.
Updated poll numbers
231,556,622 eligible voters
46.9% didn't vote
25.6% voted for Clinton
25.5% voted for Trump
1.7% voted for Johnson— Josh Nelson (@SSS_joshnelson) November 9, 2016
The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012
And who would know that better than Donald Trump?
Charles P. Pierce, in Esquire:
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA—On September 4, 1787, in a hall not far from here, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention reached yet another compromise. Like all of those compromises, this one was driven at least in part by the nervousness of the smaller states about their place in the new order, and in part because of the nervousness of the slave states over the status of their slaves. This compromise had to do with how the new system would produce what was still referred to in their deliberations as the “Chief Magistrate.”
There was some support for the idea to leave the choice to the national legislature. This was opposed on the grounds that this obviously would compromise the Chief Magistrate’s independence. There was some support for a direct election of the president, but that was opposed on the grounds that, taken as a group, the people were not, well, smart enough to make this decision by themselves. So, voila, the Founders gifted their posterity with that creaky, preposterous creature called the Electoral College…
Basically, however, the Electoral College remains pretty much as he and the rest of them left it. They felt that it would act as a kind of brake on the anti-democratic tendencies of the general population and that, as such, it would prevent angry demagogues from achieving real power. So, yeah, in the cold light of this morning, they called it a little early…
Donald Trump won the Republican nomination because more people voted for him than voted for anyone else. Donald Trump won the presidential election because enough people voted for him in enough states to hit the tripwire on one of the oldest booby traps in American politics. And it worked precisely as it was meant to work, although it produced exactly the opposite of the result it was meant to produce…
Dan Savage re-upped a column from September:
… Trump is polling well enough in some swing states that there’s a chance he could lose the popular vote and win the White House. Because, you see, our founding/slave-owning fathers saddled us with an anti-democratic Electoral College because it looked so nice up there on the mantle with that anti-Democratic U.S. Senate they got us. (Although the U.S. Senate does look like the more Democratic institution today, because states can’t be gerrymandered. Sad!)
But speaking of the electoral college: Hey, urbanists, progressives, blue-state voters, and city dwellers! Want politicians to pay more attention to the concerns of cities and the people who live and vote in them, aka 63% of the American people? Get behind the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact:
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among several U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their respective electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who wins the most popular votes is elected president, and it will come into effect only when it will guarantee that outcome. As of 2016, it has been joined by ten states and the District of Columbia; their 165 combined electoral votes amount to 30.7% of the total Electoral College vote, and 61.1% of the 270 votes needed for it to have legal force.
The Electoral College was expressly designed to keep the White House away from the “wrong” people. In 1787, that meant white men who didn’t have a stake in keeping not-rich white men and/or those who might sympathize with abolitionists out of what wasn’t yet the Oval Office, because the thought of black men — much less women — actually voting was more dystopian fiction than political possibility. Well, the nation they invented survived any number of uneducated “populist” presidents, starting with Andrew Jackson, and now eight years of a Black president. Yesterday, we’d finally have broken the Woman Barrier, if not for the Republicans’ combination of voter suppression and gerrymandering (plus the assistance of a dishonestly partisan FBI director and a foreign autocrat).
Late Night Open Thread: The Electoral College Must DiePost + Comments (88)