If it weren’t so infuriating, it would be hilarious that the very people—progressive intellectual elites—who fueled Donald Trump’s success are now reinforcing it with more intellectual elitism. Everyday Americans are tired of being told they’re too stupid to know what’s good for them. Trump is the president-elect in no small part because he respected those Americans to determine their own best interests.
So what does the self-anointed intellectual cream of the crop do? Swoop in to “save” the country from the know-nothing deplorables who thought Trump was a better pick than Hillary Clinton. Charge in with no constitutional basis to wrest the presidency from the constitutionally valid winner because, egads, the troglodytes managed to put him in office. We can’t have that.
More than 4.3 million people have signed a petition demanding that U.S. electors “ignore their states’ votes and cast their ballots for Secretary Clinton” when the official vote is taken on December 19. The rationale, of course, is that the horrible awful no good very bad Electoral College gave Trump the win even though Clinton won the popular vote.
Define ‘Popular Vote,’ Your Brilliancies
Let me get this straight. Forty-eight states have winner-take-all systems where all the electoral votes go to whichever candidate wins the popular vote in that state. Or, put more simply, 96 percent of Americans voted in an election where their vote counted directly.
That’s a popular vote, is it not? It is a popular vote mediated through electors who essentially rubber-stamp what the people have chosen. That doesn’t sound broke to me, so why is there clamoring to “fix” it? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s not about the people. Repeat after me: This has nothing to do with the people. This has to do with using rules as tools to win, then discarding those rules if it doesn’t work.
Now, to the World Series as our Rosetta stone. The Yankees beat the Dodgers 1 – 0 in the first three games; the Dodgers beat the Yankees 10 – 0 in the next three games; and the Yankees beat the Dodgers 1 – 0 in the final game. The Yankees won four games with a total of four runs scored. The Dodgers won three games with a total of 30 runs scored. Who won the series?
The Electoral College Yes! crowd says the Yankees did, because they won four games to three even though they scored fewer runs overall than the Dodgers. The Electoral College No! crowd says the Dodgers should win because they scored a total of 30 runs to the Yankees’ four.
Without political maneuvering, of course the Yankees won, because we score seven individual games, and the runs are not cumulative. The Electoral College wins because we hold 50 state elections, and the votes are not cumulative.
Doubling Down Only Hurts Your Cause
To pit the Electoral College against the popular vote as though they are in competition is either ignorant or disingenuous. I suspect the latter, at least from high-level Democrats. They are no dummies. If Hillary Clinton had won the Electoral College but not the popular vote, there would be nary a peep. Correction: there would be nary a peep about the popular vote. If a frustrated Trump supporter had even held up a sign of protest, there would be a din of deplorables-bashing. You know it’s true.
Trump won the Electoral College because that’s the way the cookie crumbled, and it crumbled fair and square the way the Framers intended. So the peeps are deafening to the point of hysteria. Media professionals and Hollywood celebrities are breaking down—on air—because they can’t cope with the reality of a President-elect Trump. Professors are cancelling classes and excusing distraught students from tests.
(This might be a good time to consider the logical conclusion of trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, and the right-around-the-corner criminalization of hurting anyone’s feelings.)
More than 4 million Americans have signed a petition declaring the rest of us too imbecilic to vote responsibly. They are so convinced of their righteousness they can’t see how each signature diminishes more of their influence in the political arena. What is an “imbecile” to do but double down on support for President Trump? It’s how he got into office, it’s what will keep him in office, and it’s why the Left is still scratching its collective head wondering where it all went wrong.
