America's Electoral College

I suppose back to 'normal' is the word for the American patient after the frenzy of the political conventions and the fever of the atrocious heatwave that blanketed about two-thirds of the entire country since the end of June.

'Normal' in terms of comfort means now that Texas, Oklahoma and the Deep South are stewing in their normal 85 to 90 degrees a day instead of frying in 105 and 110. Even New Yorkers are blithe again with the weather boys saying, 'Looks like a very pleasant weekend with seasonable temperatures in the low 80s'. Most people who've managed to get away to the lakes or the mountains or the seashore, though much good it did them, are now beginning to get out the cheque book and tot up the renters' rent and wondering how to explain the broken washing machine and the hole in the blanket.

A week or ten days from now it will be Labor Day, the last big holiday before Thanksgiving and since the American calendar stubbornly follows the English prototype, summer is officially declared at an end, though in about three-quarters of the country you can swim and sweat till the end of October.

The main relief, though it's going to be very short, is of course a break in the election campaign. Come September and Carter and Reagan and their running mates will be off again on the cold chicken and coleslaw circuit, stepping up with ever-increasing passion the warning that if one or the other is elected in November, the American republic will be plunged into a pit of despair from which it will never rise again.

There remains the third man not mentioned for these many months in these reports, the dogged little owl-like man with the snowball head of hair who, it seems an age ago, looked like a threat to the weary Carter and the genial, flip Reagan – John Anderson, a relapsed Republican, gone independent. He did have the sense, as many another heretic has not, not to set himself as leader of some third party called 'Progressive' or 'New America' or whatever. Independent means he's willing to accept converts from any faith and, for a time, it did seem that he was going to do fatal damage to Carter, since the rebels who joined him were disappointed Democrats more than liberal Republicans. What happened to John Anderson?

Well, the latest word is that his campaign is in trouble. He must look back with the last flicker of fire in his eyes if he thinks of the gaudy days when he actually outdrew Carter in the public polls, but now the public, to the extent that the public's whims can be measured by the polls, has done a sudden and dramatic switch of faith, or fatalism or what you will. Dr Gallup has just declared that the Reagan/Carter duel, which only two weeks ago had Reagan with a dizzy 61 per cent of public approval and Carter with a woeful 38 per cent, Dr Gallup says it's just about a dead heat – Reagan 39 per cent, Carter 38 and Mr Anderson with a lagging 14 per cent.

The main interest of Mr Anderson to callow students on the outside is the possibility, or was the possibility, of his taking enough votes away from both the big boys that neither of them would, in the result, get a majority of the electoral votes. May I patiently explain again for non experts what the electoral vote is?

There is, there has been since the start of the republic, an institution called the Electoral College and it's almost English in its perversity, I mean just as everybody celebrates the Queen's birthday not on the Queen's birthday and at Cambridge they all dance and frisk in June at what are called the May balls and while the Earl of Leicester lives in Norfolk and the Duke of Norfolk lives in Sussex, so the Electoral College does not exist as anything you can touch and see.

In the very early days of the republic, before there was universal suffrage; before, indeed, anyone could vote who wasn't a considerable landowner – the Americans, remember, set up a republic, not a democracy – in those far off days, each state appointed, and the governor was usually the appointer, substantial men who were required, after the popular vote was counted in the presidential election, to go off in a corner, usually to the state capital, and decided whether the man the voters of that state had chosen as president was, in their opinion, the best man for the job. They were under no compulsion to follow the popular choice. Theoretically, they still aren't.

The Electoral College assigned to each state on the basis of population so many votes. Each state is still assigned so many electoral votes. Let's say that in New York State, for example, just for convenience, one million people vote and 600,000 votes go to Carter and 400,000 go to Reagan. New York, in the Electoral College, is assigned, say – I'm far away from the books – 96 electoral votes, the popular winner takes all 96 even if Carter gets 500,001 votes and Reagan gets 499,999 and, on a day in January, after the November election, the so-called 'electors' meet in their state capitals and officially record that their electoral vote went for this man or that, the man who got the popular majority.

The president is not officially elected until that January day. We needn't trouble ourselves at this late date with the alarming fact that, in the distant past, the electors actually exercised their power to ignore the popular preference and choose the minority candidate. Now, it's a pure formality. The point is that the total of the popular vote has no direct bearing on who is the winner. It's happened over and over that a man who got less than a majority of all the popular votes in the country became president because he got enough in the big populous states to give him a majority of the electoral vote. These are called 'minority' presidents – Woodrow Wilson was one, Harry Truman was another.

So you can see that a man might carry, say, 30 states in the popular vote but if they were all small states with small electoral votes, if his opponent got New York and Pennsylvania and California, Illinois, Texas, Michigan, the opponent would win, since the big totals of the most populous states would outweigh the accumulated totals of many less populous states. And this is why, from now on, you're going to hear the politicians saying it's essential for the winner in November to take California, the most populous state and New York and, at least, two or three of the other giants.

Well now, John Anderson. When he was outrunning Carter, people began to do a little arithmetic and while nobody has ever given him a chance of being elected president in his own right, a lot of people suspected that he might get enough votes in the right places to deny either Carter or Reagan a majority of the electoral votes. If that happened, then what?

Well, then, the election is declared null and void and the decision goes to the House of Representatives. An Englishman expressed surprise at this device, 'Why,' he asked, 'to the Lower House? Why not to the Senate?' For the simple reason that the House of Representatives is chosen on the basis of population. A big state has a lot of congressmen, a small state has few. So it's a fairer copy of the popular will than the Senate, which was deliberately set up to give every state an equal say in great national affairs, irrespective of size of population. Huge California has two senators, tiny Rhode Island has two senators.

Well, I hope that now all is clear. The day after former President Ford discovered, rather late in the day, that he couldn't be a sort of co-president, he confidently predicted that neither Reagan nor Carter would win enough enough electoral votes and that it would go to the House. He was impressed by the strength of John Anderson. John Anderson was to be the spoiler.

I must say that in the rather unsatisfactory choice with which we're faced it would be a fascinating result, but now Mr Anderson is down to 14 per cent and this is one percentage point away from the possibility of his making his mark because the debates we expect to take place between Carter and Reagan are sponsored by a highly civic-minded group called the League of Women Voters. They've said that if Mr Anderson, by 1 September, stands at 15 per cent or higher in the polls, he, too, will be invited to debate with the two big shots. That might produce interesting dogfights, boggle people's convictions and throw him enough support to take votes away from both Carter and Reagan.

The reaction of the two main teams to the dramatic shift in the polls is simple and predictable. The Reagan people are saying, 'Sure, Carter got a lift from the conventions, so did we from ours'. The Carter people say, 'The convention only reminded people that the president is a responsible man'.

In the meantime, Reagan appears before the veterans of old wars and warns them that we are woefully behind in defending ourselves against the might, especially the missile might, of the Russians. What's more to the point, and more to Carter's advantage, is that the Senate budget committee the other day overrode the objection of Kennedy men in the Senate and voted to raise the swollen defence budget by another five and a half billion dollars.

In other words, Carter can say, 'See! The Senate is acting on MY warnings, not Reagan's and is, at last, following my lead, just as it followed my lead at long last on an energy programme!'

At this point, I would simply take the risk of saying, of defining, a return to normality as a return to the only true barometer of American election sentiment. When in doubt, and as a presidential election draws near, the American people, year after year, decade after decade, seem to follow a stabilising needle that moves toward the centre. They come to distrust both the left and the right. Until September that's all I'm going to say about the political future of the republic.

Meanwhile, Arnold Palmer, the grizzled veteran of 51, has won a golf tournament. Bjorn Borg is out with a bad knee. Chris Evert goes on winning everything in sight, except Wimbledon.

Anita Bryant, the Florida lady who sold orange juice through television commercials and who campaigns so fearlessly against homosexuals, swearing that marriage was the proper and blessed state, has just got divorced. Her mother says, 'Right now, she's off of men and I don't blame her!'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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