Former ESPN host Jemele Hill appeared on a CNN panel Monday night and declared that the Electoral College was invented for one reason: slavery. She went further, suggesting the system cost both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris the presidency. The first claim distorts the historical record. The second ignores the 2024 results entirely.
Hill's argument, delivered with the confidence of settled fact, is the kind of revisionism that sounds compelling in a cable news segment but collapses under even a casual reading of the Constitutional Convention debates. And CNN, which gave her the platform, made no apparent effort to push back.
As OutKick's Bobby Burack reported, Hill told the CNN audience:
"The Electoral College is rooted in slavery. That was the entire reason that it was invented, essentially, and we should have gotten from up under it a long time ago, and not just because you have two women, quite capable, who lose the election."
That word, "entirely", does a lot of heavy lifting. And it cannot bear the weight.
The Electoral College emerged from a specific structural problem the Founders faced in Philadelphia: how to select a chief executive for a republic that had never existed before. The two main alternatives on the table were direct popular election and selection by Congress. The delegates rejected both. A direct vote, they feared, would disadvantage smaller states and regions with dispersed populations. Congressional selection risked making the president a creature of the legislature.
The Electoral College was the compromise. It gave each state a number of electors equal to its combined representation in the House and Senate, balancing population against statehood.
Did slavery factor into the equation? Yes, through the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning House seats and, by extension, electoral votes. That arrangement gave slaveholding states more political power than their free populations alone would have warranted.
But calling slavery "the entire reason" the Electoral College was invented erases the broader structural debate that produced it. Small-state versus large-state tensions, fears of legislative overreach, concerns about an uninformed electorate spread across a vast continent, all of these drove the design. The Three-Fifths Compromise shaped the math. It did not create the institution.
There is a legitimate historical discussion to be had about how slavery influenced the structure of American government. Hill's version skips the discussion and jumps straight to a verdict, one that conveniently supports the conclusion she wanted to reach.
Hill's second claim, that the Electoral College cost "two women, quite capable" the presidency, has an even more obvious flaw. Kamala Harris did not just lose the Electoral College in 2024. She lost the popular vote to Donald Trump as well.
If the Electoral College had been abolished before the 2024 race, Harris still would have lost. The system Hill blames for the outcome had nothing to do with it. Trump won both measures of the national vote.
The 2016 case is different. Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. That result is the one that animates most progressive hostility toward the system. Clinton herself has called the Electoral College an "abomination," a label she repeated in a Netflix documentary. But even in 2016, the system functioned exactly as it was designed to function, by requiring a candidate to build a geographically broad coalition, not simply run up the score in a handful of dense urban centers.
Hill lumped both elections together as proof of the same injustice. The numbers say otherwise.
What makes Hill's appearance worth examining is not just what she said, but where she said it. CNN invited a former sports commentator onto a political panel and let her deliver a sweeping historical claim, one that serious historians would immediately qualify, without correction or context.
This is not a new pattern. Burack noted that CNN has repeatedly featured Hill and other former ESPN personalities on political topics, treating media celebrity as a substitute for subject-matter knowledge. The network's willingness to let historically inaccurate claims air unchallenged raises questions about whether the goal is informing viewers or reinforcing a narrative.
Hill did not respond to a request for comment about her claims, Burack reported.
The broader pattern is familiar. When the Electoral College delivers a result progressives dislike, the institution itself becomes the villain. Kamala Harris herself once called for a "no bad idea brainstorm" that included scrapping the Electoral College and packing the Supreme Court, proposals that would fundamentally reshape the constitutional order the Founders built.
Hill's Electoral College commentary did not arrive in a vacuum. Just the week before, she claimed she would have a higher-paying job for which she is "unqualified" if she were white, a statement that treats racial grievance as an all-purpose explanation for professional outcomes.
Taken together, the two claims reveal a consistent approach: frame American institutions and American life as irredeemably shaped by racism, then use that framing to delegitimize any outcome that doesn't go your way. It's a closed loop. If you win, the system worked. If you lose, the system is racist.
The Founders designed a republic with structural safeguards precisely because they understood that factions would try to concentrate power. The Electoral College forces presidential candidates to appeal to a geographically diverse nation, not just its most populated corners. The Founders' original intent was to build institutions sturdy enough to resist the passions of any single moment, or any single faction.
That design has survived for more than two centuries. It has survived because it works, not because it is perfect, but because it distributes power in ways that prevent any one region or coalition from dominating the rest.
Progressives who want to abolish the Electoral College rarely say what they actually mean: they want a system in which presidential elections are decided by the popular vote totals of a few major metropolitan areas. They want New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston to pick the president. They want rural voters, small-state voters, and voters in less fashionable parts of the country to become afterthoughts.
Wrapping that agenda in the language of racial justice does not change what it is. It is a power grab dressed up as a history lesson.
Manipulating the rules of democratic competition to guarantee preferred outcomes is not reform. It is the kind of structural self-dealing the Founders specifically tried to prevent.
Hill is free to dislike the Electoral College. She is free to argue for its abolition. But when she tells a national television audience that slavery was "the entire reason" the system exists, she is not making an argument. She is spreading misinformation, the very thing cable news networks claim to oppose.
And when CNN puts her on air to do it without a word of pushback, the network becomes a willing partner in the project.
If the left's best case against the Electoral College requires rewriting the founding to fit a cable news segment, maybe the institution is sturdier than they thought.
