Nixing the Electoral College Would Plunge America into Tyranny

The push to eliminate the Electoral College should be resisted by all means necessary. Allowing it to fall would represent yet another dissolution in decentralized power that makes America work.

The 2024 election is in less than a month, meaning calls for abolishing the Electoral College have begun again in earnest. 

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz expressed his disdain for America’s election system multiple times while fundraising on the West Coast. During a stop in Seattle, Walz said “And we know, because of our system of the Electoral College, that puts a few states in real focus. I’m a national popular vote guy, but that’s not the world we live in.” Walz got more aggressive later in Sacramento saying “I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go. We need a national popular vote.”

Walz has taken drastic steps to achieve that end. Last year, he signed Minnesota up for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement of dubious constitutionality that would see the state’s votes go to the winner of the national popular vote even if the majority of the state’s citizens wanted otherwise. 

The Compact currently has 17 states onboard: Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, California, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, New Mexico, Oregon, Minnesota, and Maine, plus the District of Columbia for good measure.

Notice anything about that list? Every single one of the states listed is dominated by Democrats. And for obvious reason. Democrats, the party of urbanites, would overwhelmingly benefit from swapping from a state-based system to one that would bias large cities with populations dwarfing their rural environs. 

Looking at the top 10 largest cities in the country, all of them are run by Democrats. And it’s not particularly close. Around 5.2 million New Yorkers, or 56.38% of the state voted Democratic in the 2020 election. A little less than half of that number, about 2.3 million people, came from NYC alone. That’s more than the combined populations of Alaska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. And it’s just one city. L.A., Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philly… the list goes on and the trend continues. Democrats all the way down. 

In a system where power becomes concentrated amongst the larger population centers, rural areas get screwed. Which is exactly the kind of thing the Founding Fathers wanted to avoid. 

I wrote about this previously when it came to Democratic desires to subvert another institution in a blatant power grab, but the Founders were very clear that they saw a problem when too much power was concentrated in the hands of the masses. To quote myself “The Founders knew that if the nation were to survive, every state would need to buy into the Union. Why would a smaller state willingly surrender itself to a system where bigger states dominated their every affair?”

That applies just as much to the Senate as it does to the Electoral College. Why would a rural state sign up to have its affairs dominated by urban blobs like Delaware or Connecticut? And notice it has nothing to do with size here. 

Politically aligned urbanites are the threat here, not just the big states. As The Heritage Foundation noted in research debunking the myriad myths attacking the Electoral College that “established urban centers like Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles will always have large populations that vote in a predictable fashion. By forcing candidates to travel outside of these urban centers and coalesce a majority of voters in their favor, the Electoral College assures that minority interests in a variety of geographic regions are protected.”

Swing states can change. Hell, Florida was a swing state as recently as 2000. But cities are almost uniformly Democratic and thus are more resistant to ebbs and flows of electoral politics. The last time New York City voted for a Republican in the presidential election was a century ago in 1924, so how does that make things more representative? 

It almost seems like the desire to eliminate the Electoral College is purely based on sour grapes and not on actually improving the health of the Republic. Consider when these clarion calls to scrap our election systems come from. When Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 but lost the Electoral College, she said it was time to retire it.

“I think it needs to be eliminated,” Clinton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I’d like to see us move beyond it, yes.” 

She’d made this statement before after Al Gore lost to Bush in 2000 following then swing state Florida. “I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president,” she said at the time. 

Both Gore and Clinton knew the rules of the election going in. Seems like only once they lose do they complain that the game itself was rigged. But we got the most votes! So? You knew that wasn’t the way you win elections so you should’ve campaigned differently! 

Democrats used to be competitive in rural areas but they stopped caring and preferred to bump up the score in urban enclaves. Just because Democrats can’t stop crapping all over rural voters doesn’t mean we should fundamentally change our electoral system so they don’t have to.

America won’t improve by ditching the Electoral College, it will become a neo-feudal nation with rural states lorded over by urban ones. The solution to the overwhelming influence of the federal government, and thus the need to win every single presidential election, is more federalism not less. 

Instead of moving towards nationalizing everything and creating consortiums of urban overlords, the overwhelming chokehold of the federal government should be weakened and power devolved back to the states. The push to eliminate the Electoral College should be resisted by all means necessary. Allowing it to fall would represent yet another dissolution in decentralized power that makes America work.

The Founders clearly feared that reality. Maybe we should listen to them.