Electoral College Quotes

Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.

When it was over, Goodman won the popular vote, but John won the decisive Electoral College and the presidency. Gerrymandering played a prominent role in the shocking result.

Yet, from limiting original voting rights to white men, to the elitist and racist origins of the Electoral College, American democracy has always left people out of participation, by design.

The commentator Peter Daou, who worked on my 2008 campaign, captured my feelings when he tweeted, “If Trump had won by 3 million votes, lost electoral college by 80K, and Russia had hacked RNC, Republicans would have shut down America.

members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desparately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for - someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and post modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots... One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion... All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet pp89-90

Denying the popular vote is un-American and anti-democratic.

I believe that Donald Trump’s decision to attack the lawfully certified Electoral College results and to ignore the rulings of our courts was an assault on the structural constitutional safeguards that keep us free.

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.

At the federal level, this problem could be greatly alleviated by abolishing the Electoral College system. It's the winner-take-all mathematics from state to state that delivers so much power to a relative handful of voters. It's as if in politics, as in economics, we have a privileged 1 percent. And the money from the financial 1 percent underwrites the microtargeting to secure the votes of the political 1 percent. Without the Electoral College, by contrast, every vote would be worth exactly the same. That would be a step toward democracy.

The two-party system amplifies and exacerbates polarization by pitting two juggernauts (Democrats and Republicans) against each other in a bitter, all-consuming rivalry—and gerrymandering, closed primaries, and the Electoral College compound the problem.

The newly dubbed General Lafayette was only nineteen years old. Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.

The Electoral College was a concession to slave owners, an affair of both mathematical and political calculation.

An institution rooted in slavery cannot be the voice of our people.

Free elections don't always result in fair elections.

PARTY OF NO? How about a No Party System? Using No electoral college, No gerrymandering and No private monetary contributions. No?

No matter their party, people with a conflict of interest should be banned from the Electoral College.

Campaign managers and other staffers point to at least three major benefits that would flow from a national popular vote: more public participation, more political moderation, and more presidential legitimacy.

Even the method for determining proportional representation in Congress and identifying the winner of a presidential election (the electoral college) were specifically developed with the interest of slaveholders in mind. Under the terms of our country’s founding document, slaves were defined as three-fifths of a man, not a real, whole human being. Upon this racist fiction rests the entire structure of American democracy.

Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests. As long as ours is a representative form of government, and our legislatures are those instruments of government elected directly by and directly representative of the people, the right to elect legislators in a free and unimpaired fashion is a bedrock of our political system.

I know that of all the great shifts that have occurred in America--the freedom of slaves, the rights of women, the equality of gays and lesbians--none has happened easily, and certainly none has happened instantly and without serious attacks and backlash. But the reason we have these things is because the fair-minded people who came before us would not give up. In my life, I have seen elections stolen--either outright or through the electoral college. I have seen wars fought because there was no other way to get peace. I have seen the rich get richer and I have seen the poor get poorer. I have seen facts get harder and harder to hide--and easier and easier to manipulate. I have been angry and I have been frustrated and I have been ecstatic and I have been proven right and wrong and back again. I have given up on some things, but I have refused to give up on most things. And I can honestly say that all of it--all of it--seems to have led me to where we are, here and now.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intellegent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as his only AVAILABLE one, thus proving that he is himself AVAILABLE for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

Today as well we have a large unbalanced electorate that is regularly convinced to vote against its collective self-interest. These people are told that East Coast college professors brainwash the young and that Hollywood liberals make fun of them and have nothing in common with them and hate America and wish to impose an abhorrent, godless lifestyle.

New York Herald said there could be plans “to take the Capitol by violence.” The counting of the Electoral College votes, scheduled for Wednesday, February 13, might be stopped.

That is a crucial point: A significant number of House Republicans thought they could ignore the Electoral College result and find a way to reinstall Trump as president.

The New York Herald said there could be plans “to take the Capitol by violence.” The counting of the Electoral College votes, scheduled for Wednesday, February 13, might be stopped.

But it's my home, and not just because I grew up pledging my allegiance and taking tests on the Electoral College and Pearl Harbor. It's in me, running through me like my mother's blood.

Clinton’s advisers Robby Mook and John Podesta had said when Trump called the Electoral College “a rigged thing” and “a fraud,” suggesting that maybe only the popular vote should matter.

For instance, Publius affirms that the electoral college "affords a moral certainty that the office of President will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications." In fact, he speaks of "a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue," or "at least respectable" (No.

Trump had tapped into a vein in the electorate that Hillary couldn’t locate—and, just as important, that his much narrower focus within the Electoral College provided a viable path to victory.

I was well into my research on the saga of Fort Sumter and the advent of the American Civil War when the events of January 6, 2021, took place. As I watched the Capitol assault unfold on camera, I had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged. It is unsettling that in 1861 two of the greatest moments of national dread centered on the certification of the Electoral College vote and the presidential inauguration.

In the 2020 election, Trump received 74 million votes, more than any presidential candidate in history with the exception of Joe Biden, who won 81 million votes. Biden secured the Electoral College with 306 votes to Trump's 232.

He and his fellow framers built numerous protections of minority rights and property rights into the document, among them the Electoral College and the Senate, with their systems of representation that favored less populous states.

In giving the South negro suffrage, we have given the old slave-holders forty votes in the electoral college. They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of the gravest mistakes in the policy of reconstruction.”58 Just

It is interesting to note that under our original Constitution the highest office for which citizens could vote was their member of the House of Representatives. Senators were chosen by the legislatures of the several states, and the president was selected by an electoral college. Our founding fathers designed a government in which the true power rests in the House, a body the electorate can change completely every two years. It is thus quite sad that so many Americans concentrate so heavily on our quadrennial presidential beauty contest.

I poked fun at rich friends growling about the unfairness of the Electoral College over a dinner at Spago that cost thousands of dollars, and took Meryl Streep to task for her outraged anti-Trump speech at the Golden Globes the same week she’d put her Greenwich Village townhouse on the market for thirty million dollars.

The ancient philosophers always had their doubts about democracy. Plato feared the "false and braggart words" of the demagogue, and suspected democracy might be nothing more than a staging point on the road to tyranny. Early American advocates of republican government also recognized the challenge that a corrupt leader could pose to democracy, and thought hard about creating the institutions that would resist one. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 created the electoral college as a means of ensuring that a man with what Alexander Hamilton called "talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity" could never become president of the United States.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 created the electoral college as a means of ensuring that a man with what Alexander Hamilton called “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” could never become president of the United States. Although it eventually became a rubber-stamp body with no power—and, more recently, a mechanism that gives outsize influence to small groups of voters in a few states—the electoral college was originally meant to be something quite different: it was designed as a kind of review board, a group of elite lawmakers and men of property who would select the president, rejecting the people’s choice if necessary, in order to avoid the “excesses of democracy.

The Founders knew that unrestrained power is always dangerous. No person or group is immune from mistakes, selfishness, and greed.

An institution rooted in slavery can never set us free.

Mostly, this was the fault of white, Rust Belt, out-of-work Democrats. They had voted twice for Barack Obama, but now they were being told that they were racists or white supremacists for voting for Trump and giving him an Electoral College edge. The contrarian liberal genius Michael Moore had been a lonely prophet who had seen it coming, but the Clinton team had ignored him, just as they had ignored their own patriarch, Bill Clinton, who sounded the same warning. In a live performance, Moore had teased voters in Wilmington, Ohio, months before the election, telling them that he knew what they were planning to do. And they laughed with him, like guilty children caught in the act by a bemused cousin. He knew they were going to vote for Trump. He didn’t like it, but at least he was one person who could not be fooled. People who had been overlooked, despised, stomped on, used, taken for granted. This was their moment to speak. They had been shamed into telling the pollsters what they wanted to hear, but in the privacy of their polling booths, they had struck a blow. This

In one respect, though, the Court received unfair criticism for Bush v. Gore—from those who said the justices in the majority "stole the election" for Bush. Rather, what the Court did was remove any uncertainty about the outcome. It is possible that if the Court had ruled fairly—or better yet, not taken the case at all—Gore would have won the election. A recount might have led to a Gore victory in Florida. It is also entirely possible that, had the Court acted properly and left the resolution of the election to the Florida courts, Bush would have won anyway. The recount of the 60,000 undervotes might have resulted in Bush's preserving his lead. The Florida legislature, which was controlled by Republicans, might have stepped in and awarded the state's electoral votes to Bush. And if the dispute had wound up in the House of Representatives, which has the constitutional duty to resolve controversies involving the Electoral College, Bush might have won there, too. The tragedy of the Court's performance in the election of 2000 was not that it led to Bush's victory but the inept and unsavory manner with which the justices exercised their power.

Since populist movements have achieved an influence beyond their numbers, fixing electoral irregularities such as gerrymandering and forms of disproportionate representation which overweight rural areas (such as the US Electoral College) would help. So would journalistic coverage that tied candidates’ reputations to their record of accuracy and coherence rather than to trivial gaffes and scandals. Part of the problem, over the long term,

Much of the significance of December 2000 was that the Electoral College, created to ensure that majority rule be thwarted if unacceptable to what Hamilton thought of as the proper governing elite, threw a bright spotlight on just how undemocratic our republic has become, causing one of the Supreme Court Justices (by many thought to be a visiting alien) to respond to the Gore lawyers who maintained that Florida’s skewed voting machines and confused rulings by various interested courts had deprived thousands of Floridians of their vote for president. The American Constitution, said the Justice, mandibles clattering joyously, does not provide any American citizen the right to vote for president. This is absolutely true. One votes for a near-anonymous member of the Electoral College, which explains why so few Americans now bother to “vote” for president. But then a majority don’t know what the Electoral College is.

The vital aspect of the electoral college was that it got the Convention over the hurdle and protected everybody's interest. The future was left to cope with the problem of what to do with this Rube Goldberg mechanism... The Electoral College was neither an exercise in applied Platonism nor an experiment in indirect government based on elitist distrust of the masses. It was merely a jerry-rigged improvisation which has subsequently been endowed with a high theoretical content.

bolstered southern power by scrapping the rule that had once counted an African American as only three-fifths of a person for electoral purposes. Despite suppressing the vote of blacks, white southerners could now count them fully for election purposes, giving the “solid South” forty extra votes in the Electoral College and disproportionate influence in American politics. “They keep those votes, but disfranchise the negroes. That is one of the gravest mistakes in the policy of reconstruction.

In 2016, the superdelegates should have steered the party away from a candidate who was so distrusted by most Americans. Instead, they marched in lockstep, supporting a woman who had high unfavorable ratings and who was being investigated by the FBI.

It is not only the unit vote for the Presidency we are talking about, but a whole solar system of governmental power. If it is proposed to change the balance of power of one of the elements of the solar system, it is necessary to consider the others.

The number of delegates to the Electoral College would be determined not by a state’s population but by the number of its representatives in the House. That is, the size of a state’s representation in the Electoral College was determined by the rule of representation—one member of Congress for every forty thousand people, with people who were enslaved counting as three-fifths of other people.10 The Electoral College was a concession to slave owners, an affair of both mathematical and political calculation.

Under the Constitution, the candidate with the most Electoral College votes becomes president; the candidate who comes in second becomes vice president. In 1796, Federalists wanted Adams as president and Thomas Pinckney as vice president. But in the Electoral College, Adams got seventy-one votes, Jefferson sixty-eight, and Pinckney only fifty-nine. Federalist electors had been instructed to cast the second of their two votes for Pinckney; instead, many had cast it for Jefferson. Jefferson therefore became Adams’s vice president, to the disappointment of everyone. During Adams’s stormy administration, the distance between the two parties widened. Weakened by the weight of his own pride and not content with issuing warnings about the danger of parties, Adams attempted to outlaw the opposition. In 1798, while the United States was engaged in an undeclared war with France, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, granting to the president the power to imprison noncitizens he deemed dangerous and to punish printers who opposed his administration: twenty-five people were arrested for sedition, fifteen indicted, and ten

Her approach, guided by Mook and informed by the demands of winning the primary, was to build a coalition focused on core strengths: African Americans, Latinos, college-educated whites, and women. But the more she catered to them, the more she pushed away other segments of the electorate.

There was the central issue: the Lincoln presidency. A window of vulnerability, Lincoln knew, was the certification of the election in mid-February. “It seems to me the inauguration is not the most dangerous point for us,” the president-elect told Seward. “Our adversaries have us more clearly at disadvantage” if they could disrupt or delay the Electoral College count. “It is, or is said to be, more than probable,” Henry Adams wrote, “that some attempt or other will be made to prevent the counting of votes and the declaration of Lincoln’s election”—and thus to prevent his presidency.

Personal storytelling is an engine of humanization, which is in turn an engine of empathy. This is a long game, but if we can change enough minds, voter suppression will lose its power, gerrymandering will be pointless, the electoral college can’t stop us. If we unleash our stories, destroy the stigma, and manage to create a broad base of unequivocal cultural support for abortion—the foundation of which is already there—then by the time the more ghastly consequences of abortion bans begin to creep up on politicians, we will have the communication tools to act as an enraged critical mass.

Any informed debate about how and why we have an Electoral College must begin with these often forgotten circumstances of its birth. It was not, as many of us learned in school, a brilliant part of the framers’ plan. It did not reflect any coherent political theory but flowed instead from deals the delegates had made in response to the specific conflicts they faced at a particular moment in history. It was settled on only after every other method failed to win enough support. It was, in the words of one constitutional scholar, a “Frankenstein compromise,” adopted mainly so the delegates could finish their work and go home.

Only in Maryland could black men born free vote (until 1802, when the state’s constitution was amended to exclude them); only in New Jersey could white women vote (until 1807, when the state legislature closed this loophole). Of the sixteen states in the Union, all but three—Kentucky, Vermont, and Delaware—limited suffrage to property holders or taxpayers, who made up 60–70 percent of the adult white male population. Only in Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia did voters choose their state’s delegates to the Electoral College. In no state did voters cast ballots for presidential candidates: instead, they voted for legislators, or they voted for delegates.

Each has Republicans losing the Electoral College from 2024 to 2036.2 These trends have been evident for over two decades, and as someone who has sat in the room for five presidential campaigns and tried to figure out how to get a Republican candidate over the 270 mark, the math has been increasingly oppressive. The obvious choice for the party was to expand its appeal beyond white voters. That diagnosis was as obvious as telling a patient with lung cancer to quit smoking. But at the same time, Republicans were taking steps to change the electoral math by making it harder for nonwhites to vote. In this, they were continuing a long tradition of efforts by powerful white politicians to remain in power by suppressing votes.

When it came to the mechanics of presidential elections, the Constitution had rather light-heartedly ruled that the candidate who got the most votes in the Electoral College would become president, while the runner-up would become the vice president. This deliberately ignored the matter of faction or party, which came to a head in 1796, when the Proto-Federalist Adams was elected president while the Proto-Republican Jefferson became vice president. In 1804 the Twelfth Amendment allowed for party interest by requiring separate balloting for president and vice president. The Electoral College, however, remains to this day solidly in place to ensure that majoritarian governance can never interfere with those rights of property that the founders believed not only inalienable but possibly divine.

What the turbulent months of the campaign and the election revealed most of all, I think, was that the American people were voicing a profound demand for change. On the one hand, the Humphrey people were demanding a Marshall Plan for our diseased cities and an economic solution to our social problems. The Nixon and Wallace supporters, on the other hand, were making their own limited demands for change. They wanted more "law and order," to be achieved not through federal spending but through police, Mace, and the National Guard. We must recognize and accept the demand for change, but now we must struggle to give it a progressive direction. For the immediate agenda, I would make four proposals. First, the Electoral College should be eliminated. It is archaic, undemocratic, and potentially very dangerous. Had Nixon not achieved a majority of the electoral votes, Wallace might have been in the position to choose and influence our next President. A shift of only 46,000 votes in the states of Alaska, Delaware, New Jersey, and Missouri would have brought us to that impasse. We should do away with this system, which can give a minority and reactionary candidate so much power and replace it with one that provides for the popular election of the President. It is to be hoped that a reform bill to this effect will emerge from the hearings that will soon be conducted by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. Second, a simplified national registration law should be passed that provides for universal permanent registration and an end to residence requirements. Our present system discriminates against the poor who are always underregistered, often because they must frequently relocate their residence, either in search of better employment and living conditions or as a result of such poorly planned programs as urban renewal (which has been called Negro removal). Third, the cost of the presidential campaigns should come from the public treasury and not from private individuals. Nixon, who had the backing of wealthy corporate executives, spent $21 million on his campaign. Humphrey's expenditures totaled only $9.7 million. A system so heavily biased in favor of the rich cannot rightly be called democratic. And finally, we must maintain order in our public meetings. It was disgraceful that each candidate, for both the presidency and the vice-presidency, had to be surrounded by cordons of police in order to address an audience. And even then, hecklers were able to drown him out. There is no possibility for rational discourse, a prerequisite for democracy, under such conditions. If we are to have civility in our civil life, we must not permit a minority to disrupt our public gatherings.

But then something unexpected happened. Donald Trump, a real estate mogul and television celebrity who did not need the Koch donor network’s money to run, who seemed to have little grasp of the goals of this movement, entered the race. More than that, to get ahead, Trump was able to successfully mock the candidates they had already cowed as “puppets.” And he offered a different economic vision. He loved capitalism, to be sure, but he was not a libertarian by any stretch. Like Bill Clinton before him, he claimed to feel his audience’s pain. He promised to stanch it with curbs on the very agenda the party’s front-runners were promoting: no more free-trade deals that shuttered American factories, no cuts to Social Security or Medicare, and no more penny-pinching while the nation’s infrastructure crumbled. He went so far as to pledge to build a costly wall to stop immigrants from coming to take the jobs U.S. companies offered them because they could hire desperate, rightless workers for less. He said and did a lot more, too, much that was ugly and incendiary. And in November, he shocked the world by winning the Electoral College vote.

In theory, at least, the Union’s victory in the Civil War had reaffirmed the supremacy of the national government over the states. But of course the states of the former Confederacy had not come back willingly. They rejoined the union at gunpoint, and only after being forced to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and rewrite their state constitutions to ensure equal rights for newly freed blacks. Even then, it took the constant presence of federal troops, who fanned out across the South, to fight off attempts by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists to intimidate, terrorize, or murder black citizens who dared try to cast a ballot.

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights). But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens. Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.

A less well known impact of immigrant populations is the increase that destination states gain in Congress where apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives is calculated on the basis of a state's entire adult population regardless of legal status. And, because each state's electoral college vote is the sum of the number of its representatives in the House and its two senators, high immigration states play a larger role in presidential elections than they might if only adult citizens and legal aliens were counted in population surveys.

Proposed 28th Amendment: 28th Amendment: Revoke Electoral College. Banish the practice of Gerrymandering. Remove private funding from politics.

I propose voting all members of GOP out. This will make America great again. Next replace both parties and end electoral college.

Q. If you were president what wold you do? A. declare world peace, remove taxation on all people with income under 100K place qa 20% flat tax on all others with zero loopholes, forgive all student loans and make state colleges tuition free, repair the infrastructure and phase out all industries that contribute to pollution or climate change. Care for all animals and their habitats. Abolish money in politics remove gerrymandering and the electoral college. Remove all non-violent offenders from prisons to create an infra-structure job corps release program and things like that....

The Electoral College, made up of locally prominent men in each state, would thus be responsible for choosing the president. Under this arrangement, Hamilton reasoned, “the office of president will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” Men with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” would be filtered out. The Electoral College thus became our original gatekeeper. This system proved short-lived, however, due to two shortcomings in the founders’ original design. First, the Constitution is silent on the question of how presidential candidates are to be selected. The Electoral College goes into operation after the people vote, playing no role in determining who seeks the presidency in the first place. Second, the Constitution never mentions political parties. Though Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would go on to pioneer our two-party system, the founders did not seriously contemplate those parties

The device the founders came up with was the Electoral College. Article II of the Constitution created an indirect election system that reflected Hamilton’s thinking in Federalist 68:

That he won at all is the result of an electoral college system originally designed to protect the power of slave owners.

He went on to make a series of preposterous-sounding claims—almost all of which would be borne out in the end: he would win a larger share of African Americans and Hispanics than Romney had (they loved him on The Apprentice!); he would open up new electoral college paths for the Republican Party; he would defeat Hillary Clinton; and he would do all this without raising the $1 billion to $2 billion that modern presidential campaigns were thought to require. Trump didn’t have the typical qualifications of a major-party presidential nominee, this he admitted. But

I’ve always loved that quip from Winston Churchill about how democracy is the worst form of government—except for all the others. I still believe that, even when our system feels totally nuts. (Electoral College, I’m looking at you!)

How we react to the presidency of Donald Trump will be the first test of our preparedness. His administration in its infancy is already wracked with scandals. But the real scandal is that he is president at all. Yes, a few extra votes in key states might have changed the electoral college outcome. But a Democratic victory would not have masked the fact that it was a third force that surged from below to fill a vacuum and defeat both parties. There proved to be an untapped yearning to hear someone address America’s new challenges in a different key, someone willing to champion change and say without equivocation that America can be great. Trump offered an authoritarian snarl and an ever-changing string of bizarre spontaneous “positions,” not a political vision. But his demagogic skills were sufficient to move millions to applaud his race baiting, his misogyny, his hardly veiled threats of violence, his contempt for the press, and his contempt for the law.

On December 5, 1792, members of the electoral college assembled in their respective states. The outcome gratified Hamilton and corresponded with his expectations. Washington was chosen unanimously as president. Adams received seventy-seven votes, enough to return him as vice president,

In the end, Hillary Clinton won nearly three million more votes than her opponent, but Trump had captured the Electoral College thanks to fewer than eighty thousand votes spread across Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

The writers and thinkers on the margins of the GOP—the Claremont gang, paleoconservatives, social traditionalists, and antiestablishment national populists—felt that Trump’s victory favored their side. Such vindication may have been a mirage. Trump failed to win a popular vote majority—he captured a smaller percentage of the vote than Mitt Romney had in 2012. His Electoral College win rested on seventy-seven thousand voters spread across three states. And for all his personal excesses and haphazard policymaking, Trump stuck rather closely to the Republican agenda of tax cuts, defense spending, and conservative judicial appointments. He rarely broke faith with either the New Right interest groups he had wooed during the campaign or with his core supporters, who would continue to defend him,

The Electoral College is a creaky, shadowy place filled with hidden doors and booby traps galore, the perfect jagged battleground for a lawless demagogue like Donald Trump, king of the deep-inside fix, the low blow, and the late hit, just the kind of place to whip up some kind of madcap switcheroo, an insider coup based on indefensible new “interpretations” of the Constitution.

byzantine architecture of the Electoral College.

Riots, investigations, impeachments, and a non-stop resistance spurred on by the Democratic Party harmed the country in grievous ways that eclipsed the objections dozens of congressional Democrats made to certifying the 2016 Electoral College vote.

could control or form the majority influence for as many as ninety Electoral College votes, more than California and New York State combined.

However, argues KR, there is a bigger problem. The Court, or more specifically, the president who selects nominees to the Court, is determined by the Electoral College. Thus, the problem is the Constitution. KR insists it allows the Republican minority to almost control the selection of the Court’s majority perpetually.

The Left owns the culture but constantly pines for political power. It chafes at what it perceives to be built-in advantages for Republicans: the rural tilt of the Senate and Electoral College, gerrymandering in the House, a conservative-dominated Supreme Court, and other anti-majoritarian features of the American constitutional system. It tries to use its cultural power to shape politics—a dangerous and often illiberal quest. The Right, meanwhile, looks at the Left’s built-in advantages in the media, universities, Hollywood, even large corporations, seeing them all as founts of a new and radical progressive ideology.

The first thing to go was fair representation. By 1796, political leaders had divided into two camps, and Jefferson saw that he would have won the presidency if only Virginia’s electors had all voted as a bloc in the Electoral College rather than splitting their votes between him and John Adams of Massachusetts. Jefferson urged Virginia to adopt a winner-take-all system that would give all of the state’s electoral votes to whichever candidate got a simple majority. It was a stunning change and one that appalled Madison, who wanted to amend the Constitution to prevent

When the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans for the first time, the House in 1929 capped its numbers at 438 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, whom lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today, the average congressional district is 761,169 individuals, which both makes representation less effective and reduces the power of states with more people.[9]

Furthermore, if the Great Migration hadn’t taken place, Black people could control or form the majority influence for as many as ninety Electoral College votes, more than California and New York State combined. And, if they and other groups voted the same way that they now do, they could have ensured that almost every president in the last fifty years was a Democrat. More specifically, if in the 2016 presidential election Hillary Clinton had been able to carry the states in which Black people are already the majority or plurality of voters in the Democratic primaries—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina—she would have become president, midwestern losses notwithstanding,6 and would have added three new justices to the Supreme Court.

Furious, Trump took to the airwaves at about two-thirty the next morning and declared he had won, although ballots were still being counted and several battleground states had no clear winner. “We won’t stand for this,” he told supporters, assuring them he had won. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”[2] But it didn’t, and by the time all the ballots were counted, the election was not close: Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College,

thought Gore would put up a better fight, since it is in our genetic heritage to battle these things. He seemed so overwhelmed at being thought a sore loser. Well, if you’ve lost the presidency when you’ve already gained the popular vote by several hundred thousand votes, and the Electoral College, as everybody knows, an easily manipulated bad joke at our expense, a present from our founding fathers to make sure that we never have democracy, that the people will never rule. And that’s why the Electoral College was invented, that’s why they retain it: It’s too convenient.

We do ourselves a disservice when we dehumanize Washington and reduce its processes and people to a few superficial talking points. Checks and balances, lobbyists, pork barrel spending, the electoral college, filibusters, Dick Cheney’s bimonthly virgin sacrifice upon a marble altar in the Heritage Foundation’s basement to placate the icy god of darkness and ward off the eternal sleep of death for another moonturn, yadda yadda yadda. The more entrenched this view becomes, the less able we are to grasp the complexities of the situation and perhaps even start to do something about it. Yes, there is corruption and yes there are systemic issues that can probably be fixed if we removed our heads from our asses—they’ll come up often enough in this book. If

In our country, the presidency isn’t decided by the national popular vote. To whine about a free and fair election in which the winner of the popular vote did not win the White House is like claiming that the basketball team who completed the most passes should win the game. We don’t score it that way and the players all know it. “Hamilton Electors” Urge Electoral College “Vote-Switching” Scheme Perhaps the most desperate last-ditch effort to block Trump from the White House was organized by a group of citizens calling themselves “Hamilton Electors.

As a final indignity for the defeated warrior, Vice President Nixon had to preside over the roll call of the Electoral College. “This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated,” he told the assembled members of Congress. “I do not think we could have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system.” He got a standing ovation.

any time I feel like quitting, I just look at a framed poster I have hanging in our office: • He failed in business in ’31. • He ran as a state legislator and lost in ’32. • He tried business again in ’33 and failed again. • His sweetheart died in ’35. • He had a nervous breakdown in ’36. • He ran for state elector in ’40 after he regained his health. • He was defeated for Congress in ’43, defeated again for Congress in ’48, defeated when he ran for Senate in ’55 and defeated for vice presidency of the United States in ’56. • He ran for Senate again in ’58 and lost. • This man never quit. He kept trying till the last. In 1860, this man—Abraham Lincoln—was elected president of the United States. I want to be like Abe Lincoln. As my dad always says, “Shoot for the stars, and you just might land on the moon.

In 2014, a disturbing study was released by political scientists at Old Dominion University. Their work showed that a significant percentage of foreign nationals residing in the United States, whether lawfully or unlawfully present, were registered to vote in US elections—and that a significant number of them actually have voted in recent years—6.4 percent in 2008 and 2.2 percent in 2010. That is enough to have swayed election outcomes in some states: “there is reason to believe non-citizen voting changed one state’s Electoral College votes in 2008, delivering North Carolina to Obama, and that non-citizen votes have also led to Democratic victories in congressional races including a critical 2008 Senate race [in Minnesota] that delivered for Democrats a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.” It is, of course, illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal and state elections. But this study suggests that hundreds of thousands of illegal votes may have been cast in the United States in every federal election.11 If this study’s results are accurate, the implications are startling. We have Obamacare because of election fraud. We have the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act because of election fraud. We have Solyndra—the alternative energy company that collapsed leaving taxpayers liable for $535 million in federal loan guarantees—because of election fraud. Without the election fraud that helped put Obama and his allies in office, there’d be no lawless amnesty for illegal aliens, no Operation Fast and Furious, no Obama IRS assault on Americans. This shows that no American can take his or her vote for granted. There is a real chance that your vote can be cancelled out by an illegal vote cast by legal or illegal aliens.

none of this matters to an Electoral College majority of American

My feeling of not wanting to leave mixed with my sense of urgency for the campaign. That mood in Brooklyn was one of self-satisfaction and inevitability. The polls were showing Hillary holding steady, between five and eight points ahead of Trump and with a clear path to 270 electoral college votes. The mood I was gathering on the ground, however, was much more restless.

learned two things from the students. One was that they disliked identity politics. They thought that Hillary spent too much time trying to appeal to people based on their race, or their gender, or their sexual orientation, and not enough time appealing to people based on what really worried them—issues like income inequality and climate change. The other takeaway was the misogyny of the media, something we had talked about every week in class. And we talked about the Electoral College. And then I finally said to the students, 2016 will be remembered for how the playbook changed on how to run for President.

Washington remains the only President to be elected unanimously in the Electoral College.

The truth was, some on the campaign were already jumping ship. The Friday before the election, Sean Spicer, then the chief strategist for the Republican National Committee and a campaign adviser, called a meeting at RNC headquarters in which his team gave tier-one network reporters its predicted totals for the Electoral College vote. The information was strictly on background and under embargo. In that meeting, the Republican data team said that Donald Trump would get no more than 204 electoral votes, and that he had little chance of winning any of the battleground states,

Yet, it was infuriating that for the second time in five elections, a Democrat would win more votes but be robbed by this archaic fluke of our constitutional system. I’d been saying since 2000 that the Electoral College gave disproportionate power to less populated states and therefore was profoundly undemocratic. It made a mockery of the principle of “One person, one vote.” In a cruel twist of fate, the Founders had also created it as a bulwark against foreign interference in our democracy—Alexander Hamilton cited protecting against foreign influence as a justification for the Electoral College in Federalist Paper No. 68—and now it was handing victory to Vladimir Putin’s preferred candidate.

Because it violates the ‘one person, one vote’ standard, malapportionment in the Electoral College and especially the U.S. Senate is the primary means by which White voters—and rural Whites most of all—retain electoral advantages at the national level.

The Republican Party and its rural White voter base also enjoy a pivotal advantage in presidential elections, which are decided by the Electoral College rather than by a national popular vote as is used in every other democracy in the world. Thanks to the inflated power that smaller states enjoy in the Electoral College, the past two Republican presidents entered the White House despite having lost the popular vote. It's not just possible but likely that yet another Republican in the near future will win the White House despite receiving fewer votes than their opponent.

Thanks to the Electoral College, our presidents are chosen by virtue of the number of states in which they can win popular majorities and the relative sizes of those states’ populations. As noted in chapter 2, one consequence of this is that presidential races are focused on competitive states, and therefore, on competitive slices of the electorate and of the issues facing the country, rather than on the voters and issues with which each party is most comfortable. Election campaigns naturally follow the lead of the voters whom the candidates most need to win

The election was over. Trump had had his day in court and lost. The Electoral College had met and voted. We had a single certified slate of electors signed by the governor of each state. Objecting to these electors would be claiming for Congress the right to overturn elections and select the president. Nothing in the Constitution gave us that authority.

although mostly unseen, he had an effect on my life nonetheless... as sure as the Moon tugs on the Earth, and causes the tides.