Why didn’t the founders choose to select the president through a national popular vote?

0:03I think that the founding, the framers were very concerned about the notion of having one president that would be an executive. There was no executive in the Articles of Confederation. The states would send delegates into this congress, and they all serve together. But they were very worried about one leader who would serve as the executive because, again, it had this sound of monarchy. They wanted to make sure that whoever they had was going to be independent of Congress and not have too much power.

0:30If you had somebody who was just beholden to Congress, then they would potentially just do whatever Congress wanted to think of a system where it's wherever the Speaker of the House is essentially becoming the president out of the Congress. There was a concern about pulling that away from Congress. But how do we decide who's going to serve as that president? How are we going to elect that person? One thought is, well, you can have a popular election, but that was actually voted down for a wide variety of reasons. States from the North, from the South, from the middle disagreed with it for a handful of reasons. One is smaller states, like Delaware and New Hampshire, were particularly worried that they would be outvoted, that it would always be Virginian selected or the Virginia voters

1:09would have this say because of where the concentration of people were. Another, there was a skepticism of direct democracy, and Elbridge Gerry in Massachusetts and some others were worried about that. They said, we're electing the House. That's okay. But we don't necessarily want to go too far. Then a third was a concern of the slave states in the South. That said, listen, if we have a popular election, this House of Representatives is based on our population plus three-fifths of the enslaved population, so we have more political power that way, and we're worried that we're not going to have this kind of political power. There was a wide variety of reasons why a direct election failed. The electoral college instead said, well, let's give each state a number of votes equal to their representation in Congress. They can do what they want with those votes.

1:58They're going to choose electors, and then those electors choose the president of the United States. There's more complicated mechanisms at the founding. But the notion was it would be a mini Congress that shows up for one day, for one job, elect the president, go home. Then in that way, it's independent of Congress but it looks like the representation we already have in Congress. Part of the thought was, and again, this gets back to some of the Massachusetts and other concerns of direct democracy. We're not sure that voters or people are necessarily going to know who the best person to be the President of the United States is. It's a big country, New Hampshire to Georgia takes several days, if not weeks, to get from one end of the country to the other. But the people know in their state who are the reliable leaders, who are the trustworthy leaders, and we're going to

2:45choose them and then they're going to choose a president. Now, at the founding, everyone knew that they wanted George Washington. He's a national hero. Everybody knows that. But there's a lot of scattered votes for vice president or who that runner-up is going to be. Then we also see very quickly after this, the development of political parties, and very quickly you are a federalist with John Adams or you a Jeffersonian Democratic, Republican, whatever you describe it, and very quickly the attachments form in the states that, well, maybe I don't know who the best person is, but I know that my guy aligns with this set of values, and when I choose these electors, they are going to choose that candidate on our behalf. The forming of political parties helped solve that information gap for good or for

3:30ill across the country by giving you a shortcut about what it meant to choose a candidate.