No, the Electoral College isn’t a plot. Yes, it is needed.
Without it, the recount in the 2000 election could have gone on forever. Without it, we could never have founded the union, as the small states would have never accepted the loss of their power. Without it, candidates could win by running up numbers among their own backers, whereas now it takes a diverse coalition with backing both deep and wide.
This isn’t to say that we haven’t seen oddities, such as for instance in 2016. Never had two candidates been so disliked and dishonest, never were votes cast with such apprehension, and never had the gap between the electoral vote and the popular vote been so wide and so glaring, or so entirely caused by one state.
The claim of the Left, from Nov. 9 onward, has been that the Electoral College defied the will of the nation by giving the White House to Trump. But this isn’t quite accurate. The will of 49 of the 50 states of the union combined was to elect Trump by a popular vote margin of about 1.5 million. California, the biggest and most populous state in the union and a political and cultural outlier by anyone’s standards, voted for Democrats by a massive two-to-one-margin, giving Clinton her popular vote win.
It was as if there were two different elections in 2016. Clinton became the first woman president of Tinseltown by the popular landslide she always had wanted. Since California had pondered secession before, on the grounds that the country just doesn’t deserve it, the right time to act might be now. But the Electoral College calms the fears of the founders that an outlier state could distort the whole process.
That isn’t its only purpose, either. Wars and depressions are historic events that never fail to get our attention; fires and floods are local events, but dramatic enough to get our attention so that help will come quickly. But what would occur if a crisis came slowly by increments, so that one factory closed at a time, impoverishing a town and those who lived in it, so that over time a whole way of life disappeared? What if the damage were concentrated in the manufacturing towns of the Midwest, places where people had voted for the Democrats since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the 1930s, but now cast their eyes toward Trump?
Trump was the first one in ages who voiced their concerns, or even suggested he knew they existed. Slowly, reporters noticed that people in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the upper Midwest were changing their registrations from “D” to “R” so they could vote in the primaries.
Trump won with the help of the Electoral College, which had done what the founders expected. It rewarded the party that spread its votes over a very wide range of precincts, instead of the party that ran up the score in just one place. The rich weren’t permitted to ignore the less fortunate. Because of the founders, Fantasy Land was forced to feel the pain of the Rust Belt, which was a long time in coming. The founders would be happy for that, and so should we.
