Senate Democrats push plan to abolish Electoral College
Three Democratic senators unveiled a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College system Monday, just more than a month after President-elect Trump stunned the Democrats by sweeping all seven battleground states, knocking off three Senate Democratic incumbents in the process.
Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii,) Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), three leading progressive Senate voices, say it’s time to “restore democracy” by allowing for the direct election of presidents through the popular vote alone.
The senators are troubled that the Electoral College has twice elected a candidate who didn’t win the popular vote in the past 19 years. In both those instances, a Republican captured the White House — George W. Bush in the 2000 election and Trump in the 2016 election.
“In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It’s that simple,” Schatz said. “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 The Electoral College is outdated and it’s undemocratic.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.”
To be sure, Trump would have still won the 2024 election if it had been decided by popular vote.
He collected 77,300,739 votes compared to Vice President Harris’s 75,014,534.
But many Democrats think that they would have had a better chance to beat Trump if they had a reason to focus on running up the margin of Harris’s victory in populous Democratic strongholds such as California, Illinois and New York.
Republicans, however, also have big, populous states squarely in their column, namely Florida and Texas.
Durbin, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, argued that the Electoral College “disenfranchises millions of Americans.”
“In 2000, before the general election, I introduced a bipartisan resolution to amend the Constitution and abolish the electoral college. I still believe today that it’s time to retire this 18th century invention,” he said.
Democrats are worried that it has become increasingly difficult to win on the presidential ticket in battleground states while advocating for the progressive agenda that candidates need to embrace in the primary to appeal to the party’s base.
“It’s always worth reminding people: It’s really hard for Democrats to win battleground states, OK?” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Harris’s presidential campaign, told Crooked Media’s “Pod Save America” last month.
“Let’s look at Pennsylvania: 25 percent of the electorate is liberal, roughly, 34 percent is conservative,” Plouffe explained. “So in every battleground state, there’s more conservatives than liberals.”
Democrats felt all the more demoralized by Harris’s loss because she dramatically outspent Trump, raising $1 billion for her campaign while a super PAC supporting her, Future Forward, raised nearly another $1 billion.
Harris lost in all seven of the presidential battleground states, including the three states that made up the "blue wall": Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Welch called the Electoral College “outdated and flawed.”
“Our democracy is at its strongest when everyone’s voice is heard — and right now our elections aren’t as representative as they should be because of the outdated and flawed electoral college. I’m excited to partner with my friends and colleagues Senator Schatz and Chair Durbin on this important constitutional amendment, which will help empower every voter in every state,” he said.
Former first lady and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for abolishing the Electoral College after she won the popular vote but lost the vote of the Electoral College in the 2016 presidential election.
“I think it needs to be eliminated,” Clinton told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in 2017. “I’d like to see us move beyond it, yes.”