How News Sources Portray Electoral College Policies
This chart shows how major news sources across the ideological spectrum frame electoral college policies, from left to right-leaning perspectives.
The Electoral College is the primary method through which the United States elects the president. It refers to a group of electors that cast votes for the president and vice president every four years. Every state has a certain number of electors, and that number is based on the total of each state’s senators and representatives. Notably, Congressional members cannot be electoral members themselves. In total, there are 538 electoral votes, and the presidential ticket that receives a simple majority —270 votes — is elected to the next administration.
Key Differences and History
In many countries around the world today, voters elect their leader directly; whoever wins the most votes becomes the next leader. However, during the time period when the United States was established, this was not true. America’s Founding Fathers debated for many months on the best approach for the United States to choose its president.
On one hand, some members preferred to give Congress the authority to choose the next president. However, this drew opposition due to fears that Congress could become corrupt and wrongfully choose the next leader. On the other hand, some members preferred direct democracy, in which the candidate with the most votes from citizens would win. This drew opposition for fears that voters were not informed enough or that they could be easily persuaded by a bad-faith populist candidate.
As a compromise, the Founding Fathers settled on the Electoral College, with independently appointed individuals who would cast their vote for the candidate based on whoever received the most votes in each state. The formation of the Electoral College was not the preferred outcome of most Founders; it was simply a consensus decision.
Even with the broad system in place, there was substantial debate around how many electors each state should receive. In particular, there was controversy around whether slaves, who comprised 40% of the South’s population at the time, should be considered people. As another point of compromise, slaves were considered 3/5ths of a person, allowing the Electoral College to become the primary way that the United States elects its president.
Today, the Electoral College remains deeply controversial. Supporters of the Electoral College continue to highlight that it gives equal representation to smaller states. Others point out that due to the rise of polarization and political parties, only a handful of swing states even matter in electing the president.
Critics have also argued that the Electoral College is unfairly biased toward one political party. In both 2000 and 2016, presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump won the Electoral College despite receiving fewer votes than Al Gore and Hilary Clinton, respectively. In fact, even as Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, Republicans enjoyed the largest Electoral College victories since 1948, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis.
The same analysis showed that while the Electoral College bias tended to be fairly random dating back into the 1800s, a more pronounced Republican bias has emerged since 2016. The primary cause for this shift appears to be the growing urban-rural divide, where Democrats are focused in cities and Republicans are focused in small communities. The analysis points out that Democrats may continue to struggle in presidential and senatorial elections moving forward for this reason.
Beginning in 2006 and continuing through today, various states and the District of Columbia have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, seeking to award their electoral votes to whoever wins the most votes in each state. As of August 2025, 17 states – Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Illinois, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine – have joined the agreement.
Despite the effort, those 17 states currently only comprise 209 of the necessary 270 electoral votes needed to elect a new president; the agreement only goes into effect once there are enough states to clear that threshold. Furthermore, there are open questions about whether the agreement is constitutional.
The Democratic Stance
The Democratic Party opposes the Electoral College. In the eyes of Democrats, the presidential candidate who wins the highest number of votes should win the election. Opposition to the Electoral College intensified after the 2000 election, when Al Gore won 48.4% of the vote nationwide compared to George W. Bush’s 47.9%, but Bush was elected president due to clearing 270 electoral votes. Opposition further increased when Hillary Clinton lost the presidency to Donald Trump in 2016 despite earning 2.8 million more votes nationwide under similar circumstances.
In an April 2024 Gallup poll, 82% of Democratic voters favored replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote. Support for the proposal peaked at 89% among Democrats in 2020.
In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon received 110 more electoral votes despite earning less than 1% more of the popular vote compared to Hubert Humphrey. In reaction, Democratic Representative Emanuel Celler introduced a constitutional amendment in which the candidate winning more than 40% of the vote would be elected president. If no candidate cleared 40%, a runoff election would be held.
The constitutional amendment passed the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, and it garnered support from both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate. President Richard Nixon also endorsed the proposal. However, the constitutional amendment was filibustered in the Senate, and efforts to break the filibuster fell short by about a dozen senators. This remains the closest the United States has come to establishing an alternative system to the Electoral College.
In modern times, efforts to abolish the Electoral College have been far less successful. A handful of bills have been proposed by Democrats during the 2005-2025 period, but none of them progressed beyond the introduction and committee stages. In 2019, Kamala Harris – who later became the 2024 Democratic nominee – expressed her support for abolishing the system.
The Republican Stance
The Republican Party strongly supports the Electoral College. Conservatives, who control many of the lowest-population states in the country, argue that the Electoral College provides those states with influence in Congress. If the United States switched to a popular vote system, high-population states such as California and New York would render the smaller, conservative states irrelevant and ensure permanent Democratic Party governance.
However, support for the Electoral College has varied over time among Republicans. In an April 2024 Gallup poll, only 32% of Republican voters favored an alternative system. This number is nearly double the 17% of Republicans who favored abolishing the Electoral College in 2017. Only 5 years prior, in 2011, 53% of Republicans favored an alternative system.
While that marks the highest level of support during modern times, approximately 7-in-10 Republicans favored abolishing the Electoral College between the 1960s and 1980s, according to Gallup, when even Republican President Richard Nixon supported a proposal to do so.
The elections of George W. Bush and Donald Trump, both of whom won the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, likely explain the movement among Republican voters. Increasing political polarization and fears of one-party rule have caused a shift from bipartisan support to deep division over time.
The Future
Although a majority of Americans, 58% in an April 2024 Gallup poll, favor abolishing the Electoral College, there is unlikely to be notable movement on this front in the near future. Constitutional amendments require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress to be introduced, and three-fourths of the states must ratify the agreement. In deeply divided times, it is unlikely that Democrats will garner the necessary support to change the way in which presidents are elected. As such, presidential elections will continue to be decided by a handful of swing states in the near future.
