Why the electoral college? So that every part of the nation has some kind of say over the next executive while preventing large swaths of said nation from being bullied
This week, anti-Trump protesters hit the streets in big cities around
the country,
notes Reason's
David Harsanyi,
chanting "This is what democracy looks like!"
Yes. That's
the problem.
That is
precisely the problem.
For many Democrats, the greatest political system is the one that
instills their party with the most power. Now that it looks like Hillary
Clinton will "win" the fictional popular vote over Donald Trump,
people—not just young people who've spent their entire lives being told
America is a democracy, but people who know better—are getting
hysterical about the Electoral College. Not only is it "unfair" and
"undemocratic" but like anything else progressives dislike these days
it's also a tool of "white supremacy" and "sexism."
If liberals truly believe majoritarianism is the fairest way to run a
government, then why shouldn't 50 percent of states be able to repeal
constitutional amendments?
Granted, because of our childish propensity to use the word "fair," I
understand that the Electoral College must seem like a relic that
undercuts the sacramental notion of "one man, one vote." As if a losing
vote ever counts anyway. But if you still generally believe the Founding
Fathers did a decent job setting up the conditions for material
prosperity and individual freedom to guarantee a stable government and
dispersed political power, you should be a big fan of the Electoral
College.
If it needs repeating, in the United States of America, we
have an Electoral College, wherein the president and vice president
aren't elected directly by the voters, but rather by electors who are
chosen through the popular votes from each state. Your state's portion
of electors equals the number of members in its congressional
delegation—one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two
for your senators. We have 51 separate elections. This is done so that
every part of the nation has some kind of say over the next executive.
The president, after all, is not a monarch. He does not make laws. Not
even President Barack Obama was supposed to do that. Voters need to view
the system as a whole to understand why this is "fair."
Diffused democracy weakens the ability of politicians to scaremonger
and use emotional appeals to take power. It blunts the vagaries of the
electorate. So, naturally, the left has been attacking the Electoral
College for years—including talk of a national "compact" to circumvent
smaller states.
Need it be repeated again, the Electoral College, and other
mechanisms that balance democracy, create moderation and compromise—they
stop one party from accumulating too much power. It is certainly
possible that Obama's unilateral governance over the past eight years
had a lot to do with the pushback of three consecutive losses in the
Senate and Congress, and the election of Donald Trump.
To some extent, the Electoral College impels presidents and their
political parties to consider all Americans in rhetoric and action. By
allowing two senators for both Wyoming, with a population of less than
600,000, and California, with a population of more than 38 million, we
create more national cohesion. We protect large swaths of the nation
from being bullied. We incentivize Washington, D.C.—both the president
and the Senate—to craft policy that meets the needs of Colorado as well
as New York.
… It's also worth remembering that the dynamics of this election would be
completely different if the popular vote actually mattered. The election
is geared toward winning states, not people. There is no guarantee that
Hillary Clinton would have won. There are tons of conservatives in blue
states, for instance, who do not vote because they understand that the
majority around them have a different political outlook. A direct
national election would mean focusing on blue-state Republicans and
red-state liberals. I'm not sure that setup works out for Democrats
exactly as they imagine.