There’s a plan to eliminate the Electoral College. Would it be good for Illinois?
Illinois voters don’t get much attention from presidential candidates. Why would they? Chicago gives Democrats a lock on the state’s 20 electoral votes, making it more sensible for campaigns to spend time and money elsewhere.
There’s a plan underway that proponents say would change that dynamic. Illinois is part of a pact with 14 other states and the District of Columbia to implement a national popular vote.
The current “winner-take-all” system awards all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes within that state. All but two, Maine and Nebraska, use these rules.
Under the interstate pact, electoral votes from each participating state would go to the candidate who wins the national popular vote.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a conservative voter in southern Illinois or a Democratic voter in Chicago, you’re routinely ignored,” said Patrick Rosenstiel, a spokesman for National Popular Vote Inc., a nonpartisan group promoting the interstate pact to implement the plan. “Every voter in every state should be equally relevant. You shouldn’t have to live in battleground state to get attention.”
Though there are questions about the pact’s legality, the Constitution does not determine how a state awards its electoral votes. Lawmakers have the power to join by passing a bill. Illinois did so in 2008 under Gov. Pat Quinn.
States that have signed on agreed it would go into effect only after members of the compact represent at least 270 electoral votes, the majority needed to win a presidency. So far, member states have only 196.
One major obstacle for proponents of this idea: a lot of conservatives really like the Electoral College. It’s easy to understand why.
Democrats have won the presidential popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. Of America’s 45 presidents, five, all conservatives, were elected without winning the popular vote, including Donald Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000.
That will make the pact a hard sell in Republican-controlled state houses said John Jackson, a visiting professor at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.
“You’re going to have a hard time convincing rural and conservative voters,” Jackson said. “They got their candidate in both 2000 and 2016 which means the minority got to win against the majority.”
Almost all of the legislatures that signed up for the agreement were controlled by Democrats with the exception of New York, which had a Republican majority Senate.
Republicans could have won the popular vote more often if they had campaigned widely, and were not just forced to focus on battleground states, said Rosenstiel, a Trump supporter.
“The idea that Donald Trump lost the national popular vote ignores the fact that the president spent time in battleground states ignoring huge parts of the country,” he said.
The outgoing president himself has supported the idea of a national popular vote multiple times.
There’s also a legal issue. The Constitution forbids states from “entering into any agreement or compact” without congressional approval if the plan exceeds the power a state is allowed to wield. Supporters assert their interstate compact doesn’t violate that rule, an argument that could easily end up in the courts or fail to receive support from Congress.
“This has probably gone about as far as it’s going to go in my estimation,” Jackson said.
Presidential candidates ignore Illinois
Illinois could become prime campaign territory if the pact went into effect, especially as Democrats and Republicans battle over increasingly conservative downstate voters.
In 2012, two-thirds of presidential campaign events took place in just four states and 38 states were completely ignored, including Illinois, according to National Popular Vote Inc. Hillary Clinton visited the Quad Cities area in 2016 because of its multi-state media market, but once again this year, presidential candidates neglected the nation’s sixth most populous state.
More campaigning appeals to advocates of the First Amendment such as Mark Maassen, executive director of the Missouri Press Association. Missouri was considered a bellwether state as recently as 2008, but as it becomes more red, presidential candidates could begin to ignore it.
Maassen says losing campaign visits would be a shame.
“It gives our voters a more informed reason to go out and vote,” Maassen said.
Rural voters might believe they have a better deal with the Electoral College because Democratic-leaning populous cities could steal the show every time. Proponents say that’s a misconception. Only 7.9% of Americans live in the country’s 10 most populous cities, according to 2019 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, and only 10% live in the top 20.
Rosenstiel says a national popular vote would result in decisive victories, an appealing proposal as the country continues to grapple with this year’s presidential election weeks after the polls closed.
“This is a system that’s crashing under its own weight right now,” Rosenstiel said. “These divergent elections aren’t good for anyone.”
