Like many of you, I am absolutely sickened by the fact that twice in our lifetimes (and indeed, for the second time in the past sixteen years) the presidency has been handed over to a person who did not win the popular vote. This is, in two words, batshit crazy. The President of the United States (along with his or her running-mate) is the one office in our government that is meant to be elected by the entire country, regardless of geographic location. These two are the only offices that explicitly represent the entire nation, rather than some particular subset of it. The fact that garnering a majority of the popular vote is not the way in which we elect this person is beyond modern comprehension.
And yet, this is our system, and it has been in place for 230 years. That does not mean I think it is a good system – indeed, I think it is a terrible one. But it is our system, it has always been our system, and to do anything about it retroactively, or to even try to do so, is in bad faith. If Hillary had lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, who amongst us would be complaining? In a dream world, I would like to think I would, due to my strong moral convictions about our political institutions and their glaring deficiencies, but I know in my heart that I would not. If nothing else, I would consider it all vindication for Bush v. Gore in 2000.
That doesn’t make it any better – it simply proves the fact that a disparity between who the American public actually votes for as president, versus who might actually become the president, exists – and in our modern times it seems to exist with worrying regularity. That is, I grant you, insanity. But, as much as it pains me to say it, this election is not the time to try to retroactively fix the system.
If we modern Americans wanted to fix the system in the light of electoral outrage, we have had sixteen years to do so – since the last time it happened. Spoiler alert: we did not. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have (we absolutely should have). But an opportunity presented itself, and we squandered it. A mere eight years after this first electoral upset, we may have had one of the greatest opportunities to correct this in history. An initially popular Republican president entered the White House despite losing the popular vote; by the end of his term he was extremely unpopular* and an upstart Democrat with little experience or record soundly defeated his Republican opposition and secured a fully Democratic Congress in the process. This, to me, was the perfect opportunity to move toward electoral reform. But we didn’t do it.
The fact that it has happened again, and so soon, simply serves to indict our failure to act, not our moral superiority as Democrats. The Republicans have been playing a masterful game at the state level to draw legislative districts in such a fashion that they are definitively electorally advantaged. This is another, legal, practice which I would quite like to outlaw, and I do hope that we will get to it very soon (indeed, I rather believe that we may need to get to this first, before we can ever successfully tackle the Electoral College).
But regardless of how this all came to be, the results of this election are the results of this election. Hillary Clinton herself has acknowledged as much. As painful and unfair as it is for all of us, we must do the same. I have no tolerance for people who resolutely deny the fact that Donald Trump is the properly elected President of the United States (even though I absolutely hate the fact that it is true). I have no tolerance for petitions that the Electoral College elect someone other than the person they have been democratically designed to elect (even though I deeply wish they could). If our republic is to have any hope of peacefully surviving this most unfavorable turn of events, it must be that we continue to respect our institutions and procedures, as they stand.
I hope and pray every day that the midterm elections in 2018, and the Presidential election in 2020, will reverse course on this national nightmare. But I am not willing to overturn our system in the meantime. Barring some sort of dramatic turn toward the truly authoritarian – which, to be fair, we are all afraid of and will be on the lookout for – we must respect the peaceful transition of power. By that, I do not condemn any peaceful protest meant to indicate a profound expression of political feeling. I don’t know what the future holds, and I am terrified about that fact. But until it comes, I do not advocate for anything that undermines the entire system, essentially guaranteeing a bloody revolution in our deeply divided country.
That being said, the Electoral College remains an anachronistic disaster for democracy, and we truly should work to repeal and replace it. But the time to start that process is not now, retroactively, if we wish to maintain peace. That said, this might be another golden opportunity to do instigate for such a change. We have had yet another example of the presidency being denied to the winner of the popular vote (by, potentially, an even larger margin than the last time). If outraged Democrats are swept back into power in 2018 and 2020, after a disastrous Trump reign (which I feel is quite likely), then let us not waste this opportunity again.
*No disrespect meant to George W. Bush. He is an, in retrospect, an adorable and well-meaning Dad/Grandpa of America and OH what I would give to have him back as our Republican President right now, especially in comparison to the Republican President we are currently facing (who, I will point out, George W. Bush never endorsed).
Doctor Dvorak's Delirium 