With even Donald Trump sometimes calling the Electoral College “ a disaster for a democracy,” it’s likely that this school’s accreditation could be seriously challenged when Congress matriculates next year. But what’s not well known is that Maine’s U.S. senators — Margaret Chase Smith and Edmund Muskie — in the 1960s and early 1970s played a role in championing the most significant effort to overthrow the system.
In 1969, with bipartisan support including the backing of newly elected President Richard Nixon, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 338 to 70 to pass a constitutional amendment to shut down the Electoral College and substitute it with a national popular vote. The next year, a majority of U.S. senators also supported the plan, but it failed to muster a required two-thirds vote. Nevertheless, voting on what was then known as the Bayh-Celler amendment was the closest the United States has ever come to enacting a popular vote system.
Interest was triggered by the wrenching 1968 election, the last time any third-party presidential candidate won votes in the Electoral College. By carrying electoral votes of five states, some observers feared that Alabama’s George Wallace, who ran as the candidate for the American Independent Party, would deprive a majority of electoral votes to either Nixon or Hubert Humphrey. In such an instance, the House of Representatives, with each state entitled to cast only a single vote, would choose the president, while the Senate would choose the vice president. It’s a process that was seen as not only less democratic than the Electoral College, but it also had the potential of choosing a president and vice president who might be incompatible.
Against this backdrop, Maine’s U.S. senators were prominent advocates of revamping the system. The state’s senior senator, Republican Margaret Chase Smith, had been for many years proposing a national popular vote. Though she supported the Bayh-Celler amendment, her bill would have gone a step further by doing away with the political convention and caucus system, substituting it with a national primary to choose presidential nominees. Moreover, her proposal included a requirement for runoffs whenever a candidate failed to win a majority of votes in either a primary or general election.
Smith’s counterpart, Democrat Edmund Muskie, who had in the 1968 election been Humphrey’s running mate, also ardently supported a national popular vote. In his 1969 remarks before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Muskie called attention to the faithless North Carolina elector who voted for Wallace instead of the state’s popular vote winner, Nixon. He also mentioned the 1960 actions of some electors from Alabama and Oklahoma to hijack the process in an attempt to withhold votes from John F. Kennedy and Nixon to extract concessions from them favorable to conservative causes as a condition for their support.
Muskie also asserted that the Electoral College failed to take into consideration the evolution of America from a country of separate, sovereign states into a cohesive national government and then went on to observe that “the President seeks and derives his support from the nation as a whole, not from one state at a time.”
What’s remarkable about Smith and Muskie’s advocacy is that it was likely against the narrower interests of their constituents. Because even small states, such as Maine, have a guaranteed threshold of electoral votes, Maine for more than a century had a proportionately greater clout in presidential elections than it would have under a national popular vote. It’s unlikely that Trump would have campaigned five times in Maine had it not been for our skewed influence.
There are also broader policy implications for Maine’s place at the national bargaining table. Because of our small population, doing away with the Electoral College might undermine Maine’s ability to compete with larger states for federal funds. Maine senators who vote for a national popular vote might be accused of throwing Bath Iron Works and Portsmouth Naval Shipyard under the bus.
It’s perhaps a tribute to the stature and influence of Smith and Muskie that neither perceived the prospect of losing the benefits of federal investments in the state as a consideration in their support of a system that might blunt the state’s leverage in Washington.
The outcome of the today’s proposals is a bit problematic, even if they do win the support of a President Trump, but it is intriguing that those pursuing them will be walking in footsteps that have somewhat unlikely origins in a state the size of Maine.
Paul Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached by email at pmills@myfairpoint.net.