Political divisions could split electoral and popular votes
Most polls at this moment suggest GOP nominee Mitt Romney is in the lead nationally, but surveys in the nine or so swing states are registering a narrow advantage for President Barack Obama.
So here’s a prospect worth contemplating: What if Romney carries the popular vote, but Obama regains the presidency by winning 270 votes or more in the electoral college?
“I think it’s a 50/50 possibility — or more,” said Mark McKinnon, who was a political strategist for former president George W. Bush.
“If the election were held tomorrow, it wouldn’t just be a possibility, it would be actual,” added William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who also served as a policy advisor to former president Bill Clinton.
That kind of split decision between the electorate and the electoral college would mark the fifth time in U.S. history — and the second time in a dozen years — that the person who occupies the White House was not the one who got the most votes on Election Day.
What has never happened before is an incumbent president being returned to office after the majority of the electorate voted to throw him out.
Every modern president to be reelected — Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush — has gotten a bigger share of the vote in their second bid for office than their first, and with it, a chance to claim a mandate.
A win in the electoral college that is not accompanied by one in the popular vote casts a shadow over the president and his ability to govern.
If Obama is reelected that way, “the Republican base will be screaming that Romney should be president, and Obama doesn’t represent the country,” McKinnon predicted. “It’s going to encourage more hyperpartisanship.”
Veterans of the Bush White House understand that problem well. Bush was never able to shake the accusations of some Democrats that he had “stolen” the 2000 election in a recount of Florida votes that required a U.S. Supreme Court decision to determine the winner. ThenVice President Al Gore had won the popular vote that year by 500,000 votes.
“A close election is a polarizing event, and a discrepancy between the popular outcome and the electoral vote only adds to the polarization,” said Karen Hughes, who served as a counselor to Bush. “It rubs a raw nerve even rawer.”
And that kind of split decision may well happen more often in the future, if the nation’s political system remains both deeply and closely divided.
Polarization
amplifies the quirkiness of the electoral college system by encouraging the candidates to ignore the nation’s biggest population centers, except for fundraising purposes, and to devote their energies to winning over that narrow slice of voters who live in states where the Election Day outcome is in doubt.
The electoral college is an artifact of an era when the lack of organized political parties and the difficulties of travel and communication prevented candidates from waging a national campaign.
Given those impediments, the Founding Fathers were leery of a direct popular vote as a means of gauging the popular will. But they also did not want to give Congress the power to select a president. So they set up a process by which each state would be allocated a number of electors, equal to the total of its House members and senators.
If that system yet again produces a president who does not also win the popular vote, it will raise new questions about whether the electoral college should be abolished — something that would require a constitutional amendment.
For now, however, both campaigns are so fixated on winning the battleground states that they are not giving much thought to the prospect of an electoral college victory that is not accompanied by a popularvote mandate.