The 2024 presidential election is now behind us. In many ways, it was magnificent. Over 150 million Americans voted in myriad elections on over 15,000 candidates. Thousands of election officials and election workers quietly stepped up to yet again orchestrate this complicated and hectic day with no significant issues.
But while the election’s scale was inspiring, its competitiveness was anything but. Despite some nail biters here in Iowa, few races for the House or Senate were truly competitive in the rest of the country.
Then there was the presidential race: Yet again, only seven so-called swing states determined the outcome. Those states attracted the press, the candidates, and a jaw-dropping amount of money. The other 43 “noncompetitive” states did not.
Most states get no attention in our presidential elections because, unlike other democracies, we do not follow the principle of “one person, one vote.” Between our antiquated Electoral College and winner-take-all systems, any votes beyond the 50% mark in a state simply don’t matter.
So if a state is reliably going to vote at least 51% for one candidate, why campaign there? A party wins just as well with 51% of the votes as with 95%. And 49% is just as much a loss as 5%. That’s why no one competed for the 100,000-plus Iowans who swung us from 50% to 56% for Donald Trump. The same applies in most states, from California’s 3 million “extra” Democratic voters to Wyoming’s 60,000 “extra” Republican ones.
The Electoral College makes many of our votes irrelevant, but it makes others too important. Consider this: in 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, even though Clinton had 3 million more total votes. Four years later, Joe Biden crushed Trump in the popular vote, winning by 7 million votes. But almost none of those extra votes mattered. Biden won because of a handful of voters in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. If just 63,000 voters in those states had voted for Trump instead, Biden would have lost the election despite winning the popular vote.
2024 followed the same pattern; if just 116,000 voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin had voted differently this year, we’d be getting ready to usher in the Kamala Harris administration, regardless of President-elect Trump’s 2 million-vote popular vote win.
It is not healthy for our elections to disregard most states and obsess over the few that happen to have a balance of Republican and Democratic voters. This system leaves the majority of the voters and their concerns outside of the national media spotlight and the attentions of future presidents. It keeps candidates from spending time or money in states they won’t win, and when it allows candidates to win without a popular mandate, it erodes the democratic foundation of the presidency.
Unsurprisingly, the Electoral College has long been unpopular. A majority of Americans have long supported replacing it and electing the president with a simple and intuitive system: one person, one vote. Everyone’s vote matters and none are undervalued or overvalued because of an accident of geography. Almost two-thirds of Americans support this change, according to Pew.
The best path to a popular vote is to amend the Constitution. We should do that. But while that slow process happens, Iowa should enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. If states with the majority of electoral votes join it, the signatories will all cast their electoral votes for the candidate who wins the popular vote. Our neighbors, Illinois and Minnesota, have joined the compact, and it only needs states representing 61 more electoral votes to go into effect.
So let’s seize these opportunities to strengthen our democracy and force candidates in 2028 to campaign for all Americans’ votes, not just battleground state votes. Contact Gov. Kim Reynolds and your state legislators and urge them to join the National Popular Vote Compact so that presidential candidates will give Iowans the attention they deserve.
Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa City and write at www.ourlibertiesweprize.com. And biannual time changes must be abolished.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Abolish the Electoral College and make Iowa relevant again | Opinion
