Arlando Monk is an increasingly rare find in presidential politics: a voter whose choices matter.
The Black entrepreneur lives in Wisconsin, one of seven expected battlegrounds in the 2024 presidential race. He is registered to vote but not sure he will bother. He has not decided between former president Donald Trump or President Biden, if those are the major-party options.
If U.S. presidents were selected through the principle of “one person, one vote” that governs legislative races, the ballots of undecided swing-state citizens such as Monk would be worth just as much as the other 150 million or so Americans who are expected to vote next year.
But that is not the system handed down from the nation’s founding fathers, who opted for multiple winner-take-all contests that give greater power to smaller states. The electoral college was supposed to moderate the passions of what Alexander Hamilton called the “general mass,” which he worried could fall prey to candidates with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity.”
[T]he system increasingly distorts the democratic process as partisan divisions grow along geographic lines.
Advances in technology, meanwhile, allow campaigns to calibrate their outreach to only the most persuadable voters. The upshot is that a tiny segment of the population will get an outsize say in who leads the United States. And the will of the majority may not even prevail.
Once rare, the frequency with which the electoral college has skewed the overall result has increased: The “general mass” — now called the popular vote — has been won in two of the past six contests by someone who lost the White House. In both cases, the Republican candidate benefited.
At the same time, the count of swingable states has narrowed. The 2024 presidential campaign is likely to target a smaller share of Americans than at any point in the modern era, despite massive increases in spending due to online fundraising, a Washington Post analysis found.
During the last election, just 10 states and two congressional districts were targeted by Republican or Democratic nominees’ campaigns. It was a precipitous drop from the 26 states on average that were targeted each year between 1952 and 1980
The Washington Post’s analysis found that just 1 in 4 Americans lived in such areas in 2020, down from roughly 3 in 4 in the earlier period. If the major parties do not contest Florida in 2024, as is widely expected, only 18 percent of Americans would live in battlegrounds.
The targeted voters in the decisive states should expect a barrage of communications . . . . . The rest of the country’s citizens will find themselves on the sidelines, watching the news or the occasional live candidate event with a diminished voice in their own futures. Their vote will still count but is unlikely to decide anything.
“It’s now getting to the point where you are probably talking about 400,000 people in three or four states. That is what it is getting down to,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns since 1980. “It does mean that more and more people feel that they don’t have a say.”
The geographic sorting of Americans along partisan lines helps explain why. Most of the country resides in red or blue states where the outcome in a two-party race is not in doubt. If a candidate wins California by one vote or 1 million votes, the electoral college outcome is the same, giving candidates no incentive to campaign in places where the outcome can be predicted. Thirty-three states — including giants such as California, New York and Texas — have voted for the same party in each presidential election dating back to 2000.
“Instead of using increased spending to target a broader swath of voters, you have more and more money focused on specific voters that campaigns think will be decisive in the electoral college.”
“It is pretty clear that not all voters are equal,” said Shaw, the political scientist, whose book “Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era” is due out next year. “It’s not just the system. It is the system and the voters it is operating on.”
The vast majority of the ad and organizing dollars is focused on media markets and outlets where the voters who will decide the election reside, as campaigns seek to infiltrate the communities, households or iPhones where the few identified swing voters such as Monk spend their time.
At the Biden campaign, the early betting is that the outcome of next year’s election will again be very close, with a margin once again hinging on tens of thousands of votes in a few states. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who won the 2016 popular vote by 2.9 million votes, or 2 percent, could have won the electoral college if about 80,000 people in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had voted differently.
In 2020, about 45,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin could have changed the outcome of that race, even though Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million.
Before 2000, the outcome of the electoral vote had matched the popular vote in every election for more than a century. But in recent years the aberrations have become more common, with mismatches in 2000 and 2016 that enabled the popular vote loser to claim the White House.
In the past two elections, Republicans have had a distinct electoral college advantage. That’s because the tipping-point states that won the election were more Republican-leaning than the country as a whole. In 2020, Wisconsin, the tipping-point state, was 3.5 points more Republican than the country, the highest advantage since 1948.
The shifts have only magnified the need for campaigns to ignore the bigger blue states where Democrats tend to rack up large margins.
Persuading people to participate in the election at all may prove more important than winning them over from the other side. That means campaigns are likely to focus on voters who are among the least politically engaged.
“The people who will decide this election don’t want to participate in it,” said one Democrat who requested anonymity to describe planning for next year.
At the root of this dynamic is the antiquated assumption at the heart of U.S. presidential politics — that regular people cannot be trusted to directly select America’s leader. Enslaved people, Native Americans and women had no vote in the original U.S. Constitution. The White, landowning men who did were seen as susceptible to their own passions and selfish interest. Electors, by contrast, were expected to be enlightened and above the fray.
“The people choose the electors,” James Madison, a drafter of the U.S. Constitution, said during the debate. “This can be done with ease and convenience, and will render the choice more judicious.”
The electoral college system came with tricky ramifications, including a built-in bias toward smaller states. The population of California, the most populous state, is more than 67 times the population of Wyoming, the least inhabited. But California only gets 18 times the representation in the electoral college of Wyoming. Put another way, the vote of Wyoming residents is worth 3.7 times more than Californians in presidential contests.
The overall effect has been to give the GOP an edge. University of Texas political scientists found that in a 50-50 popular vote election, the Republican had a 65 percent chance of winning in recent elections.
Polling data has consistently shown that a majority of Americans oppose the electoral college, and in a 2019 Gallup survey one of the most common concerns among those opposed was that “the winner of the popular vote doesn’t always win the election.”
Abraham Lincoln won 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860 when he ran against Stephen Douglas and two other candidates. He got 59 percent of the electoral college votes. Bill Clinton won 69 percent of the electoral college votes in 1992 against two rivals, while winning only 43 percent of the vote.
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