Though the 2020 campaign season is already underway, some presidential hopefuls cannot get over the results of the previous election.  

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, in launching her campaign for president, recently declared the need to abolish the Electoral College, which elected Donald Trump despite him losing the popular vote.  

In a recent speech, Warren said, “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 is right to say that every citizen’s vote matters, but the Electoral College is the system ensuring that remains the case.

As compared to senators and congressmen whose constituencies are limited within their state, the president of the United States is responsible for protecting the collective interests of all 50 states.  Therefore, the Electoral College, unlike a popular vote, is designed to weigh the interests of citizens of various states without allowing a few highly populated areas to determine the political future of the entire nation.  

Using the same rationale, our country’s founders also created the Senate, which operates in a similarly undemocratic fashion. In the U.S. Senate, a state as unpopulated as Hawaii is given the same number of representatives as the much more populated state of Texas.  

By mandating equal representation of the states in one chamber of Congress, the founders provided a check against the potential for a tyranny of the majority. This over-representation of smaller states in the Senate prevents our government from systematically prioritizing larger states’ interests over those of their less populous counterparts.  

While the Electoral College does apportion electoral votes based on the size of the states, it’s deliberately designed to limit the electoral power of highly populated states.

Opponents of the Electoral College decry how the current U.S. president lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. To put that into context, consider that the population of Manhattan, New York, by itself is over half that number.  

Manhattan is only one 22-square-mile borough of New York City, whose massive constituency of 8.6 million consistently and disproportionately votes Democrat. As ABC News reported during the 2016 election, only 59 percent of voters in the state of New York voted for Hillary Clinton, as compared to the staggering 80 percent who voted for her in New York City.  

Only 48.2 percent of American voters nationwide cast their ballot for Clinton in 2016, showing that the political persuasions and values of the massive voting bloc of New Yorkers differ from those of the rest of the country.

Under the Electoral College, presidential hopefuls are forced to appeal to different states, not just the urban centers of the U.S. However, switching to a popular vote would allow politically homogeneous and densely populated cities like New York City to decide what type of commander in chief represents the entire country. Twenty-nine states preferred Trump over Clinton, and for this reason, he was elected president.  

Rather than try to change the constitutional procedure for electing the leader of our country, presidential candidates like Warren should try to build broader bases by acknowledging the interests and values of all Americans.

If they don’t, they’ll continue to lose – a testament to the wisdom of the Electoral College.