Reader mailbag: How the Electoral College really works, tariff effects, and more

Your questions answered

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WvG: 1/ I always try to get my head around the way how the elections work in the USA. I kind of understand the technicalities of it, but would like to get a deep dive answer on (i) how it really works, (ii) why this system has been selected, (iii) has it always been this way, ever since - say - the constitution, (iv) are there any plans to change this (Trump or not) and so on. And yes, I can get parts of this info from public sources, but I appreciate your insights in this, given your background and objectivity.

I wrote a post last year (I think before you were a subscriber) which covers a lot of this but here are a few extra points:

I think framing the question as being about “how it really works” is a good move because while the basic framework has been the same since the constitution, how it really works has changed a lot over time.

The basic framework is that each state gets to pick a certain number of people to represent it in the Electoral College. Then all of those people get together and whichever candidate gets the majority of their votes wins.

The framers designed things this way because they wanted the Electoral College to be a deliberative body. Their idea was that each state picked its wisest (white) men and then those men would debate who would make the best president.

They designed things this way because they had a very elitist fear of democracy. They didn’t think that the people should be voting for president, but rather that the wisest minds in the nation (minds like theirs) would pick. Delegates to the Electoral College were generally not even voted for directly by the people at first - they were picked by state legislators. So even though this was the “Electoral College”, it was very different to the system we know today.

Over time, the system changed in two key ways to become the system that we know today. Firstly, the vote was extended to all white men (by about the 1840s), to white women (1919), and to African-Americans and over minorities (in the decades after World War II).

Secondly, Electoral College candidates became pledged, meaning that they were sent with instructions to give their vote to a particular candidate. The college stopped being a deliberative body but instead just became a vote-counting formality. Apart from the occasional “faithless” elector - someone who defies their instructions - the outcome of the college meeting is entirely predictable, which was not at all the case in the early nineteenth century.

The main proposal to change the system is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which I talked about in this post. Change can actually be achieved with enough states deciding that they want to just give their EC votes to whoever wins the popular vote nationally - nothing in the constitution stops them from doing this.

The problem is that for a long time it has been understood that Republicans have a built-in advantage in the EC. That advantage basically stems from the distribution of the two parties’ voters nationally. Democrats run up huge and useless margins in New York and California, whereas Republican voters are distributed more efficiently to get an EC victory. So Republicans really have no interest in changing the system and I’m not sure I see that changing anytime soon.

WvG: More of a musing question: if Trump would be out before his 2nd term ends (e.g., he passes away or is 'taken out'), would the US and the world for that matter, be worse or better off? Initially, people might think 'Anybody than Trump and the world would be a better place'. But if you look at guys, such as JD Vance, that might even be a worse choice (if he would take presidency as a 'simple' roll-over from Vice-President into POTUS), given his stance and network? Also, are the Democrats ready with a good candidate to even stand a chance, given their party is - as you nicely put it - in the toilet. There is probably not a right-wrong answer here, just opinions. But very curious to hear yours.

I debate this in my head a lot, and I did the same thing in Trump’s first term when the alternative was Mike Pence. I used to feel pretty strongly that although Pence was a guy I disagreed with on basically every policy issue, I didn’t see him as a threat to the very existence of the democratic system in the way that Trump is. And I think that the way Pence acted on January 6th by completely rejecting the attempted coup basically bore this view out.

With Vance, the situation is very different. I guess there’s a tiny chance that after he becomes president he’s going to go “surprise!” and pivot back to being the less objectionable version of himself that he was before he went full MAGA. But I doubt it. I think he is thoroughly plugged into the MAGA ecosystem now. With him you basically get a more energetic, less senile version of MAGA, but one that forefronts the religious strand of the movement more. And so my initial response is that I think in general terms it would be worse.

The only way I can see it being better is if Vance takes office and then intends to let there be a free and fair election in 2028. Trump right now is ruling like he is never going to face an election again. Almost all of his policies are wildly unpopular, he’s doing nothing to address inflation - which was the reason he got elected - and he’s shrinking rather than expanding his political coalition.

A Republican who actually wanted to win the next election would be acting very differently. So if Vance comes into office as someone who still needs to prove himself to the voting public and actually intends for there to be a meaningful election, I think he would need to pivot to the center. But I think it’s more likely he would double down on the authoritarianism as if the next election is not going to happen - which, let’s face it, it might not.

Petra: It’s not exactly a question for a historian, I guess, but there has been a lot of coverage in May 25 or so, about empty ports on the west coast of the US, and no ships on the way, and thousands of truckers losing their jobs in the very near future. This very near future is now here, but I haven’t seen coverage about the development of international trade so much. How is that going? Better than expected? Do any of these hardships (if present) change the general political climate?

What basically happened here is that for all of the confusion and media circus around Trump’s tariffs, most of them have not actually come into effect yet. Trump delayed them multiple times, and even after letting them “come into effect” on August 7th, he included a loophole which meant they didn’t apply to goods already in transit so long as they arrive by October 5th. It can take 30 - 40 days for a container ship to get from China to the United States, so the tariffs are simply not applying to a lot of U.S. trade yet.

Another factor is that because of the impending tariffs, U.S. businesses went on a pre-emptive spending spree to load up on goods before the tariffs came into effect. This meant that traffic volumes were actually pretty high earlier this year, although they started to dip in the spring as the front-loading ended.

On the other hand, as Trump’s tariffs do come into effect, we will start to see declining trade volumes. But the sort of apocalyptic scenarios that we heard about in April are not likely to come to pass for the simple reason that Trump backed away from most of his tariffs. What he is now imposing is much lower than what he first threatened, and so trade is not going to fall as much as initially predicted.

That doesn’t mean the effect will be non-existent. But it’s going to be more of a background, melancholic drag on employment and growth than an apocalypse. And that’s depressing in its own way - Trump has settled on a level of tariffs which is going to make the economy bad, but not so bad that ports will be empty and he’ll be forced to change course. But it’s definitely going to be a negative drag on the economy and overall that is going to be bad for him and other Republicans politically.

Andrew Fagan: Curious of your thoughts on this potential historic parallel Andrew: when Ireland negotiated independence from UK, the deal involved the UK keeping a chunk (ie.Northern Ireland), which ultimately lead to a civil war in Ireland (as many people would not accept what was seen as the ‘surrender’ of that territory), which destabilized the region for quite some time. One could imagine that certain factions in Ukraine might not be happy with surrendering the rest of the Donbas region …. a deliberate attempt to destabilize Ukraine perhaps, or at least a fringe benefit for Russia of pressing for the whole of the Donbas?

I think this is a really interesting question and I wrote an article touching on it with one of my PhD students earlier this year.

In short, I think your intuition is absolutely right - any territorial concessions by Ukraine are going to make Ukrainian internal politics even more intractable and be a threat to the country’s unity. And that alone is a win for Putin.

I also think that it highlights just how shaky any “peace” agreement between the two sides would be.

If Ukraine ends up ceding the Donbas, then a lot of Ukrainian citizens are going to be left under a brutal occupation. The Russians have been torturing and murdering Ukrainians and stealing their children for years. There’s little reason to think that they will back off in the aftermath of a peace agreement.

For Ukrainians, that raises a big question - what to do? Let the Russians do that? Try to whip up some sort of insurgency against them? This isn’t just a matter for the government either - there are an awful lot of people in Ukraine with military training and a big grudge against the Russians. It’s not impossible to imagine them taking matters into their own hands.

But it’s not likely that any activity of this sort is going to actually threaten Russian control of Donbas. So what you have instead is a constant source of pretexts for Russia to renew its invasion of Ukraine and accuse Kyiv of breaking the peace agreement. It doesn’t strike me as a very tenable situation.

Matthew Rea: Hi Andrew, politics teacher here in Northern Ireland and I’ll be teaching American politics this year which I’ve never done before. A question for you, if you please; How does Congress check presidential power? Also, has the presidency increased its power over the last couple decades?

There’s a lot to cover here but the basic answer is that over the last century or so, the presidency has gained in power enormously over pretty much every other element of government created by the constitution - Congress, the courts, and the states.

We live in such a president-oriented culture that it can be hard to believe that in the nineteenth century, the president was often considered as a sort of comic and meaningless figure. Early in his career as an academic Woodrow Wilson wrote a book called Congressional Government in which he argued that Congress should be supreme and the president a mere administrator (when Wilson became president, he had different ideas, as they always do).

And this was how many of the framers of the constitution wanted things to be. They saw Congress as the most important branch of government because it was the place that made laws. The idea of the president controlling a vast array of of government agencies and ruling through executive fiat was alien to them - not to mention very alarming.

In order to prevent presidents amassing too much power, they gave Congress various powers to check him. The most important was the “power of the purse” - the need for all money spent by the government to be authorized by Congress. Because anything the government does requires money, this was theoretically very powerful. If the president tries to set up a police state, Congress can just stop funding the police! In theory, at least.

There are also other powers that Congress holds, such as the need to confirm officials in the executive branch, the power to declare war, and the power to investigate a corrupt president and bring his misdeeds to light. Ultimately, they can even impeach and remove a president from office.

But, as I think we all know, this system doesn’t seem to work very well today. And the main reason is the rise of political parties. The framers thought that the president and Congress would both be filled with ambitious men who wanted to keep one another in check. What they didn’t anticipate was that both the presidency and Congress would come to be controlled by members of the same party for whom party loyalty was more important than defending their institution.

So gradually over the last decades, Congress has let presidents get away with more and more, to the point that Trump is now trying to build some sort of authoritarian regime and Congress is barely lifting a finger to stop him.

If you enjoyed this reader mailbag, feel free to post questions below or on a future post for the next one! And please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help me keep this newsletter going.