During two campaign fundraising events this week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, expressed a desire to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a popular vote model for selecting the president — a position he shares with a majority of American voters.
Walz recognized in his comments, however, that such a change wouldn’t come about anytime soon. Later, the campaign for him and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, made it clear that his views weren’t the official position of the ticket.
“I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go. We need a national popular vote,” Walz said during a fundraising event at the home of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-California).
But the way to win the race this year, he reminded those in attendance, was to win the Electoral College, specifically by traveling to swing states that are up for grabs.
“So we need to win Beaver County, Pennsylvania. We need to be able to go into York, Pennsylvania, and win. We need to be in western Wisconsin and win. We need to be in Reno, Nevada, and win,” he said.
At a campaign event earlier in Seattle, Walz also said he was a “national popular vote guy” but that he understood that’s “not the world we live in.”
Shortly after, a spokesperson for Walz tried to backtrack his comments.
“Governor Walz believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket,” said spokesperson Teddy Tschann. “He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes. And, he was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts.”
Walz’s view on the Electoral College isn’t new — he has long opposed keeping the system in place, and as governor signed a bill into law to make Minnesota part of the interstate National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
The Donald Trump campaign was quick to attack Walz over his views on ending the Electoral College, claiming on X that it was proof he “hate[s] the Constitution.”
Notably, there have been 27 amendments to the Constitution since it was enacted. Trump himself is campaigning on ending birthright citizenship, a key pillar of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution — and also called for the “termination” of the entire document in 2022 as a means for him to retake the White House two years after he lost the presidential race to Joe Biden.
Trump has also called for ending the Electoral College in the past. On election night in 2012, when it appeared that former President Barack Obama was going to win the Electoral College without securing the popular vote, Trump described the mechanism for selecting the president as being a “disaster for democracy.” (Obama would go on to win both the Electoral College and the national popular vote.)
Trump also said the Electoral College should be ended in the days after his own election win in 2016, stating in an interview that he wouldn’t “change my mind just because I won.” Days later, however, he did change his stance, likely because his staff informed him that he might have to win again in the future without the popular vote.
In an opinion column in Mother Jones, Ari Berman defended Walz’s position, noting that the Electoral College is both undemocratic and racist, as it gives disproportionate voting power to states with both lower populations and whiter populations.
“The Democratic vice presidential nominee is right — the Electoral College should be abolished,” Berman wrote.
Berman also noted that the Electoral College makes it easier to rig the election, citing Republicans’ failed plan last month to change how the state of Nebraska allocates its electors. Although Republicans claimed they were pursuing the change so that Nebraska’s procedure would be more in-line with the rest of the country, it appeared that the move was actually an attempt to benefit Trump in the election.
Though that situation has resolved itself, election officials in Georgia may have made it easier for their state to game the Electoral College, granting local officials the ability to engage in indefinite “inquiries” into election outcomes in their municipalities — allowing them, for example, to extend their investigations into supposed voter fraud beyond deadlines for submitting their totals, thus potentially tipping the scales for one candidate over another, even if the claims of fraud are spurious.
Trump’s attempt to subvert the results of his 2020 election loss to Biden was itself a sign of the fragility of the Electoral College system — were it not for then-Vice President Mike Pence disagreeing with Trump’s errant claim that, as president of the Senate, he could disrupt the official count of the elector votes, Trump could have stayed in office despite losing that year’s race.
In an interview that aired on Wednesday, Trump lamented Pence’s decision not to disrupt the Electoral College vote on January 6, 2021, indicating that his campaign may embrace a similar strategy if he loses the 2024 election to Harris.
“He couldn’t cross the line of doing what was right, in my opinion,” Trump said of Pence in that interview. “Some people would disagree with that, but he had the right to go and put them before the legislatures and have them reassessed because they found out a lot of bad things.”
Pence did not have the legal right to block the counting of specific states’ Electoral College votes, and there was no evidence whatsoever that election fraud had tilted the outcome of the presidential contest. (Every claim by Trump and his allies suggesting otherwise has been thoroughly debunked.)
Polling shows that a majority of Americans, consistently over the past quarter century, support Walz’s position of getting rid of the Electoral College. In its most recent survey from late August and early September, Pew Research Center found that nearly two in three voters (63 percent) backed shifting to a popular vote model for president, while only a third of voters (35 percent) wanted to keep the Electoral College in place.
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