(LifeSiteNews) – Minnesota Governor and Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz endorsed the idea of abolishing the Electoral College on Tuesday, lamenting that a world without the mechanism by which America has chosen every president since her founding is “not the world we live in.”
The New York Post reported that Walz made the comment at a fundraiser hosted at the home of California Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom. “I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go,” he said. “We need a national popular vote that is something. But that’s not the world we live in.”
This is not the first time Walz has expressed such sentiments, and his running mate, current Vice President Kamala Harris, had said she was “open to the discussion” about abolishing the Electoral College in 2019.
“Governor Walz believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket,” a Walz spokesperson responded. “He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes. And he was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts.” The statement does not disavow opposition to the Electoral College or commit to keeping it.
The system of government America’s founding fathers established in the U.S. Constitution was designed to be a representative republic rather than a pure, direct democracy in which the public ultimately chooses its leaders, but its will is filtered through checks, balances, and mediating processes, theoretically to ensure different parts of government have different levels of responsiveness to popular sentiment and cultivate reasoned deliberation over rash, emotional action.
As part of this framework, the Electoral College gives every state a number of electors “equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress,” which in turn determines the president based on how a state votes. Today, that means whoever wins 270 electoral votes becomes president, and every state but Maine and Nebraska awards all of its electors to whichever candidate wins a majority of its vote, with the loser getting nothing in that state.
As a reflection of its congressional representation, a state’s number of electors is based primarily on its population size, and most of America’s presidents have also won their popular votes. But on rare occasions a close election can come down to a combination of states such that a candidate can win the Electoral College and become president despite losing the popular vote.
That the two most recent times this happened, George W. Bush’s victory in 2000 and Donald Trump’s in 2016, benefited Republicans has made abolishing the Electoral College a passion of many left-wing activists, who argue that only a pure popular vote can faithfully reflect the will of the people and embody a democratic character.
Defenders of the Electoral College argue that it is essential to maintaining trustworthy election results that reflect the country as a whole. By making the margin of victory within each state irrelevant, it limits the ability of a ruling party to cancel out the will of other states through its dominance at the state level, whether through vote fraud, beneficial voting rules, or conformity of thought in dense population centers. Supporters cite maps of the 2000 and 2016 election results showing that the vast majority of counties favored the Republican both years, and the Democrat’s popular vote advantage came primarily through the party’s control of certain high-population cities.
Harris and Walz, who are running on a comprehensively left-wing agenda, currently lead Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance by 1.8% in RealClearPolitics’ popular vote polling average and by about 3% according to RaceToTheWH but margins remain extremely close in the swing states that will decide the Electoral College outcome, which currently sits at 276 for Harris and 262 for Trump according to RaceToTheWH.