The United States Electoral College

The US electoral college is a group of people, called electors. Each elector has one vote, with 538 electoral votes in total. Each US state has a certain number of electors, each with one vote, based on their population. For example, the state of California has 54 electoral votes, while Alaska has 3. Therefore, more populous states have more electors in the electoral college.

In a presidential race, whoever wins the popular vote of a state wins all of its electoral votes. For example, in 2020, Joe Biden won the state of Arizona, winning all of its 11 electoral votes. Since some states have more votes than others, candidates will strive to win these large, valuable clumps of votes, but often only if they are "swing states" (more on them later). A presidential candidate will win the presidency if they can earn 270 electoral votes, which is more than half of the 538 total votes.

In most cases, all the electors for each state vote for the single candidate that won their states. However, in Nebraska and Maine, there are 2 votes for earning the state, and there are several congressional districts as well. Maine has two additional districts, while Nebraska has 3. Each district counts as one vote, and has its own electoral race, separate from its state. The person who wins that district will win its one electoral vote, regardless of the rest of the state.

The electoral votes that each state has is, as I've said before, dependent on their population. Each state automatically will receive two votes, for each Senator they have (which, given every state has two Senators, is a free two electoral votes). Then, the number of representatives they hold in the House of Representatives, which is based on how much of the total population of the US they contain, will be added to the total for that state. Since the electoral count for each state is based on a percentage (from the House of Representatives), this ensures the electoral college will never expand beyond 538 votes.

I should also note that the base number of electoral votes any state can have is 3. Even if a state doesn't have that many people, they still have one Representative, in addition to the 2 from their Senators, to make a total of three. This includes Washington, DC, which, even though it is not a state, and doesn't have any Senators or Representatives, counts for 3 electoral votes.

Due to the presence of the electoral college, a candidate does not win if they win the popular vote, but only if they win the electoral vote. In the event of an electoral tie, in which two candidates receive 269 votes each, the House of Representatives will decide who wins the election.

The electoral vote count for a state can change as well. Since state populations keep increasing and decreasing, states can also increase or decrease in electoral votes. For example, in the 2020 election, California had 55 electoral votes. However, for the 2024 election, it will have 54. This does not mean that California's population decreased, but rather, that its share of the US population has decreased, meaning that the populations of other states have increased more rapidly.

Those unfamiliar with the electoral college might think that every state is up for grabs every election. While this is true, the chances of getting a state varies widely based on which party you are in. Democratic candidates are more likely to earn states that are more urbanized, or have populations that are centered in urban regions, while Republican candidates are more likely to earn states that have more rural populations.

What are the reasons for this? There are many, such as where different people tend to go, their ethnicity, their degree of education, and their jobs. Often, rural and some suburban regions too are mostly populated by white, less-educated (generally having no college degree), manual workers. They tend to oppose immigration, and, unfortunately, some (but not all) have a few segregationist traits still left from the 20th century. Meanwhile, cities are mostly populated by a melting pot of ethnicities, and many of them being college-educated professional workers, due to the many available jobs in the urban areas as opposed to rural regions. These people tend to support immigration, and, since cities tend to also be the nodes of labor unions, also often lean towards leftist policies. Now, Democrats often support immigration, which gets them some support from people, but what really helps them is a historical support for labor unions, going all the way back to the 19th century, which really helps them in big cities. Meanwhile, Republicans are usually quite anti-immigration, and rely on less-educated, white rural communities, who often feel disconnected from the multiculturalism of big cities, and seek a more conservative approach for their country, both inwards and outwards.

Now, due to the tendency for rural states to go Republican, and urbanized states to go Democrat, there are states that can be projected to go to either party pretty safely. For example, the West coast states (Washington, Oregon, and California) and the Northeastern states have voted for Democrats in every election since 2000. Meanwhile, Great Plains states and Southern states can pretty much be guaranteed to vote Republican (with the exception being Georgia, which voted for Joe Biden in 2020).

The electoral college is not without its criticisms. Many have said that the electoral college is outdated, and undemocratic. Given it was created by the Founding Fathers because they thought that the common people were too uneducated to vote for the right candidate, this does appear to be true.

Others say that the electoral college doesn't represent the true will of the American people. There have been a good few cases where a candidate won the popular vote, but lost the electoral vote, such as 2016 (Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump) and 2000 (Al Gore vs. George W. Bush), which were two of the most controversial elections in American history.

Still more people say that the electoral college gives too much power to swing states, and prevents candidates from campaigning in states where they know they have no chance.

Meanwhile, supporters of the electoral college state that the electoral college makes sure that less populous states, like Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and Alaska still have a say in the election, given that the 3 electoral votes they hold is a higher percentage of the total electoral college than the states's percentage of the total US population. They also say that without an electoral college, the most populous states will have an enormous say in the election, causing candidates to only campaign within these states.

Regardless of your standing, it doesn't appear that the electoral college will be going anytime soon, since the US government staunchly opposes any legislative that attempts to remove it. Therefore, hopefully this blog will be able to help people in the future elections as well!

Thank you very much for taking your time to read this, as it took quite long to write, and hopefully you were able to learn a lot about what the electoral college is!