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THE ELECTORAL COL-

LEGE’S IMPACT ON PRESI-

DENTIAL MANDATES AND 

AGENDAS 
 

BILAL YOUSUF AHMED 

 

✵ ABSTRACT 
The Electoral College is the method used in 

every four years to elect the President of the United 

States. Given that the Electoral College gives the 

power to elect the president to state-casted votes, 

the system has in recent years become a source of 

growing controversy given how two presidents, 

George Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016, 

without winning the national popular vote. These 

elections and the public discourse around them 

have brought new life to the purpose and impacts 

of the Electoral College.  

This paper uses key presidential elections, 

including those of John Quincy Adams, Andrew 

Jackson, Benjamin Harrison, Woodrow Wilson, 

Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, give insight on how 

the Electoral College should now be understood. In 

particular, this paper examines the implications of 

the Electoral College on one fundamental question: 

Does election to the presidency via the Electoral 

College route fundamentally affect the ability of a 

president to govern effectively?  

Examining these elections, the context 

around and impact after these elections, and mod-

ern United States political history shows that when 

the Electoral College is not an extraordinary or ex-

ceptionally notable part of an election cycle, the 

Electoral College does not fundamentally affect the 

president’s ability to command public and political 

support required to effectively govern. However, 

when the Electoral College does become a point of 

focus during a presidential election and in the be-

ginning of a president’s term, it has wide-ranging 

impacts. In particular, the College can shape the po-

litical and public mandate the president has to lead, 

shaping their overall agenda for their time in office; 

cause biases to arise towards certain states and con-

servative politics; and undermine their ability to 

serve as a unifying figure. With each modern elec-

tion having an increased focus on the Electoral Col-

lege, the system is likely to cause increased polari-

zation and tension with each passing election if seri-

ous reforms are not undertaken. 

 

1 THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE 
The ideals of the Electoral College are high-

minded and illustrative of the hopes the Founding 

Fathers had for American democracy. As originally 

created, the ideal elector in the Electoral College 

would be a “noble, non-partisan person who, in 

company with his fellow electors in his state, would 

perform the high political function of choosing a 

president and vice-president” (Dixon 1950). It was 

meant to be a system above politics, allowing those 

with the competencies and capabilities required of 

the presidency to rise to the top.  

This is no longer how the Electoral College 

functions. With the trend of states selecting electors 

on the basis of a popular vote starting almost imme-

diately after the first presidential election, presiden-

tial elections became far more politicized, conten-

tious, and dramatic than expected by the Founding 

Fathers. Partisans and politicians now had to 

(mis)use the system in order to get their person of 

choice into the highest office in the land. High ideals 

of politicians above politics devolved into patron-

age and factional candidacies. The ultimate result 

was that, despite the original intent of the Electoral 

College, the system was now a major part of politics 

in America. Those running for president not only 

had to be popular among the Electoral College 

electors: they had to win a popular mandate, gain 

the support of certain states, and ensure their coali-

tions were maintained for their reelection bids. The 

politicalization of the College has evolved to where 

it influences how the public and political actors per-

ceive the victory and mandate of the president, how 

the president frames their agenda, and how the 

president can use the tools of their office. 



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

 

2 CONSTITUTIONAL BACKGROUND 

AND IMPLEMENTATION  
The general structure of the Electoral Col-

lege is relatively simple. As stated in Article II Sec-

tion 1 of the Constitution, “[e]ach State shall ap-

point, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may 

direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole 

Number of Senators and Representatives” given to 

the state (Art. II § 1, United States Constitution 1787 

rev. 1992). This is clear enough -- it is not meant to 

be a direct election, with there being a clear separa-

tion between the election of the presidency and the 

electorate itself. This separation is made even 

clearer when noting that each elector was required 

to “vote by Ballot for two Persons”, meaning that 

each elector had to publicly vote for two people 

they felt would be fit for the presidency (Art. II § 1, 

United States Constitution 1787 rev. 1992). Further, 

prior to the 12th Amendment, there were not sepa-

rate elections for the president and vice president. 

The system in place was such that “after the Choice 

of the President, the Person having the greatest 

Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice 

President. But if there should remain two or more 

who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from 

them by Ballot the Vice President” (Art. II § 1, United 

States Constitution 1787 rev. 1992; superseded by 

12th Amendment on 15 June 1804). And as a final 

separation, the Electoral College -- meeting to elect 

the highest federal office -- would only “meet in their 

respective States”, not at a form or type of national 

convention (Art. II § 1, United States Constitution 

1787 rev. 1992, emphasis added).  

Why does the original structure of the Elec-

toral College matter in the context of our question? 

Before we can address whether the Electoral Col-

lege does affect the ability to govern based on their 

public and political support, we must answer if it was 

meant to. What type of structure were the Founding 

Fathers attempting to create? Presidential scholars 

Sidney Milkis, a professor of politics at the University 

of Virginia, and Michael Nelson, a professor at 

Rhodes College, note that this structure “pre-

vent[ed] a cabal from forming in the Electoral Col-

lege”, meaning it would be nearly impossible for a 

national campaign for a single president to be 

waged (Milkis & Nelson 63). It was also a matter of 

practicality. Having a system that required “voters to 

pass judgment on candidates from distant states of 

whom they knew little or nothing” seemed “imprac-

tical”; having an intermediate body seemed more 

reasonable at the time (Milkis & Nelson 61). Having 

the Electoral College also meant that the “executive 

powers and patronage” would not have to be used 

by the president to secure their reelection (Milkis & 

Nelson 62).  

Regardless of their intentions, the Founding 

Fathers left the United States a novel system that (at 

the time) had compelling positives and negatives. 

Separation as a virtue resonates throughout the 

structure: separation from Congress, separation 

from patronage, separation from the people, sepa-

ration from party politics. Despite arguments that 

might be posited by those in favor of the Electoral 

College, arguments that say the Electoral College 

was the Founding Father’s attempts at “fixing” poli-

tics miss the point of the College itself. The question 

of whether the Electoral College affects the presi-

dent’s ability to govern is inherently framed from the 

view that the president, through constitutional and 

governmental processes, will be forced to engage 

with politics in a meaningful way. On the contrary, 

the Electoral College was made to avoid the presi-

dent from dealing with petty politics altogether. The 

Founding Fathers did not foresee concepts of man-

dates, of election legitimacy, and of political re-

spect. To put it simply: even though the Electoral 

College has different implications regarding the 

ability of a president to govern, it was not meant to. 

The system we are left to analyze therefore is one 

that was meant to be a-political but was instead 

forced into the heart of politics. The Electoral Col-

lege was supposed to be a collage of different fac-

ets of various systems -- an attempt at creating an 

election system that would insulate the president 

from political concerns and allow them to remain fo-

cused on what was in the best interest of the nation. 

Analyzing the impact of the Electoral College on a 

president’s mandate and agenda shows how effec-

tive the Founding Fathers were in creating a system 

where this type of leader would rise, as well as how 



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

 

the College system they created has led to unin-

tended negative effects.  

 

3 IMPACT ON A PRESIDENT’S MAN-

DATE TO LEAD  
A president’s mandate, or political and pub-

lic support necessary to govern, can be deeply con-

nected to their election. In a 2013 paper for Social 

Science History, Julia Azari discusses how presi-

dents-elect may frame their mandates to lead. She 

does so by grouping mandates into three types. The 

first type of framing is based on “directness of rep-

resentation”, which holds that “presidential legiti-

macy comes from the (imagined) relationship with 

the entire electorate”. In other words, the presi-

dent’s mandate comes from the general voting pop-

ulation itself. Having won the people’s support dur-

ing the election, they have a mandate by default. 

The second is based on the “threshold of [the] elec-

tion result”. Unlike the first type, which focuses 

purely on whether or not they retain the support of 

a majority of the electorate, the second type of man-

date focuses on scale. That is, the larger the land-

side, the larger the mandate. The final mandate type 

takes the form of a “policy clarity”, emphasizing the 

campaign’s platform and how the president’s “legit-

imacy as a political actor” comes from the “clarity of 

promises'' and the president’s ambition to work on 

behalf of the electorate (Azari 2013). The president, 

in this third type of mandate, must continue to act 

on behalf of those who voted for him or her in order 

to retain legitimacy as the chief executive. The Elec-

toral College complicates the usage of each of 

these models for mandate claims. The perfect case 

studies to examine this phenomenon would be the 

elections of John Quincy Adams and Donald 

Trump. Milkis and Nelson argue that Adams was 

“severely constrained by the general view that he 

was a minority president”, having been elected by 

the House of Representatives rather than the Elec-

toral College in what became known as the “Corrupt 

Bargain” (Milkis & Nelson 188). Jackson would use 

this framing of Adams’ elections to stay a dominant 

figure in national politics. By 1828, Jackson was us-

ing anger against Adams’ victory to claim that Jack-

son, unlike “minority president” Adams, was the “im-

mediate and direct representative of the people” 

that were deprived of a fair election in 1824 (Dahl 

1990). Later on, Jackson used his victory to rebut 

much of what Adams had supported or protected. 

Jackson attacked the Bank of the United States, for 

instance, arguing that his veto was “justified [as] a 

defense of his or his party’s policies”, thus utilizing 

all three of the mandate types that Azari presents. 

He became a thorn in the side for John Quincy Ad-

ams for four years on the basis that the Electoral Col-

lege should have made Jackson president, but in-

stead remained deadlocked and tossed the election 

to the House of Representatives. He rode this re-

sentment to the White House in 1828.  

This is a clear example of both the direct-

ness of representation argument and the threshold 

of election argument. Jackson and many of his sup-

porters saw Adams as illegitimate, as to them it was 

clear the Electoral College and popular vote plural-

ities had made Jackson the true representative of 

the people. With such a convoluted path to victory, 

Adams was also attacked using the threshold argu-

ment: with no clear electoral mandate, Adams had 

no mandate to lead. Jackson’s own presidency was 

dominated by his claim to be a legitimate political 

actor, allowing him to take dramatic actions on the 

basis that he had “something like a popular ratifica-

tion” as the “direct representative of the American 

people” (Dahl 1990).  

For Jackson and Adams, the extent to which 

they were able to exercise the powers of their office 

was absolutely connected to the manner in which 

they each achieved (or were denied) victory. Yet, 

Robert Dahl argues that Jackson’s “myth of the pres-

idential mandate” began “as a result of his defeat in 

1824 in both the electoral college and the House of 

Representatives” (Dahl 1990). For nearly all previous 

elections, the margin of victory in the Electoral Col-

lege was not of concern since, as discussed when 

looking at the origins of the College, it was a system 

meant to improve “the chances of electing a na-

tional figure who would enjoy majority support” 

(Dahl 1990, emphasis added). And since the Elec-



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toral College was never of concern, it never im-

pacted the ability of presidents to govern. The one 

exception -- the election of 1800 -- broke the system 

to the point where it required a constitutional 

amendment. Jackson’s victory in the Electoral Col-

lege shattered the notion of national figures with 

wide-ranging appeal: factional candidates, that 

could win the Electoral College if not the support of 

the majority of people, could now argue they were 

legitimate political actors by having an inflated Elec-

toral College victory. Jack Riggs and Gerald Hobbs 

of West Virginia University, as well as Todd Riggs of 

the United States Military Academy, labelled this the 

“Electoral College winner’s advantage” (Hobbs et al. 

2009). Through simulating Electoral College out-

comes, they discovered that “the Electoral College 

magnifies the perception of the winner’s margin of 

victory”, while complicating how the victory itself is 

understood. Such complications are clear with Ad-

ams and Jackson. By having the Electoral College 

be the focus of the 1824 election, it was difficult to 

understand the extent to which Adams could lead 

as a legitimate political actor. Similarly, with Jack-

son’s 1828 victory, his claims to be a legitimate actor 

-- allowing him to exercise unprecedented execu-

tive power -- were based on how he believed to be 

a direct representative of the people. An inflated 

victory in the Electoral College compared to his 

popular vote certainly did not hurt his claim.  

Such as it is with Donald Trump. With such a 

slim victory in the Electoral College, complicated by 

his defeat in the popular vote, Trump was struggling 

to argue for any three types of mandates that Azari 

presented. An analysis published by The Washing-

ton Post within days of Clinton’s 2016 defeat argued 

that Trump would have had “[more] political time 

and an easier time pursuing [his] agenda” if his vic-

tory had translated to a more comprehensive man-

date (Blake 2016). Discussion after the 2016 elec-

tion placed extraordinary emphasis on how the 

Electoral College had made understanding Trump’s 

mandate so much more complicated, just as how it 

had hurt Adams in his victory. His popular vote vic-

tory was the easiest argument against his ability to 

govern as a popular president: Aaron Blake for the 

Post, echoing a common sentiment at the time, held 

that “popular appeal does matter when it comes to 

how presidents can govern” (Blake 2016). With such 

a thin margin, one could make the argument that 

Trump had little to no mandate. This would be in 

line with Azari’s threshold of election version of 

presidential mandate.  

The Electoral College, though, tosses in two 

problems when applying Azari’s threshold of elec-

tion mandate type to the Trump victory. The first is 

that Trump’s Electoral College victory was still rela-

tively notable. Though Trump may not have re-

ceived the massive victories of some other modern 

presidents, his 56.5% of the Electoral College was 

still a larger victory than numerous other post-Sec-

ond World War presidents, including Kennedy’s 

56.4% of the College in 1960, Nixon’s 55.9% in 

1968, Carters’ 55.2% in 1976, Bush Jr.’s 50.4% in 

2000, and Bush Jr.’s 53.2% in 2004. (Peters 2020). 

This College victory was bolstered by how he had 

swung the “Blue Belt” -- Michigan, Wisconsin, and 

Pennsylvania. If framed in this way, Trump would ac-

tually have a real claim to being elected as a presi-

dent who, if factional, was at least fighting on behalf 

of a silent or underrepresented part of America’s 

working class. This would not be too dissimilar from 

Jackson’s presentation of himself in the 1824 and 

1828 elections. Even this framing, however, is again 

complicated by the Electoral College. After all, 

those “Blue Belt” state victories were themselves 

demonstrative of the “inflation” that the College 

tends towards. Only 100,000 votes spread across 

three states gave Trump 46 electoral votes, making 

Trump’s Electoral College victory disconnected 

from the actual support he received from the na-

tional popular vote. What Trump’s victory makes 

clear is that the impact on the Electoral College 

does not come from an inherent aspect of the sys-

tem. Instead, it comes from how it made the entire 

process so convoluted to the point where a presi-

dent’s mandate may be unclear, exaggerated, or 

deflated.  

With Adams and Trump, their claim to gov-

erning mandates were not founded in their Electoral 

College victories -- they were complicated by their 

Electoral College. Adams had a difficult time com-



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

 

batting Jacksonian Democrats in the four years fol-

lowing the Corrupt Bargain, setting up for Jackson’s 

victory in 1828. Trump was plagued with claims he 

was barely president, with his few policy successes 

coming “thanks to the GOP’s congressional majori-

ties” (Blake 2016). An election where the Electoral 

College is of notable contention will at the least 

make it difficult to form a coalition. At the worst, it 

will make the elected president seem illegitimate as 

a force in national politics. 

 

4 BIAS TOWARDS STATES AND CON-

SERVATIVE AGENDA-SETTING  
Adams and Trump were embroiled in bat-

tles for a mandate after their elections were entan-

gled in the complexities of the Electoral College. Re-

gardless, they still became presidents; they still 

wielded constitutional and political power. How did 

their complicated victories impact their policies, as 

well as the policies of presidents who found them-

selves in similar situations? Professors Bernard 

Grofman of the University of California, Irvine and 

Scott Feld of Purdue University, writing in Public 

Choice in 2005, found that “the Electoral College fo-

cuses candidate attention only on the relative hand-

ful of potentially competitive states”, thus “unduly 

rais[ing] the importance of issues that are of concern 

to voters in competitive states” (Grofman & Feld 

2005). Coupled with complicating a president’s 

mandate, the power the Electoral College has on 

shaping a president’s governing agenda cannot be 

understated. Since the election is based on states 

rather than individual votes, many political scien-

tists, such as Joseph Kallenbach of the University of 

Michigan, have noted that the system potentially vi-

olates the concept of one person, one vote and a 

potential form of gerrymandering to give certain 

states and electoral districts more influence than 

other states regardless of the size of their popula-

tion. The Electoral College’s tendency to “distort the 

values of individual popular votes in much the same 

way that legislative district gerrymanders do” put-

ting the ability of the College to accurately repre-

sent the people’s overall will at risk (Kallenbach 

1960). Combining the arguments of Grofman, Feld, 

and Kallenbach leads to two disturbing conclusions: 

The first conclusion is that the Electoral College 

forces presidential candidates to look at particular 

states rather than the popular will of the people. The 

second conclusion is derived from the first. Combin-

ing the emphasis on particular states with how Dem-

ocrats and Republicans are not evenly distributed 

(with Democrats tending to be in dense locations, 

and Republicans being in less dense areas) creates 

a form of de facto quasi-gerrymandering. Demo-

cratic voters will tend to have their votes un-

derrepresented, while Republicans will have the im-

pact of their votes inflated through this type of “ger-

rymandering”.  

Presidential policies, when formed in the 

face of narrow or indecisive Electoral College victo-

ries, are founded in these two conclusions. Those 

that were elected by narrow margins in the College 

after an election, or those that assume they will face 

narrow margins in the College during an election, 

will take two actions. The first is that, in line with 

Grofman and Feld, they will focus on particular 

states. The second is that, in line with Kallenbach, 

they will tend towards being more conservative in 

their policies and actions. Benjamin Harrison 

showed how this focus on particular states will sway 

a presidential agenda. Winning a narrow majority in 

the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, 

Harrison aggressively pursued policies that favored 

the Northern and Western states that voted for him. 

Harrison, for instance, signed “the Sherman Anti-

trust Act; the McKinley Tariff Act... and the Land Re-

vision Act of 1891”, all of which were well-received 

by his core voter base. He touted, in particular, his 

support of the McKinley Tariff since it gave him sup-

port in the North and West, even if it alienated 

Southern voters (Calebresi & Yoo 2008). He was 

making it such that states which looked favorably on 

conservation and reasonable regulation on industry 

-- New York, Indiana, California, and the like -- would 

continue to vote for him. All the same, he recog-

nized that he lacked a compelling presidential man-

date. While he may not have “permit[ed] any en-

croachment on his overall presidential power” by 

serving “absolutely [as] the head of his administra-

tion”, in matters with Congress, “Harrison cheerfully 



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

 

submitted to being practically a figurehead” (Cala-

bresi & Yoo 2008; Milkis & Nelson 316).  

Though the dust is still settling, we might be 

so bold as to analyze President-elect Joe Biden’s 

campaign through this lens of bias towards con-

servative politics and certain states. Joe Biden 

demonstrated the bias towards a more conservative 

agenda and a bias towards certain states as that was 

what would have assured him an Electoral College 

victory. As many pundits have said, Joe Biden won 

by taking back the “Blue Belt” states. Joan Williams 

of Harvard Business Review argued that Biden did 

this by “appeal[ing] to enough white working-class 

Trump voters without alienating and disrespecting... 

voters of color” (Williams 2020). This bias is exactly 

what Grofman and Feld would have predicted, as 

these voters would give Biden the states he needed 

to win the election. Biden’s strategy is also informed 

by Kallenbach’s notion of the gerrymandered presi-

dential election, which would result in more con-

servative politics. Rather than focusing on issues 

that might have appealed to progressives, even in 

the midst of a historic racial and social justice move-

ment, Biden held firm on presenting himself as a 

moderate. His messaging was based on how “we 

can revitalize our industrial base at the heart of the 

American middle class”, appealing to voters in the 

center and center-right when his entire party was 

debating on whether it should move in a diametri-

cally different direction (Williams 2020). This was the 

“disciplined strategy” that was “just enough to help 

Biden secure the 270 Electoral College votes” (Hun-

nicutt et al. 2020). As written in a Reuters article a 

few days after the election, “[a]t a time when pro-

gressives in the Democratic Party were pushing for 

big, structural change, the 77-year-old staked out 

the moderate lane and bet -- correctly -- that voters 

would coalesce around him” as a moderate choice 

(Hunnicutt et al. 2020). This same mentality is what 

allowed him to win the primary election to be the 

Democratic Party’s nominee for president in the first 

place. Democratic voters, anticipating that the Elec-

toral College’s preference towards those three Rust 

Belt states would swing the election, chose a mod-

erate in Biden rather than a progressive in Bernie. 

Interestingly, when it has come to governing, Biden 

has adopted progressive policy stances, openly 

casting himself as a “new-generation Franklin D. 

Roosevelt pressing for a modern-day New Deal” 

(Baker 2023). He has largely been successful: he has 

pushed to enact laws or otherwise taken execution 

action that included “large-scale spending on cli-

mate change, social welfare programs and student 

debt relief” (Baker 2023). All the same, he is still wary 

of public perception. Representative Josh 

Gottheimer of New Jersey noted that “[t]he country 

wants common sense; they don’t want extremism 

and I think [Biden] gets that”, showing how Biden 

has still presented himself as a moderate in presen-

tation (Blake 2023). Biden, of course, benefits from 

having spent nearly 40 years in public life where he 

intentionally cast himself as at the center of the 

Democratic Party, if not to the right-of-center (Biden 

2023). His modern progressivism is masked by the 

public’s perception that he is a moderate, middle-

of-the-road, common-sense politician. This allows 

Biden to have progressive politics while being per-

ceived as a moderate in elections. Biden, under-

standing that losing votes in key states in the Elec-

toral College could cost him the 2024 election, con-

tinues to maintain the image of a moderate. All the 

same, he is still able to act as a progressive, expand-

ing past what constraints his electoral mandate may 

have placed on him.  

The argument that the Electoral College 

forces presidents to be more conservative and to be 

biased towards certain states has opposition. Mi-

chael Nelson of the University of Chicago wrote that 

a “more accurate explanation [of bias in the Elec-

toral College] is a pro-Democratic bias that [exists] 

in the electoral college system itself” (Nelson 1974). 

Noting that presidents Woodrow Wilson and John 

Kennedy both benefited from close elections -- with 

Kennedy having a “trifle more than an even share” 

of the popular vote yet receiving a decisive victory 

in the College -- Nelson argued the system biased 

liberalism, rather than conservatism. As argued pre-

viously, the Electoral College only matters insofar as 

a particular election places an emphasis on it. As 

such, Nelson’s argument may be suffering from the 

presence of strong multicollinearity in those partic-

ular elections. In the election of Woodrow Wilson, 



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

 

there was a strong third-party candidate, making 

what was an underwhelming popular vote mandate 

(with only 41.8% of the popular vote) into a deceiv-

ingly commanding Electoral College victory. This is 

not demonstrative of a bias towards liberalism. This 

is instead demonstrative of how it is difficult to inter-

pret a president’s mandate when the Electoral Col-

lege is the center of an election. As Hobbs and 

Riggs would argue, Wilson’s margin was inflated in 

the Electoral College. Kennedy’s election, on the 

other hand, was again not based on a bias towards 

liberalism. It was an example of the “gerrymander-

ing” of presidential elections as articulated by Kal-

lenbach. Kennedy was essentially lucky to have just 

enough votes to win in certain states and used his 

choice of vice president to secure Texas and boost 

his overall electoral victory. There was a bias to-

wards New Deal liberalism -- as much as that can be 

conceded. But this must be qualified by the fact that 

all of national politics at the time was viewed 

through how to reinvent, reinterpret, and build on 

the New Deal. That would not change until the Civil 

Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and 1968 election. 

Kennedy did not win off of the Electoral College’s 

bias towards liberalism; instead, he won through 

savvy electioneering and a politically smart choice 

for vice president. Nelson’s argument that the Elec-

toral College has a bias towards liberalism is, there-

fore, misguided.  

 

5 CONCLUSION  
The Electoral College’s influence on presi-

dential politics is not inherent; it is a manifestation 

of how important the College is in any particular 

election. Randall Adkins and Kent Kirwan, writing for 

Publius, posited that since the Electoral College 

“rarely, if ever, played a decisive role in determining 

[the outcome of] presidential elections”, as the out-

come of the Electoral College vote has nearly always 

aligned with the outcome of the national popular 

vote. (Adkins & Kent 2002). On the whole, then, the 

Electoral College is not a source of major contro-

versy. It will go in line with the popular vote, serving 

as a relic of the high values of the Founding Fathers. 

However, when elections are especially close and 

there is a potential for there to be disconnect be-

tween the results of the Electoral College and the 

national popular vote, the College receives dramat-

ically increased attention. In these instances, the 

Electoral College becomes key to the public’s per-

ception of the election and fundamentally alters 

Americans’ views on their democracy and presiden-

tial election system. For the presidents who we have 

discussed in depth -- Biden, Trump, Harrison, Jack-

son, Wilson, and Adams -- the Electoral College was 

an important part of their campaign and narratives. 

As such, its impact is clear and can be understood 

in terms of their mandates and biases. The Electoral 

College we have been left with, when serving no 

other purpose than muddling election outcomes, 

makes the mandate and coalitions of presidents un-

clear and inapparent. This compounds with how 

presidents who focus on the Electoral College will 

tend to be biased towards certain states and con-

servative politics. The result is that the Electoral Col-

lege may, generally, have little impact on how a 

president governs -- but when it does have an im-

pact, its impact is grand, overwhelming, and domi-

nating.  

There are certain aspects of the Electoral 

College that this paper has not investigated. For in-

stance, the formal voting process that takes place in 

the January following an election, where state votes 

are certified, has been a subject of much more re-

cent discussion given the attack on the Capitol on 

January 6th, 2023, which attempted to disrupt the 

certification of the 2020 election. Additional re-

search could also be done on the potential impact 

of returning to the classical model of the Electoral 

College, where party insiders and electors had 

more agency in selecting the president. What re-

mains clear, however, is that the trends seen in the 

Electoral College should be of grave concern to 

Americans in the modern era, where two elections 

since 2000 have been given to a candidate who did 

not win the most votes and where political polariza-

tion is reaching a fever pitch. Without reforming the 

Electoral College to better reflect the wishes of the 

American people in aggregate, such as electing the 

president instead through a popular vote, presiden-



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

 

tial administrations will continue to face an in-

creased chance of weakened mandates, and presi-

dential candidates will have to continue to contort 

themselves to fit the arcane rules and structure of a 

system developed nearly 250 years ago.  

The Founding Fathers wanted America to 

have non-partisan presidential elections. Or, at the 

least, they wished that the president might be some-

one who would be able to rise above politics. They 

created the Electoral College towards this end. The 

impact of the Electoral College on presidential pol-

itics shows that, unfortunately, they failed∎ 

 

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http://www.jstor.org/stable/3331027
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24573940
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq9nc.35
https://doi.org/10.2307/2150822
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30026787
https://doi.org/10.2307/2108706
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/presidential-election-mandates
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/presidential-election-mandates


ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

 

 

 

Bilal Yousuf Ahmed graduated magna cum laude from Rutgers - New Bruns-

wick in May 2022. While at Rutgers, Mr. Ahmed was Editor-in-Chief of the Rut-

gers University Undergraduate Law Review, an Aresty Research Assistant, and 

a two-term Student Body Parliamentarian. He was also an inducted member 

of the Omicron Delta Epsilon and Pi Sigma Alpha honors societies.  

 

Since graduating, Mr. Ahmed has worked at the Royal Bank of Canada in New 

York City and been a member of the Rutgers Alumni Association. In his free 

time, Mr. Ahmed enjoys discovering new live music spots and finding the best 

places to eat in the city. 


