Ranting About the Electoral College

     There has been much ranting about the Electoral College in the wake of the fact that Hillary Clinton won the overall popular vote, but lost the Electoral College vote, thus giving Trump the Presidency. Articles are popping up in left-leaning news publications saying that the Electoral College is anachronistic, indefensible, etc...I disagree with this however, for the following reasons:

     If there was no Electoral College, then virtually none of the states would get any attention by the candidates except for California and New York, people need to remember how our country is structured. We are a republic that consists of fifty states, hence the name, the United States of America.

     No one state, just because it has more people, has a right to dictate its will on the other states in terms of national policy. That is why the system is set up to check that. That is why each state gets two senators, regardless of its population size, because the Senate acts as a check on the House, which serves to represent the popular will and passions of the people. The Senate is to consider the longer-term ramifications of legislation. The Senate's design prevents the more populous states from being able to dictate national policy and essentially lord over the smaller states. The Electoral College is designed for a similar purpose.

     What people are also forgetting or unaware of is that the House ultimately has to approve of the Electoral College vote. They can choose to reject it. Now remember, the House is structured to represent the popular demands of the people. Unlike the Senate, each state gets House representatives based on their population size. More population equals more House members. Yet, the House has remained solidly in Republican hands. In fact, the GOP  actually gained some seats in the House. What this tells us is that Hillary's win of the popular vote most likely only was due to states like California giving her a slight edge. Had the House clearly gone Democratic party, along with the popular vote going to Hillary, then one could make the argument that the House should reject the Electoral College outcome. But the fact that the House has remained solidly Republican means that the overall popular will is aligned with the Electoral College outcome and that the Electoral College, if anything, is likely working exactly the way that it is supposed to.

     Some might try to claim that the Electoral College is aligned against the Democratic party candidates, but I disagree with that completely. Barack Obama won both the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2008 and 2012, with a lousy economy in the latter. And we now know that some of the swing states and blue states that flipped red only managed to do so by small margins of voters, likely because around a million black voters stayed home this time around then voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Had they come out and voted, Hillary would likely have won the Presidency. This also would mean that the working-class white vote that came out in force, ranging from Republicans to some Democrats, wouldn't have still been enough to put Trump over the top (although I would be very interested in seeing the popular vote had Trump not said a lot of the stupid things that he did during his campaign---he could still have run on his overall themes of reforming trade, building a border wall, etc...and still done even better I think with many people). So Democratic party presidential candidates can very much win with the Electoral College.

     I also do not at all agree with those saying, "No other country in the Western world has a system like the Electoral College!" well for one, the claim that "every other country" does or does not do something is not unto itself an argument. Plenty of other liberal democracies also require you to show an I.D. before you vote, but the same people complaining about the Electoral College consider voter I.D. here in the U.S. to be racist, oppressive, and the equivalent of a poll tax and hence blatantly un-Constitutional. I would think that one reason other countries can get by without an equivalent of the Electoral College is because population-wise, they tend to be a lot smaller than the United States. And for the ones that do have a very large population, such as Japan, it is crammed into such a small space that there is just no need for any Electoral College equivalent.