Election Ironies and Lessons

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Dr. Malcolm Cross

The final episode in the presidential election of 2016 is over:  Last Monday, December 19, the Electoral College officially elected Donald Trump President of the United States.

The election was shot through with irony, and not only because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but Donald Trump won the presidency itself.  Consider:

  • Clinton supporters appealed to Trump’s electors to vote either for Clinton or for another Republican—Mitt Romney, perhaps, or John Kasich, but in the end only 2 Trump-pledged electors proved faithless, while 4 electors pledged to Hillary deserted her;
  • Those who urged Trump electors to violate their pledges did so in the name of Alexander Hamilton, who seemed to say in Federalist 68, that the electors should deliberate on their decisions and pick the best qualified person for president, yet the tactics used against Trump electors—emails, threats, demonstrations—were anything but deliberative, and besides, Hamilton, as Federalist Party leader, urged Federalist electors to vote on the basis of party loyalty anyway; and most tellingly:
  • Although Hillary Clinton had been proclaimed by President Obama to be the best qualified presidential candidate in history, she and her strategists acted as if they far more ignorant of the role of the Electoral College in deciding the election outcome than did the inexperienced—to put it mildly—Donald Trump and his strategists.

Since the election Hillary Clinton and her strategists have blamed everyone and everything—the Russians, racists, you name it—except their own bad decisions on their failure to win a majority in the Electoral College.  Yet research by journalists who want to do more than be parrot Clinton and company indicates she ignored pleas from campaign workers to campaign more in the upper Midwest, especially Michigan, where she campaigned little, and Wisconsin, where she failed to campaign at all.  Trump won both states, despite the fact that Michigan had not voted Republican since 1988 and Wisconsin since 1984.

Even worse, Hillary Clinton transferred campaign funds to the Democratic National Committee and allowed its interim chair, Donna Brazile, to spend them in Illinois, which Clinton had no chance of losing, and Louisiana, which Clinton had no chance of winning.  Wise strategists, whether Democratic or Republican, know it is a foolish waste of time and money to campaign in states which either can’t be won, or can’t be lost, and that resources should be devoted to states where the outcome is not a foregone conclusion, and where effort can produce reward.  The apparent rationale for these otherwise irrational decisions is that the Democratic strategists believed Clinton would win the popular electoral vote but not the popular vote, so they wanted to run up the popular vote by urging more African Americans in Chicago and New Orleans to vote for her.  Trump, on the other hand, by campaigning in toss-up “purple” states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, while ignoring states where the election outcome was a foregone conclusion (deep blue states such as California and Illinois; deep red states such as Texas and Louisiana), remained focused on winning the all-important electoral vote, even at the cost of losing the constitutionally meaningless popular vote.

Of course there have been demands that the Electoral College be modified or abolished, but the Electoral College will, in fact, remain intact, for a very simple reason:  As has been discussed in at least one earlier column, those who benefit from the current system are numerous enough and powerful enough to block any attempts to modify or eliminate the Electoral College.  The small states love the Electoral College since their percentage of the electoral vote is greater than their percentage of America’s population (the thirteen smallest states have 5% of the population and 9% of the electoral vote).  The big states love the Electoral College since their shares of the electoral vote are great enough to have a real impact on the outcome of the election  (California’s 55 electoral votes constitute 10% of the total and 20% of the total needed to attain an electoral vote majority).  Swing states, or purple states, where the Republican and Democratic Parties are more or less evenly balanced, love the attention the Trump bestowed, and Clinton would have bestowed had she been wiser, on them.  Few, if any, of these states’ members of Congress will support a constitutional amendment to change or eliminate the Electoral College.  Few, any, of these states’ legislatures will support any changes either.

The presidential election of 2020 is already underway, although serious reporting of it will not begin until November, 2018, following the midterm elections.  Potential candidates and their strategists will be wise to take advantage of the outcome of the 2016 presidential election and learn—or relearn—the basics of the Electoral College.  Trump’s understanding was superior to Clinton’s, and he, not she, is the next President of the United States.

Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville and taught politics and government at Tarleton since 1987. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990 to the present).  He was Mayor Pro Tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014.  He is a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and the Stephenville Rotary Club, and does volunteer work for the Boy Scouts of America. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.

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