As you may have heard, the upcoming presidential election is the most important in our lifetime.
They say that every four years, of course. But this time, it’s probably true. I mean, if both sides say the future of American democracy is in danger – and I’d certainly agree that at least one party is plenty endangering – you’d obviously want to weigh in.
And yet.
However important you might think it to be, your vote for president – not to mention mine – is completely irrelevant. (Not that you shouldn’t vote. I mean, it still matters, of course, for all the down-ballot races and whatever else is on your ballot).
And no matter how much time you spend on social media fighting with your (possibly former) friends and (possibly former) family over Trump v. Harris, you might as well just hold your breath. As for me, unless someone from Pennsylvania is reading this, I might as well go back to covering the Rockies.
It isn’t just wrong. It isn’t just anti-democratic. It’s also, well, stunningly stupid.
Thanks to the Electoral College, it is widely held that the presidency will be decided by only seven states. I’ll bet you can name them – the so-called Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and the Sunbelt states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina. And also a single Electoral College vote in Nebraska.
There’s nothing special about these states. Nothing particularly representative about them. They are simply states where there are approximately equal numbers of Democratic and Republican voters plus a smattering of those who somehow remain undecided.
If it comes down to one state – Pennsylvania is the election analysts’ favorite – our future could be in the hands of maybe one guy from, say, Smicksburg, flipping a coin upon entering the voting booth. The race is just that close. The stakes are just that high.
Seven states, and that’s it, none of them Colorado.
Yes, I’m old enough to remember when Colorado was a swing state. It was a glorious time to be alive, if you hadn’t lost your house to foreclosure. Sure, we had to endure nonstop political TV advertising, much of it an affront to our collective intelligence. Sure, if a president or vice president stopped by, there were endless traffic jams.
But we mattered.
It was such a brief time. Colorado turned purple just in time for the 2008 election between Barack Obama and John McCain. And we ended our purple phase by the end of the 2012 election between Obama and Mitt Romney.
Colorado – which was bright red as late as 2004 – hasn’t been this blue since at least the Late Cretaceous Epoch when the Rockies were mostly covered by water. If candidates come to the state at all in this cycle, it’s probably just to raise money.
Here’s the funny thing. Before the 2012 election, there were also seven battleground states – Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire and Colorado. Look closely. Nevada is the only battleground that has survived over those 12 years. Who knows which states will get left out 12 years from now, assuming we still have elections?
But if those were glory days for Colorado, that didn’t mean the Electoral College was any more fair. It just meant that Colorado was a player.
If you remember your high school U.S. history class, you may recall that the College was created by the Founding Fathers, who didn’t exactly trust the one-man, one-vote proposition – or, for that matter, any votes if you happened to be female or Black or, yeah, both.
The only voters were white males with horses and muskets and inkwells. It had to do with a bad compromise – see the Three-Fifths Compromise when slaves (read: Black people) were counted as only three-fifths of a person – that was forged, in large part, over the power of the slaveholding states.
And please, don’t give me the we’re-not-a-democracy-we’re-a-republic line. The winner of virtually every American election is determined by who gets the most votes. But in the most important election – the one deciding the most important job in the world – the winner can actually lose.
And because the Electoral College winner has lost the popular vote twice in this century – Republicans George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 – one party has found good reason not to abandon the College. In 2020, when Joe Biden won by 7 million votes, the election could have swung to Trump with just 43,000 votes across Wisconsin and Georgia and Arizona.
And this time out? According to analyst Nate Silver’s election model, Kamala Harris is a very slight favorite to win the popular vote. And Trump is a very slight favorite to win the Electoral College vote.
Once upon a time, we were told that without the Electoral College, only votes from big states like California and New York would count. But if you look at the battleground states today, all but one of them is a mid-to-large-population state.
What small states do get is overrepresentation in the Electoral College, just as they do in the Senate.
There have been countless attempts to get rid of the Electoral College. Colorado voted to be part of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is a semi-complicated system that would serve as a workaround. For the compact to work, it would need enough states to allocate 270 out of the 538 Electoral College votes. And every state would agree to cast its electoral votes for the popular-vote winner. As of now, the compact is at 209 electoral votes. The last state to sign on was Minnesota in 2023, with Gov. Tim Walz signing the bill into law.
Maybe the compact will get to 270 electoral votes someday. Maybe the Supreme Court would agree – just kidding here – that such a compact is constitutional.
But here’s where we are today. In another tossup election for president. In another contest where one candidate is already saying that if he loses, the election would have to be rigged. And it’s a fight, with just more than two months to go, in which hardly anyone is prepared to pick a winner.
It makes you want to rush out to your mailbox, claim your ballot and vote, doesn’t it? Which would be great if your vote actually counted.
Mike Littwin writes Opinion columns for The Colorado Sun, a nonpartisan news organization based in Denver.
