The problem with national polls showing Vice President Kamala Harris opening a narrow lead over the Republican nominee Donald Trump is that national polls do not matter. As every voter knows, the popular tally will not decide who wins the presidential election in six weeks. It takes at least 270 votes in the Electoral College.
To critics of this unique institution, the possibility that the next president may lose the popular vote by millions but wind up in the White House anyway — as happened in 2000 and 2016 — is reason enough to abolish the Electoral College. Its defenders counter that without it, small states would be ignored, leaving every national election decided by America’s large population centers.
Another common criticism of the Electoral College is that its origins were tainted by the institution of slavery. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the delegates listened to the concerns of southern states, so the story goes, that they would be disadvantaged by a direct national election. Thus, the framers compromised and settled on a body that would allot votes based on the size of each state’s population (plus two senators). The southern slavocracy’s power was inflated by adding slaves, who were counted as three-fifths of a person but with no voting rights themselves.
But the creation of the Electoral College was no pro-slavery ploy, says historian Sean Wilentz. In this episode of History As It Happens, the Princeton scholar and author of “The Rise of American Democracy” says he once believed that the Electoral College unfairly rewarded slaveholding states in 1787, but upon closer examination, this interpretation falls away.
“Slavery was an issue in everything one way or another, and of course the fact that three-fifths clause was going to be there did matter in terms of representation with the Electoral College, but it wasn’t a ploy by the slaveholders to get more power,” because many of them pushed for alternatives to the Electoral College for electing the president, Mr. Wilentz said. James Madison, for instance, favored a direct popular election — an idea that lacked support among the delegates.
“Because the three-fifths provision favored the South and because the Electoral College is based on representation, people say, well, therefore it must have been about slavery. That’s fine if you don’t actually look at what happened,” Mr. Wilentz added. “These days, people basically want to assume the Constitution was a sop to the slaveholders.”
Also discussed in this episode is Mr. Wilentz’s essay in the journal Liberties, about the former president’s bid for another term.
History As It Happens is available at washingtontimes.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
