Elizabeth Warren Calls For Abolishing Electoral College, Moving To National Popular Vote [VIDEO]

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Monday proposed the abolition of the Electoral College and moving instead to a national popular vote for presidential elections.

Warren, one of 15 Democratic presidential candidates for 2020, is among the most progressive contenders to be launching a bid against President Donald Trump. 

“Every vote matters,” 69-year-old Warren said at a CNN town hall in Mississippi. “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 stressed she wanted to make this point in Mississippi because, during a general election, “candidates don’t come to places like Mississippi” and other none-swing states.

“They also don’t come to places like California and Massachusetts because we’re not the battleground states,” Warren added. “We need to make sure that every vote counts.”

The Electoral College is a vestige of American politics that dictates, among other things, that presidential candidates can win an election it they secure at least 270 electoral votes (more than half of the 538 elected officials in Congress), even if they lose the popular vote. In 2016, Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes but earned 304 electoral votes, while Hillary Clinton took home 227 electoral votes.

Warren isn’t the only 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to call for eliminating the Electoral College, however. Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also said he believes the institution should be abolished, partly because it has made the United States “less and less democratic.”

“We’ve got to repair our democracy. The Electoral College needs to go,” Buttigieg, who is openly gay, said on CBS This Morning in January.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — another 2020 contender who came up short in 2016 to become the Democratic nominee — called during the last election for a “reassessment” of the Electoral College.

An agreement called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would be one step in abolishing the Electoral College.

In six of the last seven U.S. presidential elections, the Democratic candidate won the popular vote. The only exception was the 2004 election, when George W. Bush defeated John Kerry by just over three million votes to win his second term.