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What I didn't learn about the Electoral College

August 27, 2024 at 4:28 PM by Dr. Drang

People my age1 like to talk about how our education was superior to that of these kids today. I can say with absolute certainty that one aspect of my education was terribly deficient: how the Electoral College works.

I’m not talking about the existence of the Electoral College or how it works on a superficial level—I definitely learned that. But there were two aspects of the Electoral College system that were never mentioned.

First was the likelihood of the popular vote and the electoral vote being at odds with one another. My classmates and I were taught that it could happen, but it was treated as a sort of theoretical thing, not something of any practical significance. Maybe that sort of thing had happened long ago—I say “maybe” because the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 was never a big focus in history class—but we modern Americans would never have to worry about that.

I suspect this misguided optimism came from the extremely close elections that had recently occurred: Kennedy-Nixon in 1960 and Nixon-Humphrey in 1968. In both cases, the winner of the popular vote won the electoral vote with room to spare, and that may have given people the feeling that the Electoral College would always reflect the popular vote.2

The second problem was how we were taught that the Electoral College could—theoretically, remember—lead to an inversion of results. The example we were given was two candidates, call them A and B, and two states, a large one and a small one. If A wins the large state by a very small margin and B wins the small state by a large margin, Anderson would get more electoral votes with fewer popular votes.

While this is true, it’s misleading in that it leads you to think that it’s the large states that have sort of an unfair advantage, when the truth is the exact opposite. Because every state gets two senators, they also get two “free” electoral votes, votes that are unrelated to their population.

Here’s a summary of the states, ranked by their number of electors and presenting their percentages of the population and the Electoral College. I took the 2023 population estimates from the Census Bureau and the current Electoral College vote counts from the National Archives.

Electors States Pop Pct EC Pct
3 AK, DE, DC, ND, SD, VT, WY 1.61% 3.90%
4 HI, ID, ME, MT, NH, RI, WV 3.04% 5.20%
5 NE, NM 1.22% 1.86%
6 AR, IA, KS, MS, NV, UT 5.60% 6.69%
7 CT, OK 2.29% 2.60%
8 KY, LA, OR 3.98% 4.46%
9 AL, SC 3.13% 3.35%
10 CO, MD, MN, MO, WI 8.93% 9.29%
11 AZ, IN, MA, TN 8.49% 8.18%
12 WA 2.33% 2.23%
13 VA 2.60% 2.42%
14 NJ 2.77% 2.60%
15 MI 3.00% 2.79%
16 GA, NC 6.53% 5.95%
17 OH 3.52% 3.16%
19 IL, PA 7.62% 7.06%
28 NY 5.84% 5.20%
30 FL 6.75% 5.58%
40 TX 9.11% 7.43%
54 CA 11.63% 10.04%

There are lots of ways to slice this data, but it always looks bad for the large states. For example, the 14 states that have either 3 or 4 Electors combine to have 9.11% of the total Electoral College vote3 but only 4.65% of the population. Compare this to Texas, which has nearly twice the population (9.11% of the US total) but gets only 7.43% of the Electoral College vote. You could make a similar comparison between the 16 states with 5 or fewer Electors and California.

Starting in 2000, every election except the two Obama wins has either inverted the popular and electoral winner or come close to doing so. I’d like to think that’s changed the way civics is taught.

  1. I turned 64 last Friday, which will be the last time my age will be a power of 2 or of 4. Still hoping to make it to the next power of 3. ↩

  2. The Carter-Ford election of 1976 probably confirmed that feeling, but I was past civics classes by then. ↩

  3. The table suggests it should be 9.10% (3.90% + 5.20%), but that’s because of rounding. To three digits, it’s 9.11% (49/538). ↩

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