It’s (almost) Independence Day in the United States. A day to celebrate our freedom, grilled foods, and American democracy.
Except, well, the United States is not a pure democracy — meaning not all our federal leaders are elected directly by voters. In fact, as the U.S. constitution was originally written, even U.S. senators were indirectly elected. (That changed in 1913 with ratification of the 17th amendment.)
In our Fourth of July week post, we examine another form of indirect election: the Electoral College. We will look at what the Electoral College is, the founders’ arguments for it, and what its existence could mean for Election 2024. We also address the question many Americans are consumed with this Independence Day: what fireworks can we expect if President Joe Biden decides to drop out of the race for the White House following last week’s debate?
Why The Electoral College?
As the National Archives, an independent federal agency charged with preserving government and historical records, explains, “The Electoral College is a process, not a place.” Outlined in the U.S. constitution, it’s how the country selects who will serve as the president and the vice president.
Electors themselves are elected through a two-part process. According to the National Archives, political parties in each state choose slates of potential electors before the general election and then, during the general election, voters in each state select their state’s electors by casting ballots.
The Electoral College consists of 538 electors, which means a presidential candidate needs 270 electoral votes to become president. The number of electors each state has is determined by a simple mathematical formula: two (the number of senators from each state) plus the number of U.S. House members a state has. (Virginia, for example, has 13 electors because it has two senators and 11 House members.) Washington, D.C. also has three electors and, as the National Archives notes, is treated like a state for purposes of the Electoral College under the U.S. constitution’s 23rd amendment.
In most states, the winning candidate of that state’s primary or caucus earns all the state’s electors, meaning that whichever ticket wins the popular vote in that state gets that number of votes in the Electoral College. (So whichever candidate wins Virginia will gain 13 electors.) Maine and Nebraska split their electors. As the campaign website 270ToWin explains, these states allocate two electoral votes to the state popular vote winner, and then one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each congressional district. (Maine has two congressional districts; Nebraska has three.)
So, why did the founders create the Electoral College? According to scholars at George Mason University, while most Americans might think this process exists because of the founders’ distrust of direct democracy, there actually is another reason.
“A few framers objected to election by the people because of the dangers of democracy. But more framers favored election by the people,” explain James P. Pfiffner and Jason Hartke. “The primary impediment to popular election concerned the uneven distribution of population among the states and the counting of slaves for purposes of presidential election. The electoral college mechanism … solved these problems in the political reality of the convention.”
Regardless of the founders’ reasons for creating the Electoral College, and the ample supply of modern arguments against it, electors, not the American people themselves, will decide the outcome of the 2024 presidential election. So: what does current polling indicate about how the Electoral College process might end up?
A Look At Current State-By-State Presidential Polls
Late last night, the New York Post reported that a series of polls conducted by OpenLabs, a “Democrat-affiliated nonprofit” indicated that, over the last week, incumbent President Biden has lost ground to his challenger, former President Donald Trump, in several swing state polls.
Specifically, the surveys indicated President Biden “would not only lose all seven of the swing states thought to hold the key to the White House in 2024 — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but also states he won convincingly four years ago.” The states President Biden won in 2020 that are now vulnerable are New Hampshire, a state that Republicans have not held in a presential race since 2000 and George W. Bush, Virginia where President Biden defeated Trump by in 2020 by 10 points, and New Mexico, which has voted for the Democratic candidate for president in seven out of the last eight elections.
These findings conform with a new election prediction model released by data guru and polling expert Nate Silver last week. Based on swing state polls and other modeling before last week’s debate, Silver gave President Biden just a 35 percent chance of beating former President Trump in the election. According to The Hill, that probability declined to 28 percent after the debate.
Given those numbers, it’s not hard to understand why this week’s political headlines have been fixated on Democrats’ fears about the election and questions about President Biden’s fate on the ballot. Added to that is the fact that the OpenData survey reported by the New York Post also asked whether President Biden should leave the race. According to the Post, 40 percent of voters who voted for President Biden in 2020 think he should drop out. More than half of swing voters, 55 percent, want him off the Democratic ticket.
What would happen if these voters got their way?
To begin to answer, we must go back to 1968 and the site of that year’s (and this year’s) Democratic National Convention: Chicago.
Back To The Future: 56 Years Ago, Convention Delegates Were Not Bound To Anyone
On his podcast in February, The New York Times’ Ezra Klein interviewed Brookings Institution Senior Fellow for Governance Studies Elaine Kamarck to determine what would happen if President Biden dropped out of the race mid- or post-primary season and before the Democratic National Convention (DNC).
As Karmack explains, DNC delegates today must support the candidate who won their state’s primary. They are “bound” to that candidate unless that candidate releases them.
This situation was not always the case, however. Through the 1968 Democratic National Convention, delegates could support whomever they wanted, and many of them went into the convention not committed to a candidate. Primaries were mere “beauty contests” and had no impact on what happened at the convention. (In fact, that year Kamarck says there were only about 15 or 16 Democratic primaries held across the country.)
This system fell apart in 1968. Incumbent President Lyndon Johnson, deeply unpopular due to the ongoing Vietnam War, announced on March 31 that he would drop out of the race for president. Candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 6, nearly three months before the convention. That left Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy and incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey prevailed over McCarthy on the first ballot, but not before news cameras caught Chicago police beating antiwar protestors, who supported Sen. McCarthy, on live television.
Chaos ensued and, as Kamarck explains to Klein, the violence and disarray prompted the Democratic Party to create a commission to rethink how it chose its candidates for president. It did and, at the 1972 convention, delegates were bound to the candidate that voters in their state preferred.
These rules still stand today and mean that if President Joe Biden were to drop out of the race today, he would first have to release his delegates from being obligated to vote for him during the state-by-state roll call vote that happens on the floor during the convention.
If President Biden releases his delegates, any person who wanted to vie for the Democratic nomination would then try to convince individual delegates to support him or her. As Klein points out on his podcast, the list of potential nominees would likely include Vice President Kamala Harris and “eight or nine others.” (Govs. Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, and J.B. Pritzker are among the other names being floated.)
If the party went into the convention without a clear frontrunner — and that likely would not be the case if President Biden endorsed a successor — Kamarck says each state delegation would gather at a location in Chicago in August and the candidates or their surrogates (family members, staff members, or other lawmakers who support the candidates) would go from “room to room” making pitches to the delegates. Certain voices would be incredibly important in these discussions, including governors and members of the House and Senate, along with labor union leaders and other important organizations that normally support Democrats in the general election.
There also would be a “massive” social media campaign, Kamarck says, and each candidate would be fielding polls to try to demonstrate the strength of their potential performance against former President Trump.
Then, per usual, there would be that state-by-state roll call vote on the convention floor — the outcome of which may not be certain since delegates, even if they give their word to candidate, are never really bound. “It would be pretty wild,” says Kamarck. “This would be really great reality TV.” Kamarck predicts that if there were more than one candidate still in the running at this point, it would take more than one roll call vote on the convention floor to arrive at a nominee.
Could this scenario unfold in Chicago? This morning, The Washington Post reported President Biden will meet with Democratic congressional leaders and governors ahead of a planned Friday interview with ABC News, and The New York Times reported that Biden told an ally he is weighing whether to stay on the ticker. Only time – and President Biden – will tell.