The Supreme Court has disarmed one time bomb ticking away in our presidential election system — the risk of "faithless" electors throwing an election to an undeserving candidate. Other critical problems remain, which the decision can play a part in helping us address.
The court's conclusion this week that the Constitution does not "establish that electors must have discretion" should end the claim that electors play an important role in our system of checks and balances. The electors have never checked or balanced anything, and we wouldn't want them to.
Debates about the role of electors usually include conservatives citing our founding compromise between small and large states and the resulting electoral advantage for the smaller ones — which many Republicans perceive as critical protection against tyranny of the majority. But "Why electors?" is a separate question from "Why an electoral advantage for small states?"
Nothing is gained and no party benefits from keeping human electors, as compared to states' simply reporting their electoral votes. Monday's unanimous decision, supported by all five of the conservative justices, should help establish consensus on this point.
We should also be able to build consensus that most remaining problems with our presidential system stem from the winner-take-all electoral votes rules of 48 states, not the Electoral College advantage for small states.
Some facts help demonstrate why.
First, the United States is not exceptional internationally in having votes from different regions carry different weight. Every constitution addresses both citizens and territory, and in that balance many convey greater voting impact to less populated regions. In Britain, the smallest parliamentary district has one-sixth the voting population — and thus six times the impact on who becomes prime minister — as the largest.
Second, polls consistently show roughly two-thirds of Republicans oppose electing the president by national popular vote, the mechanism often proposed to end the advantage for sparsely populated states.
This is the context that makes amending the Constitution to switch to a direct popular vote effectively impossible. It also should shape our thinking about the viability of the National Popular Vote Compact, under which states agree to award their electors to the national popular vote winner once states with a combined 270 votes (a majority) sign on.
Lastly, contrary to conventional wisdom on the left, Republican nominees do not now gain a major advantage from the distribution of electoral votes.
Small-state voters certainly have more impact, but in 2016 the impact of the average red state voter was almost exactly the same as her blue state counterpart. Similarly, Donald Trump did not become president because of small states: The 16 least populous split, eight to eight. Instead, Trump won from second place because he carried states with smaller margins of victory than Hillary Clinton did.
Winner-take-all is the reason our elections effectively sideline two-thirds of the states, making voting largely meaningless in most of the country. Presidents in office respond to this odd incentive, often prioritizing swing states over the nation as a whole.
Either party can end up on the short end of margin-of-victory math. Republicans were in 1960 and could easily be again, particularly if Texas transitions to thin margins for Democrats. And, at the state level, neither party likes that both tickets ignore all but a handful of battlegrounds.
So it ought to be possible to build support for replacing winner-take-all with a new system that nonetheless maintains an advantage for small states.
Winner-take-all is nowhere in the Constitution, but became entrenched through competition among states to maximize their impact. The Founders quickly regretted this, and most advocated for amendments to prevent states' using winner-take-all.
The best known alternative is what's used by Maine and Nebraska: two electoral votes for the statewide winner and one for carrying each House district. But that injects gerrymandering into presidential elections and, applied nationwide, would still have yielded a Trump victory in 2016.
Far better for states to allocate their electoral votes proportionally to the candidates, with the proportional calculation carried to the right of the decimal point to reduce rounding.
Seventy years ago, senators voted 64-27 to amend the Constitution with exactly the features discussed here: replacing human electors with electoral votes, replacing winner-take-all with proportional allocation, and retaining the advantage for small states.
The version electoral reformers are pushing now is an improvement, because it would limit the proportional allocation to the top two vote-getters nationwide.
Here are four reasons this is a good idea:
1. The president would nearly always be the popular vote winner.
2. With shares of electoral votes available in every state, candidates would have incentive to campaign nationwide — because every state would matter.
3. The "spoiler" problem would largely be fixed. (The 1 percent in Michigan for the Green Party's Jill Stein probably swung 16 electoral votes to Trump four years ago; with top-two, her impact would have been .05 of an electoral vote.)
4. Our state results would finally reflect our true preferences, replacing the image of warring red and blue with just different shades of purple.
In the Supreme Court's decision this week, it's possible to see the justices' concern over a problem that was not even mentioned: the exceptionally high hurdles to altering the Constitution.
In less polarized and less chaotic times, maybe the court would have treated the textual questions more strictly, with the amendment path cited as an available remedy to the risk of electors permitted to be "faithless" with their votes.
If there are such doubts on the court about the prospects for amending the Constitution, we should not share them; there is no future for a country that cannot update its founding document. The outlines of a viable amendment to fix our presidential system are in plain sight. It's time to start transforming them into reality.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.