Electoral College Spirit

AP U.S. Government and Politics

Which tend to be closer, popular votes or electoral votes?

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PEW RESEARCH CENTER

AP U.S. Government and Politics

1. How accurate was your prediction?

2. What is the big story this chart tells about popular versus electoral votes?

3. How does the electoral college magnify a small popular vote victory into a landslide?

4. Is that a good thing?

5. There have been four times in American political history where because of the electoral college, the person who got less popular votes than their opponent won the presidency (1876, 1888, 2000, 2016).*And if you really want to go down an electoral college rabbit hole, you can check out the election of 1824! But if you look at the chart above you'll see that there have been many more than four times that the person who won the presidency didn't get a majority of the popular vote. How do you explain this?

6. What is one positive consequence of the electoral college?

7. What is one negative consequence of the electoral college?

8. Do you think that the US would be better off without the electoral college?

9. Why do we have an electoral college anyway?

10. If a popular vote makes sense for gubernatorial elections, why doesn’t it make sense for presidential elections?

11. How did the electoral college impact our most recent presidential election?

Visual Extension

Learning Extension

Read this interview with one of America's foremost Constitutional scholars, Professor Akhil Reed Amar the Sterling professor of law and political science at Yale University, who argues that the real reason for the electoral college was to empower slave states.

Action Extension

Each state's legislature actually decides who to give their electoral votes to. They could, for example, give all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote - even if that person lost the popular vote in their own state. They could even give all their electoral votes to Kanye West! They really could. I'm not even kidding. Look it up! Contact your state legislature and tell them what you think they ought to do about how they award your state's electoral college votes. And tell them I said hi!

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