VDH - Electoral College vs Popular Vote

November 21, 2016 3:25 pm / Leave a Comment / Megan Ring

From an Angry Reader:

She WON the popular vote!!!!!

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Suzanne Williams,

I got your point without the capital letters and the five exclamation marks.

As a general rule the resort to exclamation is a reflection of an absence of argument. Let words speak for themselves—and in your case fail on their own merits.

The Founders created an Electoral College for a reason: to avoid the sort of fickle demagoguery that characterized ancient Athenian democracy and that turns up in chilling scenes in Thucydides and Xenophon, and was thus in depth critiqued by Aristotle and Plato. We follow more instead Roman Republicanism that sought to provide reflection to the pulses of the people before they translated into instant political change. A few additional points:

1) Would you have written this sentence had the opposite occurred: that is, suggesting that Hillary was somehow an illegitimate president because Trump won the popular vote?

2) Do you think that candidates would campaign quite differently had the rules been different? Do you not think that both candidates otherwise might have skipped more sparsely populated swing states to focus on population density? Who knows that outcome?

3) You seem somewhat in a state of denial. The Trump victory was remarkable in ways well beyond his substantial victory in the Electoral College:

1. a) I cannot remember a candidate in modern memory who was bitterly opposed by those in his own party. Trump won despite a dearth of party endorsements, with the hostility of conservative media (Weekly Standard, National Review, many at The Wall Street Journal). The #NeverTrump people shook the Republican Party in a way Bernie Sanders did not the Democratic Party.

1. b) Trump was outspent at somewhere between 3-1 to 2-1 by Hillary: he had few bundlers; his campaign team was much less experienced; he had no ground game in traditional terms; far fewer ads; no real celebrity rallies; etc. Yet he blew up the “blue wall.” Why was that?

1. c) The media hated Trump in a way the Left have never quite matched before. Read WikiLeaks and you can see that both reporters and opinion writers were checking in first with Podesta, Inc. The entire media was corrupt and sought to shape the election by collusion with Hillary and yet all for naught? Why?

4) Unfortunately, Trump was not a fluke: A 2016 red/blue county by county map of the U.S. shows a geographical sea of red (85% of the territory of the U.S.) In sum, Barack Obama destroyed the Democratic Party in just 8 years: Senate lost; House lost; state legislatures and governorships lost (just 6 states have combined Democratic legislatures and governors); 1,000 elected Democrats have lost their offices since Obama took power; the Supreme Court will be conservative at a likely 6-3 or even 7-2 margin for a generation.

It would be wiser to look forward and be introspective: what are liberals doing that is destroying the Democratic Party at state and federal levels? The answers will be more helpful to you rather than suggesting that the U.S. Constitution is at fault.

Sincerely,

VDH