A good friend of mind sent me a copy of an email from a guy who feels compelled to defend the Electoral College System. I’ve seen the material before…it is from a debunked article that appeared on the Breitbart News site one week after the November 2016 election.
The article (and email, which quoted it) stated that there are 3,141 counties in the United States, Donald Trump won 3,084 of them, and Hillary Clinton won only 57. According to the writer, these “statistics should put an end to the argument as to why the Electoral College makes sense.”
Except for the fact that… Clinton won 487 counties nationwide, compared with 2,626 for Trump (according to the Associated Press), or 489 and 2,623 (according to PolitiFact.com). So, the Breitbart guy has chosen bad facts…which usually happens at Breitbart…to inflame readers. Nothing new here.
Interestingly, the word “county” doesn’t appear in the U.S. Constitution, so it is curious why the writer of this article is focusing on “counties”.
I know a little bit about counties…I was the Deputy Chief Executive Officer of Riverside County, California for ten years before retiring in 2003. Riverside County is the 10th most populous and 4th largest (in land area) county of the 3,141 counties in the United States. Also, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is about $150 billion annually, which would make it larger than the economies of all but 57 of the 211 countries in the world.
So, it’s a big county by any measure. Donald Trump won here.
We live in California, which has a higher GDP than Russia. The economy here is exceeded by only 11 countries in the world, and accounts for about one-eighth of the entire U.S. economic output. California has a lot of people, too, about 40 million of them; in fact, 12 percent of the U.S. population lives here.
Due to its population and economy, California should have a major voice in American government. And…it does…although it is under-represented (see below).
Speaking of counties…California has 58 of them. In contrast, Texas has 254, Georgia has 159, Virginia has 133, etc. In fact, more than half of the 50 States have more counties than does California. Why they need all of these counties is a mystery to me.
There is a large variation in size and population of U.S. counties. San Bernardino County (California) encompasses 20,056 square miles, while Kalawao County (Hawaii) is not quite 12 square miles in size. In terms of population, Los Angeles County (California) is home to over 10 million residents, while seven counties in Nebraska and Texas have fewer than 600 residents. I suspect that there are more cattle there than humans.
(Interestingly, over one-third of the counties in the United States are found in States that seceded from the Union (i.e. causing the Civil War, 1861-65). Nowadays, that part of the country is known as the “Bible Belt”. Coincidentally, it is also home to Breitbart’s and Donald Trump’s political base, and probably the target of this goofy article on the Electoral College.)
So…why are we talking about counties in the first place?
I think the author of the Breitbart piece was trying to infer that Donald Trump’s mandate to govern was much broader than some people think. After all, he won the vote in an overwhelming number of counties. Therefore, his support by American voters was broad and strong. And, as the Breitbart author states, the electoral college is a “guard against any small vocal area, with a specific agenda, speaking for the whole of the nation“.
There are several issues here which deserve discussion.
Undeniably, Donald Trump’s mandate to govern is a weak one. He lost the popular vote, not by the 1.5 million votes that Breitbart alleges, but, actually, by almost 2.9 million votes. In addition, approximately 40 percent of registered voters did not vote for President. So, out of the 235 million eligible voters in the U.S., only about 27 percent cast a vote for Donald Trump to be President. (I only voted for Clinton because Trump was so morally repulsive. Many people that I know couldn’t bring themselves to vote at all.)
Trump’s support is strongest in rural areas…i.e. those sparsely-populated areas with a lot of counties and not much else going on…economically. His populist promise to them…he’ll “listen to them”, support their religious goals, generate jobs for them, and “stick it to the city folks”.
Unfortunately, most of the people who live (and vote) in America reside in urban, not rural, areas. That is where the economy is, that is where the jobs are, and that is, in fact, where Donald Trump operates all of his business enterprises. If Trump’s policies are going to grow the U.S. economy, that growth is going to take place in urban, not rural, counties.
So, there is a disconnect between Trump’s populist base of support and the reality that is the United States economy. Hopefully, the economy will grow, but it probably won’t expand much in most of those 1,000 tiny Southern counties. As they say in real estate, location is everything. We will know that President Trump’s motives are sincere when he announces that he is going to build his next luxury skyscraper hotel in Loving County, Texas…population 113.
Let’s call Trump’s political base the “solid-as-a-rock 27 percent” (of eligible voters). That leaves 73 percent who didn’t vote for him. Statistically, most of them reside in major urban areas. The culture there is different from that in the Bible Belt, and many of these city dwellers perceive Donald Trump as a threat because of things he’s said about their race, religion, economic station in life, and their urban values.
(Ironically, Trump is as urban a guy as one can get; there’s nothing rural about him, he’s not religious, and his value system is abnormal, to put it mildly. He’s a New York guy who New Yorkers dislike; he lost the election in New York by 2 million votes, for God’s sake!)
The point is that, in order to govern effectively, President Trump needed to expand his political base right out of the gate, and…he has not even attempted to do that. He’s like the genius trying to pound a square peg into a round hole, and can’t seem to figure out why he’s failing. He keeps preaching to the choir…the rural folk.
Let’s get back to the Electoral College. Donald Trump has a problem governing because he WON the Electoral College. Most Americans didn’t vote for him, and, yet, he (and the Breitbart propagandists) want to pretend that everyone loves him, his ideas, and his manner of governance.
The answer is: they don’t. The President’s approval rating was the worst of any President’s first year…in the past fifty years or so. It’s not that he’s done such a bad job (he has), but he had a lot of people against him from the start and he’s alienated a bunch more since then. He’s working against himself.
Rather than applauding the “infinite wisdom” of the Founding Fathers, it might make more sense for Americans to question the veracity of the Electoral System model: a Rube Goldberg contraption that can put an unpopular man in the White House.
The founders never anticipated the eventual size of this country, the very uneven population distribution, and the astounding economic vitality (of world-wide significance) of States that weren’t even conceived of in 1789. The Nation was primarily rural in the beginning, and the Federal government was a secondary player to States back then.
(The latter is why each State gets two Senators: as a check against urban power. Although…one might argue that a Senator from Wyoming, representing roughly 500,000 residents and a GDP of $38 billion, should not have the political clout of a Senator from California, representing 40 million people and a $2.5 trillion economic engine. It’s politically incorrect to say this, but: if Wyoming ceased to exist tomorrow, it would be like the sound of one hand clapping…no one would notice. If California’s economy collapsed, so would that of the United States.)
Many things have changed since 1789. The Founding Fathers didn’t contemplate the U.S.:
(a) Expanding from 13 mainly Eastern Seaboard colonies to 50 States, to the Pacific Ocean and beyond (Hawaii and Alaska);
(b) Growing into the strongest economy in the World;
(c) Becoming the dominant military force in the World;
(d) Outlawing the practice of slavery, conducting genocide on the Native American people, giving women the right to vote, and allowing American citizens the right to own automatic weapons that could kill scores of people in a matter of seconds.
In other words, the wisdom of the Founders wasn’t exactly “infinite”.
The Electoral College system is something that made sense at the time due to the rural nature of the new republic and the importance of the individual States at that time.
As the country grew, the Federal government had to grow to provide for things like: a standing army; the Interstate Highway System; criminal justice system components like Federal courts, prisons and the F.B.I; the air traffic control system; etc. The relationship between the people, the States, and the Federal government changed.
All of the changes required money, therefore taxes, and taxes are generated from economic activity. The country grew because many rural American communities became urban. More people, more workers, more industry, more opportunity for economic growth, etc. The backwaters of the American economy, i.e. rural areas, have been left behind, so to speak, and a populist politician, like Donald Trump, plays to that nostalgia.
What we need to remember is that, first and foremost, we are a democracy. In a democracy, people vote to elect their government representatives. Counties don’t vote; people do. The “will of the people” is supposed to mean that the majority of the population supports the government and the work that it is doing on their behalf.
The Electoral College System doesn’t necessarily make that happen. The guy or gal with the most ballot box votes can, and has, lost the Presidency due to the Electoral College having a slight bias toward rural areas.
This happens because all States, regardless of population, get two votes for their two Senators, and one each for their Congressmen. States with a population of 500,000 (Wyoming) get the same number of Senatorial votes as California, with a population of almost 40 million. This formula over-represents citizens in rural States, and under-represents residents of urban States. In addition, some States have such low population that they wouldn’t normally qualify for a Congressional seat (711,000 people). The Constitution grants them one at-large seat. So, seven rural states are over-represented, statistically speaking.
Probably a bigger issue is the “winner take all” design of the Electoral System. If a candidate wins the popular vote in a hotly-contested State by one single vote, he/she gets ALL of that State’s electoral votes. It would be theoretically possible for two candidates to almost evenly split the popular vote but one candidate who narrowly defeated the other in each state would get all 538 electoral votes.
That sounds crazy. But, consider: Donald Trump got 1% more popular votes in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan than did Hillary Clinton. A one percent swing in any two of those States, and Hillary Clinton is President. But, that didn’t happen, and Trump won the Electoral College vote easily, with 304 to 227.
This is how it can come to pass that after the “people have spoken”, the popular vote winner for President can actually win second place.
When this happens, and I will paraphrase the Breitbart article here, we can experience a “small vocal area, with a specific agenda, speaking for the whole of the nation.”
Except that, we find rural America (i.e. Trump) driving the train that the urban areas of the country have paid for.
So, I have to disagree with the Breitbart intellectuals: the Electoral College System does NOT make sense.