Swing States Shouldn't Exist
They are the Electoral College's spawn, explains Luke Pickrell
Photo by David De Hart
In an article titled “Six swing states set to decide the 2024 US election,” James FitzGerland of the BBC notes, “About 240 million people are eligible to vote in this year’s US election, but only a relatively small number of them are likely to settle the question of who becomes the next president.”
The key word is “but.” Everyone knows about swing states. However, most domestic news outlets fail to note the contrast between eligible voters and voters who matter. Headlines like NPR’s are typical: “Voters in a handful of battleground states like Pennsylvania will play a critical role in deciding who the next president will be” — as if there was anything vaguely democratic about a handful of voters determining the fate of millions of others.
Why do presidential elections come down to voters in six states? Why aren’t they determined by the total number of votes across the country instead of points allotted to states? The Founders wanted little to do with democratic self-government,” explains David Dayen. Therefore, they “vested presidential electors, chosen by whatever manner a state legislature saw fit, with the power to exercise independent judgment.” Dayen continues:
This year, conventional wisdom suggests that there will be no more than six true swing states (along with two swing congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine, the only two states that apportion some electors based on the district vote). The other 45 elections are already committed to the Democratic or Republican nominee.
Within those swing states, you can pinpoint the tiny universe of voters who will pick the most powerful ruler in the free world for the next four years. Campaign strategists put the number consistently at around 400,000 voters, out of 150 million expected to vote in the next election. So about 99.8 percent of all voters are rendered relatively unimportant. This has huge consequences for democratic legitimacy, because swing voters do not always match the broader electorate. In two of the last six elections, the elected president did not get the most popular votes. The second-place vote-getter almost won a third time in 2020, and could easily win again in 2024.
Swing states wouldn’t exist without the Electoral College. Lose the EC, and the president would be elected by popular vote. No state would be more important than another.
Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law since 2017, recently argued that the Electoral College should be ditched. As Chemerinsky pointed out, “There’s not any other country in the world that has a popular election for its chief executive, in which a person who loses the popular vote can be chosen.” Left unexplained by Chemerinsky is how the Electoral College can be abolished using an Article V amendment process, given how difficult that process has become.
There’s a non-zero chance that Trump will again lose the popular vote but win the Electoral College after capturing a few of the oh-so-precious swing states. Regardless of the outcome in November, one of our many tasks on the way to a democratic constitution is to make the familiar seem strange, and the Electoral College and the swing states it spawns are anything but ordinary.