Editor's note: Daily through Jan. 25, ADN will publish poll results showing how Alaskans feel about topics ranging from the Affordable Care Act and President-elect Donald Trump's transition to crime and the opioid crisis.
America's Electoral College is a throwback to the Revolutionary War era, when direct democracy wasn't trusted. Since the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution became law in 1913, U.S. senators are popularly elected in every state, but presidents are still chosen by the Electoral College. Hillary Clinton would be president-elect today if elections were decided by popular vote.
Alaskans, who overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump, not Clinton, and who, as members of a small state, benefit disproportionately from the Electoral College, nonetheless would like to see it eliminated, according to a public opinion poll conducted among 750 respondents statewide for Alaska Dispatch News by Ivan Moore's Alaska Survey Research as part of the quarterly Alaska Survey.
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Statewide, Alaskans support a direct popular vote by 45.9 percent to 42.2 percent, with 11.9 percent not sure. Regionally, Southeast Alaska had the strongest support for doing away with the Electoral College, 57.4 percent to 30.8 percent, while opponents of the popular vote outnumbered supporters in Southcentral Alaska not counting Anchorage, 50.4 percent to 34.1 percent. Statewide, Democrats strongly favored doing away with the Electoral College, while Republicans were nearly as strongly in support of keeping it.
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Full crosstabs for this survey question here.
Next: Affordable Care Act.
The Alaska Survey is a statewide public opinion survey project consisting of 750 interviews with randomly selected Alaskans aged 18+. 500 interviews are conducted on cellphones, 250 on landlines. With the exception of rural Alaska, all numbers for this study are generated randomly onto the set of active Alaska telephone prefixes, with no calling done to lists or phone book records. Survey completions are apportioned appropriately by geographic area in Alaska, and collected data is weighted to make the sample representative of the Alaska population by gender, ethnicity and age, according to latest Census estimates, and also by land/cell phone status. The full sample of 750 (MOE +3.6%) contains a subsample of 624 registered voters (MOE +3.9%).