What is a “swing state” — a place like Michigan, Arizona or Pennsylvania that’s super important every four years to people running for president? And why do votes in those states seem to mean more than votes in places like Connecticut or New York?
It’s because of the Electoral College. It’s a process that includes a group of 538 people, divided by state population, that meet every four years to elect the president. Each state’s number of electors is equal to the number of members of Congress it has.
That means Connecticut, which has two U.S. Senators and five U.S. Representatives, gets seven votes in the Electoral College. (Every state has two senators. The number of U.S. reps depends on the population.)
American voters aren’t actually directly electing their president — they’re voting on which electors to send to vote for president on their behalf.
Mara Suttmann-Lea is an Associate Professor of Government at Connecticut College. Suttmann-Lea explains that the idea was a compromise between the founding fathers to make sure each state was represented in the vote.
“There were some really big fears that smaller states had about being drowned out by large population centers,” Suttmann-Lea said.
Plus, the framers of the U.S. Constitution didn’t completely trust the American people.
“It was created with a mind to a very young country with a much smaller number of states, where the people were both afraid of centralized power, having just overthrown a monarchy, but also deeply skeptical about the capacity of the public writ large to realize that power,” Suttmann-Lea said.
So, take Michigan in the 2024 election, for example. They had 15 Electoral College votes. Since the majority of Michigan voters voted for President Trump, the Republican Party got to pick 15 Republican electors to cast their votes in the Electoral College.
The system is not foolproof. In 2000 and 2016, the president won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote, meaning Al Gore and Hillary Clinton got more votes in total than George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Plus, there can be faithless electors. Those are Electoral College voters who pledge to vote for one candidate, but actually vote for another.
For these reasons — and more — some say the Electoral College shouldn’t be used anymore.
According to a 2024 Pew Research survey, more than 60% of Americans favor replacing the system with the popular vote to determine who wins the presidency.
However, getting rid of it would require a Constitutional amendment. For that, you need support from 60% of both the House and the Senate and 75% of the states — something Suttmann-Lea says is unlikely.
“It would be a very long, arduous, likely contentious process, and I think that we would, at least in our current political climate, need buy-in by both political parties,” Suttmann-Lea said.
So, is the Electoral College the best way to decide an election? And if the framers of the Constitution were still alive, would they still support it?
“My instinct is to say that someone like Thomas Jefferson would be a fan of, if not getting rid of it, at least reforming it,” Suttmann-Lea said. “ I think that it would really depend on who you're asking. Someone like Alexander Hamilton — no.”
Unfortunately, we’ll never know. The framers would be almost 300 years old now.
