Well, everything I said in the grandparent would still apply if there were more than two major political parties in the US, or if electoral votes were tabulated in a different way (a ranked-preference voting system, say). There seems to be a loose consensus that first-past-the-post election schemes tend to lead to two-party systems, but I’d expect the presence of an electoral college to have a minor if any effect.
(The last time this was significant relative to the two-party system was probably the election of 1992, when Ross Perot swung just under 20% of the popular vote as an independent but carried no states.)
Thinking about it, I think that the main effect of the electoral college is to amplify the two-party-ism of the first-past-the-post voting system (by making it that a person with less than 50% of the votes can beat a person with more than 50% of the votes).
I also think that, from the outside, removing the electoral college looks like an easier fix than changing the first-past-the-post nature of the vote.
Well, everything I said in the grandparent would still apply if there were more than two major political parties in the US, or if electoral votes were tabulated in a different way (a ranked-preference voting system, say). There seems to be a loose consensus that first-past-the-post election schemes tend to lead to two-party systems, but I’d expect the presence of an electoral college to have a minor if any effect.
(The last time this was significant relative to the two-party system was probably the election of 1992, when Ross Perot swung just under 20% of the popular vote as an independent but carried no states.)
Thinking about it, I think that the main effect of the electoral college is to amplify the two-party-ism of the first-past-the-post voting system (by making it that a person with less than 50% of the votes can beat a person with more than 50% of the votes).
I also think that, from the outside, removing the electoral college looks like an easier fix than changing the first-past-the-post nature of the vote.