Trump Electoral College Quotes

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.

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.

Free elections don't always result in fair elections.

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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,

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.

Both George W. Bush and Donald Trump lost the popular vote, in the latter’s case by nearly three million votes, but were still elected president. Given the realities of the electoral college, candidates all but ignore states where they are sure to win or lose and concentrate their efforts on the handful of states that could tip the balance.

By the time the Electoral College met on December 14, 2020, Trump had lost fifty-eight cases. When the smoke cleared, he would lose over ninety cases between those filed by his own team and those filed on behalf of his campaign by the Republican Party.

And anyway, it was Friday. Thank God it was Friday, after the worst week in the history of the Trump presidency—losing the Senate, failing in an Electoral College showdown, the Capitol attack, impeachment on the agenda, again. In fact, it was the worst week in the history of any presidency.

When McCarthy and I spoke on November 5, we discussed the fact that although the election hadn’t yet been called for Joe Biden, it seemed likely that would happen soon. When Biden’s tally in the Electoral College reached 270, the dynamic would shift and people would start looking toward the future, the next administration, and the new Congress. McCarthy appeared to be dealing in reality. This made it all the more surprising when I saw his appearance on Fox News just a few hours later: “President Trump won this election,” Kevin proclaimed, “so everyone who is listening, do not be quiet! Do not be silent about this! We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” McCarthy knew that what he was saying was not true.

Bill may have thought he or Hillary could persuade voters, but she would have needed a stronger vision to make the case. She had plans for every imaginable corner of public policy, but they were loosely strung together. There was no simple vision unifying them—no central, defining promise of a Hillary presidency. Bernie, on the other hand, presented a very clear idea of where he wanted to take the country. He told voters he would break up a system that favored the privileged over the masses. What he lacked in breadth and depth, he made up for with a bright, tight thunderbolt of a message that benefited from the echo effect of Trump’s populism in the Republican primary. His platform of breaking up big banks, providing universal single-payer health care, and subsidizing free college tuition for students suffocated her among the white economic liberals who dominate the Democratic electorates in Iowa, New Hampshire, and many other states. But this was not the only set of voters she found in the primaries, and the calendar after New Hampshire would allow Hillary another chance to fashion a message that would get her campaign on track.

IT WASN’T OVER QUITE YET. BUT WITH TRUMP NOW AT 264 ELECTORAL votes, any one of the outstanding competitive races—Michigan, Wisconsin, or Arizona—would put him over the top. He won all three. When the final numbers were tabulated, Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton in one of the strangest results in presidential history.2 Trump won the Electoral College with 306 votes to Clinton’s 232 (officially 304 to 227, after seven pledged electors went rogue). The margin of the GOP victory was found in three states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—which Trump won by a total of 77,744 votes, less than the capacity of some Big Ten football stadiums. Meanwhile, Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million.

Fear has been a staple of American politics since the founding of the republic. In 1800, the Connecticut Courant, a Federalist newspaper that supported President John Adams in his reelection campaign against Thomas Jefferson, suggested that, if the Electoral College chose Jefferson, the founding father and religious skeptic from Virginia, the country would have to deal with a wave of murder, atheism, rape, adultery, and robbery

The electorate is getting less white every year, which means that the Republican Party’s success depends on getting a higher and higher percentage of the white vote— specifically white men without a college degree. And those white voters are getting more conservative— driven by the fear of a “changing” America that barely resembles the country they grew up in. This fear has been fueled by the racism-for-profit operation at Fox News.

What's surprising about the 2016 election results isn't what happened. It's what didn't happen. Trump didn't lose by 30 points or win by 20 points. Most people who voted chose the same party in 2016 that they'd chosen in 2012. That isn't to say there was nothing at all distinct or worthy of study. Crucially, white voters without college educations swung sharply toward Trump, and their overrepresentation in electorally key states won him the election. But the campaign, by the numbers, was mostly a typical contest between a Republican and a Democrat. The fact that voters ultimately treated Trump as if he were just another Republican speaks to the enormous weight party polarization now exerts on our politics.

Ask your local political science professor to explain why it is the case that to steal the national election one does not need, “widespread fraud”. If the professor is honest, you will hear, "Because it does not take widespread fraud, it only takes deep fraud in six cities to flip the swing states they are in, to thereby flip the electoral college, and to thereby steal the national election. Those cities are Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and Las Vegas.

Then came the unthinkable: the ignorant demagogue Trump was elected to the most powerful office in the world. Trump’s victory that November only happened thanks to the Electoral College, an anti-populist instrument from long ago, but that irony quickly receded into the background. Instead, the Democracy Scare developed into a kind of hysteria. Across the world there were panels and convenings and academic projects dedicated to analyzing and theorizing and worrying about this thing called populism.

Safe spaces were especially prominent after the election of Donald Trump as U.S. President. As college and university administrators went into crisis mode, they sought to provide students with spaces to relieve their post-electoral anxiety and distress. Safe spaces have been supplied with coloring books, crayons, therapy pets, and even pacifiers. They have come to most resemble hospital pediatric units.

Fear is why the president still has a map of his electoral college victory hanging outside the door to the Oval Office. Fear is why the president makes every person who goes into his office pass by a display meant to assert his right to sit behind the Resolute desk. Fear is why he asks people to pledge personal loyalty

Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.

And while America has a party system to protect against such minority rule, the damage a third-party candidate, or candidates, could do on Election Day 2024 is as palpable as it is terrifying and incalculable. A relatively small percentage of the voting public in a mere smattering of crucial battleground states could easily tip the Electoral College to Donald Trump with little more than 40 percent of the vote and potentially somewhere in the mid-to high thirties.