A Peculiar Way to Pick a President

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2020

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The winner-take-all system used by the Electoral College in the United States appears nowhere in the Constitution. It awards all of a state’s electors to the candidate with the most votes, no matter how small the margin of victory. Critics say that means millions of votes are effectively ignored. The fairness of the Electoral College was seriously questioned in the 1960s. Amid the civil rights push, changes to the system were framed as the last step of democratization. But a constitutional amendment to introduce a national popular vote for president was eventually killed by segregationist senators in 1970. Desire for an overhaul dwindled until the elections of 2000 and 2016, when the system’s flaws again came to the fore. In both instances, the men who became president had lost the popular vote. Jesse Wegman, a member of The Times’s editorial board, describes how the winner-take-all system came about and how the Electoral College could be modified. Guest: Jesse Wegman, a member of The New York Times’s editorial board. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Here’s a guide to how the Electoral College works.Watch Jesse’s explainer, from our Opinion section, on how President Trump could win the election — even if he loses.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From The New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is a Daily.
0:09.3	Today, in two of the past five presidential elections, the electoral college has awarded
0:17.3	the White House to the loser of the popular vote, raising questions about the legitimacy
0:23.6	of how America picks its leader. Editorial board member Jesse Wegman on the origins of that system,
0:32.3	and just how close America came to dismantling it.
0:43.5	It's Thursday, October 22nd.
0:46.1	Jesse, I think by now everyone understands that President Trump won the White House four years ago
0:57.0	by losing the popular vote and winning the electoral college vote. But can you remind us of
1:02.4	a specific math involved in that split? Sure. I mean, what's amazing about it is he didn't just
1:11.0	lose the popular vote. He lost it by a huge number, nearly three million more people voted for
1:17.1	Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump in 2016. And yet, because of 77,000 votes in just three
1:24.2	states in the upper Midwest, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Donald Trump wins the entire presidency.
1:31.4	The math there is very hard to wrap your head around 77,000 somehow outweighing
1:37.7	three million. It's smaller than the size of a college football stadium and it decided the
1:43.2	election for the entire country, which is a legitimately strange way to conduct a nationwide
1:49.0	presidential election. And I think the question everyone has and what we want to talk to you about
1:53.1	is how we developed such a peculiar system in the United States for picking a president. One that
2:01.5	allows for the popular vote, the majority's will to be ignored or outvoted by a minority of voters.
2:09.6	And it turns out you are an expert in this area, pretty much the expert in this area. So tell us that
2:15.6	story. Right. So in 1787, the framers who come to Philadelphia to design our new constitution
2:24.8	had no idea how to pick the leader of a self-governing republic. No one had done it before, certainly not on
2:32.4	this scale. And they argued about it almost from the first day to the last day of the constitutional
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The New York Times, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The New York Times and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.