Minnesota governor Tim Walz on Tuesday reiterated his support for abolishing the Electoral College and switching to a national popular vote as the sole means of electing presidents and their running mates.
While campaigning for Vice President Kamala Harris on the West Coast, Walz suggested at two different fundraisers that he would prefer to focus on winning votes across the country rather than concentrate on key battleground states that could sway the upcoming presidential election as they have done in the past.
“I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go. We need, we need national popular vote, but that’s not the world we live in,” the Democratic vice-presidential nominee told donors in California governor Gavin Newsom’s Sacramento home. “So we need to win Beaver County, Pennsylvania. We need to be able to go into York, Pennsylvania, win. We need to be in western Wisconsin and win. We need to be in Reno, Nevada, and win.”
In a similar statement at a Seattle fundraiser earlier Tuesday, Walz touted himself as “a national popular vote guy, but that’s not the world we live in.”
Last year, the governor signed legislation that added Minnesota as the seventeenth state to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The initiative commits participating states to awarding their electoral votes to presidential candidates who win the popular vote and takes effect once states representing 270 electoral votes have joined the compact.
The Harris campaign said Walz’s call for abolishing the Electoral College is not an official campaign position.
“Governor Walz believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket,” a campaign spokesperson said in a statement. “He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes. And, he was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts.”
Despite the campaign’s statement, Harris herself has said in the past that she’s “open to the discussion” of abolishing the Electoral College.
“There’s no question that the popular vote has been diminished in terms of making the final decision about who’s the president of the United States and we need to deal with that, so I’m open to the discussion,” she told late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel in 2019 when she was running for president.
Though it appears a radical position, a recent Pew Research Center survey found 63 percent of Americans supporting the move away from the Electoral College toward a popular-vote system. By contrast, 35 percent said they would favor retaining the Electoral College.
The issue is further divided along partisan lines. Eighty percent of Democrats prefer to see the Electoral College changed, while Republicans are more closely divided on the issue: 46 percent say it should be changed compared to 53 percent backing the current electoral system.
Former president Donald Trump’s campaign criticized Walz’s Tuesday statements, stating the governor “hates the Electoral College.” The system is protected by the U.S. Constitution and would thus need a constitutional amendment to change.
Democrats lost the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections, in which they received more popular votes but lost the electoral votes to their Republican opponents. After losing to Trump eight years ago, Hillary Clinton called for the Electoral College to be scrapped.