Harris and Trump Are Blowing Up the Case for the Electoral College
Trish Badger/imageSPACE via ZUMA
With a little more than a week to go before Election Day, the presidential race is expected to come down to just seven states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. But the two biggest campaign events this weekend weren’t scheduled for any of them. On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris rallied with Willie Nelson and Beyonce in Houston, where early voting is already underway. And on Sunday, former president Donald Trump is set to appear at Madison Square Garden with his disbarred attorney and a long list of the weirdest people you know.
Trump is on a bit of a blue-state swing. He appeared at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island in September promising to win New York. Earlier this month, he went to Coachella, in Southern California, where he introduced supporters to the vital concert-festival experience of “waiting for shuttle buses that never show up.” Last week he went to a barber shop in the Bronx.
None of these visits lack immediate value. Both New York and Texas have big races that matter a lot to the national parties—six races in New York could determine control of the House; Texas’ Senate race could determine control of the Senate, and the state is close enough on paper that it may well be a part of Democrats’ presidential strategy sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Trump’s visit to reliably blue California could affect the down-ballot races that could swing the House. Getting control of Congress is half the battle; the candidates for president want to actually be able to do things as president, after all.
And to both Trump and Harris, these dips into enemy territory serve their larger messages: Texas, on the one hand, and New York and California, on the other, represent the sort of outcomes they’re promising to steer the nation away from. The Houston event was organized around the theme of protecting reproductive rights, using as its backdrop a state that has—thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court justices—now criminalized abortion with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. If you want to see what Trump’s policies get you, just take a look at a state where, according to a study released in January, 26,000 women who have been impregnated by a rapist since the Dobbs decision have been left without access to care that was once their right. For his part, Trump uses his blue-state hosts to paint a picture of American Carnage 2.0—buildings taken over by Venezuelan gangs; rampant homelessness; crime crime crime.
But in doing so, Trump in particular has made clear something that should be obvious but which a lot of observers on both sides often don’t acknowledge: He has a ton of supporters in these places, albeit almost certainly not enough to win either state. Still, he received more votes in NYC alone than he did in 16 states in 2020—eight of which he won—and his popularity has, according to the polls, ticked upwards over the last few years. A New York Times poll this week showed a 14-point shift in the city since the last presidential election. He got more votes in the five boroughs than he did in the entire swing state of Nevada, while more California voters supported him than in any other state. One of the reasons the national popular vote appears to be so close this year is that Trump is more popular in the places that aren’t nominally competitive.
Of course, we don’t have a national popular vote, as much as Tim Walz might wish otherwise. But Trump’s tactic exposes the absurdity of the Electoral College, and it does so in so flagrant a manner that perhaps even the people who have benefited from that system might start to notice. It was one thing when candidates only focused on the key Electoral College states, where every vote counts. But he is spending the last days of the campaign, speaking to people whose votes mean very little to the Electoral College, in the hopes that it might redound to his benefit somewhere else. Once you accept that the people in these states matter—or at least some of the people in these states—and that you’re going to be campaigning there anyway, it’s harder to argue that their votes shouldn’t.