A lot of superficial soul searching has been going on in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s surprising loss last week. Her campaign has blamed the FBI, some liberal campaign operatives are blaming Clinton’s “arrogance”, national pundits have blamed white men, and a local far-Leftie is blaming the Founding Fathers.
John Burbank, known for his own inability to win a state legislative election in one of Seattle’s most liberal districts, nevertheless applies his political expertise to raising disdain for the founders and the electoral college, calling it an “archaic symptom of anti-democracy.”
Of course, that’s because his preferred candidate lost. So it must be “a constitutional coup, the result of the founders’ designs against democracy.”
So, Burbank had a friend do the math on how many voters there are per electoral college vote, which told him that “Wyoming citizens have more than three and a half times the voting power for the president than citizens in California. That’s why, while Hillary Clinton will end up with more than a million votes more than Donald Trump nationwide, she lost the vote in the Electoral College.”
Burbank ignores the fact that had the rules of the election been different, the candidates would have campaigned differently. Were he just chasing total votes, not electoral college ones, Trump might have campaigned in such safe Democrat states as New York or California, which has provided all of Clinton’s vote-total victory margin. The Golden State is kind of the like the King County of the United States when it comes to ultra-liberal electoral results that can overwhelm voters in other states/counties.
But, the rules being what they were, the focus was on states which could be competitive. The Democrats just weren’t thinking that Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin would be competitive enough to vote for Trump.
SO, since they couldn’t hold on to those states, we must change the rules.
Leave a Reply