American politicians love to boast that the United States is the greatest democracy in the world. But a little humility is in order. The way the U.S. elects presidents is not the method any self-respecting democracy should use to select its head of state, as our Electoral College system holds us hostage to the whims of a shrinking portion of the electorate.
A new Washington Post report tracing the modern trajectory of the Electoral College has the latest sobering data and finds that the 2024 White House race is “likely to target a smaller share of Americans than at any point in the modern era, despite massive increases in spending due to online fundraising.”
The overwhelming majority of American voters are being made into spectators in their own republic.
But a quick refresher on our election system before we dig into just how bad those numbers are: Under the Electoral College, American voters do not directly elect the president but instead choose a set of state-specific electors to represent their vote. The distribution of electors is not fully proportional to state populations and greatly overrepresents the voting power of citizens in small states. And due to the winner-take-all system for electors in every state except Maine and Nebraska, presidential candidates view states that consistently skew heavily toward one party as not worth engaging with.
Before our polarized era, this resulted in White House hopefuls ignoring a bunch of the citizenry, but still engaging with quite a lot of it: As the Post explains, political scientists Daron R. Shaw, Scott Althaus and Costas Panagopoulos have found that between 1952 and 1980, presidents targeted 26 states on average during their campaigns. That number has plunged since then, and during the last election Republicans and Democrats running for president focused on merely 10 states and two congressional districts. In that first era, presidential campaigns targeted areas that covered about 3 in 4 Americans, but by…
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