Electoral College: Should They Win Key States?

The Electoral College could be considered the ultimate embodiment of a Representative Republic style of government. The Electors vote on behalf of the constituents within their states by typically voting in agreeance with whichever candidate wins the popular vote in the state they represent. A candidate clearly wins and the populace rejoices. However, this is not a certainty as certain states, for example California, have more Electors than several other less populous states combined. Due to this, a candidate could feasibly lose the popular election while winning the necessary number of Electoral votes should they win key states, thus securing the Presidency. This ‘electoral crisis’ (Spilerman & Dickens, 1974) can give rise to situations such as in the 2000 election where VP Al Gore won the popular vote by approximately 500,000 votes, yet lost the election to George W. …show more content…
The meaning behind this theory is that campaigns focus towards key states that hold more electoral sway rather than states that where a majority of constituent voters may already be dedicated to a certain candidate. This political bottlenecking levels an uneven amount of focus towards those chosen states, while other states may remain unaddressed. The concern being that by implementing such a strategy a campaign deems certain states ‘acceptable losses’ while the campaigns focus on solidifying their leads in states that are all but guaranteed wins (Johnson, 2005). This results in “wasted votes” where voters are essentially wasting their vote on a candidate that has either already lost or won the public voter majority in that state. While this does bolster the candidate’s public voter numbers, ultimately they do not incur any additional electoral votes for their candidate, rendering the votes meaningless after a certain threshold has been reached (Ardoin & Parsons,