4/7 Centralized Candidates
As political parties seized the power to nominate candidates, there was a dramatic shift away from the framers’ Electoral College. This new system made elections centralized, pitting two national candidates against each other, and forcing the voters to choose between only two ideologies and personalities.
The framers’ design of decentralization, groups of electors spread throughout the country, was removed as the parties choose their nominees first and presented them to the voters.
The framers’ use of deliberation also became non-existent as the path to the presidency was routed through elections.
Fortified by the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, the Electoral College system we’re familiar with today was born.
Today, the debate revolves around canceling the Electoral College or keeping the system. Like most issues in modern American politics, the institution has become a partisan one.
Democrats want to remove the Electoral College and replace it with a nationwide popular vote. The Republicans prefer to keep the system around.
Much of the partisanship revolves around the perception of the 2000 and 2016 presidential election results, where both Democratic candidates won the popular vote but won fewer electoral votes and thus lost the White House. Known as the “wrong winner” scenario, there is a discrepancy between the two vote counts.
We should consider the fact that the United States has never actually held a nationwide popular vote election. More accurately, we have held fifty-one popular votes throughout the several states.
Due to the winner-take-all system, individual state elections have evolved into either safe states or swing states. Safe states have such large majorities of one of the parties, that the result is essentially predetermined. Candidates tend to ignore safe states. Swing states have the potential to go to either candidate prompting lots of attention from the two candidates.
This tends to lead to low voter turnout in safe states and higher turnout in swing states. In an alternative world where the nationwide popular vote was actually used, it’s difficult to say with certainty who actually would have won given all voters have an equal say in the election. Holding a popular vote would change the dynamics of how campaigns are conducted and which voters to go after.
The comparison between the popular vote and the modern Electoral College is not the point of The Framers’ Method. That debate is more or less arguing over the same style of system of two or a few candidates competing nationally with the general focus directed at the personal characteristics of the candidates. The point is to compare the framers’ decentralized and deliberative system to the centralized and candidate-centered systems of the popular vote and the modern Electoral College. Often this leads to voters having to choose between two unpopular candidates (see above image).
Once we see how different the two systems are we may begin the conversation toward giving the framers’ original concept of choosing a president another chance.
