Though he has lost the popular vote in two out of three electoral bids, Donald Trump accused Democrats on Monday of “fighting hard to get rid of the Popular Vote.”
|
Listen To This Story
 |
Self-proclaimed genius Donald Trump is not known to be a political (or any other type of) scholar… or overly bright, for that matter. But even he raised eyebrows when he suggested Monday that Democrats hoped to make sure that the Electoral College, and not a majority of voters, will elect presidents going forward.
“The Democrats are fighting hard to get rid of the Popular Vote in future Elections,” the president-elect wrote on his social media site. “They want all future Presidential Elections to be based exclusively on the Electoral College!”
First of all, this is already what is happening. That is the actual mechanism laid out in the Constitution.
In addition, if you have been paying any kind of attention (and Trump apparently has not), you’d know that this is the opposite of what Democrats want.
This century, they have won the popular vote in 5 out of 7 elections. Twice, their candidates were defeated by a Republican who received fewer votes but prevailed thanks to the Electoral College.
In fact, Trump would not have been president if it weren’t for this constitutional wrinkle. In 2016, Hillary Clinton earned nearly 3 million more votes than he did, but she still lost because the Republican had eked out victories in enough swing states to give him the edge in the Electoral College.
Trump did turn things around in November, when he became just the second Republican since 1988 to win the popular vote.
While the president-elect and his supporters have hailed this outcome as a “landslide” that gave him a clear mandate, the margin of victory was actually fairly narrow.
With some votes still being counted, he is ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris by about 2.3 million votes, which comes out to a winning margin of roughly 1.5 percent. That is the slimmest in more than 50 years (apart from both him and George W. Bush when they became president while losing the popular vote).
Perhaps buoyed by this success, Trump, who is one of the great narcissists of all time, now seems to suggest that it would somehow be in the GOP’s favor to allow Americans to elect their presidents directly.
While it seems likely that a high-priced consultant, or perhaps a well-educated third-grader, will sit him down to explain that this is not the case, Democrats should at least try to capitalize on the president-elect’s baffling ignorance.
There are two ways to do this: The most obvious strategy would be for them to go on Fox News and lament that Trump has found them out.
“Oh no! The president is too brilliant for us. Now he is going to want to eliminate the Electoral College, which means we will never win another election again, and he will be hailed as the greatest Republican of all time.”
That seems like it shouldn’t work, but we wouldn’t rule it out, either.
The backup plan would be to get MAGA supporters in red states to believe Trump (not a heavy lift), and back efforts to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
That is the initiative that would ensure that the candidate who gets the most votes would become president, which shouldn’t be a novel concept in a democracy.
Here is how it works: If states that have a majority of Electoral College votes (i.e., at least 270) sign on, then their delegates are bound to support the candidate who received the most votes.
As WhoWhatWhy reported earlier this year, 17 states (plus Washington, DC) have now joined the compact. Together, they represent 209 Electoral College votes.
The problem is that these are generally blue states, which makes sense. After all, it is decidedly not in the GOP’s interest to let Americans choose their leaders directly.
Therefore, it always seemed unlikely that Republican-led states would sign on.
However, the president-elect’s word has always trumped reason, so why not now?
Of course, we say this tongue-in-cheek.
At some point, somebody will show Trump a School House Rock clip and either convince him that what he said is idiotic, or at least distract him with a catchy tune.
The real takeaway from this episode is that the American people (and, in this case, even a plurality of voters) elected a guy who is simply not all that smart.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
