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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.