The reason the Electoral College was implemented goes all the way back to the founding of the country and its purpose is exactly the same today. The smaller states felt they would be under-represented because they have fewer voters and concerns that are particular to their region would be ignored since ignoring them would harm no one in other states. Candidates wouldn't care about poor drinking water in a state with 1 delegate as much as in a state with more delegates being the concern. Bigger states argued that they should have more say because they have more people. A compromise was reached, assigning two extra delegates to slightly change the ratio. The smaller states would not join until this compromise was reached and everyone agreed on it. They struck the agreement and now some people want to change the contract after it is signed.
This is also related to the argument that you can not change the rules AFTER the election. You can't start the election based on one set of rules, which also influences how the candidates campaign by the way, and then look at the results and try to change the rules after the election. It's like waiting until cards are dealt in a game, then looking at the hand you were dealt, and trying to change the rules in the middle of the game.
The etiology of the EC is irrelevant. The consequences of it are not.
What we see today is that the EC has wrought an electioneering process whereby candidates campaign vigorously in "purple" and "magenta" states, that is, states where (1) their campaign strategists see there as being a reasonable chance that they can win the electoral votes there or (2) they have to defend their hold on the electoral votes there. To wit,
Trump and Clinton Campaign Rally States:
- Clinton Rally States:
- Ohio
- Pennsylvania
- Florida
- North Carolina
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- Michigan
- Arizona
- Trump Rally States: (Look at where Trump's biggest rallies were)
- Colorado
- Florida
- Iowa
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- Ohio
- Pennsylvania
- North Carolina
- Virginia
- Wisconsin
They both knew Hillary would win CA and DC, for example, so neither put much effort into either location.
Then there is the matter of factions, which is an unavoidable consideration in any discussion about the EC.
The most famous ‘law’ in political science, coined by Frenchman, Maurice Duverger in the early 1950s, holds that the operations of first-past-the-post voting system with single-member districts directly and strongly tends to cause two party politics. Duverger claimed that his effect operated in two ways.
- First, politicians know that a party can only ever win a seat by coming top in a local election district (or constituency) – that is, by winning the largest pile of votes (a plurality), whether or not the party has a local majority. So if you are not going to be in the top two parties locally, why stand? Nationally, what’s the point of coming second, third, or fourth in lots of seats without winning any – the traditional fate of liberals in the UK since the 1930s. As a result, third and fourth parties don’t stand, and if they do, they quickly die out.
- Second, voters know that only the top two parties are contenders, so why ‘waste’ their one and only vote on supporting an also-ran party that is going to come in at a third, fourth or lower place? The pressure to make a difference pushes voters instead to back the top two and leave the rest to wither on the vine.
Accordingly, by
Duverger's Law, the cause of the problem would appear to be the near universality in U.S. elections at all levels of the pluralistic "winner take all" vote outcome model. That the "big race," the presidential general election, happens also to follow that model (except in Maine and Nebraska) is merely incidental to it. By Duverger, one sees that the problem isn't the EC design itself but rather that most states have implemented "winner take all" in apportioning their electoral votes.
In the U.S. Duverger's Law plays out to a tee.
Figure 9 from Dunleavy: The seats outcomes in the US House of Representatives election, 2006
Going down to the level of seats in the House of Representatives, the bottom axis shows seats where Republicans are in the lead on the right hand side of the chart, and seats where Democrats lead on the left-hand side. The vertical axis shows the combined proportion of votes in each locality backing third, fourth or fifth parties.
Duverger’s prediction is completely borne out here. All the seats are piled along the bottom axis, often with zero support for third parties in two-party only contests. When there is any degree of support for third and subsequent parties, it is almost always tiny or very minimal. The two coloured triangles show zones where one of the top two parties wins a clear majority (50% + 1) of local votes in the election district -- the red zone being Republican seats and the blue zone being Democrat ones. Virtually all the available seats in the House of Representatives lie in one or other of these coloured zones. Indeed, for many seats, the leading party amasses super-majority vote shares in the 70% to 90% range.
The only odd seats with higher level of third party support occur not in the middle white areas (as one might expect) but in these high dominance areas. These outlier results do not genuinely indicate high levels of third party voting however -- instead, they reflect a local Republican dominance that is so complete that no Democrat candidate will stand and lose their money doing so, and vice versa in the Democrat majority areas. Voters thus denied a major party choice plump for the closest they can get to a viable opponent -- for instance, rightwing voters denied a Republican candidate to support will back the Libertarian. So even these cases do not undermine Duverger; rather they highlight areas of one-party dominance.
The fact that U.S. aligns with Duverger’s predictions provides a fine explanation of American voting behavior, and it shows us how voters' behavior patterns reinforce the bipartist duopoly of which you write. A problem arises, however, when one looks outside the U.S. and both Cox (see Making Votes Count, attached) and Dunleavy's work show that for for as perfectly as Duverger's Law explains the U.S. situation, it doesn't seem to hold true outside the U.S.
The factors leading to perfect two-party politics in the U.S. cannot be general to all plurality rule systems; they must instead be specific to the American political context. Incidentally perfect two-party systems like this are now found almost nowhere outside the U.A., except for a few small Caribbean nations. In particular, all the major Westminster system countries have shown strong trends towards multi-partism. There must be something else that -- if not in perpetuity, at least at one "prime moving" point in time -- fomented(s) the "duopoly" that causes the Duvergerian voting behavior, that reinforces the "duopoly" that results in Duvergerian voting behaviors, etc., etc., etc. [1] And in fact, the USA has many other features that might conduce to the same effect -- including a presidential system, the absence of socialism, a political plutocracy, an absence of much limits on campaign spending and political advertising, etc. The EC is another of those traits unique to the U.S.
Now we get to the limit of what I can credibly discuss -- I don't know which distinct characteristic effects the "duopoly." That said, it's very clear to me that something causes the overwhelming bipartism in the U.S. Moreover, it strains credulity to presume that one unique feature that applies only to one political race among the thousands (tens of thousands?) in the U.S. can be the cause of the two-party model that brings "Duverger" to perfect fruition in the U.S. while his law doesn't hold outside the U.S.
I recognize that I don't know which of the multiplicity of US-only characteristics is the cause of the U.S. being a "duopoly'" however, given the repeated remarks of the researchers referenced in this post, neither does anyone else, at least not as of the publication dates of those documents.
Quite simply
the original design of the EC aimed to minimize the impact and role of parties. The revisions to the EC design did exactly the opposite. And here we are suffering the consequences: stymied governance, policy controlled by the money of parties, NGOs, and huge corporations rather than that of the people, and poor quality candidates.
Note:
- Interestingly, in a 2010 paper, Eric Dickson and Ken Sheve use rational choice proximity models to predict that no contest should end up with more than two thirds of votes for one party. The logic here is that a local majority of 67 per cent or more can afford to split its vote across two parties, knowing that its biggest faction will still always win over any opposition party. By doing so, the majority of the large local majority can always advance their welfare. This logic works perfectly in the UK and India, as the charts above show (with no seats above the 67% majority level), and not at all in the U.S.
- Though Duverger's Law assumes strategic voting, it has been shown that that voting impetus need not be present for Duverger's to apply.
