Dems Try To Rip Apart Republic By Abolishing Electoral College

As states continue to certify the 2024 presidential election, far-left activists in the U.S. Senate are attempting to rip apart the republic by abolishing the Electoral College.

Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., say they want to “restore democracy” by destroying one of the Constitution’s foremost safeguards against tyranny, in a move that would make it extremely difficult for most states to have proper representation in presidential elections.

“Abolishing the Electoral College will destabilize presidential elections and undermine our uniquely successful form of government,” Trent England, executive director of Save Our States, told The Federalist. “The Electoral College provides an important check and balance on our election system by limiting the power any one state can have and spreading that power out among rural and urban voters and large and small states.”

“Without the Electoral College, voters in states like California and New York will dictate the outcome of Presidential elections,” he added. “Politicians should embrace and celebrate the Electoral College instead of proposing partisan measures that will essentially rip out part of the Constitution and embroil our elections in political turmoil.”

The Senate resolution, which introduces a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, provides for the direct election of president and vice president by national popular vote.

Ironically, Schatz and Welch, being from less populous states, are effectively attempting to nullify the votes of their own constituents and give them to states like California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois. The resolution also calls into question the need for a Senate in the first place, as it was created in order to create a balance between the will of the people (the House) and the interests of the state, giving less populous states a place on the same scale of power as more populous ones.

Schatz, however, said that “in an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It’s that simple. No one’s vote should count for more based on where they live. The Electoral College is outdated and it’s undemocratic. It’s time to end it.”

But it is not “that simple.” Under Schatz’s program, the president would be decided by just a handful of states, rather than the will of the people of all 50 states and the District of Columbia playing a meaningful role.

As England wrote, allowing just a few states to decide the presidency could lend itself to an outcome where only one region of the country controls national politics. It would likewise disenfranchise every rural voter in the country, including the ones in populous states, because the political will of big cities in those states would overwhelm the will of rural voters.

The outcome is a tyranny of the majority.

As Alexander Hamilton made clear in Federalist No. 68, the Electoral College is a necessary component of electing the president specifically because it serves to deter both “corruption” and “tumult and disorder” in the process:

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.

This time around, President-elect Donald Trump would have still won the election under Schatz’s plan, as he won the national popular vote. But Republicans have lost it in every recent election except 2004, and yet they still managed to win the Electoral College in 2000 and 2016.

That track record is not an indictment of the Electoral College: It is the feature of it.

Aside from disenfranchising the voters of most states in the country, if the Electoral College were abolished, it would allow people like Vice President Kamala Harris to simply campaign to run up the vote margins in places like New York, Illinois, and California, win the election, and completely ignore people anywhere else in the country.

As they did when Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 (when she won the popular vote and subsequently called for the elimination of the Electoral College), Democrats become angry when elections are decided not by their establishment allies, but by people in states they wish they could disregard entirely.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.