Why the electoral college makes candidates lose

HostMost of us grew up thinking that in a fair fight, the person who gets the most votes wins the job. But in the race for president, that's not always how it goes. Sometimes the person who comes in second with the voters actually ends up in the White House. How's it that the big tally at the end of the night can say one thing, but the result says another?

GuestIt happens because we're not actually having one big national vote. We're having fifty-one separate little races at the same time. Think of it like a points system rather than a head count. Each state is worth a certain number of points based on how many people live there. When you win a state, you usually take all of its points. If you win California, you get fifty-four points. If you win Wyoming, you get three. The goal isn't to get the most people to like you; it's to be the first one to hit two hundred and seventy points. Because of that, you can rack up millions of extra votes in a state like Texas or New York, but those extra votes don't help you get any more points. They just sit there.

HostSo if I win a state by one single vote, I get the same reward as if I won it by five million votes? That feels like a lot of people are just being ignored.

GuestThat's exactly what happens. Most states use a winner take all rule. If you get fifty percent of the vote plus one more, you get every single point that state has to offer. The other forty-nine percent of the voters might as well have stayed home for all the good their votes do in the final points count. This is why a candidate can win the whole country by a huge gap but still lose the race. They might have won a few big states by massive numbers, but lost a bunch of other states by just a tiny bit. Those big wins look great in the total count, but they don't help you cross the finish line if you're losing the point game in the rest of the country.

HostBut why would anyone think that's a good way to run things? It seems like it makes some votes worth way more than others.

GuestWell, the people who wrote the rules were trying to solve a specific problem. They were worried that if we just did a simple head count, the biggest states would run the show forever. A few crowded cities could pick the leader for the whole country, and the small, quiet states would never have a voice. So, they gave every state a little boost. Every state gets two points just for being a state, on top of the points they get for their people. This means a person in a tiny state like Vermont has a lot more pull in the points game than a person in a giant state like Florida. Their three points represent way fewer people than the thirty points in a big state.

HostWait, I want to dig into that. If the system is built to help small states, does that mean candidates spend all their time in places like Wyoming or Rhode Island to get those easy points?

GuestYou would think so, but the winner take all rule creates a different kind of trap. Candidates don't go where it's fair; they go where they might lose. Most states are already locked in. Everyone knows a Republican will probably win Idaho and a Democrat will probably win Massachusetts. There's no point in spending money or time there because those points are already decided. Instead, the whole race ends up being about five or six swing states. These are the places where the vote is a toss up. If you live in a safe state, the candidates basically act like you don't exist. Your vote still counts in your state, but it doesn't change the map.

HostSo if I'm a Republican in a deep blue state, or a Democrat in a deep red one, there's basically no way for my vote to help my person win the points they need?

GuestIn the current system, yeah, that's pretty much true. Your vote helps your candidate in the big national tally that everyone sees on the news, but it doesn't help them get any closer to that magic number of two hundred and seventy. This creates a weird gap where a candidate can lose the total count by millions of people but still win because they picked up the right mix of swing states. It has happened five times in our history. In those cases, the person who won had a better plan for the map, even if they were less popular with the actual people living on it.

HostIt feels like we're playing a game with two different sets of rules. One person is trying to win the crowd, and the other is just trying to win the right squares on the board.

GuestAnd the squares on the board are the only thing the law actually cares about. We could see a day where one person wins by ten million votes across the country and still doesn't get the job because they lost the right spots by a few hundred votes each.

HostThe whole race for the top job is less about one big group of people and more about a handful of specific places that happen to be undecided that year.

GuestThe math is so tight that someone can win the whole country by millions of votes but lose the presidency because of a few thousand people in a single state.

HostThese points on the map turn the election into a game of checkers where some squares are simply worth more than others.