By Anna Daniels
Yesterday, December 19, electors cast their votes in the Electoral College against a backdrop of protests across the country, including here in San Diego. For the second time in some of our memories, the winner of the popular vote lost the Electoral College vote.
Democrats howled after Al Gore’s loss in 2000 and agreed that something must be done about the Electoral College. All of the sound and fury ultimately signified nothing–here we (Democrats) are again.
A useful thought experiment is to imagine what would have happened if Trump had won the popular vote and not the Electoral College. Do you seriously think that we would be hearing about anything except how the election was stolen from Trump?
It is past time to assure that the candidate receiving the popular vote is elected president.
A Constitutional Convention to eliminate the Electoral College under a Trump presidency has little likelihood of being convened. The Electoral College, established by Article Two of the Constitution and further codified in the 12th Amendment served as a protection to slave states. A direct election would have favored the North over the South which had more than a half million slaves who could not vote.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
Since a Constitutional Convention is not much of an option, there is a work around that has been pursued on the state level. While the Constitution establishes electors, it is the states that tell them how to vote. The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It has been enacted into law in 11 states with 165 electoral votes (CA, DC, HI, IL, MA, MD, NJ, NY, RI, VT, WA). It will take effect when enacted by states with 105 more electoral votes.
The New York Times editorial today takes the position that it is Time to End the Electoral College.
And so for the second time in 16 years, the candidate who lost the popular vote has won the presidency. Unlike 2000, it wasn’t even close. Hillary Clinton beat Mr. Trump by more than 2.8 million votes, or 2.1 percent of the electorate. That’s a wider margin than 10 winning candidates enjoyed and the biggest deficit for an incoming president since the 19th century.
The Democratic Party must take this up as an issue now and DNC leadership must be committed to take the issue to all 50 states.
The Electoral College has institutionalized our country’s original sin of slavery and it has given disproportionate weight to smaller states such Wyoming where resident’s votes count more than 3.6 times as much as California. It has given Donald Trump the presidency.
Two participants at a San Diego rally to protest Electoral College vote, Dec. 19th, 2016. (Photo: Annie Lane)
The Mandate and Minority Rule
What the Electoral College hasn’t done is given Trump a mandate. Spin it as much as they want, neither Trump nor his attendants can make Trump’s popular vote loss of more than 2.8 million votes into a mandate. The Left needs to resist the use of that term every time it arises from the Trump camp. Language is resistance.
What we have in lieu of a mandate is minority rule. With a Republican President and Congress and most likely the Supreme Court, our system of checks and balances is compromised. It is up to us, the people, to provide them during a presidency whose very legitimacy will rightfully continue to be questioned.
Take action today
Tell state legislatures: Dismantle the outdated Electoral College system by joining the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact now. Click here to sign the petition
Anna Daniels
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“What we have… is minority rule.” Let that phrase sink in. The trolls are gloating at the failure of democracy, a system which — when it works — puts them at a disadvantage because it gives everybody a fair shot at seeing their own preferences taken seriously.
QOTD: “Amazingly, an anti-democratic mechanism intended to overrepresent the interests of slaveholders has not prevented a white nationalist authoritarian who lost the election by the standard that prevails in pretty much every democratic jurisdiction in the world from becoming president.” (Lawyers, Guns & Money)
Exactly right. In some African nations, a stunt like this would have people rioting. Literally! And what are we all doing?
I wrote it before and I’ll write it again:
Hey hey, ho ho; that undemocratic anachronistic Electoral College has got to go! (doesn’t scan worth a damn but sure makes sense).
The American voting system is also to blame. In the 2000 election Ralph Nader, the man most closely aligned with Al Gore actually took votes away from Gore giving Bush the election. Until we use a more enlightened voting system, third party candidates will help the candidate they dislike the most win.
Voting theorist Claude Hillinger puts it this way:
A recent example is the candidacy of Ralph Nader in the presidential election of 2000. Most Nader supporters would probably have voted for Gore rather than Bush. In this very close and contested election, in which Gore actually received more popular votes than Bush, Nader’s candidacy probably tilted the scale in Bush’s favor. It is typical of such elections that the third party candidate takes votes away from the candidate that he is ideologically closest to and perversely favors the election of the candidate that he and his supporters most oppose.
And i’m reply to my reply which is fair game here evidently:
5 biggest actual reasons why Gore lost:
1. Turncoat Jospeph Liebermann VP candidate – ’nuff said.
2 Even Mondale won his own State which Gore did not and which would have won electoral college w TN
3. The ‘ Gorebot’ candidate constricted by the stodgy DNC which has also lost the last four elections! Dnc has been an epic fail!
4. Dems caved in on recount stoppage and had basically conceded before USSC selected Bush President.
5 Failure to win Democratic voters in Florida! 300,000+ Democrats switched over & voted for Bush which us a double whammy meaning it’s a 500,000 vote turn around! Compared to the measly 24000 Dem votes Nader got ?! Haha !! And by the way, no one knows how nany Nader voters would have simply stayed home if RN was not on ballot. I’d bet about half …
to John L and OB John– 1) Al Gore won the popular vote by 540,000 votes. So are you both making the case that the popular vote shouldn’t be the basis for winning the presidency?
All the other arguments you raise- 3rd party spoiler, Gore didn’t win his home state are also off the mark. Charles Pierce provides a trip down memory lane that is clarifying:
“Again, the 2000 election is instructive. There was no question that Al Gore was the victim of extraordinary media malpractice. There was no question that C-Plus Augustus won because he carried Florida, and there was no question that he carried Florida through various schemes arranged in that state in which his brother was the governor and his state chairman was secretary of state. There was no question that a perfectly legal recount in that state was stopped by the unprecedented—and non-precedential—intervention of a Scalia ex machina Supreme Court, several justices of which had naked conflicts of interest. Some 100,000 people showed up in Washington to protest the inauguration, and TV showed them hardly at all.
Soon, all of this was obscured by the fact that Al Gore had ‘lost his home state,’ that he had failed to use Bill Clinton properly, and that he had failed to counteract the stupid caricature of himself that was presented to the voters in the guise of campaign journalism. The unique circumstances of how his loss had been calculated and certified were just one factor among many, and it was time to move forward as a nation.”
Anna, you raise a really difficult, challenging question: Does Trump’s winning of the electoral vote but not the popular vote mean he does not have a mandate? That raises a deeper question: Is our electoral college causing the democratic incoherence and unbalanced governance dividing and paralyzing our nation?
I would answer those questions with a ‘yes’ and a no,’ respectively. I will try to put that judgment in some context and welcome all counter thoughts.
Hillary’s team seems to have underplayed or missed the importance of every vote in every state, including key traditional Democrat ‘swing’ states with high electoral votes like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and her scant attention to key red states. In contrast, Trump not only won 70% of all states, he did so by flipping large numbers of Democrat white-working and middle class voters over to his side from those key traditional blue states – Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Florida.
I think this gives him a mandate to meet his promises to improve the well-being of ordinary Americans of all color, ethnic, sex and political veins – but not a mandate to see himself as the sole personified answer to our internal conflicts and decay.
Trump won the presidency by fanning people’s fears and distrust of politicians and institutions, while often incorporating a stream of outright lies to gain broad voter acceptance. He now has a mandate to overcome those fears and distrust through evidenced based analysis, inclusion and reasoned debate to arrive at balanced solutions to our critical societal problems. If he fails in staying loyal to these mandates, then he will be unceremoniously kicked out of office in the next election!
Like Sanders, Trump campaigned very intensely in both key blue states AND red states. Like Sanders, he tapped into the deep distress, resentment, simmering rage felt among millions of white-working and middle class Americans on both sides of the political spectrum. People who have become inflamed by decimated economic prospects to make a decent living, stagnating wages, rising inequality, job-destroying trade deals, deteriorating communities, congressional gridlock, xenophobic nationalism, big money in politics, not having a voice or feeling culturally marginalized, unattached.
These are truly serious problems that have been building up and unanswered for years by establishment elites … problems just waiting to be exploited by a right wing populist like Trump who tends to operate on emotions and narcissism.
Now we have reached a point where two presidents have been elected over the last 16 years who didn’t win the popular vote. Thus, the call for eliminating the electoral college. But this action would take a 2/3 super majority vote in Congress and approval of 3/4 of the states which are highly unlikely. If winning the presidency were changed to who got the most votes, candidates would likely be encouraged to focus most of their efforts on the biggest cities and states. Future presidents would be chosen by those living in big cities and high population regions.
The Founding Fathers were concerned that such a development could eventually lead to ‘tyranny of the majority’ and mob passions – whereby many voters particularly in smaller states would become ‘under-represented and their needs unheard.’ That in part explains their three constitutional separation of powers initiatives and limited voting rights with two senators in each state regardless of population, but different numbers of representatives based entirely on population. In their eyes, these distinctive constitutional processes for selecting the President and Senate seats would give a counter balance to the popular vote for the House of Representative seats.
However, for a long time now the tragic irony is that under-representation’ of voter concerns has been occurring on a significant scale by a pervasive corrupt influence of special interest money and lobbyists in legislative policy-making, the disproportionate power of big campaign money, and the quintessentially corrupt process of gerrymandering. On positive side, our more direct democracy has shown how Obama and Sanders could finance their campaigns on the backs of small donors rather than relying on the financial big-money elites. Trump was a self-funding billionaire and now is surrounding himself in his secretarial-ministries with billionaires and millionaires!
And here we are about to have a new government under a president selected by a historically high 2.8 million less votes than his opponent, a Congress that’s Republican dominated, and a Supreme Court that’s about to become ever more dominated by conservative judges.
Ominously, we are now embedded in the potential ‘tyranny of the minority’ (the executive) AND of the ‘majority’ (the congress and supreme court). Would this NO have occurred under an eliminated electoral college? I doubt that.
How to change things for the better? The scholar Theda Skocpol stresses that revolutionary threats to a democracy are created when democracies themselves fail over time to deal with fundamental societal breakdowns and challenges,e.g., climate change, income inequality, permanent warring, accelerating debt. In Skocpol’s view with which I am in the main in agreement, revolutionary movements don’t create crises; they respond to them. Authoritarian demagogues like Trump exploit the inevitable societal crises that the failures of established leadership elites bring. BUT, often the Trump-styled glorified ‘saviors’ end up making matters far worse by assuming the role of ‘Overlords’ craving and demanding godlike fealty.
The one mechanism actually in the control of the states to protect their sovereignty and democratic processes from excesses of all-out majority and/or minority rule is the adoption of laws that dictate how electors are chosen by some correlation with the popular vote. My state of Maine and Nebraska have done this in some form. Any state can choose how it allocates its electors.
The challenge would be how to design such a mechanism to better insure that bare majorities or minorities cannot easily dominate the rest of the country. The multiparty and coalition governing systems based on proportional representation in advanced European countries achieve this goal in a rather effective manner despite some bumps here and there.
I’m doubtful we are up to this challenge of incorporating the concept of proportional representation in any productive form in our electoral college or popular voting systems.
We appear too ideologically divided, blinded and controlled by special money interests to unify around constructive change in the interests of all Americans. Unlike European nations, we have a profound cultural reluctance to amend our Constitution to correct systemic breakdowns and to be in tune with changing times
I agree with Frank Thomas that: “Since a Constitutional Convention is not much of an option, there is a work around that has been pursued on the state level. While the Constitution establishes electors, it is the states that tell them how to vote. The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It has been enacted into law in 11 states with 165 electoral votes (CA, DC, HI, IL, MA, MD, NJ, NY, RI, VT, WA). It will take effect when enacted by states with 105 more electoral votes.”
It is important to notice that the states that, presently, support the National Popular Vote bill are not the small,red states who benefit most from the presently constituted Electoral Vote System. In this system, except for Maine and Nebraska, all of the electoral votes of each state, because of the so-called “Unit Rule,” go to the popular vote winner of that state, thus, in a sense, disenfranchising all of those who had voted for the losing candidate.
What if we were able to keep the number of electoral votes for each state based on the number of U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives presently allocated to each state, but substituted proportional representation of the popular vote of each state as the way the electoral votes of each state are counted to say two percentage points. In this way the small red states would not have their total electoral votes changed, preserving the federal nature of the system, just as we have two U.S. Senate votes for each state. However, the popular vote for each state would be the basis for counting those electoral votes.
This would be a more attractive reform to some of the states than complete direct election of the President, and might win over enough of the reluctant small,red states to actually effect a fundamental change in the system. Such a change would encourage candidates to campaign more than they do now in some of the more populous parts of our country, without denying the small, red states the slight advantage that was, originally, granted to the slave-holding states at the time of our Constitutional Convention.
Such a plan was, originally, proposed following the 1948 election by Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. in the U.S. Senate and by Texas Congressman Ed Gossett, in the U.S. House of Representatives, but failed to get enacted. It might be well to consider this plan as a possible alternative that would stand a better chance of gaining sufficient support today than would direct election of the president.