Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, has called for the electoral college system of electing US presidents to be abolished and replaced with a popular vote principle, as operates in most democracies.
His comments – to an audience of party fundraisers – chime with the sentiments of a majority of American voters but risk destabilising the campaign of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, who has not adopted a position on the matter, despite having previously voiced similar views.
“I think all of us know, the electoral college needs to go,” Walz told donors at a gathering at the home of the California governor, Gavin Newsom. “We need a national popular vote. 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.”
He had earlier made similar remarks at a separate event in Seattle, where he called himself “a national popular vote guy”, while qualifying it by saying, “that’s not the world we live in.”
The statements refer to the apparent democratic anomaly whereby US presidential polls are decided not by who wins the most votes nationwide but instead by which candidate captures a majority of 538 electoral votes across the 50 states, plus Washington DC.
The votes are distributed broadly reflective of each state’s population size, so populous California, for example, has 54 electoral college votes, while tiny Rhode Island has just four. However, rare cases of US presidents winning the electoral college while losing the popular vote tally do happen, notably in recent times George W Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.
The concerns over the electoral college system crystallise the reality that next month’s contest between Harris and Trump, the Republican nominee, will come down to the outcomes in a small number of battleground states, where polls show them running neck-and-neck.
Most surveys indicate Harris having a small but consistent nationwide lead. Yet even if these are borne out on polling day, Trump could still return to the White House by winning enough swing states to reach the 270 electoral votes needed.
That scenario is feared by Democrats since it would repeat the outcome of the 2016 election, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton thanks to the electoral college despite winning nearly 3m fewer votes across the nation.
Walz’s comments are eye-catching because he was chosen as Harris’s running mate because his homely, plain-speaking style was judged as appealing to working-class voters in three of the most important battleground states, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
It is not the first time that Walz, the Minnesota governor, has advocated ditching the electoral college.
Last year, he signed legislation that added Minnesota to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would force states to award their electors to the national popular vote winner if enough of them agreed to do so.
In the absence of that, only a constitutional amendment could alter the current electoral system.
Harris-Walz campaign officials stressed that abolishing the electoral college was not part of its agenda.
“Governor Walz 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,” Teddy Tschann, a spokesman for Walz, told the New York Times.
The comments were seized on gleefully by Trump’s campaign, which is generally believed to have an advantage in the present system.
“Why does Tampon Tim [Trump’s derisive nickname for Walz] hate the Constitution so much?,” the Trump campaign posted on its official X account.
The comment overlooked the fact that Trump himself has been accused of calling for “terminating the constitution” in support of his lie that Joe Biden and the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election.
Research published last month by Pew showed 63% of American voters favouring electing the president by the popular vote, although support was greatest among Democrats, while a small majority of Republicans favoured keeping the electoral college.
Harris said in a 2019 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live that she was “open to the discussion” of changing the current system, saying the popular vote had been “diminished”. But she has avoided more categorical statements on the subject.
In a 60 Minutes interview on CBS that aired on Monday, the vice-president said she had recently told Walz that “you need to be a little more careful on how you say things.”
