Two-Thirds Of Democrats Want To Scrap The Electoral College

Most Democrats want to see the nation switch over to a popular vote system for electing the nation’s leader, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds, with about 4 in 10 also saying that they will refuse to accept Donald Trump as their legitimate president.

Americans overall are narrowly in favor of changing the way the nation elects its presidents. Forty-one percent support amending the Constitution so that the candidate who receives the most total votes nationwide wins the election, while 34 percent would prefer to keep the current system. Another 25 percent aren’t sure.

Given that Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is winning the popular vote, the views are perhaps unsurprisingly divided along partisan lines ― a change from past decades, when doing away with the Electoral College was broadly popular among members of both parties. This was the case even in more recent years.

“Republicans were far less supportive than Democrats of abolishing the Electoral College in late 2000, when Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush had lost the popular vote, but was fighting a legal battle to win Florida and therefore the Electoral College,” Gallup’s Lydia Saad wrote in 2013. “Since then, however, Republicans have gradually become less protective of the Electoral College, to the point that by 2011, a solid majority of Republicans were in favor of abolishing it.”


Source Huffington Post

Democrats now favor a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, 66 percent to 14 percent, according to the HuffPost/YouGov survey, while Republicans support keeping the current system by 67 percent to 13 percent. Independents are close to evenly split. 

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