How can the candidate with most votes lose? The US electoral college explained

Article II of the US constitution lays out the process by which a president is elected.

When the founding fathers gathered in Philadelphia to draft the US constitution in 1787, they had a lot of trouble figuring out a system for choosing a chief executive. Initially, they proposed a plan that would have Congress choose the president. But that led to concerns that the executive branch, designed to be independent from Congress, would be subject to it.

A contingent of the delegates also favored electing the president through a direct popular vote. But the idea never got broad support and was shut down repeatedly during the convention, the historian Alexander Keyssar wrote in his book Why do we still have the electoral college.

There were a number of reasons the idea was not widely popular. First, the convention had adopted the racist three-fifths compromise in which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for population purposes. This was a win for the southern states, in which slaves made up a sizable chunk of the population. A popular vote system would have disadvantaged the southern states because they had fewer people who could vote.

There were also concerns about giving too much power to larger states and that voters would be unable to learn about the candidates from different states, according to Keyssar. It was a debate driven more about pragmatics than about political rights, he writes.

Towards the end of the convention, a committee of 11 delegates was appointed to deal with unresolved matters and one of them was how to select the president. They proposed a version of what we have now come to understand as the electoral college.

In the 2024 election, there are seven swing states: Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Michigan (15 electoral votes), Georgia (16 electoral votes), North Carolina (16 electoral votes), Arizona (11 electoral votes), and Nevada (six electoral votes). Whichever candidate wins the election must carry some combination of those states, which is why the candidates will spend the majority of their time and resources there. Joe Biden carried all of those states bar North Carolina in the 2020 election.