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The abolition of state-by-state, winner-take-all electoral votes would speed the disintegration of the already weakened two-party system. It would encourage single-issue ideologues and eccentric millionaires to jump into presidential contests. The multiplication of splinter parties would make it hard for major-party candidates to win popular-vote majorities. Cumulating votes from state to state, they could force a runoff if no candidate got more than 40% of the vote--and then could extract concessions from the major parties. The prospect of double national elections could be alarming to a bored and weary electorate, especially when the final prize might go to the candidate who came in second in the first round.
There is a simpler reform that would ensure the popular-vote winner a majority in the Electoral College: award a bonus of 102 electoral votes, two for each state and for the District of Columbia, to the winner of the popular vote. Under this reform, there would remain a temptation to bring moral pressure on individual electors to reject the decisions of their states and shift their votes to the popular-vote winners. This invokes the myth that the Founding Fathers expected the electors to be free agents. The evidence is that the Founders fully expected the Electoral College to execute the popular will in each state. And the problem of the "faithless elector" can easily be handled by abolishing individual electors while retaining the Electoral College.
The Republic has faced succession crises before--and the Star-Spangled Banner yet waves. There is no need to get too excited over this one.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s autobiography, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, is being published this month by Houghton Mifflin.