Walz Says the Electoral College ‘Needs to Go’

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Tuesday called for abolishing the Electoral College as a means of electing American presidents, reiterating a position he has articulated in the past while he and Vice President Kamala Harris are in the heat of a campaign for the White House.

Twice during campaign fund-raisers on the West Coast, Mr. Walz said he would prefer that presidential candidates did not have to focus on a few political battlegrounds and could instead focus on winning votes from across the country.

“I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go. We need a, we need a national popular vote,” Mr. Walz told donors at the Sacramento home of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. “So we need to win Beaver County, Pa. We need to be able to go into York, Pa., and win. We need to be in western Wisconsin and win. We need to be in Reno, Nev., and win.”

Abolishing the Electoral College is generally a popular position with voters but is something that would either require a constitutional amendment or more states agreeing to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

Mr. Walz’s support of the position — in deep-blue West Coast states no less — with less than a month before Election Day risks rocking the boat for the Harris campaign as it tries to deliver a message focused on economic concerns, abortion rights and the threat of former President Donald J. Trump.

Teddy Tschann, a spokesman for Mr. Walz, said that Ms. Harris’s campaign did not support abolishing the Electoral College.

“Governor Walz believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket,” Mr. Tschann said. “He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes. And, he was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts.”

Earlier Tuesday, at a different fund-raising event in Seattle, Mr. Walz called himself “a national popular vote guy, but that’s not the world we live in.”

Indeed, Mr. Walz has long signaled that he favors electing presidents by a national popular vote. Last year, he signed legislation adding Minnesota to the National Popular Vote Compact, which would force states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote if a sufficient number of states commit to doing so.

In response to Mr. Walz’s remarks on Tuesday about the Electoral College, Mr. Trump’s campaign posted on social media asking why Mr. Walz hates “the Constitution so much?”

Twice since 2000 — that year, when George W. Bush defeated Al Gore, and in 2016, when Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton — Democratic presidential candidates have won the national popular vote and lost the presidential election in the Electoral College. Mrs. Clinton in 2017 called for abolishing the Electoral College.

When Ms. Harris was running for president in 2019, she said on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night television show that she was “open to the discussion” of ending the Electoral College. But during this campaign, she has avoided taking ambitious positions of the type that would upend the American political system.

At the same time, her running mate has caused her some unwanted distractions with headlines about how he inaccurately described his military record and his travels in China, among other topics.

During an interview that ran on Monday night on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Mr. Walz said Ms. Harris had told him recently, “You need to be a little more careful on how you say things.”