As has been the case for more than 200 years, the Electoral College will determine the outcome of the U.S. presidential race this fall. Yet most Americans have long supported abandoning this system.
In 2000 and 2016, popular vote winners lost their bids for the presidency of the United States after receiving fewer electoral college votes than their opponents. To continue tracking how the public views the U.S. presidential election system, we surveyed 9,720 U.S. adults from August 26 to September 2, 2024.
All those who participated in the current survey are members of the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel recruited through a national random sampling of residential addresses. This way, almost every American adult has a chance of being selected. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Learn more about the The ATP methodology.
Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with the answers and its methodology.
THE Electoral College assigns a number of electors based on the number of senators and representatives from each state in Congress (plus three electors for the District of Columbia, for a total of 538). Most states award all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins that state.
More than six in ten Americans (63%) would rather see the winner of the presidential election be the person who wins the most votes nationally. About a third (35%) favor retaining the Electoral College system, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 9,720 adults conducted Aug. 26-September. 2, 2024.

The Electoral College is always the focus during presidential elections. But a recent – so far without success – efforts to change how Nebraska allocates its electoral votes have highlighted the prospect of a Narrow Electoral College Victory for either candidate in an extremely close race.
Related: In a tied presidential race, Harris and Trump have contrasting strengths and weaknesses
As has been the case for more than two decades, there are large partisan differences in attitudes toward the Electoral College:
- Eight in ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents favor replacing the Electoral College with a popular vote system.
- Republicans and Republican-leaning voters are more evenly divided: 53% favor retaining the Electoral College, while 46% would prefer to replace it.
Focus on the Electoral College
In 48 states and Washington, D.C., the candidate who gets the most votes in that state gets all of their electoral votes.
Nebraska and Maine have a different approach, awarding two electoral votes to the candidate who wins the most votes statewide and one to the winner of each congressional district. Some Republicans have pushed to change Nebraska’s rules so that the statewide winner gets their five electoral votes. This would likely work to former President Donald Trump’s advantage, given Nebraska’s situation. consistent support for GOP presidential candidates.
A candidate must win a majority of the 538 electoral votes to become president. If no candidate obtains a majoritythe outcome of the election is decided by the United States House of Representatives, with each state’s delegation having one vote.
Under the current electoral system in the United States, the winner of the popular vote may not receive enough votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency.
- This happened in the 2000 and 2016 elections. George W. Bush and Donald Trump respectively won those elections with clear victories in the Electoral College, but they did not win the greatest number of votes in the national scale.
- In 2020, while President Joe Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, his victory in the Electoral College was decided by less than 50,000 votes in a few nearby states.
- Due to the electoral college system, inordinate attention is paid to results in a handful of countries. Battlefield States. This year, these battlefields include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Partisan views on the Electoral College over time

Since the 2000 election, two-thirds or more of Democrats have supported adopting a popular vote system.
Republicans remain fairly divided today, with 46% in favor of moving to a popular vote system.
Republicans were less supportive of this change after Trump’s victory in 2016. In November of that year, following Trump’s Electoral College victory and loss of the popular vote, only 27% of Republicans supported a system popular vote.
Party and ideology
There are only modest differences by ideology on this issue among Democrats:

- 87% of liberal Democrats and 74% of conservative and moderate Democrats say they would prefer presidents to be elected by popular vote.
Ideological differences are wider among Republicans:
- 63% of conservative Republicans prefer to keep the current system.
- In contrast, 61% of moderate and liberal Republicans (who represent a much smaller share of the Republican coalition) say they favor a popular vote for the election of the president.
Age
Majorities across all age groups support changing the system. However, adults under 50 are a little more in favor than those aged 50 and over (66% versus 59%).
Note: This is an update of an article previously published in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
A note on question wording
In January 2020, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey experience who asked this question in two slightly different ways. One used language that we and other organizations had used in previous years, with the reform option calling for “amending the Constitution so that the candidate who receives the most votes at-large national team wins the elections. The other version called for “changing the system so that the candidate who receives the most votes nationally wins the election.” The January 2020 survey found no substantial difference between the question of “changing the Constitution” and “changing the system.”
We conducted this experiment largely because reforming the way presidents are selected does not technically require changing the Constitution. THE National Interstate Compact for the Popular Votefor example, could theoretically achieve this without a constitutional amendment. Since there was no substantial difference in the survey results between the two question wordings, we adopted the revised wording, which refers to “changing the system.”