The majority of Americans would rather a national popular vote total decide presidential elections than the Electoral College vote totals, a survey from the think tank Pew Research Center has found.
The survey sampled more than 6,000 Americans, discovering that 63 percent would prefer presidential elections be decided by the national popular vote. Conversely, just 35 percent of respondents favored keeping “the current system, in which the candidate who wins the most votes in the Electoral College wins the election,” the survey found.
The gap between pro and anti-Electoral College Americans has grown since last year. In January 2021, Pew Research found that 55 percent of Americans preferred moving towards a popular vote system, as opposed to 43 percent who still favored Electoral College vote totals deciding the president.
After the 2000 and 2016 elections, where Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump both won the presidency but lost the popular vote, the electoral college was placed under the spotlight.
The current survey is reflective of a partisan divide between the left’s opposition to the system and the right’s support of it. Of respondents who are Democrats or lean towards being a Democrat, 80 percent were in favor of moving toward the popular vote, while 87 percent of liberals surveyed agreed.
Among Republicans or those leaning Republican, 56 percent said they want to preserve the current system where the Electoral College vote totals determine presidential elections, as do 66 percent of those who were of a conservative ideology.
Moreover, Pew research found that the majority of individuals across all age demographic supported moving to the popular vote. However, the support declines steadily across the populations.
While those on the left fantasize about elections decided by the popular vote, a constitutional amendment through Congress or a Constitutional Convention would be required to make the radical change. If such a change were sought by Congress, two-thirds of both chambers would need to vote in favor of the amendment, which would then need to be ratified by 38 state legislatures.
As the Heritage Foundation pointed out, the Electoral College system put in place by the Founding Fathers forces presidential candidates to build broader voter coalitions rather than focusing on swaths of voters in population-dense metro areas. “This addresses the Founders’ fears of a ‘tyranny of the majority,’ which has the potential to marginalize sizeable portions of the population, particularly in rural and more remote areas of the country,” the foundation stated, adding:
Large cities like New York City and Los Angeles should not get to unilaterally dictate policies that affect more rural states, like North Dakota and Indiana, which have very different needs. These states may be smaller, but their values still matter—they should have a say in who becomes President. By forcing presidential candidates to address all Americans during their campaigns, not just those in large cities, the Electoral College has the added benefit of eschewing radical candidates for more moderate ones.
The Electoral College “lessens the chance of voting fraud affecting the outcome of a national vote by compartmentalizing the outcome among the various states,” as Victor Davis Hanson, of the Conservative think tank the Hoover Institute, wrote in a Tribune Media Services op-ed in 2020.
The Pew Research Center sampled 6,174 U.S. adults from June 27 – July 4.