The Unpopular Vote

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Speaker 10 It's 1972. A young British family is is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.
Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

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Speaker 10 The true story of a family's fight for survival, hosted by Becky Milligan. This is Adrift, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House.

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Speaker 1 Wait, you're listening. Okay.

Speaker 1 You are listening

Speaker 1 to Radio Lab. Lab.
Radio Lab. From

Speaker 1 WNYC.

Speaker 1 Hey, I'm ready to go. Let's go.
This is Radio Lab. I'm Letzif Nasser.

Speaker 16 Good.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I'm Annie McEwen.

Speaker 16 I'm going to be in the thing.

Speaker 1 I'm going to to be in the thing. Yeah, sure.
Why not?

Speaker 16 And I'm Annie McEwen.

Speaker 1 And you might be wondering why you're here, Annie McEwen. I thought this was the bathroom.
What am I doing here?

Speaker 1 Well, I needed help. I needed a companion.

Speaker 1 Okay, Lulu's out. Lulu's out, still on maternity leave.
And I wanted you here for this story because you and I, we are both. Canadians,

Speaker 1 and I wanted to do a story that is not about Canada, but about something essential to this country, the United States.

Speaker 1 And I just thought there's a value to you and I not being from here in this foreign land.

Speaker 16 Like we're aliens staring out of the cockpit of our UFOs at the new land in front of us and observing. We're anthropologists.

Speaker 1 Yeah. We're very polite anthropologists.
Okay. And so if we could, I would like for us to turn our Canadian eyes to

Speaker 1 the U.S. presidential election.

Speaker 19 This election is close. Everyone knows that.

Speaker 1 And so, well, so maybe my first question is just, what do you think about when you think about an American election?

Speaker 1 The circus.

Speaker 1 The carnival. So put on Pavarotti singing Ave Maria.

Speaker 16 Nice and loud. It's sort of a grotesque carnival type thing.

Speaker 16 That is just so confusing.

Speaker 1 I'm just like in awe of how complicated it is. Yeah, that's the thing.

Speaker 1 When I first got here, the way this country picked president felt to me like here we've got our reds, we've got our blues, a giant-ups, Rube Goldberg machine with all kinds of, you know, it's like...

Speaker 1 Take a look at this. This is her big blue firewall.
If Pennsylvania goes blue, eight doors open up. Slip back.
the blue wall. And a marble hits Michigan and a mousetrap falls on Wisconsin.

Speaker 20 So that's her clearest path to victory, but but she's got several paths.

Speaker 1 Or how about...

Speaker 19 Drake Harris loses Georgia.

Speaker 1 Well, guess what? Look out for North Carolina.

Speaker 22 Come over now to the Sun Belt Battleground states.

Speaker 1 Which means then you really need to pay attention to Nevada and Arizona.

Speaker 22 Well, those are very, very swingy states that are very much in play for both campaigns right now.

Speaker 1 And it's sort of just like...

Speaker 1 How?

Speaker 1 Like, one of, if not the most important election in the world. How is this the system? Like, just the system seems so arbitrary and confused.

Speaker 1 It's always seemed so arbitrary and confusing until I heard this story.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 This story for me felt like it explained so much about how Americans picked their president and why, but also that it didn't necessarily have to be this way.

Speaker 1 And there was a moment, there was one moment, not like much more recent than I expected. There was one moment where it all could have been a lot simpler.

Speaker 1 And it all almost was

Speaker 1 a lot simpler.

Speaker 1 Hello.

Speaker 1 Hi. How are you? And it's a story I first heard.
Good. How are you? I'm good.

Speaker 16 I'm good. Sorry.
We're a little,

Speaker 16 as usual, slightly frantic here.

Speaker 1 From my friend and mentor, Harvard historian, Jill Lapore.

Speaker 1 So the story starts with a guy.

Speaker 16 And I kind of love this guy.

Speaker 1 Birch Bai.

Speaker 16 And I especially love him because of his jingle. Hey, look him over.

Speaker 1 He's my kind of guy. His first name is Birch.
His last name is Bai. He was a U.S.
senator. From Indiana.
Or who's your state?

Speaker 16 Like a very wholesome-looking kind of corn-fed guy. One has done before, so hey,

Speaker 1 very handsome, charming, dimples, blue-eyed young guy.

Speaker 16 Like a John F. Kennedy monkey, as they would say.

Speaker 1 He literally gets called the Kennedy of the Midwest.

Speaker 25 Please join me in a warm welcome for the Democratic Senator from Indiana.

Speaker 10 Hi.

Speaker 10 Birch Five.

Speaker 26 And thank you very much.

Speaker 16 He was very ambitious.

Speaker 27 I think we have a responsibility to see.

Speaker 16 Very, very ambitious.

Speaker 29 That this country is today and will be for future generations.

Speaker 30 What Abraham Lincoln described as the one last best hope.

Speaker 26 It's a rather significant responsibility.

Speaker 30 It's ours,

Speaker 26 yours, and mine.

Speaker 26 And I hope we don't shirk it.

Speaker 16 So he's elected to the Senate in 1962, takes office in 1963. And when he gets there, he's one of the youngest members of the Senate.

Speaker 20 He's still wet behind the ears.

Speaker 31 Yeah, he's 34 years old.

Speaker 1 So Birch died in 2019, but we were able to talk to two of his former staffers.

Speaker 20 I'm Jay Berman. At one point, I was legislative assistant to Senator Birch Bay of Indiana.
At another point, I was the chief of staff.

Speaker 31 And my name is Bob Blaymeyer. I spent the first 13 years of my adult life starting as a freshman in college working for Senator Birch Bayh.

Speaker 1 So a couple things to know about Birch. One.

Speaker 31 Birch had an ice cream addiction.

Speaker 1 He loved ice cream.

Speaker 31 Which was bane in my existence for many years longer.

Speaker 1 Why, wait, why?

Speaker 31 Because you're always on a tight schedule, and he was the dairy queen, and we had to go there. He carried a spoon in his briefcase.

Speaker 1 Seriously.

Speaker 1 And then the other thing,

Speaker 1 which we already mentioned, he was really ambitious. But he was a problem solver.

Speaker 31 He would see something that needed to be fixed and go after it.

Speaker 1 And when he gets to the Senate in 1963, he immediately has a problem.

Speaker 1 It's a kind of petty personal problem, but he is put on the judiciary committee because he'd gone to law school.

Speaker 1 But as a junior member, he doesn't get to chair a subcommittee, which sounds like who cares?

Speaker 1 Sounds very boring. But

Speaker 1 that's what people want. Yeah, because that's how you actually get a little slice of power power in Congress and how you can actually do things.
Okay.

Speaker 20 Well, what happens is there was a subcommittee on constitutional amendments.

Speaker 1 And it was kind of a dud of a committee.

Speaker 20 Didn't do a lot of work.

Speaker 16 It was known as the graveyard where proposed amendments go to die. But the chair of the subcommittee suddenly dies.

Speaker 1 So the guy in charge of all the subcommittees is like, all right, I'm going to shut it down. We're just like spending money on this thing.
It's pointless.

Speaker 1 But Burch, when he finds out about this, he goes straight to the guy in charge and he's like, Hey, don't worry about these budgetary concerns.

Speaker 20 I'll finance the committee out of my own Senate office budget.

Speaker 1 And Burch is just telling him, Hey, come on. It's available now.
Nobody wants it. Let me have it.

Speaker 16 I need something to play with.

Speaker 1 Because he's just looking for something to grab onto. Yeah.

Speaker 16 He doesn't have like a big plan for the Constitution. He's not that guy.

Speaker 1 But he's a charmer. So eventually the guy said, Sure, Birch, you can have it.

Speaker 31 And it changed his life and it changed our country.

Speaker 1 Because two months later,

Speaker 32 bang. Here is a bulletin from CBS News.

Speaker 1 November 22nd, 1963.

Speaker 33 Three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas.

Speaker 1 John F.

Speaker 16 Kennedy is shot and killed.

Speaker 32 Vice President Johnson will be taking the oath of office shortly and become the 36th President of the United States.

Speaker 1 Two weeks later in the New York Times, there's an article with the headline, succession problem.

Speaker 20 About how the terrible assassination of President Kennedy raised an issue of what if a president became disabled? Because Kennedy didn't die immediately.

Speaker 1 What if he'd gone into a coma or been brain dead?

Speaker 20 So disabled that he could not have carried out the duties of the president.

Speaker 1 Duties that could include the power to launch nuclear weapons.

Speaker 31 There was nothing in the Constitution in this.

Speaker 16 People are like, shoot, we don't have a plan for this.

Speaker 1 Which

Speaker 1 was a problem.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 31 there's Birch, the chairman of the subcommittee on constitutional amendments.

Speaker 1 And this seems like a constitution level problem. Let's fix it.

Speaker 31 We got a problem. Let's fix it.

Speaker 1 But another problem, passing a constitutional amendment is like the hardest thing you can do as a politician.

Speaker 20 Because you're required to get two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and three-fourths of the state legislatures. All of them.
Not an easy thing to do.

Speaker 20 But Birch, he took that as a challenge.

Speaker 16 And he's got dimples.

Speaker 1 He's got charisma.

Speaker 20 Unbelievable political skills.

Speaker 16 And one of the things he did, he went to the American Bar Association.

Speaker 1 He pulled in lawyers, political scientists, to try to build a coalition to get non-partisan support behind him so he can take this amendment, go to both parties, and say, it's just logical.

Speaker 1 This amendment is simple. Easy.

Speaker 16 It's kind of a no-brainer amendment.

Speaker 1 We've got a problem. Let's fix it.

Speaker 1 So he takes his amendment. He goes to the House, the Senate, all the state legislators.

Speaker 16 And overwhelmingly, it passes

Speaker 1 a whole brand new amendment to the Constitution.

Speaker 20 And that is the 25th Amendment. Presidential inability and succession.

Speaker 1 Now, the kind of interesting thing is that if you have, have you heard of the 25th Amendment before? No. No.
Okay.

Speaker 16 So we're calling on Vice President Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment.

Speaker 1 It came up a lot during both the Trump presidency and

Speaker 16 25th amendment.

Speaker 1 It has come up a lot during the Biden presidency.

Speaker 16 Which would possibly remove him from office.

Speaker 1 Of like, oh, look at this guy. He's so old and he's so irrational and dah da da and we should use the 25th amendment to unseat this guy or whatever, right?

Speaker 1 Like it's a sort of political weapon now, right? But initially it was not supposed to be that. It was not political.

Speaker 35 It was just practical.

Speaker 28 Writing the 25th amendment to the Constitution is one of the ways I have been able to serve both Indiana and the nation.

Speaker 1 And for Birch, you know, this young, ambitious guy, like, this is a huge deal. Like it, like a founding father-level achievement.
He's still in his 30s.

Speaker 16 Birch five. What's his theme song?

Speaker 5 Hey, look him over.

Speaker 16 He's just singing it to himself in the graveyard.

Speaker 1 That's right. Didn't he check me out? Okay, so he passes this constitutional amendment.
And Jill says, because it's so hard to pass an amendment.

Speaker 16 Once one happens, people are like, oh. I forgot.
You can amend the Constitution.

Speaker 1 And all of a sudden, it's like a window opens.

Speaker 16 And this burst of amendment activity.

Speaker 1 And suddenly Birch's Birch's graveyard became like a dance club that everybody wanted to get in. And he's the bouncer.

Speaker 16 I was thinking of like Candyland.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's the candy man and everyone wants into Candyland.

Speaker 16 I kind of feel like it's more of a candy guy than a dance club guy.

Speaker 1 Sure, sure. Fair.
But yeah, so all of these people are coming to Birch with these ideas for what they want to see in the Constitution, including. the new president, Lyndon B.
Johnson.

Speaker 20 And he says, well, you know, you just passed the Constitution Amendment. We'd like you to be the sponsor of one that we want, which is to eliminate what we call the faithless elector.

Speaker 16 Faithless elector?

Speaker 1 Faithless elector.

Speaker 16 Like without religion?

Speaker 1 Uh, no.

Speaker 1 But.

Speaker 1 Okay, so here we are actually finally getting to the thing of electing a president. Okay.

Speaker 1 Wait, so most people don't actually realize this, but when you vote

Speaker 1 for the president of the United States, you're not actually voting for the president of the United States. You're voting for someone who then votes for the president of the United States.
Oh.

Speaker 1 So those people are called electors.

Speaker 1 And basically how this goes is like you vote in your state. Your state has a certain number of these electors.

Speaker 1 And then the electors take a pledge to vote for the candidate who got the most votes in your state.

Speaker 20 But

Speaker 20 a pledge is a pledge, and it could be broken.

Speaker 1 In the history of U.S.

Speaker 1 presidential elections, approximately 156 electors have broken that pledge and either not voted or have voted for a different candidate, essentially have acted as faithless electors.

Speaker 1 And Johnson, for a lot of reasons, just thought, okay, this is a problem. And Birch, you're a problem solver.

Speaker 20 So we'd like you to eliminate electors and therefore the prospect of a faithless elector. And Birch said, sure, I'll introduce it as a constitutional amendment.

Speaker 1 But what happened?

Speaker 1 What happened was, once Birch started holding these hearings on faithless electors, he started learning more and more about the Electoral College, about how it came to be, about why we still had it.

Speaker 1 And the more he learned, the more he became sort of radicalized. Convinced that this system, the Electoral College, that it's a ticking time bomb.

Speaker 1 And that somebody

Speaker 1 had to stop it.

Speaker 1 That's coming up after the break.

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Speaker 35 It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.
Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

Speaker 35 All they have left is a life raft and each other.

Speaker 35 This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan listen to a drift an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House follow and listen on Apple podcasts

Speaker 1 Latif Annie Radio Lab okay before we get going I'm curious what do you what do you as a Canadian here on a visa uh what do you know about the Electoral College okay well I guess when I first got here I thought this is probably a school you go to when you want to become become president.

Speaker 1 It's a college. It is.
That was my

Speaker 1 first question about it. Why is it called college? You know what it is? It's like, so the use of the word college here, this is a total tangent.

Speaker 1 It's college, like, you know how they have like the college of cardinals or the college of surgeons or whatever. It's like college is just like the meaning is just a group of people.

Speaker 16 Oh, like a pot of whales.

Speaker 1 It's like a pot of whales. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1 Okay, so we left off. Birch by is now focusing his problem-solving gaze on the Electoral College.
He's having these committee hearings, and he's learning, right,

Speaker 1 why it exists, what it does,

Speaker 1 how it works. And so I think for us to be able to understand why all of this radicalizes him, we have to learn what he learned.
We have to go back and understand

Speaker 1 the Electoral College. Okay, let's.

Speaker 1 So let's go. Let's go all the way to the beginning to explain.
Explain.

Speaker 16 I don't know if we had started, but it sounds like we haven't even started.

Speaker 1 No, we haven't even started. It's so wonky.
But we're ready. You have me.

Speaker 1 I'm your candyman.

Speaker 1 I don't follow you anywhere. Okay.
All right.

Speaker 1 So here we go.

Speaker 1 So here we are in the candy land that is Philadelphia, 1787, the Constitutional Convention. And founding fathers are like, we're starting this new country.
We're very excited about it.

Speaker 1 The thing we can all agree on is we do not want a king, but we do kind of need someone to be in charge. So we're going to have this person called the president.

Speaker 1 But how are we going to choose the president? That would require some thought. Can I pause and take a little sip of Coke here? Yeah, of course.
Go for it. By the way, this is Alex Kaysar.

Speaker 1 Also, I should say, even in our first conversation when I was talking to Jill.

Speaker 16 So there's a great book by Alex Kaysar called, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

Speaker 1 She brought you up. And then basically every other interview we've done for this story, people have brought you up.
That's what I tried to do in that book.

Speaker 1 So he wrote the book, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? And he's also a professor of history and social policy at Harvard University. But

Speaker 1 so anyway,

Speaker 1 they couldn't agree on a method of choosing the president.

Speaker 16 And so there are some ideas on the table.

Speaker 1 One idea was, well, we just came up with Congress.

Speaker 16 All right, well, Congress should just elect the president.

Speaker 1 But that's a bad idea. Then you lose separation of powers and checks and balances.

Speaker 16 Then the president would be answerable to Congress. Like, what if he runs for re-election? He needs to have their favor.
That's stupid. We can't do that.
That's a dumb idea. Thanks very much.

Speaker 16 So someone else in the room says, well, what about the people? And Mayor Franz's like, no, we can't do that.

Speaker 1 Look, you know, how is Farmer Johnson in a distant county going to know about some guy in Virginia running for president?

Speaker 16 It's 1787. People didn't know anybody beyond their own neighborhood or town.

Speaker 1 So what they decided to do was to take a break for a week. They just left Philadelphia.
George Washington went fishing for the week. What?

Speaker 1 And they left behind a committee called, and you'll like this, it was called the Committee on Unfinished Parts.

Speaker 16 I kind of love that.

Speaker 1 Right? Okay, so these founders, most of whom you never heard of,

Speaker 1 weeks later, they are still stuck there in Philadelphia.

Speaker 16 All the cool guys are fishing.

Speaker 1 All the cool guys are out fishing and doing other stuff, and they have to figure this this out. To get this thing done, they wanted to get it sent to the states.

Speaker 1 So they're like, okay, how do we do this? How do we pick a president? How do we do this? And then they figured it out. They were like, okay, how about we just copy-paste Congress?

Speaker 16 What does that mean?

Speaker 1 Well, it's... How do you copy-paste

Speaker 16 like just plagiarize?

Speaker 1 They're not going to plagiarize. They're just like, okay, we know everybody's already agreed on Congress, right?

Speaker 1 There's been a lot of debate, a lot of arguing, but what they did to make a government that everybody agreed on, to make Congress, is they started putting thumbs on scales for different groups of people.

Speaker 16 Thumb on a scale. Go over it quickly.

Speaker 1 Okay, so one of the thumbs is they make the Senate and they say every state, doesn't matter if you're big or small, you get two senators.

Speaker 1 And so that's a little thumb on the scale for the small states that don't have a lot of people in them so that they aren't completely overrun by the big states. Okay.
The other thumb is for the South.

Speaker 1 They say, okay, you can count an enslaved person in your state as three-fifths of a person. That way, you boost the population of your state and you get more representatives in the House.

Speaker 1 That was another thumb to give more power to the South so they weren't overrun by the North. You know, you can imagine them sitting there.
Okay, so how do we choose a president?

Speaker 1 Well, do big states have more influence than small states? And, you know, what about slaves? And then we're going to reopen that whole thing. No, we're going to import the whole thing.

Speaker 1 So, what the Electoral College is, is in some respects a replica of Congress.

Speaker 1 If you think about it, each state has electors equal to the number of representatives plus the number of senators. Okay.

Speaker 1 And then the electors would convene in their state capitals and cast their electoral votes. And so the committee's like, bingo, job done.

Speaker 16 So that sort of seems smart to me.

Speaker 1 It is, under the circumstances, very clever solution. Yeah.
So that also is stuff they put in the Constitution, right? So it's like there's this body of electors that vote for the president.

Speaker 1 Each Each state has a certain number of electors based on how many representatives they have in Congress. All of that is in the Constitution.

Speaker 1 What is not in the Constitution is how to convert the people's votes in the state into electoral votes. Do you do it proportionally?

Speaker 1 Where if you get 53% of the state's vote, you get 53% of the electoral vote. Right, right.

Speaker 1 Or you could do it by district. Each district in a state gets an electoral vote.
But ultimately, the founders are like, we're going to let the states decide.

Speaker 16 That makes sense. That's like an important part of this country is that the states

Speaker 16 are making big decisions. That's true.

Speaker 1 But that might be the biggest mistake they made in this whole process.

Speaker 1 And Alex says there is this pivotal moment pretty early on where the system we now have

Speaker 1 starts to really take shape. In the 1800 election.

Speaker 1 Between these two sort of juggernauts in the history of this country, Adams and Jefferson. Now, they have also run against each other in 1796.
And in that election, which Adams won.

Speaker 1 Adams had gotten an electoral vote from the state of Virginia, Jefferson state. Because Virginia was doing district voting.
Adams had won a district, so he got a vote.

Speaker 1 But in 1800, the Virginia legislature didn't want that to happen again. They saw a close election coming.

Speaker 1 And so the Virginia politicians got together and passed a state law that said, okay, we're done with this district system. From now on, the way our electors will vote will be.
Winner-take-all.

Speaker 1 If you win the majority of the votes in this state, all of our electors will cast their votes for you.

Speaker 1 And the Virginian politicians, they did this because they knew Jefferson was going to win a majority of votes in their state, and this way he wouldn't leave any on the table. A little dirty.

Speaker 1 A little dirty.

Speaker 16 Someone's a little smelly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the candy's gone smelly. Because what they're doing is erasing all of the votes of the people who voted for Adams.
Yeah, no, exactly.

Speaker 1 And what's interesting when you look into the documents of it is they passed that law and then they attach to it a kind of apology for doing it.

Speaker 1 Effectively saying, we know this isn't really good or fair. We know it would be better for the country if we did not do this.
But... We're doing it anyway.

Speaker 1 So after Virginia did this, shockingly, Massachusetts, John Adams state retaliated and did a version of the same thing. And Alex says after that, the states.
They're off to the races.

Speaker 1 Another state does it, then another state does it. And this is basically what the system is now.
And what that system leads to is the feeling that your vote just doesn't actually matter.

Speaker 1 Because like if you vote for someone for president and then 50% plus one people in your state vote for someone else, your your vote doesn't get counted. Like

Speaker 1 for president, it means it's thrown out. It's basically, it's effectively thrown out.
And that is essentially happening to tens of millions of votes every presidential election. Right.

Speaker 16 Are you going to make us feel better about voting by the end of this?

Speaker 1 I think so. I think so.

Speaker 45 It is with pleasure that I introduce Senator Birch by.

Speaker 1 Because I kind of think of Birch and what he was trying to do as a sort of beacon of hope.

Speaker 45 Thank you very much, Mark, members of the faculty and student body of UCLA. It's a privilege for me to have the chance to be here with you this afternoon and to share some of my thoughts.

Speaker 1 So when Burch started holding those hearings in the mid-60s on faithless electors, he's having all these different experts come in and testify about the whole history of the Electoral College, the fact that it wipes away all these people's votes, you know, all different kinds of things.

Speaker 1 But one of the things that these experts hit on over and over is that the system is actually fundamentally

Speaker 45 dangerous. And you may say, well, why is it dangerous? Well, basically, it's dangerous.

Speaker 45 The most dangerous aspect of it is the fact that the present system, the Electoral College system, does not guarantee that the man who wins is the man that has the most votes.

Speaker 1 And Alex says that's because when you have this winner-take-all system. It transforms the contest into a contest among states.

Speaker 1 Because once you have winner take all, then winning the state really matters. Winning as many people as you can doesn't.

Speaker 45 And because of this, the political leaders of both of our major parties know.

Speaker 1 You can lose the popular vote in the election.

Speaker 45 It doesn't make any difference if you're soundly defeated.

Speaker 1 So long as you win the right state.

Speaker 45 You're going to have enough electoral votes to be elected president of the United States.

Speaker 1 And this had almost just happened.

Speaker 16 In 1960?

Speaker 16 1960 was one of those very close elections where if like, I think it was like 20 or 30,000 votes had gone differently in a few states, the loser of the popular vote would have won because of the Electoral College.

Speaker 1 And this is the thing that all the experts were saying was dangerous, which was the very thing that... terrified Birch.

Speaker 16 Because, I mean, we think of the United States as in a particularly fragile moment historically right now, but that was also the case in the 1960s.

Speaker 1 So remember, in 63,

Speaker 1 President Kennedy gets shot and killed.

Speaker 16 It's the height of the Cold War.

Speaker 16 There's continued racial unrest and police brutality. By 68.

Speaker 1 Speak of the war in Vietnam.

Speaker 47 The whole world is watching.

Speaker 1 There's a protest at the Democratic National Convention. Violence on the streets.
Dr.

Speaker 33 Martin Luther King.

Speaker 7 M.L.K.

Speaker 1 Jr. is assassinated.
Shot to death.

Speaker 1 Robert Kennedy.

Speaker 48 President Kennedy has been shot.

Speaker 1 Is that possible?

Speaker 1 Is that impossible? So, Birch, he's watching all of this unfold.

Speaker 16 And he's just really worried.

Speaker 45 When we have an electoral college system.

Speaker 1 That if we have a system that can take the loser and make them a winner.

Speaker 16 winner we tend to erode the confidence in the people of this country in their president and in their form of government that is his huge concern that at some point in the future americans will refuse to recognize the legitimacy of a president

Speaker 1 and so once he came out of these committee hearings learning what he did about the electoral college he says you know what we need to do we need to get rid of it We don't need to tinker with it.

Speaker 16 We need to get rid of it.

Speaker 20 Yes, it should be one person, one vote.

Speaker 1 The direct popular election of the president.

Speaker 20 One person, one vote. It's the only plan that guarantees you that the candidate with the most votes will win.

Speaker 20 And from this point forward, he devoted himself

Speaker 20 to this cause.

Speaker 1 To take the Electoral College

Speaker 1 and burn it to the ground.

Speaker 1 That's coming up after a short break.

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Speaker 1 Okay, Latif? Annie. Radiolab.
Back from break. Back from break.
Can I tell you another fun fact about the Electoral College? Lativ.

Speaker 16 I would like nothing more.

Speaker 1 Okay, so take a guess. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 1 What is the least amount

Speaker 1 of the popular vote?

Speaker 1 What is the least proportion, percentage of the country

Speaker 1 that could vote for you where you could still win the Electoral College?

Speaker 16 49%.

Speaker 1 So you think 49% of people have to vote for you to win the Electoral College?

Speaker 16 40%.

Speaker 16 No, I don't know. I mean, nothing makes sense.
I mean, like, in a, yes, I would say 40-something.

Speaker 1 23%.

Speaker 1 Wow. So if you get 50%

Speaker 1 plus one in all the smallest states,

Speaker 1 you could conceivably get 23% of Americans' votes and become the president.

Speaker 1 Hmm.

Speaker 16 That is shocking.

Speaker 1 Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Okay, so 23%, that would be like that has never happened.
Okay.

Speaker 1 What has happened five times, five times in the history of this country, a candidate has lost the popular vote, but won the electoral vote and become the president. And

Speaker 1 besides those five times, it nearly happened in 1960. It nearly happened again in 1968.
And so that year, 1968, Birch Bay thinks

Speaker 1 now is the time to launch this amendment to abolish the Electoral College.

Speaker 20 And having just done the 25th, he had some sense of it.

Speaker 1 And Jay, his chief of staff, said step one, build a coalition.

Speaker 25 And so... Please join me in a warm welcome for the Democratic Senator from Indiana.

Speaker 1 He's going to these nonpartisan groups.

Speaker 10 Senator Birch Bayh, giving speeches

Speaker 1 to the American Bar Association.

Speaker 1 The League of Women Voters, the Chamber of Commerce, we know with confidence that he is the President of the United States.

Speaker 31 Saying that we have a problem here.

Speaker 1 Again, Birch Bay staffer, Bob Blaymeyer.

Speaker 31 I'm telling you,

Speaker 31 it was so exciting.

Speaker 49 Senator Bayh has launched a campaign

Speaker 1 establishing a nationwide movement to do away with the Electoral College. Hammering home this idea, which was.

Speaker 20 Each of us, whether we live in Rhode Island or Texas, one word. Indiana, Alaska, equality.

Speaker 27 Each one of us ought to have the same opportunity to elect a president. It ought to be one person, one vote.
And it seems to me there's no excuse for any other system.

Speaker 20 One person, one vote.

Speaker 31 Everybody's vote should count the same.

Speaker 1 And by 1969.

Speaker 50 Opinion polls show that around 80% of the people favor a more direct election of presidents.

Speaker 1 80% of Americans agreed with him.

Speaker 26 Buy intends to get Congress to pass a direct election law this year.

Speaker 1 And so 1969, his amendment goes in front of the House.

Speaker 20 And what happened was

Speaker 1 boom. Overwhelming.
Huge victory. 339 to 70.
What? Easy pass. Wow.

Speaker 20 Unbelievable. It was just amazing.

Speaker 1 I mean, right now, it would be extremely difficult to get a House vote of 80% to declare what day it was or to declare Christmas to be a holiday.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 as Alex Kesar points out, then the action switches to the Senate. And in the Senate, Birch hits

Speaker 1 a wall.

Speaker 1 A wall made up of two different groups of people. One of them was senators from small states.

Speaker 20 Now, small state senators, mostly Republican, said, oh, well, we get two votes automatically because we have two senators. And that was the compromise made at the Constitutional Convention.

Speaker 1 Remember, those two senators was the thumb on the scale for the small states. Right.

Speaker 31 So, I mean, think of Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota, these states that have these electoral votes have no voters.

Speaker 1 These two votes are a big deal.

Speaker 20 And the small state senators wanted to preserve these two electoral votes.

Speaker 1 So that was one group. And then the other group

Speaker 1 standing in his way were southern segregationists.

Speaker 1 And they were against Birch's amendment because the electoral college in a winner-take-all system gave them more power while continuing to erase black voters.

Speaker 1 It was almost like that same thing back at the convention with the three-fifths clause.

Speaker 1 Because white segregationists could use the black people in their state to count towards the state population, which gave them more electoral voters, more power.

Speaker 1 But at the same time, because of the system, the winner-take-all system, the overwhelming white majority would wipe out

Speaker 1 and erase the black vote. So it becomes something of an article of faith that the Electoral College is key to protecting the, quote, southern way of life.

Speaker 20 Senator James Allen of Alabama, he had a quote, something to the effect that, the Electoral College is the South's only political advantage left.

Speaker 1 Let's keep it.

Speaker 30 The Senate has refused to shut off debate of the proposed constitutional amendment to elect presidents by a direct popular vote.

Speaker 1 And basically, because of these two groups of senators, small state Republicans and Southern segregationists, Birch's amendment gets stuck in the Senate six votes short.

Speaker 51 Six votes short of the necessary two-thirds, and now electoral reform seems about ready to fall.

Speaker 1 But there was one last hope, which came in the form of a very unlikely ally. Nixon.

Speaker 1 Nixon. Republican President Richard Nixon.

Speaker 49 Whether there'll be any action up here on Capitol Hill, it depends pretty much on one man, Richard Nixon.

Speaker 1 And Nixon, even though he got elected by the Electoral College, he had said, It's obsolete. It's dangerous.
It should go. Right.
And Jay says Nixon knew how popular Birch's amendment was.

Speaker 1 He had seen that House vote. So overwhelming.

Speaker 20 That right after it, Nixon made a public statement saying, in view of what the House has done, the only chance for reform of the present system is for the Senate to do the same thing.

Speaker 1 And Nixon, being a Republican president, maybe he could put some pressure on these Republicans who are blocking the amendment.

Speaker 30 It'll take all the political clout a new president can muster to keep this new Congress from sweeping electoral reform under the legislative rug.

Speaker 16 But meanwhile,

Speaker 1 again, Jill Lapore.

Speaker 16 This other whole drama is unraveling in the Senate Judiciary Committee that

Speaker 16 Bayh could not have anticipated, which is that Nixon has a bunch of Supreme Court nominees that are going to come before the Senate Judiciary Committee on which Bayh serves.

Speaker 16 And Nixon has pledged that he will appoint a Southerner to the court.

Speaker 1 So early 1969, Nixon nominates a judge from South Carolina, Clement Hainsworth.

Speaker 16 And Hainsworth, he has this problem.

Speaker 31 Hainsworth had made a number of decisions in which he had a financial interest. He owned stock in companies that he made decisions that helped those companies.

Speaker 1 And in the confirmation hearings, Birch

Speaker 1 planned on voting yes, confirming Hainsworth.

Speaker 31 And Birch kept saying, I gave him every opportunity to say, you're right. You know, if I had to do it again, I would have recused myself.
And he would never do it.

Speaker 31 He kept insisting he had done nothing wrong.

Speaker 1 And to Birch, it was pretty clear that this guy, if not totally corrupt, we got personal financial

Speaker 1 secrets. Yeah.
And so Birch is like, all right, this guy is not fit for the court.

Speaker 1 And so... Good evening.

Speaker 50 In a severe setback to President Nixon, the Senate today firmly refused to confirm the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Clement Hainford.

Speaker 1 Birch by leads the charge against Nixon's Supreme Court nominee.

Speaker 32 President Nixon was obviously not pleased by what the Senate did to his nominee.

Speaker 33 The president issued a written statement in which he expressed disappointment and anger over the Senate rejection of Hainsworth.

Speaker 50 Hainsworth, the 10th man in history to be so rejected, the first since 1930.

Speaker 16 Well, if so, does that mean like what he's doing to Nixon here, is that going to affect his efforts with the amendment stuff?

Speaker 1 At this point, I don't think he knows.

Speaker 16 But Nixon says, goddamn, goddamn Birchby. I'm going to go further south and farther right.

Speaker 16 So he does.

Speaker 16 So he brings in his next southerner, this guy Harold Carswell, who's from Florida, who is further south and much further right, but also happens to be completely unqualified for the Supreme Court.

Speaker 48 I have to tell you, I looked for a place to hide, but there was no one else there.

Speaker 1 This is Birch from an oral history from 2009 done by the University of Virginia's Miller Center, talking about the Carswell nomination.

Speaker 48 I have a good recollection how this all happened.

Speaker 48 Because I'd been sort of commissioned to lead the charge here. I got together in my office

Speaker 1 all of the groups. He said he got together union leaders, Jewish leaders, black leaders.

Speaker 48 I remember going around the room

Speaker 48 and saying, what do you think?

Speaker 48 Now we knew then that Carswell

Speaker 48 as a young 25-year-old when he was running for the state legislature in Georgia, had said, I yield to no man in my belief in white supremacy

Speaker 48 we knew that

Speaker 48 was that enough

Speaker 48 pretty damning well but you know everybody had was exhausted fighting the Hainsworth thing there was no stomach left for another battle

Speaker 48 and as we went around the room here these people who had thrown themselves on the spears of the

Speaker 48 opposition Hainsworth said well you know Birch

Speaker 48 Senator, there have been a lot of changes in the South since then. And,

Speaker 48 you know, Birch, you know, none of us want to be responsible for everything we said when we were 25.

Speaker 48 And it was that way all the way around until we got to Clarence Mitchell,

Speaker 48 who was the executive director of the NAACP.

Speaker 48 We got around to him and he said, well, gentlemen, it was almost as we were getting ready to leave. He said, gentlemen

Speaker 48 um

Speaker 48 i respect where you're all coming from but in my lifetime of experience i found that once a person ever feels that way they never ever really change their mind

Speaker 1 birch says that when he went home that night he couldn't sleep He kept thinking about what Clarence Mitchell had said in that room. And in that moment, he he didn't know what to do.

Speaker 1 Like, here's Nixon, a potential ally for his amendment.

Speaker 20 Nixon had just been elected, okay?

Speaker 31 This is Nixon's first year as a president.

Speaker 1 And to shoot down another nominee of his.

Speaker 20 It would have been the first time a president had had two nominees defeated in 76

Speaker 20 years.

Speaker 1 It would humiliate Nixon, likely turn him against Birch, and kill

Speaker 1 his chance at abolishing the Electoral College.

Speaker 16 The thing the the country least can see that it needs.

Speaker 31 There were several times when he said, if I do this, it's going to hurt me over here.

Speaker 1 Like, where if he votes no, it might hurt his amendment.

Speaker 31 Yes.

Speaker 1 Or do you protect the highest court in the land, the most influential court, from having a white supremacist on it for who knows how long? Like, which thing gives you the best outcome?

Speaker 48 And I was rolling and tossing. In fact, I got out of bed and crawled into bed in the guest room.

Speaker 1 He didn't want to bother his wife, who was asleep. And he started thinking about like

Speaker 1 in their home, they had their son Evan. And he'd always been telling Evan, the way that we make change in this country is we work through the system.
We always work through the system.

Speaker 48 Somehow or other, it came to me that if my face was black and Evan's face was black.

Speaker 1 And this guy, Harold Carswell, was sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Speaker 48 And I said, son, we're going to work through the system. He'd say, Dad,

Speaker 48 the system's already said what it thinks about us.

Speaker 48 So the next morning, I got my staff together and I said, come on, we're going to rally the troops. I think we've got 25 people who stand up against this guy.

Speaker 46 Judge Carswell's nomination died today.

Speaker 1 March 1970, while his amendment is still stuck in the Senate, Birch leads the charge against Carswell.

Speaker 16 And single-handedly destroyed his chance of confirmation.

Speaker 32 The Senate dealt President Nixon another embarrassing defeat, rejecting his second Supreme Court nominee.

Speaker 33 The end of the long fight to confirm the Senate.

Speaker 1 And so Birch's amendment sits and languishes in the Senate six votes short.

Speaker 1 And Nixon, despite having come out publicly and said the Senate had to act on electoral college reform, despite the fact that Nixon was the one last person who could maybe sway some of these Republican senators who were blocking Birch.

Speaker 20 Nixon never lifted a finger.

Speaker 1 He didn't do a thing.

Speaker 20 He never, ever called a single Republican senator and said, I'd like you to vote for direct popular election.

Speaker 51 Bay was asked if it were true the White House is not helping because of his fight against the president's Supreme Court nominees, Hainsworth and Carswell.

Speaker 30 Yeah, I'm not naive enough to suggest that it isn't a possibility, but that's a poor way to run a country.

Speaker 1 Now, we can't say for sure that Nixon was retaliating against Birch, but what we do know is that a few years later, it was made public that Nixon kept a list of his political enemies.

Speaker 1 And the very first name on that list

Speaker 1 is Birch Buy. No.

Speaker 1 And that's the thing.

Speaker 1 Had Birch not tanked Nixon's nominees, maybe Nixon would have pushed some senators around and maybe quite possibly today we would have in the USA a totally different way of picking our president.

Speaker 16 Because one thing is true. If it had gotten through that vote in the Senate, it had already passed in the House.
The support in the public was above 80% at that point.

Speaker 16 It would absolutely have been ratified.

Speaker 1 Instead, it fell six votes short. And that was that.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 presidents come and go. A senator can stick around for a while.
And Birch would ultimately get another chance at passing his amendment under another president.

Speaker 1 Only this time, he would find the people he thought he could count on, the people he thought were on his side, were suddenly standing against him.

Speaker 1 That's after the break.

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Speaker 1 Latif? Annie. Radio Lab.

Speaker 53 Do you know that every time it seems that the Senate gets into a major squabble, my next guest is in the middle of it. He led the fight against the Hainsworth and Carswell nominations.

Speaker 53 Would you welcome the junior senator from Indiana, Senator Birch Bay?

Speaker 1 1970, Birch's election amendment fails. But during the 70s, he goes on to do some pretty momentous momentous stuff.
He passes a different constitutional amendment, the 26th amendment.

Speaker 47 But the injustice of

Speaker 20 lowering the voting age to 18.

Speaker 47 A voting system that sends young men to Vietnam, where the cold statistics on the battlefield show that half of them who died in Vietnam weren't old enough to vote for the public official to sent them there.

Speaker 47 Seems to me this is not the type of democratic system we ought to be proud of.

Speaker 1 So that made for two amendments.

Speaker 31 Making him the only person since James Madison, the founding fathers, to write more than one constitutional amendment.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 16 That's amazing. Wait, was the voting age 21 before?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Also? Yeah, he wrote Title IX.

Speaker 1 Have you ever heard of Title IX? No. It's mostly known for women's college sports.

Speaker 20 But it had to do with the real issue of women in higher education.

Speaker 1 It's this legislation that basically says that any school that gets any public funding needs to treat men and women equally. It changed the country.

Speaker 1 But throughout all of this, the thing that he is just obsessing over and that he thinks would be his biggest legacy is abolishing the Electoral College.

Speaker 1 And in the late 70s, he thinks he has his best shot at doing it. And that's because

Speaker 1 Republican Richard Nixon.

Speaker 45 I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Watergate happened, so he's out of office.

Speaker 26 Now, James Earl Carter, Jimmy Carter, elected the next president of the United States.

Speaker 1 A Democrat from the South is now the President of the United States. When he takes office, one of the first things he does

Speaker 1 is he tells Congress.

Speaker 1 We need to get rid of the Electoral College.

Speaker 1 And in the late 70s, he was set up to do that because now his party, the Democrats, had this big majority in the Senate.

Speaker 16 Clear sailing, smooth sailing ahead. Right.

Speaker 1 They think they have the votes.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 as Birch is getting ready to bring his amendment back to the Senate, a whole bunch of rabbis, leaders of Jewish organizations in New York and in California and other places had started teaming up with leaders in the black community.

Speaker 34 And they have joined the conservative South in support of the Electoral College.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 34 I didn't know if I was having a nightmare.

Speaker 1 This is another former former Birch by staffer, Frederick Williams.

Speaker 34 Yeah, they didn't have to cold cock him like that. You know, he had no idea those guys were going that way.
He's like,

Speaker 1 like, it's very much an at two Brutus kind of a moment, right? Totally.

Speaker 34 It made no sense.

Speaker 16 Okay, well, why are they like, why, why would they do that?

Speaker 1 Well, because

Speaker 1 there was a belief in parts of the African-American community, which is that the Electoral College advantaged black voters because, and this was the theory, that black voters were swing voters in swing states.

Speaker 31 There were a number of Jewish leaders that argued the same thing, that we have this impact on how New York goes and how Florida goes.

Speaker 1 Can you spell that out a little bit more? Can you explain that?

Speaker 31 What they're saying is that if we as a bloc, you know, blacks, for instance, typically have been voting 90% for the Democrat, if their votes can tip which way New York goes, or Florida or Illinois or some other state,

Speaker 31 then they're having a real impact on the Electoral College vote.

Speaker 1 Because those states, like New York used to be a swing state.

Speaker 31 Yeah, and California, too. Mississippi, too.

Speaker 1 And so in these big, crucial swing states, black voters and Jewish voters felt they had sort of an outsized power.

Speaker 1 I mean, Jesse Jackson, prominent black leader at the time, proclaimed, you know, the hands that picked the cotton have now picked the president.

Speaker 1 And this is kind of the thing about the Electoral College, especially in a winner-take-all system, is this possibility that a minority group like black people or Jewish people or Hispanic people or even like labor unions, teacher unions.

Speaker 1 Many groups that you could name could become the decisive votes. Any minority in the right state at the right time could become extremely powerful.

Speaker 1 And thus the switch to a national popular vote would remove that power. And whatever group you belong to, you would just go back to being a tiny minority in the country as a whole.

Speaker 1 And the fear was from these black leaders and Jewish leaders in the 1970s is that political parties could then just ignore them.

Speaker 1 And there's this amazing moment in a committee hearing on Birch's amendment, and Birch is obviously present for it.

Speaker 1 The leader of the National Urban League, very prominent organization, Vernon Jordan, testified at the committee hearing.

Speaker 1 And he opens his testimony by saying, Me and Senator Birch Bayh are very close personal friends. Senator Birch Bayh has been a friend to black people in this country.
But

Speaker 1 I'm here to say we do not support this amendment. And he goes on to basically say, we as a people have been denied power in this country for over 200 years.

Speaker 1 And now that we finally have some, you're trying to curb it.

Speaker 1 And basically goes even further to say, if we were to support this switch to the national popular vote for president, our voting power would quote unquote melt away.

Speaker 46 You You know, just to defend Vernon Jordan, his argument wasn't 100% just, hey, black people are in these states, so we have some power. He has a good quote, too.

Speaker 46 He said, the electoral college system acts as a break to extremism.

Speaker 1 So we did also speak to this guy, Harry Roth.

Speaker 46 I'm director of outreach for Save Our States, a pro-electoral college organization. We defend the electoral college system, trying to educate lawmakers and their constituents.

Speaker 1 And we reached out to him because we saw he wrote an essay about this moment when black leaders and Jewish leaders were coming out against Birch's amendment.

Speaker 46 And, you know, and I mean, I wouldn't say 1979 was the height of racism in America. But, you know, Vernon, Jordan, National Urban League, they were around for a while.

Speaker 46 They saw how bad things could get.

Speaker 46 And, you know, they feared a racial demagogue who hates blacks coming in and winning the presidency by maybe getting enough support from white voters in a time like that.

Speaker 46 But with the Electoral College, that makes it much more difficult. You have to pay attention to blacks.

Speaker 46 You have to pay attention to Jews who I think Jews make up 1% of the population, but Jews make up what percentage of New York? A very, you know, a decent percentage of at least New York City.

Speaker 46 So they're important in a state like that. You can't, it's going to be hard to win New York if you're just attacking Jews left and right.

Speaker 16 Oh, okay. So like it sounds, so like Birch is just sort of taking this in, sort of like taking these arguments in.
What does he do with them? Like, what does he do next?

Speaker 34 Well, I got a call at like, must have been between 6.30 and 7 o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 1 Frederick says when Birch first learned about this opposition that, you know, that all these people were flipping on him.

Speaker 34 He said, please be in the office at eight o'clock. We have to deal with this.

Speaker 1 And it's hard to say exactly which meeting this occurred at and when it took place, but Birch tells his story of when a man from a prominent black organization and a man from a prominent Jewish organization came to his office, sat down with him, and told him, Direct popular election is not good for us.

Speaker 1 That this hurts us in all sorts of ways, and we're not letting you pass this. Just they even ask him to withdraw it.

Speaker 20 And Birch says, I've worked my whole life voting for measures to make you equal to everybody else. And you're sitting in my office telling me that you want your vote to count for more.

Speaker 20 Get the hell out of here.

Speaker 20 Wow.

Speaker 1 And Frederick says he would later talk to that same black leader, the one Birch kicked out.

Speaker 34 And saying, look at, look at, man.

Speaker 34 The senator's been with you all the time going all the way back to cars well and hainsworth what are you doing here he says well we have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies just permanent interests

Speaker 1 so basically what happens is these same black jewish leaders kind of just go down the hall of the Senate and start knocking on doors of a handful of liberal Democrats from big states.

Speaker 1 And those liberal Democrats, including a young senator from the small state of Delaware, Joe Biden, vote against Birch's amendment.

Speaker 1 And so in 1979, once again, his amendment fails. But this time, the wall that stops him is

Speaker 1 liberal Democrats, the few remaining segregationists, and small state Republicans.

Speaker 1 I don't know the degree to which you can say, but like, was that objectively true that they had more clout or sway as minority groups under Electoral College versus how much they would have had in the popular vote?

Speaker 1 It was probably true in the 1976 election when Carter ran, but it certainly wasn't true as a broad pattern. And it was clearly evident within a very few years that

Speaker 1 simply it simply was not a dominant pattern or a clear pattern it was oh wow so it was like a truth with a shelf life yeah a very short shelf life hmm

Speaker 16 okay so like

Speaker 1 what's like what's birch's next step um so 1980 reagan gets elected in a kind of landslide and birch loses his election he's not in office anymore and that's that's the end of his career as a legislator it's a sad story i'm okay well that that's a because it sounds like you all were very productive.

Speaker 1 You all got a lot done.

Speaker 20 Well, we, we, Birch Pry got a lot done, uh, and we always describe this as the one that got away.

Speaker 1 Like, this is the thing you would think about. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 20 It's his, it was, he said, it was his greatest regret.

Speaker 1 Huh. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And, you know, there's this moment.

Speaker 1 uh in one of Birch's oral histories where he kind of he almost like turns on himself and he asks himself, himself like what could I have done differently what could I have done to to to keep that from happening

Speaker 1 and I don't know like from from even what I've read from what we've read like

Speaker 1 it it doesn't feel like there was anything he could have done differently because this was just this is the thing about the Electoral College it's it's it's distributing power right um and and that's that's the whole thing about the Electoral College that he Birch didn't like that it was distributing power.

Speaker 1 He thought power should be equal.

Speaker 1 And that gets to this kind of central question of democracy, which is like, should you put thumbs on scales? How do you do it? And for which people? And for how long?

Speaker 1 And who gets them and who doesn't? And how hard do you press that thumb down? Those are fundamental questions.

Speaker 1 And they're really hard questions to answer.

Speaker 16 Yeah, totally. And it seems like once you do put a thumb on the scale, it's just so hard to take that thumb off.

Speaker 1 Yeah, really hard.

Speaker 1 And Jill even pointed out that after Birch's amendment failed in 1979, like that was kind of it.

Speaker 16 It's a kind of, you know, powerful pronouncement about the end of the campaign to abolish the Electoral College. Have we ever had a hearing on abolishing the Electoral College since?

Speaker 16 Is there any, do we even still do public opinion surveys about it? You know?

Speaker 1 And the thing is,

Speaker 16 Birch Buy was right

Speaker 16 that the more often a presidential candidate will win the Electoral College and lose the popular vote, the more likely it will be that at some point in the future, Americans will refuse to recognize the legitimacy of a president.

Speaker 16 And it doesn't matter which side you favor, you cannot favor an election

Speaker 16 where we can't all agree on the result.

Speaker 19 This election is close. Everyone knows that.

Speaker 54 And in the race to 270 electoral votes, every vote matters.

Speaker 19 If Harris were to get Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania,

Speaker 55 we're going to put New Mexico in play. We're going to put Virginia in play.
We're going to put New Hampshire in play. How are we going to win the battleground state of North Carolina?

Speaker 56 Candidates are fighting to win key Midwestern states. South Asians in the state are the largest and fastest-growing Asian voting bloc there.

Speaker 1 Like Michigan, both are determined to get as much of the union vote there as they can.

Speaker 55 The Democrats, if they can see huge African-American enthusiasms, they'll continue to play there.

Speaker 22 This tells you, it's winning the election.

Speaker 55 Both campaigns agree. Look at all the spending in Pennsylvania.
It's about evenly matched. But then, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina, and Nevada.

Speaker 55 Are the Democrats behind in North Carolina waiting to see if they really mean it, waiting to see if the Harris campaign will put significant money into North Carolina?

Speaker 1 The Prime campaign puts more money into New York today.

Speaker 1 Matt Kilty and I reported this episode. Matt Kilty and Simon Adler produced it.
Matt Kilty, Simon Adler, and Jeremy Bloom contributed original music and sound design. Jeremy Bloom mixed it.

Speaker 1 Diane Kelly fact-checked it. And Becca Bressler and Pat Walters edited it.
We first heard about this story from Jill Lapore, who is writing a book about the Constitution coming out next year.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, you can read her Magisterial History of the United States, These Truths.

Speaker 1 We've linked to that on our website, along with Bob Blaymeyer's Burge By biography, Alex Kesar's book about the Electoral College, and so much more.

Speaker 1 Even Burge Bye's little jingle is on there. What an earworm that is.

Speaker 1 The last thing I have to say: if you're living in the United States and you are able to, please go vote. Peer pressure others to do the same.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much for listening and good luck to us all.

Speaker 1 Indiana's own virgin.

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm David and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler.
Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.

Speaker 1 Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 1 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Shindu Nyanam Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Rebecca Lacks, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandback, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster.

Speaker 1 Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

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