Trump’s 2024 win with a near majority of the popular vote illustrates the fallacy that the popular vote is a better method than the Electoral College for selecting our President. A point this blog has made on multiple occasions.
While I’m not a Trump supporter, I’m not a Trump hater either. He had a strategy to win the College and the popular vote, which NPR lays out a great set of charts showing the strategy to pile on more votes in what the article calls “lose by less.”
Hillary Clinton blames the Electoral College for her 2016 loss to Trump in her book “What Happened.” She has since joined the call to eliminate the College and replace it with a national popular vote initiative. In a 2000 interview, she complained:
We are a very different country than we were 200 years ago. I believe strongly that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people and to me, that means it’s time to do away with the Electoral College and move to the popular election of our president.
She makes two fallacy arguments.
First, the Constitution is also over 200 years old. I hope she is not arguing that age is a high criterion for ditching elements of the Constitution. Age is often more of an argument for the staying power rather than the obsolescence of the College.
Her second fallacy is that the United States is not a pure democracy. As most high school students know, this statement is wrong. We are a republic. James Madison made this argument absolutely and unequivocally in Federalist Number 10.
In her book“‘Why We Need the Electoral College,” Tara Ross points out these fallacies and others. She also notes that Clinton is sadly not alone in misunderstanding the importance of the College to our republic.
The 2024 Electoral College breakdown by state. Chessrat, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Trump victory in the popular vote highlights the importance of the Electoral College. As the NPR charts note, Trump was able to “run up the score” so to speak by increasing his margins of victory in states he was sure to win and by “losing less” in battleground states.
The hidden fallacy is that the popular vote is easier to increase than the Electoral College votes. Trump was able to motivate his voters in traditionally “red” states and thus increase his popular vote margin.
Here’s a look at the raw popular vote numbers for 2016, 2020, and 2024.
| Election Year | Votes for Democratic Candidate (Clinton, Biden, or Harris) | Votes for Republican Candidate (Trump) | Total Votes Across All Candidates | Total Eligible Voters |
| 2016 | 65,853,514 | 62,984,828 | 136,669,276 | 245,502,000 |
| 2020 | 81,283,501 | 74,223,975 | 158,429,631 | 252,274,000 |
| 2024 | 73,755,300 | 76,453,852 | 153,011,399 | 244,000,000 |
The interesting point in this table is that no candidate comes close to receiving a majority (greater than 50%) of votes relative to the total eligible voters in the US. Why is the popular vote held so sacred when it reflects less than 65% (at best) of the views of eligible voters?
Further, no President has ever received more than 50% of the votes based on eligible voters in the history of the US. Again, why prefer a system that cannot generate a majority outcome?
If one loosens the criteria and accepts a “majority” of the popular vote, only 24 of the 46 people elected to serve as President have come into office with a majority of the popular vote. The other 21 Presidents merely had a plurality or less, with five of those having less than a plurality.
The 2024 Trump election illustrates how malleable the popular vote is. The ability to “run up” the score in safe states would become even more important in a purely popular vote election. The risk for fraud would also increase since the incentives would be high for a “safe” state to manipulate its popular vote counts. Party strongholds would become havens for vote harvesting.
The 2024 election, whether you agree or disagree with the outcome, illustrates why the popular vote is a flawed mechanism for selecting the President for a republic as large as the United States.
