Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Monday she supported eliminating the Electoral College in presidential elections.
Speaking at a CNN town hall in Jackson, Mississippi, Warren laid out her proposed voting reforms to Democratic primary voters.
"We need to make sure that every vote counts," she said, before going on to say in presidential election years, candidates ignore states like Mississippi, as well as blue states like California and Massachusetts, because they're not battleground states.
"My view is that every vote matters, and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College," Warren said, to cheers and applause.
Warren is one of more than a dozen Democrats vying for the 2020 nomination.
Democrats have won the popular vote in six out of the last seven presidential elections, but Al Gore (2000) and Hillary Clinton (2016) were both defeated in the Electoral College by their Republican opponents in spite of getting more votes.
2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren calls for abolishing the Electoral College and moving to a national popular vote: 'Every vote matters" #WarrenTownHall https://t.co/pPFMVywETf pic.twitter.com/yy0J0HgAjc
— CNN (@CNN) March 19, 2019
Clinton and other Democrats have clamored for an end to the Electoral College since her loss to Trump. Trump lost California by roughly 4.3 million votes and won the rest of the country by roughly 1.4 million votes.
However, moving to a national popular vote would likely mean candidates would focus their attention and policies on large, urban population centers. Fellow 2020 candidate Andrew Yang made that point on Twitter on Sunday.
"The problem with deciding Presidential elections via popular vote is that candidates would naturally campaign in urban areas with big media markets and their policies would follow suit. Better to have proportional electoral college votes in each state so you campaign everywhere," he wrote.
https://twitter.com/AndrewYangVFA/status/1107346979611463680