In the American presidential election system, each state is entitled to a number of electors in the Electoral College equal to its total Congressional representation, including its two Senators. This fuels the most pernicious myths about the Electoral College system: The idea that the Electoral College protects small states’ interests by design.
The “senator” electors do mean that the smallest states, with only one House representative, field about three times as many electors per voter as the largest states. This feature of the Electoral College has gotten quite a bit of attention. Graphics like the one below purport to show a vast advantage for small states in the Electoral College.
However, this isn’t actually a major factor in how the Electoral College functions in practice. There are 538 electors and only 102 bonus electors. Since the House (currently 435 members) is usually 4–5 times as large as the Senate (currently 100 members), the bonus “senator” electors usually aren’t more than since small and large states usually fall on both ends of the political spectrum, those extra “senator” electors usually don’t matter in the end.
In fact, there are only three or four elections in which removing the “senator” electors would have changed who won the presidency. In each of those elections, the loser could have won just as easily by performing well in a single large state than by massively improving his performance in all small states. Each election was also so close that the losing candidate could have won just by winning a single additional battleground state.
Election of 1796
The presidential election of 1796 was arguably the first competitive election in American history. It pitted Federalist John Adams against Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson.
This election was very close in the Electoral College: Adams won 71 electoral votes, and Jefferson won 68 electoral votes. Adams won 9 states, while Jefferson won 7 states. If we simply subtract the two “senator” electors from the winner of each state, the election might have gone to Jefferson 54-53, although there are some caveats:
One district in North Carolina elected a Federalist elector.
One district in Virginia elected a Federalist elector, Benjamin Temple. Another Federalist elector was only 13 votes away from winning his district.
Four out of Maryland’s eleven districts voted for Jefferson. In one of the districts voting for Adams, the margin was only 4 votes.
The 14th and 15th place electors in Pennsylvania’s state-wide election were Federalists, although one (Samuel Miles) chose to vote for Jefferson.
Because of the extremely close nature of the race and uncertainties tied to specific district lines and the choices made by electors, it’s possible that Adams could have still won without the “senator” electors. States didn’t simply use the modern “unit rule” and assign an entire slate of electors at once.
However, in spite of the fact that the “senator” electors may have played a critical role in Adams’s victory, it’s also true Jefferson could also have won by winning two additional electors from Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, or Pennsylvania. This election was not only within the margin of any one state, but within the margin of two electoral districts.
Elections of 1876 and 2000
These are two of the most contentious elections in American history. The reason for this is that in both cases, electoral votes were cast and accepted on the basis of uncertain results. In both cases, it is likely that the presidential candidate earning fewer actual votes in Florida ended up winning the electoral votes of Florida - in other words, it is likely these elections were decided incorrectly in the first place.
The election of 1876 featured contested popular vote results in three (!) states: South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. Not coincidentally, these were the three former Confederate states still under occupation by federal troops. Additionally, there was one elector in Oregon whose eligibility was questioned. All 20 disputed electoral votes were assigned to Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden by an 8-7 party-line vote in a 15 member commission designed to resolve the disputes.
With 20 disputed electors from 4 states, Hayes won 185-184. Hayes’s total included 42 “senator” electors; Tilden’s total only included 34 “senator” electors. Thus, even with all 20 disputed electors, Tilden would have defeated Hayes 150-143 without the bonus “senator” electors in play. However, Tilden also could have won with the votes from any of the three disputed states, or even the vote from Oregon’s single contested elector.
In the case of 2000, Florida was the only state whose results were contested after the fact. An unofficial recount after the fact determined that if all ballots had been counted correctly by the same standards across the state of Florida, Al Gore would have won by a narrow margin over George W. Bush. There were good reasons to conclude that Gore had probably won more votes in Florida. Ultimately, though, the results were well within the margin of counting error, much less the margin of any potential irregularities that went undetected in analysis after the fact.
With Florida’s 25 disputed electors, Bush won 271-266 with one elector abstaining. However, Bush’s total included 60 of the 102 “senator” electors; without those “senator” electors, he would have only earned 211 electoral votes, with Gore earning 221 or 222. In addition to probably having earned more votes in Florida, Gore also could also have won with a few more votes in New Hampshire.
Election of 1916
In the elections of 1876 and 2000, it was difficult to discern who the true winner should have been. Both elections were decided by litigation rather than by actual counts of votes. However, there is one election not commonly thought of as anomalous where the winner’s margin of victory depended on winning a larger number of small states: The election of 1916.
Woodrow Wilson won a total of 30 states, including many small western states, while Charles Evans Hughes won only 18 states, including most of the traditional battleground states around the Great Lakes. Wilson won 277-254 in the Electoral College, a margin of 23 electoral votes, compared to the 24 electoral votes he netted from winning a larger number of “senator” electors.
Wilson won the election by a margin of 3,773 votes in California. If he had lost California, he would have lost the election. Without the “senator” electors, Wilson would have lost 218-217 in an exceptionally narrow race. In that hypothetical case, Wilson would have still only needed one additional state to win, e.g., Minnesota, which he lost by a razor-thin margin of 392 votes.
What happened afterwards
The presidential candidates of 1800, 1880, 1920, and 2004 didn’t respond to the prior unusual elections by catering to small states, in spite of the fact that the extra margin of the “senator” electors was enough to account for the margin of victory in the previous election. Instead, they took note of the fact that winning any additional battleground state would bring them victory, and paid particular attention to large key battleground states.
This is the same thing that has continued to happen in other hotly contested elections. The lion’s share of attention is concentrated in a handful of states, mostly the largest of the battleground states.
In 1800, the Jefferson and Adams campaigns focused on state legislatures, changing the rules for selecting electors and working to win political majorities in key state legislatures. Jefferson’s victory was due to his victory in the key battleground state of New York, where his running mate (Aaron Burr) helped win a majority in the state legislature.
In 1880, the Garfield and Hancock campaigns fought intensely over New York other key battleground states surrounding the Great Lakes - the region now known as the Rust Belt. The subsequent narrow win by Garfield in New York decided the election. Neither campaign expended much effort on small states.
In 1920, Warren G. Harding infamously didn’t travel much at all, running a “front porch” campaign from his home battleground state of Ohio and letting the news media come to him instead of touring small states. Between the war, the recent influenza pandemic, and the fact that women had just gained the right to vote, Harding won in a massive blow-out.
In 2004, the Kerry and Bush campaigns followed a playbook of concentrating hard on a small number of key battleground states, particularly Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Bush won two of these three key battleground states, and thus won the election.
Recap: Why the “senator” electors don’t matter much.
Only four out of fifty-nine presidential elections have been close enough for the bonus “senator” electors to play a decisive role. To put this in a fuller context, not only do the “senator” electors make up just under 19% of electors, they’ve been potentially decisive as a group less than 7% of the time. Half of those elections were so close that we cannot be certain the results were legitimate.
Even in landslide elections, the actual net impact of the “senator” bonus electors is usually still smaller than the potential impact of flipping a single large state.
In general, if the “senator” electors are potentially decisive, the results are so close enough that tipping any one state out of the winner’s column is likely to reverse the results. Even in the election of 1916, which had the largest margin of victory out of any of these four elections, the presidential election results hinged on less than 4,000 votes.
There have not been any cases where small states truly banded together as a group to elect a president with minority popular support in defense of the interests of small states. Instead, there have simply been a few elections so close that every single small quirk of the Electoral College was potentially critical.
What does drive the Electoral College a lot more? Individual battleground states. Almost a third of American presidential elections have been within the margin of one state’s electoral votes. (Historically, this has most often been New York.) The “winner-take-all” rule that almost all states use is much more important than the “senator” electors, and using winner-take-all slates of electors provides a large and powerful advantage to the largest battleground states.