If the Electoral College truly functioned as an indirect election, we would have a real case to consider for why it is different from a first-past-the-post system — but it doesn’t really work that way. Since electoral votes are correlated to popular votes, the system essentially functions as a first-past-the-post popular vote with added noise.

There are two patterns in the noise. First, parties that control state-level governments tend to win, because when the election is expected to be close in a state, the state government can influence the outcome of the election by purging voter rolls, making voter registration more difficult, or supporting outright fraud. Second, the presidents who are elected without a plurality have been generally bad presidents (leaving aside Trump, who we can’t put into a historical context yet, three have been single-term presidents rapidly swept back out of office, and history does not seem likely to be kind to Bush II given the Iraq debacle, financial meltdown, and massive deficits).

There is a case to consider regarding regional support, but it cuts in the other direction. The winner-take-all-by-state electoral system rewards, rather than penalizes, candidates with narrow regional support. Even very strong candidates with broad national support are penalized.

Note that the system does require a majority in the Electoral College. If it does not, then the election goes to the House of Representatives using a one-state-one-vote rule using the top three candidates.

The last third-party candidate to win the electoral votes of multiple states in a US presidential election was George Wallace (1968), who had very tightly regionalized support. Ross Perot (1996) had considerably stronger support, but since it was fairly evenly distributed across the country, he won no electoral votes.

The 1860 election is a more striking demonstration of what happens in the US when candidates have regionalized support. There were four major candidates. Out of those four, the candidate with the most votes (Abraham Lincoln) was also the candidate who was on the ballot in the smallest number of states.

The candidate with the geographically broadest base of support (Stephen Douglas, also the second-largest number of votes) received the fewest electoral votes; the two centrist candidates between them only won a handful of border states. Douglas won almost a third of the vote — but only a single state.

The result was a civil war, which we in the US like to think of kindly (since it did end slavery) but which is generally not what you want to result from a presidential election.