Opinion: Electoral college a relic of past

Bill Clinton didn’t even come close to winning a majority vote in his first run for president. He got only 43% of the vote in a three-man race — but he won with a heavily lopsided 370 electoral votes.

His successor, George W. Bush, didn’t even win a plurality of the votes as Clinton did.

Instead, he fell about a half-million votes short of the vote for Al Gore. But he won in electoral votes, despite the majority of votes going against him.

And Donald Trump was a good 2 million votes short of a popular vote win in 2016, but he won the electoral vote to become president.

As for Barack Obama, he won both the popular vote with a clear majority, and the electoral college to boot, in 2008. And so did Joe Biden, in 2020.

We have a watered-down process for electing our presidents, and it sometimes gets in the way of the popular will. The electoral college needs to be rescinded.

The electoral college is a relic of the past — an ugly past, one that added weight to the slaveholding South with a “three-fifths clause” that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. It also gave muscle to the smaller states where the popular vote total is less significant to the national count than are the electors those states carry. Plus, the electoral college was a more practical approach back in the horse-and-buggy days of the late 1700s, when a national tally of votes was far difficult if not impossible to pull off.

Nowadays, it’s the small-state advantage that leads many who oppose the electoral college’s abolishment, because that’s essentially what it still provides — an advantage in the national court for many less populated counties.

Here’s the here-and-now reality: Rural voters tend to be more conservative than urban voters, so any effort to truly democratize our presidential elections is going to be met with opposition mainly from the countrysides.

And, mostly, that’ll come from the South, which still carries more weight than it should, thanks to the electoral college and the U.S. Senate.

In the Senate, Wyoming and its half-million residents have the same representation as California and its 40 million inhabitants. Not exactly a balance of power there.

To be clear, I’m not in favor of reshaping the two-per-state makeup in the Senate, but to throw the electoral college in with it seems to be overkill when it comes to granting power to the less populated states.

Moreover, the electoral college corrupts the presidential campaigns themselves. Instead of fighting for every vote anywhere they can get it, the candidates focus on the swing states.

Places like the decidedly Democratic New Mexico hardly get the time of day from presidential candidates because they know, long before the votes are cast, whether they will or won’t get our electoral votes. So, instead, they focus their attention on the states whose majorities could swing one way or another.

And here’s another factor to consider: The strategy of running for president would change dramatically if we were to abolish the electoral college. Sure, the candidates will court the population centers — which they do already — but in a close election especially, they’ll come a-courting that small-town vote too. After all, my vote in rural Guadalupe County will count just as much as some city-slicker’s vote in New York City. That’s the way it should be.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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