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... Except now with the addition of a lawsuit-happy, amoral hack in the Oval Office trying to game the system and stay in power, to protect himself from tax fraud lawsuits pending in the states.
It's worth acknowledging here that even though there is a lot of drama and shouting, there is relatively little actual civil unrest. There's the usual griping about the electoral college and the two-party system, but Americans are not, for example, setting fire to government buildings or hunting each other in packs. (Like they did during Civil War times.)
Since there is attention on the electoral college, I'd like to add a few points to the discussion.
To an outsider especially, the electoral college looks like the appendix of the body politic: Useless and potentially deadly; only suitable for removal. But that assumes there aren’t significant differences, or there isn’t significant competition, between the US states. That’s only a little less outlandish than Americans believing France, Germany, and Spain all have the same economy and political issues because they’re in the EU. Or believing that China really is one big monolithic Communist political apparatus. There's a lot more going on than people realize.
One valuable trait of the electoral college is it gives individual states flexibility in how they contribute to the election of a president. There are already movements working their way through the country compelling individual states to divide up their electoral votes directly along the lines of the popular vote within. How much traction those gain is a matter of the political environment in each state.
As an example, California votes about 2/3 Democrat. If Californians embrace the popular vote approach, they’d be adding about eight million Republican voters into the mix. Every small state that breaks republican, obscuring the votes of democrats within, would be overwhelmed by the republican votes that suddenly become exposed in California. It would be more Republican votes than the total population of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, and Alaska combined, voting or otherwise.
The California state legislature is largely Democrat. Why would they shoot their own party in the foot that way? Same deal with Texas, except in the other direction, and even more so. In this election, Texas neutralized over 5.2 million Democrat votes.
Regardless of these shenanigans, the last quarter-century of presidential elections came down to a rounding error in the popular vote, including this one. That means that turning to a popular vote would not have appreciably changed the fairness of those outcomes: They ended up representing almost exactly half of voters.
It's worth acknowledging here that even though there is a lot of drama and shouting, there is relatively little actual civil unrest. There's the usual griping about the electoral college and the two-party system, but Americans are not, for example, setting fire to government buildings or hunting each other in packs. (Like they did during Civil War times.)
Since there is attention on the electoral college, I'd like to add a few points to the discussion.
To an outsider especially, the electoral college looks like the appendix of the body politic: Useless and potentially deadly; only suitable for removal. But that assumes there aren’t significant differences, or there isn’t significant competition, between the US states. That’s only a little less outlandish than Americans believing France, Germany, and Spain all have the same economy and political issues because they’re in the EU. Or believing that China really is one big monolithic Communist political apparatus. There's a lot more going on than people realize.
One valuable trait of the electoral college is it gives individual states flexibility in how they contribute to the election of a president. There are already movements working their way through the country compelling individual states to divide up their electoral votes directly along the lines of the popular vote within. How much traction those gain is a matter of the political environment in each state.
As an example, California votes about 2/3 Democrat. If Californians embrace the popular vote approach, they’d be adding about eight million Republican voters into the mix. Every small state that breaks republican, obscuring the votes of democrats within, would be overwhelmed by the republican votes that suddenly become exposed in California. It would be more Republican votes than the total population of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, and Alaska combined, voting or otherwise.
The California state legislature is largely Democrat. Why would they shoot their own party in the foot that way? Same deal with Texas, except in the other direction, and even more so. In this election, Texas neutralized over 5.2 million Democrat votes.
Regardless of these shenanigans, the last quarter-century of presidential elections came down to a rounding error in the popular vote, including this one. That means that turning to a popular vote would not have appreciably changed the fairness of those outcomes: They ended up representing almost exactly half of voters.
