text: The winner take all method of awarding electoral votes induces the candidates,  to focus on their campaign; the voters in toss-up states are more likely to pay close attention to the competing candidates.  The electoral college restores some of the weigth on the political balance that large states lose by virtue of the mal-apportionment of the Senate decreed in the Constitution. The most popular vote was in Florida in 2012. Who won the vote, got 29 electoral votes. So other things being equal, a large state gets more attention from presidential candidates ina campaign tahn a small state. Nixon in 1968 and Clinton in 1992 both had only a 43 percent plurality of the popular votes, while winning a majority in the  Electoral College the 301 and 370 electoral votes, repectively.