Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz said on Tuesday that the “Electoral College needs to go,” forcing the Kamala Harris campaign to release a statement saying it does not support abolishing the Constitutional mechanism for presidential elections.
At two campaign fundraisers on the West Coast, Walz called for abolishing the Electoral College, arguing that it forces candidates to focus too much attention on a handful of battleground states, The New York Times reported.
“I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go. We need a national popular vote,” Walz told donors at California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s home in Sacramento. “So we need to win Beaver County, Pennsylvania. 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.”
At an event earlier on Tuesday, Walz told supporters that he is “a national popular vote guy, but that’s not the world we live in.”
Following the Minnesota governor’s call for the Electoral College to be abolished, the the Harris campaign said in a statement, “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.”
“He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes. And, he was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts,” the statement added.
The Electoral College was established in Article II and the 12th Amendment of the Constitution, which calls for “Electors” to “meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President.” The system requires presidential candidates to gain support from voters across the U.S. instead of focusing on states and cities with the largest populations.
As governor, Walz has pushed for presidents to be elected by popular vote instead of through the Electoral College. In May of 2023, Walz signed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact into law, making Minnesota the 17th state to agree to award its electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote.
Walz is not the only Democrat pushing for the end of the Electoral College. After losing the 2016 election to former President Donald Trump, Democrat Hillary Clinton argued for electing presidents through a national popular vote. While Clinton won the popular vote against Trump, she lost to the Republican nominee in the Electoral College 227 to 304.
During the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, candidates Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) all called for abolishing the Electoral College while on the campaign trail. Harris said in 2019 that she was “open to the discussion” of abolishing the Electoral College.
“I mean, there’s no question that the popular vote has been diminished in terms of making the final decision about who’s the president of the United States and we need to deal with that,” Harris said.
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