Dr Tom Cutterham explains how the Electoral College could shape the result of the US presidential election.
“The US federal constitution written in 1787 is one of the longest standing in the world, but it’s also one of the shortest. It sets a basic framework for Presidential elections, but it leaves an awful lot of the detail to the individual states. That includes how each state chooses its ‘electors’: members of the Electoral College, where the vote for President formally takes place.
There are a couple of reasons why this is really important in 2024. First, there is a real risk that state officials have opportunities to intervene in the process in ways that help their party's candidate. In the 2020 election, the Trump campaign tried unsuccessfully to pressure Pennsylvania legislators (where Republicans held a majority) to select a slate of electors that was not determined by the popular vote. Republican state officials elsewhere faced similar pressures from the campaign.
Secondly, there are two states, Maine, and Nebraska, where electors are chosen district by district instead of on a whole-state basis. That might be critical this year because some projections suggest that Nebraska’s second district—the city of Omaha, which leans more Democratic than the rest of the state—could actually determine the final outcome.
Whatever happens in the end, the 2024 presidential election will be shaped by the decisions of the men who framed the constitution more than two centuries ago. In many respects, those framers were committed to creating a more powerful central government. But when it came to organising presidential elections, they mostly left the states to do what they liked.”
Associate Professor of United States History
Biographical and contact information for Dr Tom Cutterham, Associate Professor of United States History, at the Department of History, University of Birmingham.
