Electoral College Reform in 1969

The most famous failure of the Bayh Subcommittee was the defeat of its Direct Presidential Election proposal, which passed the House but failed in the Senate. The proposal was complicated, as I'll discuss another time. But one point of agreement was that the election of a president who had lost the popular vote would be a disaster. Richard Nixon said as much in 1968, along with many others.

Why, then, did the country accept two such outcomes in 2000 and 2016? Were the leaders in the 1960s just wrong on this point? Not necessarily. They faced a country engaged in massive protests against government policies. Those policies, though, were implemented by people who won the most votes in their election. Imagine how that would have played out if Nixon had, say, lost the popular vote to Hubert Humphrey but won the electoral vote. You can see why that would have seemed like an impossible situation then.

Another factor was that during the Cold War America cared a lot about being a democratic model. This was a motivation for abolishing the Electoral College, expanding the right to vote, and giving DC full congressional representation. But that goal also kept leaders up at night about the prospects of a minority-vote President. Today there are no concerns about serving as a model for much of anything.

UPDATE: Here's a fun 2024 podcast on this issue.