AT A fundraiser in California last week, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, declared that "the Electoral College needs to go." Walz wants to scrap the two-step process laid out in the Constitution — first the states choose electors, then electors meet to choose the president and vice president — and replace it with a single national popular vote.
A spokesman for the Harris campaign hastily told CNN that Walz's call to eliminate the Electoral College was not an official policy position. Maybe not, but Walz wasn't speaking off the cuff — he had said the exact same thing at a Seattle fundraiser earlier in the day. And back in 2019, during her first presidential attempt, then-Senator Kamala Harris said that she too was "open to the discussion" of abolishing the Electoral College.
Americans have been grumbling about the Electoral College for a long time. Indeed, dissatisfaction with the way it functioned led as early as 1804 to adoption of the 12th Amendment, which changed the rules to require electors to vote separately for president and vice president. But hostility to the Electoral College has intensified in the past 25 years, especially among Democrats. That is understandable — the last two Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, both became president by winning a majority in the Electoral College, even though their Democratic rivals each drew more popular votes.
In constitutional terms, the "popular vote" isn't a thing — it has no legal significance. The Framers of the Constitution created the Electoral College in order to ensure that presidents were not elected in a single national plebiscite, but via elections within each state. Thanks to the system they devised, it is not enough for presidential candidates merely to pile up votes in the few areas where they are most popular. In order to win, they must demonstrate appeal across numerous states. Electoral votes are almost always awarded on a winner-take-all basis, which gives candidates a powerful motivation to campaign aggressively in "swing" states — they work extra hard to carry states where the public is divided, in order to win those states' electoral votes. Under a national plebiscite, by contrast, candidates would be more apt to ignore states and regions where they weren't already popular.
 In 1984, Minnesota was the only state where a majority of voters supported Walter Mondale. If Tim Walz's scheme to bypass the Electoral College had been in force, Minnesota would have had to give its electoral votes to Ronald Reagan. |
To express it in terms of this year's election: If not for the Electoral College, Harris and Walz would spend all their time banking votes in deep-blue California, Massachusetts, and Oregon, while Trump and JD Vance would be working to rack up the highest possible vote totals in the red heartland of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.
Many Democrats, convinced that a national plebiscite would work to their advantage, have come up with a way to circumvent the Electoral College. They are promoting the National Popular Vote Compact, under which states would agree to cast their electoral votes for the candidate who wins the most popular votes nationwide, rather than the candidate who wins the most votes in their state. As drafted, the arrangement would take effect only after it has been adopted by enough states to reach 270 electoral votes, the total needed to win the White House. So far the compact has been adopted by 17 states and the District of Columbia, which together control 209 electoral votes, which is 61 short of the 270 needed for implementation.
The most recent governor to sign legislation adding a state to the compact was — can you guess? — Walz. In May 2023, he signed a bill passed by the Democratic Legislature that brought Minnesota into the plan. Barring some upheaval in American politics, the compact will never go into effect unless it wins the support of some red states.
So for now, whether to dispense with the Electoral College is little more than an interesting topic of discussion.
Some of that discussion is thoughtful, such as the debate among legal scholars over whether the national popular vote compact would pass constitutional muster. Mostly, however, the subject is reduced to shallow sloganeering about "democracy" and "one-person-one-vote" that ignores the nation's singular structure as a federal republic. The Framers' Electoral College compromise — whereby Americans come together to choose a president, but do so as citizens of their respective states — reflects America's identity not as an undifferentiated mass of people but as a union of individual states with different social, political, and cultural characters. New Hampshire, New Jersey, and North Dakota are very different places. The Electoral College arrangement ensures that those differences are respected, while guaranteeing the right of all adult citizens to participate in the process.
Rarely mentioned is that the only impact of the National Popular Vote Compact in states, like Minnesota, where it has been approved would be to sometimes award their presidential electors to the Republican candidates most of their voters reject. Suppose it had been in effect in 1984, when Ronald Reagan carried every state in the union except Minnesota, where native son Walter Mondale prevailed. By the terms of the compact, Minnesota would have been compelled to award its 10 electoral votes to Reagan, giving him a clean sweep. Four years later, when Minnesota was one of only a handful of states to support Michael Dukakis, the compact would have forced it to back George H. W. Bush in the Electoral College. Does Walz really imagine that that would have been a fairer, more democratic outcome?
Most Americans will never accept a system that operates through the nullification of their vote. Critics of the Electoral College denounce it as an affront to democracy. The existing arrangement has its drawbacks. But one thing it does not do is oblige states to cancel the result of their own elections just because a presidential candidate was more popular elsewhere.
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Fort Bragg is dead. Long live Fort Liberty.
Donald Trump has been pandering for votes with a relentlessness matched only by its public-policy incoherence: "No tax on tips!" "Revoke birthright citizenship!" "Deport millions of migrants!" "No reform of Social Security!" "Tax-free car loans!" Of course he is not the first national politician to promise his audiences whatever he thinks they want to hear. After Harry Truman won the presidential election in 1948, H. L. Mencken acidly remarked in The Baltimore Sun: "If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at the taxpayer's expense."
One of Trump's latest panders came during a rally earlier this month in Fayetteville, N.C. Before a crowd of MAGA locals, the former president vowed that if he returns to the White House, the region's biggest military installation — Fort Liberty — will regain its former name.
 For decades, North Carolina's biggest Army base was named for a Confederate traitor. Now it bears a far more uplifting name. |
"I walked in and the first question that I was asked — should we change the name from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg?" Trump told a cheering crowd, according to Stars and Stripes. "So here's what we do: We get elected, I'm doing it. I'm doing it."
Not likely.
Fort Bragg was named in 1922 for the odious General Braxton Bragg, a West Point graduate and artillery commander in the Mexican-American War who later betrayed his country, violated his oath as a military officer, and joined the Confederacy to fight for the preservation of slavery and the dissolution of the Union. The naming of US military facilities after Confederate generals was a project of Southern segregationists long after the Civil War had ended. It was one of the ways in which they sought to promote the "lost cause" myth that treated Southern secession as a noble and heroic endeavor, rather than a movement committed to the defense and expansion of Black slavery.
In the 2021 defense authorization act, Congress directed the Defense Department to tally all US military assets named after Confederate leaders — there turned out to be more than 1,100 of them — and give them more appropriate names. Trump, who was president at the time, vetoed the bill. A large bipartisan congressional majority handily overrode his veto and the Pentagon at long last got to work on removing the Confederate stain from innumerable military facilities. Fort Bragg was renamed Fort Liberty. Really, could there be a more appropriate name for a US Army base?
Like Ronald Reagan, I believe that monuments to tyranny should be torn down. And monuments to the Confederacy honor the vilest cause in our history. It was appalling that US military bases or naval vessels or highways should ever have been named for leaders of the Confederacy, disloyal men who were so determined to keep human beings in chains that they sought to shatter the Union and launched a savage war against their fellow Americans. An Army base honoring Braxton Bragg ought to have been as unthinkable as an Army base honoring Benedict Arnold or Alger Hiss or Aldrich Ames.
Bragg wasn't even a great general! He was an incompetent bumbler who lost far more battles than he won and was intensely disliked by his men, who regarded him as a tyrant. As I have written, I have no sympathy for the woke nihilists who want to topple or expunge anything that honors men and women whose careers were admirable except for some notable respect in which, by modern standards, they fell short. But glorifying traitors was always an obscenity. Trump's devoted fans may cheer his call to revive the name "Fort Bragg" but Congress isn't about to repeal the law that finally cleansed America's military spaces of veneration for the Confederacy. Even Republican lawmakers will want no part of stripping the name "Liberty" from one of the nation's foremost military facilities. Braxton Bragg has been relegated to the anonymity he merits, and there he will remain.
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What I Wrote Then
Not your typical column
This year, to mark my 30th anniversary as a Globe columnist, I am occasionally resurrecting a column that I wrote about a subject far off the beaten path — an idiosyncratic topic that no one was expecting at the time and that I have never written about since.
This is a column I wrote in 2003 after visiting the town of Milton, Mass., to look at — well, what did I see?
"A miracle in Massachusetts," June 26, 2003:
MILTON, Mass. — I came here to see a miracle.
I drove to this placid Boston suburb to view for myself a sight that has become one of the biggest attractions in New England: a nondescript third-story window on a medical office building next to Milton Hospital. It was there, on June 10, that someone noticed that a large stain on the glass looked strikingly like a Madonna with a child. In the two weeks since, tens of thousands of people have flocked to the hospital to gaze at the image. Many of them believe it is a sign from Heaven, and they have turned the window and the brick wall that contains it into a shrine to the Virgin Mary.
When I arrived on the hospital grounds one evening this week, about 350 people were already there. Dozens of others, in cars and on foot, were streaming in behind me. All eyes turned to the window, where the whitish discoloration — the result of condensation caused by a ruptured chemical seal — did resemble a robed woman holding a baby. Many in the crowd, perhaps most, clearly believed themselves to be in the presence of something miraculous. More than a few were fingering rosary beads and praying; their murmured Hail Marys were audible everywhere I turned. "Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners. . ."
Eight or 10 people were on their knees beneath the window. One woman repeatedly touched the wall and then her head, as if anointing herself with its unseen essence. Bouquets of flowers rested on the ground, along with pictures, money, and handwritten notes. Nearby, a small group of elderly Vietnamese prayed in their native tongue. Parents pointed out the image to children; hospital patients with IV drips were trundled over in wheelchairs to pay homage. Many in the crowd simply stared. I cannot remember ever being surrounded by so many people who were sure God was sending them a message.
But is this really how God communicates with His children — through chemical deposits on a suburban hospital window? And is this really how He would want them to respond — by swarming into that suburb, clogging the hospital's parking lot, and offering flowers or prayers?
The Archdiocese of Boston has declined to express an opinion on whether the anomaly in the Milton window is a genuine miracle; its spokesman suggests instead that it doesn't really matter. "If it leads to a deepening of faith," says the Rev. Christopher Coyne, "it's a good thing." The Rev. Gilbert Phinn, pastor of St. Elizabeth's in Milton, concurs. "Anything that inspires devotion is a good thing," he told the Boston Herald, "and that's certainly what this is doing."
Certainly God has the power to send a message without resorting to supernatural effects. In Genesis, God tells Noah after the Flood that He will never again destroy the world — and that the rainbow will forever be a reminder of that promise. Rainbows can be readily explained by the laws of optics; in that sense they are no more miraculous than chemical condensation forming on a window. And if a rainbow can inspire thoughts of the divine, why not a Madonna-shaped stain?
But thoughts of the divine are of value only if they lead to self-appraisal and changed behavior. Otherwise, what is the point? What is accomplished by kneeling beneath "Our Lady of the Window" if nothing about your life is altered when you get up?
"When I saw it, I knew it was a sign from God or something," one young woman told the Quincy Patriot Ledger. "When I left there, there was something different. I felt holy. I felt like I was a better person."
There is no reason to doubt her sincerity. But surely God cares less whether she feels like a better person than whether she acts like one. True spiritual self-improvement takes time and effort and discipline. There is no shortcut — not even at the site of a "miracle."
One clergyman made the point beautifully in a letter to The Boston Globe. "I don't know if the image in Milton Hospital's window is of divine origin or simply a curious natural phenomenon," wrote the Rev. John Swencki of Waltham, "but I am certain it would please and honor the Virgin Mary if the onlookers would stop gawking at the window and go inside the hospital, become a volunteer, visit patients, make a donation, pick up litter on the grounds, offer hospitality to families of patients who live a distance away, or escort patients into and out of the hospital."
That gets it just right. With or without a miraculous apparition, Heaven's message is what it has always been: Love thy neighbor.
I came here to see a miracle and I saw one, but it wasn't condensation on a window. It was in all the people who had come to view it — in their uniquely human yearning to find divine involvement in this world. The spirit that drew them here may have been God's gift. Where it takes them when they leave is up to them.
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The Last Line
"Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a damned good time together." . . . "Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?" — Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
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Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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