DALLAS (WBAP & KLIF News) — One week after President-elect Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, some are questioning the validity of the electoral college with Clinton winning the popular vote.
Not so fast, says one expert.
Political author Tara Ross, who has specialized in studying the electoral college, says without the electoral college, candidates like Clinton could win an election by simply focusing on a couple of states.
“She got a huge percentage of her support from California and New York,” Ross said. “If you take that out, Trump is actually three and a half million votes ahead.”
Ross pointed to the 1888 election between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland as another example of why abolishing the electoral college could be detrimental. She says in that election, Cleveland won the popular vote after winning six southern states in a landslide, but Harrison still won enough electoral college votes.
“Six southern states shouldn’t be able to tell the rest of the country what to do anymore than two states should be able to tell everybody what to do this year,” Ross said.
Trump said in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday that he would be in favor of doing away with the electoral college, even though he would have lost the election had it not been there this year.
But Ross says without it, the general election would look a lot like this year’s Republican primaries.
“There were 17 candidates. It was divisive and angry,” she said. “Even towards the end when you kind of heard people talking about it, there was really no incentive to make anybody create a coalition or reach across to somebody and maybe say, ‘Let’s focus on our similarities and not our differences here.’”
Some have also suggested tweaking the electoral college by maybe adjusting the number of electoral votes each state gets. But as Ross pointed out, the number of electoral votes each state gets is based largely on the U.S Census, which determines every 10 years how many representatives each state gets based on the state’s population. The remaining two electoral votes for each state represents the number of senators each has.
“There are two electors that everybody gets, just like there are two senators no matter what,” Ross said. “In a country composed of both big and small states, that was a compromise the founders hit upon, and I think it was appropriate.”
