By T N Ashok
NEW YORK: Americans vote for their president and their legislature as two separate acts, and one can cancel the other’s ambitions without ending the presidency. This month shows it. Networks projected on 4 November that Democrats had taken both the House and the Senate, a rebuke to President Donald Trump. He stays in office regardless.
In a parliamentary democracy, losing the legislature means losing power. In the United States it means a harder second half of the term.
When Americans vote for president, they are taking part in the national popular vote, the raw total of ballots cast. It is not what elects the president. The Constitution gives that job to the Electoral College, which has 538 electors. Each state gets one elector for every member it sends to Congress (two Senators plus its House members), and Washington, D.C. gets three. A candidate needs 270 to win.
Almost every state awards all its electors to whoever wins its statewide vote. A candidate can therefore lose the national popular vote and still win the presidency, as has happened in 2000 and 2016. For readers used to “most votes wins,” this is the system’s strangest feature. It was designed in the 18th century as a compromise between large and small states, and it has survived because changing it needs the consent of the very states that benefit from it.
Many outsiders assume the electors are the senators and representatives themselves. They are not. Article II of the Constitution bars any Senator, Representative or federal office holder from serving as an elector. Electors are chosen by state parties, usually loyalists, and meet in their state capitals in December to cast formal votes.
Americans therefore run two parallel elections. The presidency is decided every four years through the Electoral College. Congress is decided separately, with all 435 House seats up every two years and roughly a third of the 100 Senate seats.
A midterm falls two years into a presidential term. It is a referendum on the sitting president, but it cannot remove him. His term is fixed, and a loss in Congress has no legal effect on it.
It is not an omen for re-election either. Harry Truman lost Congress in 1946 and won in 1948. Bill Clinton lost both chambers in 1994 and won in 1996. Barack Obama lost the House in 2010 and won in 2012. Unlike a prime minister, an American president does not need the legislature’s continuing confidence to stay in office.
When the opposition controls Congress, the result is “divided government.” The president still commands the armed forces, conducts foreign policy, enforces the laws and holds the veto. Congress holds the power of the purse and the power to legislate. Neither can govern fully without the other, so the voters’ message is oversight and bargaining, not removal.
The framers chose this design deliberately. They rejected the British model, in which the executive survives only while it commands a legislative majority, and built a presidency with a fixed term and its own mandate. The price is gridlock. The benefit is stability, since a president cannot be toppled by a lost vote.
France is semi-presidential, which is the clearest contrast. The president is directly elected for five years in two rounds, so a winner always has majority backing in the final vote, which the American system doesn’t guarantee. France also has a prime minister who runs the government day to day. The president appoints the prime minister but cannot dismiss him; the National Assembly can. When the president’s party loses the legislature, France gets “cohabitation,” forcing the president to govern with an opposition prime minister. There have been three such spells, the last under Chirac and Jospin from 1997 to 2002. The presidential term was cut from seven years to five to match the Assembly’s mandate, and legislative elections now follow soon after the presidential one, so the same camp usually wins both. America’s divided government, by contrast, is built into the calendar.
Sri Lanka has an executive presidency elected by a single national vote, with no electoral college. Voters rank up to three candidates, and a winner needs more than 50 percent. It has no separate runoff. If no one clears that bar, the losing candidates are eliminated and their second and third preferences are added to the top two. This happened for the first time in 2024. Anura Kumara Dissanayake led with 5,634,915 first-preference votes to Sajith Premadasa’s 4,363,035, then won after the transfers. In 2024 incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe finished third with about 17 percent. The system guarantees a majority winner without a second trip to the polls, something neither the American nor the French model does.
Elsewhere, the designs diverge sharply. Brazil uses a two-round runoff like France. Mexico and the Philippines elect their presidents in a single round by plurality, for one six-year term. Nigeria adds a geographic test: a candidate needs a plurality plus at least a quarter of the vote in two-thirds of the states. That echoes the American instinct that a president should have broad territorial support, but it works through the popular vote rather than a college.
Almost every presidential democracy counts the popular vote directly, and America is the outlier in letting the Electoral College override it. Where the system really stands out, though, is in letting the legislature and the executive stay at odds for years with no mechanism to resolve the standoff. France gives the president a prime minister to absorb the shock, and Sri Lanka makes sure the president starts with a majority. America offers neither. (IPA Service)
