Democratic vice presidential nominee Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday told party donors in California that he supports eliminating the Electoral College – the system the country has used to elect presidents since the 1780s.
Walz said at a private Democratic fundraising event at the residence of controversial California Gov. Gavin Newsom: “I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go.”
“We need a national popular vote,” Walz asserted, referring to an electoral system predominantly used in developing countries. In such a system, a nation’s head of government is chosen by winning the greatest total number of votes nationwide, regardless of where the votes were cast.
During the event, the vice presidential hopeful pointed out to the California-based crowd that under the Electoral College, presidential candidates need to campaign in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada.
“So we need to win Beaver County, Pennsylvania,” he said. “We need to be able to go into York, Pennsylvania, and win. We need to be in western Wisconsin and win. We need to be in Reno, Nevada, and win.”
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The Harris-Walz campaign appeared to distance itself from Walz’s comments after they made headlines.
Via a statement, the campaign said that Kamala Harris’ running mate “believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket.”
The campaign claimed that Walz was “commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes,” and “was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts.”
Karoline Leavitt, the National Press Secretary for the campaign of Republican nominee Donald Trump, took to X (formerly Twitter) to question whether Walz’s remarks against the Electoral College were intended to lay the “groundwork to claim President Trump’s victory is illegitimate.”
In 2016, Trump won the election with a comfortable majority of electoral votes while losing the popular vote to failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by two percentage points.
No candidate won a majority of the popular vote in that year’s election.
Clinton, who had garnered a plurality of 48.2%, saw her support mainly concentrated in populous blue states, while Trump on the other hand carried a host of battleground states across the country by slim margins.
Many Democrats, including Clinton herself, accused Trump of being an “illegitimate president” during his first term.
Both Harris and Walz have a record of past opposition to the Electoral College.
National Review noted that “Harris herself has said in the past that she’s ‘open to the discussion’ of abolishing the Electoral College.”
Then-Sen. Harris told comedian Jimmy Kimmel in 2019: “There’s no question that the popular vote has been diminished in terms of making the final decision about who’s the president of the United States and we need to deal with that.”
In terms of Walz’s record on the Electoral College, The Daily Wire reported:
As governor, Walz has pushed for presidents to be elected by popular vote instead of through the Electoral College. In May of 2023, Walz signed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact into law, making Minnesota the 17th state to agree to award its electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote.
Earlier this year, CatholicVote reported that the controversial Compact seeks to “eliminate the Electoral College without an act of Congress or Constitutional amendment.”
Walz, who was born and raised in Nebraska and moved to Minnesota in 1996, has long portrayed himself as a champion of rural middle America.
He seemed to double down on this image in August by walking out onto the Democratic National Convention (DNC) stage to the song “Small Town” by John Mellencamp – a popular musical artist widely associated with the rural midwest.
However, many analysts have pointed out that if Democrats were to succeed in nixing the Electoral College, states in the American heartland such as Minnesota and Nebraska would lose a significant amount of influence over who becomes president.
While Nebraska may be a heavily Republican state, it is still one of two who award one electoral vote each to the winner of each of its congressional districts. Next month, the Harris-Walz ticket is likely to win one of the state’s five electoral votes, due to Nebraska’s Omaha-based Second District being Democratic-leaning.
Meanwhile, Walz’s adoptive home state of Minnesota, though considered safely in the Harris-Walz column for 2024, has trended to the right over the past decade – and if current political trends continue, it may be considered a battleground state for the 2028 election cycle.
Critics also highlighted that electing presidents based on the national popular vote would effectively concentrate the power of selecting presidents mainly in populous states along the nation’s coasts – such as California.
As I previously wrote in CatholicVote’s explainer on the Electoral College, if the country were to switch to the national popular vote system that Walz called for,
presidential elections would be completely different from how they are now. It would, for starters, no longer be necessary for candidates to campaign in a host of states.
Instead, under a national popular vote system candidates could theoretically spend the vast majority of their time running up the score in massive states such as California or New York – and completely ignore the entire part of the nation colloquially referred to as “flyover country.”
Conversely, the Electoral College “allows more states to have an impact on the choice of the President,” The Heritage Foundation indicated via its project “The Essential Electoral College.”
“The U.S. is a large country made up of people from very different regions and cultures, and federalism is an important way of preserving the differences that make us unique while uniting us behind one common federal government,” Heritage explained.
“Since the country is comprised of 50 states coming together to form the federal government, it is important that the system to elect the President fairly represent them,” the think tank emphasized.
LifeNews Note: Anthony Iafrate writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
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