McMahon is an adjunct associate professor of applied economics and political science at the University of Vermont and an international democracy and governance consultant.
It has become clearer to Americans than ever before that the Electoral College is archaic and represents a threat to our democracy — and needs to be significantly altered if not abolished. But what's the best way forward?
Relying on electoral votes is cumbersome and can be so unrepresentative of the will of the people that two of the past four presidents got elected despite losing the popular vote, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016. And in several other elections, including last year's, small shifts at the margins of a few states would have produced the same result. (President Biden got 7 million more votes nationwide, but his margins of victory in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin were a cumulative 43,000. Had only those ballots gone the other way, a 269-269 electoral vote tie would have meant Trump's reelection — by the House, where each state would have had one vote and most delegations have Republican majorities.)
So people are talking now about how to change the system. A problem with the most straightforward alternative – simply relying on the national popular — is that it eliminates a main benefit of the Electoral College, and a reason why it was created in the first place: less-populated states benefit from having more electoral vote clout per person than the bigger states. So the smaller states are not going to want to eliminate the college, which means the constitutional amendment that would be required is not happening.
Instead, some are thinking about ways such a change can happen at the state level. This is now the case in Wisconsin, where Republican state Rep. Gary Tauchen has introduced a bill that would assign one electoral vote to the winner in each of the state's eight congressional districts, with the statewide winner getting the other two votes. (This is the system used in Maine and Nebraska; everywhere else, the statewide winner gets all the electoral votes.)
Tauchen's proposal has been criticized as a partisan ploy to leverage the state's highly gerrymandered congressional map — which faces its once-a-decade redraw in any case, this time by a divided state government. But his larger objective of making electoral votes "reflect Wisconsin's diverse political landscape" is a worthwhile goal that his and other states could achieve by better means.
Under the current system political parties can count on being able to win all electors from states they control. That's why in California, for example, the Democratic-majority Legislature won't be changing a mechanism that reliably provides 55 electors for the Democratic ticket. What makes Wisconsin different is that control is split between its Republican-majority Legislature and its recent favoring of Democrats statewide: Biden last fall, and both Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers in 2018.
Tauchen's proposal aims to salvage as many electoral votes for his side as possible. Applied to last fall, Trump would have claimed 6 of the state's 10 votes because he carried three-quarters of the congressional districts.
That disproportionate outcome is the result of what a Schwarzenegger Institute study found to be the second most gerrymandered state in the county. In 2018, for example, Democrats received 53 percent of the overall vote for state House candidates but won only 35 percent of the seats.
Because of such partisan gerrymandering, a district-based system would not fix a core problem in our presidential elections: The candidate with the most votes does not always win. If applied to the whole country, the system would not have rectified the outcomes of 2000 and 2016. And broad awarding of electoral votes by House districts would likely make congressional gerrymandering worse, given the increased political reward for maximizing partisan leverage.
A much better approach would be for the state to award electors based on the overall split in the popular vote — 60 percent of the ballots translating to three-fifths of the electors, say, or as close to that as possible. Proportional solutions have been proposed many times in the country's history, and in 1950 the Senate passed such a proposal with more than a two-thirds majority.
In the Wisconsin context, the Legislature could opt to award all electors proportionally, probably yielding a 5-5 split in most elections. Alternatively, they could use the proportional system but also include the element of Tauchen's proposal giving a two-elector bonus to the statewide winner — which could help keep Wisconsin on the list of presidential battlegrounds.
Moving from winner-take-all could help the state turn down the electoral heat after years of intensifying partisanship and a polarizing gubernatorial recall election. A proportional approach would also defuse tensions arising there and in many other states over qualifications of third-party candidates. In 2016, Jill Stein's 1 percent share in Michigan probably swung 16 electoral votes from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump; if the state had awarded its Electoral College votes proportionally, the Green Party candidate's impact would have been non-existent. And this year, Wisconsin courts decided not to allow the Greens' Howie Hawkins on the ballot, a decision derided by Republicans as a partisan move to protect Biden's edge.
Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania — like Wisconsin — are toss-up states that went for Biden last fall but have Republican legislatures now. So there could be alignment between a GOP desire to compete for more electoral votes and our national need to move away from an unhealthy winner-take-all system.
Adoption by several influential states could build momentum for a constitutional amendment applying the proportional system nationwide, and switching from an Electoral College populated by humans to one where a computer awards electors approximating the statewide totals as closely as possible.
The good denizens of the Badger State might miss the special focus the current system showers on swing states like theirs. But its electoral votes would still matter under this proposed system, and the nation's political health would improve. Wisconsinites should concur that acting in the best interests of the country — even if it means ceding some attention for the common good — is the right path to follow.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.