized and dysfunctional now that we can't really even have this conversation. Of course, the things that are still in the books that were put there by the founding fathers, it seems a little silly to me that we can't go into a room and have conversations about them, that we can't go onto the floor of Congress and have debates about them.
The Electoral College is kind of like gun control. It's kind of like the Second Amendment. "Well, in 1780-something, somebody wrote that down, how dare you want to change it in 2024?" It seems a little ridiculous. It's not my job to say what the outcome should be, but I do find it kind of ridiculous that we can't have conversations about these things and let people come to the table. If you think it's wrong, show me your way. And if you don't have the votes for your way, are you willing to talk about what-- could there be some hybrid?
Both sides have good arguments, but trying to see if there's any way to compromise is something that is just impossible at the moment because of the polarization.
You've talked to a lot of undecided voters around the country this year. Does this topic ever come up for them? Is the electoral system something that has been mentioned, in terms of whether it affects their likelihood to get out and vote?
Not whether or not they're even going to vote.You do sometimes hear from hardcore Democrats, people who are very committed Democrats, "Why do we still do it this way?" And you can understand that because a few times in recent history, the person who won the popular vote has not won the presidency.
In our more recent history, that would be Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, and those were rather contentious. Not only did they lose the election and won the popular vote, but they were both really contentious elections. Right? 2000 was the hanging chads in the Supreme Court and 2016 was Trump. And so Democrats are more passionate at the moment about this because of their recent memories.
I don't ever remember meeting a voter who says, "The Electoral College is my driving issue," or "I'm not going to vote." I've never heard people get that worked up about it. But passionate, committed Democrats do bring it up sometimes.
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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a Wisconsin campaign rally on Oct. 17, 2024What would it take to abolish the Electoral College?
Well, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious right before us. If Kamala Harris wins the popular vote by — Biden won by, what, 7 million votes? — if Vice President Harris wins the popular vote by anywhere ballpark of what Joe Biden did in 2020 and loses the election, you can be certain-- I say this water's bubbling, sometimes it will boil. It will boil over, and Democrats will demand a political reform. And that's a guarantee.
If Harris wins the popular vote and Trump wins the presidency, so that'll be what, three times in 24 years? Three times in 24 years, a Democrat has won the popular vote, but lost the election. That will, I think, put something that is an interesting conversation into a very contentious front-and-center issue.
And you do see with the national popular vote movement, there are people in the States trying to do this. And none of them have reached the tipping point yet. But whether it's ranked choice voting, whether it's nonpartisan primaries, there's a basketful of political reform ideas bubbling up in different places around the country, born out of a common discontent or dismay with the way things work or don't work right now — and the Electoral College is one of those conversations.
What does it take to push that from a conversation to actually being acted upon? That part, I don't quite know. I haven't had enough time to think about it and study it, but I do think you see a bunch of these reforms. One man's reform is another man's poison, I guess. And so part of the question is, what would it take to get them to a tipping point?
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