The Electoral College Is The Next Frontier In The War On Trump
Even as they impeach and otherwise brass-knuckle Donald Trump, the 2016-never-happened Trump Derangement Sufferers are already working on excuses for losing to Trump in 2020. Just in case.
The alibis are plentiful. One beauty hinted at by flaccid #NeverTrump Canadian David Frum is that the Electoral College will deny the will of the people once again. Only the unique selection system designed by America’s Founders in the 1780s is keeping the enemies of The Donald from their due.
Indeed Trump was outvoted by just under three million in his contest with Hillary Clinton. Sadly for the Pantsuit, her vote plurality was concentrated in three or four ultra-liberal states such as California, New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts where she maxed out her electoral college chance.
Trump, meanwhile, assembled a coalition of medium/ smaller states with fewer EC votes per capita but enough to deliver a resounding 304-227 thrashing of the Media Party. Immediately, people who should know better began blaming the EC for Clinton’s failure. As if suddenly discovering that these were the rules of the game, the talking heads of CNN and MSNBC proposed Trump’s win to be illegitimate.
The great knee-slapper in this latest scheme to delegitimize American presidential elections is Frum’s implication that winning the EC is only open to Trump. That it is a secret sauce designed to foil the Democrats. That Orange Man Bad has rigged something.
Of course, the DEMs might use the EC themselves. All they have to do is adopt a few of the policies that got Trump elected. But that might mean leaving the salons of Hollywood actors to mix with the hoi polloi in Michigan or Wisconsin. No can do, apparently. So let’s change the system.
While the Trump Haters bloviate about the evils of the EC system, we wrote in October that such as system might be a godsend for Canada where the liberal urban majorities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver have unbalanced the political reality of today’s Canada.
“To Orange Man Bad subscribers, the EC robbed Hillary Clinton of her rightful sinecure in the White House. It allegedly negated the millions of Californians whose Clinton votes could only reap 56 of the 538 EC votes needed to claim the presidency. And it’s a manifestation of the white patriarchy, mansplaining, gerrymandering and probably climate change too.
For those scoring at home, the EC assigns votes equal to the combined total of the state's membership in the Senate and House of Representatives. So California has 56 votes while the seven smallest states get just three. Using this formula, Donald Trump was still able to lose two of the three largest states (California and New York) but still bring home the electoral bacon.
The genius of the EC is that it is a brake against the largest parts of the nation dominating the country. In 1787 they feared Massachusetts, New York and Virginia big-footing their 10 partners. As Hillary learned, being popular at donor parties in Hollywood and the Hamptons isn’t enough to claim the prize in 2016. Nebraska gets a say, too.
Like similar rants about the unfairness of the Supreme Court, these complaints only became issues when the Left loses elections. When the math worked for them, they’ve been copasetic about the EC and SCOTUS. Like anything else that denies the progressive Left its entitlements, the EC needs to be changed today. No… yesterday. How could a bunch of guys wearing wigs and wooden teeth in the 1787 understand the perfection that is #metoo #blm #climatechange #aoc etc.?
These turbulent times of Trump demand the Constitution be gutted and precedent be abandoned to achieve a more perfect union. The only thing standing in the way of these firebrands is SCOTUS and some tricky math about how many states you need to amend the Constitution. But they’re working on that…
Canada doesn’t go with the straight So You Think You Can Dance popular vote either. It elects its prime minister in a parliamentary system with the PM almost always being the one whose party wins the most seats in Parliament.
It is possible to have the most seats without winning the most votes. Rarely in a five- or six-party horse race does one party get anything approaching 50 percent of the vote. Unlike Hillary, the Liberals, winners on October 21, received fewer votes than Andre Scheer’s Conservatives. But Trudeau maxed out his urban support to stay PM. Scheer, no doubt to Frum’s distress, resigned as leader of the Conservatives.
For most of the 152 years in Canada’s history, people accepted this hiccup of their democracy.
What Canada’s system does not have, however, is a brake on the power of its largest constituencies. In its early days, Ontario and Quebec’s needs dominated those of the four smaller provinces. In today’s Trudeaupia, the needs of Ontario and Quebec still dominate those of the smaller provinces, which now number seven— along with the three northern territories.
Trudeau— like his papa Pierre Le Parfait— knows that in 2019, like 1867, he can effectively stymie a large portion of the nation if he controls Québec and gets enough urban votes in Toronto and the Lower Mainland. Those swaths of the West, the North and Maritimes? Meh. Canada’s population guarantees more seats in Parliament in the East and a veto on the pesky pipelines crossing into Ontario and Quebec’s verdant plains…
So condescend to the Americans electoral college if you will. But their Founders knew the addictive qualities of power. And the gullibility of the elites in believing their own manifest right to power. They put up strong barriers to separate the two.
Canadians, meanwhile, remain as marginalized as they were in 1867, captives of a class that believes in its own superiority. As George Orwell opined, “"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com . He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them is now available on brucedowbigginbooks.ca..