https://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/505512587/cokie-roberts-answers-your-questions-about-the-electoral-college
She notes that at one time, the popular vote was quite limited in scope in the USA.
The original limitations imposed on popular voting were apparent in other ways. From 1800 to 1824, presidential candidates were selected by Senate caucus. This system fell apart and was replaced by a system in which parties selected presidential candidates at national party conventions.ROBERTS: Electors, by and large, were appointed by state legislatures. Keep in mind, Steve, so were senators. You know, we didn't go to the popular election of senators until the 20th century. And, in fact, when people say that it doesn't seem very democratic to have an Electoral College, neither is the Senate democratic. The Senate is two from each state, regardless of the size of the state. So the - the founders were trying to balance all kinds of things in this complicated business of establishing a country that was based essentially on the consent of the governed, but the governed who were allowing other people to make those decisions.
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Nominating_presidents.htm
This party convention system was itself bypassed in the 1970s with the election of Jimmy Carter, an outsider who utilized the primary system to upend the election. The primaries have now trumped the convention system as the method of selection. Consequently, most of the presidents since Carter (Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump) have been telegenic celebrity politicians, famous for being famous without much in the way of prior accomplishment. These men would most probably have been weeded out by any previous system of candidate selection.
What one finds in the evolution of the systems of presidential selection is a creeping democratization, in which an elitist representative system has been eroded by the growing power of popular direct democracy.
The Electoral College persists as a kind of fossil of the old republican ideal of mediated governance.
Cokie Roberts was alarmed by calls for the possible abolition of the Electoral College.
CALYSSA HYMAN: My name is Calyssa Hyman (ph), and I live in Covington, La., outside New Orleans. And I would like to ask Cokie, what will it take to get rid of the Electoral College?
ROBERTS: I know Covington well. I'll tell you, the last time there was a big effort to get rid of the Electoral College was in 1969, when the House of Representatives actually did pass a resolution to abolish the Electoral College. It failed in the Senate. It was after very close elections of 1960 and 1968. One of the main proponents of getting rid of the Electoral College - and I've gone back and looked at the transcripts - was my father, Hale Boggs, who was majority whip at the time. I have to tell you, I think he was wrong.
INSKEEP: You think the Electoral College should stay? It's OK?
ROBERTS: I think that it has a very important role in terms of protecting minorities. The founders thought about small states. Keep in mind, they were always against the tyranny of the majority.
INSKEEP: We're not talking about racial minorities here. We're talking about...
ROBERTS: Yes, I'm talking about racial minorities here.
Her father was the Democratic House majority leader from Louisiana.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hale_Boggs
During his tenure in Congress, Boggs was an influential player in the government. After Brown v. Board of Education, he signed the Southern Manifesto condemning desegregation in the 1950s and opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Unlike most other Southern Representatives, however, he supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Open Housing Act of 1968.
The whole purpose of the Electoral College is to keep control of presidential elections in the hand of elites -- the party establishment -- in order to crush dangerous populists who might trample minority rights.
What is odd about the election of Donald Trump is that for so many, especially for the Republican establishment, Trump seemed to embody such a dangerous populism. So why did the Republican establishment in the Electoral College not vote against him?
One big reason might be Hillary Clinton. She was portrayed in the media as the establishment candidate when compared to Sanders and Trump. But in reality, the Clintons were always outsiders in Washington. In fact, the Democratic establishment took a big chance in 2008 and endorsed an unproven outsider, Barack Obama, because the Democratic establishment, especially the Kennedys, despised the Clintons so intensely. (One comment by insiders during the 2008 election was "We don't want the circus coming back to town.")
One candidate that many members of the Electoral College might have embraced is the anodyne and moderate billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of NYC, who has been a member of both political parties. In a race between Bloomberg and a controversial populist, Electors might have voted for Bloomberg and against their own party. But Bloomberg might never have survived the primary system because he is not charismatic enough.
Questions about the 2016 Electoral College are academic at this point.
The question to ask today is, Is it possible to put the dangerous genie of democracy back into the bottle of representative government?
Is it possible to resurrect the power of the presidential caucuses in the Senate, or to re-empower party conventions?
Or, going further, would it be possible to adopt a semi-presidential system, in which the president would be elected by popular vote and would select a cabinet and a head of government, but the president would remain merely the head of state and not the head of government?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-presidential_system
A semi-presidential system or dual executive system is a system of government in which a president exists alongside a prime minister and a cabinet, with the latter two being responsible to the legislature of a state. It differs from a parliamentary republic in that it has a popularly elected head of state, who is more than a purely ceremonial figurehead, and from the presidential system in that the cabinet, although named by the president, is responsible to the legislature, which may force the cabinet to resign through a motion of no confidence.
Such reforms seem unrealistic. It seems that the basic political beliefs that guided the Founders are incomprehensible to modern Americans (even to hosts at NPR), and have been replaced by a vague populism.
