Let’s be quite clear about who won the 2016 presidential election. It was Hillary Clinton, who is currently ahead by about 700,000 popular votes with the counting still underway. More significantly, when all the votes are counted, most estimates have the final total at 1.8 million more votes for Clinton than for Trump. That’s 1.5% of total votes, which while not a landslide, is a greater difference than many elections in which the popular winner also wins the Electoral College. The raw total of 1.8 million is roughly twice the difference between the winners’ and losers’ vote in all four previous elections in which the loser in the popular vote assumed the presidency.
Almost everyone knows that two peculiarities of the American
system lead to the loser in the popular vote sometimes assuming control of the
White House: 1) Voters vote for electors who then vote for the president and
vice president. 2) Electors vote as a block according to state. Without an Electoral
College, or with one that voted proportionately, we would have our first woman
president embracing the most progressive platform in American history. It’s
what the American people clearly wanted, but what we will get instead is a
mentally unbalanced know-nothing political novice guided on social issues by
the alt-right and on economic issues by the greed of his social class.
The stated reason that the founders of the United States—you
know, that handful of rich white male merchants and slave owning gentry—preferred
the Electoral College to electing a president via the popular vote was to
balance the interests of the states with those of the national government in
the same way that the Senate does. I also believe some of them feared the votes
of the mob and thought they could manipulate the Electoral College to keep real
power in the hands of the few, which worked for maybe two decades.
What the Electoral College really does is put more power in
the hands of rural areas because it rations out votes based on geography. Rural
areas are less populated than urban areas, so a state with a large rural
population has greater influence on elections than one with an urban
population. Note that in the entire recorded history of mankind in all parts of
the earth, more densely populated areas have always without exception been more
diverse, spun off more innovation and have had more rules governing
interactions than less populated areas. The urban-rural divide goes back
probably to the formation of cities. At the beginning of the 19th century, the U.S.
voting population was primarily agrarian and either of Anglo-Saxon or German
origins, so the urban-rural divide didn’t matter that much. Since about the 1880s,
it has mattered a great deal.
Today’s situation is ridiculous. Let’s do the math: When you
divide the number of electoral votes per state by the number of voters, we find
that a vote by someone in Vermont, our smallest state in population and also one
of our most rural, is worth more than twice as much as a vote by someone in
California. (Vermont: 3 divided by 321,000 = .0000093; California: 55 divided
by 13,600,000 = .0000040). Now in today’s topsy-turvy world, that’s a lack of
taxation because of a lack of representation!
A significant ramification of the Electoral College is to
make it seem at least in most instances that the presidential mandate to govern
is stronger than it actually is. For example, while Lyndon Baines Johnson got
61.1% of the popular vote, his total in the Electoral College was in excess of
90%! This year while losing the popular vote, Trumpty-Dumpty (no, I will not
give him the respect he doesn’t deserve and has not earned!) won the Electoral
College with a landslide of 56.9%.
Looking at the other four instances of the loser winning the
popular vote for president is very illuminating. Here is a chart with the
essentials:
|
Year
|
Popular Winner/Edge
|
Declared President
|
Electors/House
|
|
1824
|
Andrew Jackson (10.5%)
|
John Q. Adams
|
House
|
|
1876
|
Samuel Tilden (3%)
|
Rutherford B. Hayes
|
Electors*
|
|
1888
|
Grover Cleveland (.8%)
|
Benjamin Harrison
|
Electors
|
|
2000
|
Al Gore (.5%)
|
George W. Bush
|
Electors
|
|
2016
|
Hillary Clinton (1.5-3%)
|
Donald Trump
|
Electors
|
* After negotiation over
disputed electors
In every case, the Republican won, and in all but the
selection of the brilliant John Quincey Adams over the ruthless, racist and
sometimes lawless Andrew Jackson by the House of Representatives, the decision
led to mediocre or disastrous presidencies. Only the unmitigated disaster—Bush II—was
reelected. Every one of these elections had one or more third party candidates
who siphoned off at least one percent of the vote and enough votes to turn the
tide. In two of the elections, the loser assumed the presidency in the very
next election.
The similarity that is most noteworthy for the recent
election is the fact that in all the popular-loser-wins elections,
disenfranchised voters would have gone heavily for the candidate who won the
popular vote but lost the election. Remember that one of the strands of
American history is the gradual enfranchisement of voters, from white males
with property to white males in general to African-American men in theory to
women to African-Americans in practice to expanded voting hours and voting
days. This history takes an anti-democratic turn in the 1990s, when one of the
major parties implemented a long-term campaign to suppress voting by minorities
and the young by purging voter rolls, gerrymandering states to create safe
districts for their party, decreasing voting hours and polling places, not
allowing ex-felons who have paid their debt to society to vote, passing new
laws that mandate voter IDs and using dirty tricks against organizations such
as ACORN that work to get out the vote. The largest voter suppression efforts
were in the so-called swing states.
Voter suppression paid off in 2000 and again in 2016. While
the will of a majority of the states was to elect Donald Trump, the will of the
people was to elect Hillary Clinton. The people were thwarted by the Electoral
College.
I recently signed a petition that demands that the Electors vote for Hillary instead of Trumpty-Dumpty. I urge all readers to sign it, but only as a protest act. The Electors virtually
never vote against the will of the voters in their respective states, even
though they could in 24 states. They are
just too interested in maintaining the stability to which I alluded before.
It would be wishful thinking to think we can replace the
Electoral College with popular voting in the short term. It would take an
amendment to the constitution and those are getting harder to pass with each
decade. But first one or both of the two major political parties would have to
get behind a move to abolition the Electoral College, and, to quote my father, that ain’t gonna happen!
The reason: stability. Once the election is over,
establishing a peaceful transfer of power and communicating the long-term
stability of the United States usually becomes the most important goal of the
losing party. It’s why Nixon didn’t raise a stink about possible voter fraud in
Illinois and elsewhere in 1960, why Gore didn’t protest the Supreme Court
decision that gave Bush II the election in 2000, and why Clinton and Obama are
striking such conciliatory notes towards the Donald and not encouraging the
wave of protest that has broken out all over the country. It’s also why Trump’s
accusations that the election was rigged were considered so destabilizing by so
many elected officials and political scientists of both parties. By magnifying
the victory of the winner, the Electoral College helps to assure stability by
giving a false mandate.
The smarter play for the left would be to work at the state
level in two ways:
1.
Register voters and get them to the polls. We
can’t limit voter registration drives to presidential election years.
2.
Elect state representatives who will repeal the
recent wave of voter suppression laws.
The goal should be to control all state legislatures in
swing states and as many as possible overall by 2020, when the country next sets
Congressional districts.
The left can’t take back this country until we take back the
states.
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