Won the Country, Lost the Vote

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

An American presidential candidate can lose the national popular vote and still win the presidency, a possibility built directly into how the Electoral College allocates power among states rather than counting every vote as equal nationwide. It has happened five times in American history, most recently in 2000 and 2016, and each occurrence has renewed a debate over whether the system still serves its original purpose. Public opinion on the question has shifted markedly: survey research from the Pew Research Center has found roughly two thirds of American adults favoring a switch to a national popular vote system over the current arrangement. Reform proposals generally split into two approaches. One is a constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College outright, a route requiring supermajorities in Congress and among the states that has never come close to succeeding. The other, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, tries to reach the same outcome without amending the Constitution at all: participating states agree in advance to award all of their electors to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, once enough states holding a majority of electoral votes, 270, have joined the compact, which would make the popular vote winner the presidential winner in practice even though the Electoral College mechanism itself remains untouched on paper. Defenders of the existing system argue it forces candidates to build broad, geographically distributed coalitions rather than campaigning only in the country's biggest population centers, a version of the same argument the framers made in 1787 about not letting the most populous states dominate every contest. Both sides of the argument, in other words, are still fighting over the same basic tension the delegates in Philadelphia never fully resolved.