They designated electors to each of the three political branches with the purpose of each institution in mind.1 As opposed to the House and Senate, whose members know their employers and thus whom they must satisfy, the Framers’ President was unbeholden to the people-at-large, states, Congress, faction, or collection of factions – what we know as political parties.
Our Framers discarded the ages-old methods of appointing chief executives. We cannot thank them enough! They devised a third body, neither popular nor aristocratic, a temporary electoral college to whom their choice, the President, owed nothing!
Thanks to a few electors, passing electors who did not hold federal office themselves, the Framers’ President didn’t owe his office to either the masses or elites.
He could do his duty to the Constitution and not to a political party.
However combinations or associations of the above description (political parties) may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
President George Washington’s Farewell Address (original written for him by James Madison as Washington’s first term neared... GW put it aside when he decided to run for a second term, this version as co-edited by Washington himself and Alexander Hamilton at the end of his second term)