Going to College

It could happen again. It happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and it could happen to Kamala Harris in 2024, once again benefitting Donald Trump.

It's possible for Harris to win the popular vote and lose the presidential election thanks to the Electoral College, and every time the winner of the popular vote comes up short in the electoral vote, it always seems to be a Democrat holding onto the short end of the stick, thanks nowadays in part to Republicans dominating Texas, Florida, and a multitude of less populated states in the nation's midsection.

The reason for the Electoral College in the Constitution is usually given as slavery, mainly due to the slave states wanting an increased role in selecting the President and Vice President.  The constitutional clause basing the number of electors for each state on how many House and Senate members a state sends to Congress - at a time when slave states could count every five slaves as the equivalent of three citizens for the number of representatives they would send to the House -  certainly lends a great deal of truth to that, but it is hardly the only reason.  Another reason, according to Alexander Hamilton, was to ensure that the President and Vice President were chosen by private citizens who would vote on behalf or the people and who also could make sound judgments based on their better education and their deeper knowledge of the candidates.  In other words, Hamilton - and many of the other framers - didn't trust the judgment of the masses and and wanted people who knew the presidential candidates more intimately than the hoi polloi.  Each elector would vote for a first choice and a second choice, the runner-up in the election would be elected Vice President, and a bare majority of electoral votes - 35 in the first presidential election of 1789 - were needed to win the Presidency, else the House of Representatives would elect the President.

The plan worked perfectly - and then it didn't.  The states were left to decide how electors would be chosen, and most of them decided to have their legislatures choose them.  At the start, everyone agreed that George Washington should be President.  All of the electors voted for him in the first two elections, and John Adams, as the runner-up in each case, was twice elected Vice President.  Then, as parties formed, inconsistencies and difficulties started screwing things up.  Electors became more partisan, and the election of 1796 resulted in Adams, a Federalist Party member, being elected President and Thomas Jefferson, the leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, ending up as Vice President. When 138 electors were chosen in the election of 1800, 73 of them were Democratic-Republican electors, and they voted for Jefferson and Aaron Burr, resulting in a tie - the electors had intended for Burr to be Vice President, but there was no way to indicate that on the ballot.   The tie was broken in the House in favor of Jefferson, and the Constitution was amended in advance of the 1804 election to have electors specify and indicate their choice for President and their choice for Vice President (and it gave the Senate the power to choose a Vice President if no vice presidential candidate got a majority).

With the two-party system firmly established by the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans and the evolution of popularly chosen electors, the participating parties changing until settling into the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as of 1856, the Electoral College turned into a mere formality where the electors - once meant to be independent thinkers with educated choices based on sound judgment - became mere echoes of the popular choice.   While some states allow electors to vote their conscience, in many if not most states electors are expected to choose the nominee of their party.  For all intents and purposes, the Electoral College have mostly ratified the choice of the masses since 1828, when Andrew Jackson became the first popularly elected President.  In some states, as in New Jersey, the people vote for a whole slate of electors without even knowing their names.  That's how irrelevant the Electoral College has largely become.  This was fine, as long as it reflected the will of the people.

And after the disputed election of 1876, in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tilden by the barest electoral margin despite losing the popular vote, and the election of 1888, when President Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the Presidency to former GOP Senator Benjamin Harrison in the electoral vote, the Electoral College did, for quite a long time, reflect the will of the people. Franklin D. Roosevelt won four presidential elections in huge landslides - especially in 1936, when he won 46 out of 48 states - and John F. Kennedy won a close race in 1960 that could have been closer if he'd lost Illinois. (Kennedy won by an electoral vote of 303 to Richard M. Nixon's 219. Without Illinois, Kennedy still would have won, 276 to 246.) With the more recent examples of Democratic popular-vote winners losing the White House in the Electoral College, there are calls to abolish the Electoral College and let the President and Vice President be chosen directly by the people.

Be careful what you wish for.  The Electoral College has been beneficial in many cases where the parties broke down and split apart in attempting to choose a presidential ticket.  The Electoral College may have saved the Union. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln came in first in the popular vote in a four-man race with two Democratic candidates, Stephen Douglas and John C. Breckinridge - the Democratic Party splitting over slavery - and a centrist candidate from what was left of the old Whig Party.  However, Lincoln only won 39 percent of the popular vote because an overwhelming aversion to him from over six out of ten voters. In New York State, which ultimately decided the election, the Democrats ran a fusion ticket to block Lincoln and to split the electoral votes between different candidates. If 25,000 votes had gone the other way, Douglas or Breckinridge might have become President of the United States because Lincoln would have won only 145 electoral votes - seven short of a majority - and the election would have been submitted to the House, where Lincoln would have lost because the Democrats controlled that chamber. (Lincoln won New York and the election with 180 electoral votes.)  Similarly, in 1912, the split between President William H. Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt caused a great fissure in the Republican Party that led to Roosevelt forming a rival party and standing for the Presidency.  The Democratic candidate, New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson, whose liberal policy proposals were similar to Roosevelt's came in first in the popular vote with Roosevelt finishing second.  But Wilson was a minority President, winning only 41 percent of the vote, and his solid win in the electoral vote - 435 votes with 266 needed to win - sanctified his victory.

So how would we reform the presidential selection process, especially when the Electoral College increasingly relies on a handful of swing states as many states become less bipartisan?  Have the President and Vice President popular elected and have a runoff between the top two presidential tickets if no one gets a majority?  Sure, let's make the already interminable electoral process even longer!  If we're going to have a system like that, perhaps the best thing to do would be to reform the nomination process.  Since the mid-1970s, the presidential nomination process has mirrored the presidential election process, with party members voting for delegates pledged to vote for their choice for the presidential nomination and the convention delegates voting in a predetermined roll call just like the electors voting in December.  Before the modern primary and caucus system, though, the parties vetted the potential candidates for their presidential nominations with little input from the rank-and-file.  Women and people of color may complain about how this system was dominated by white men, but this system gave us Franklin D. Roosevelt (nominated on the fourth ballot in 1932),  Harry S. Truman (nominated for Vice President on the second ballot in 1944, when most party insiders knew that FDR could not survive a fourth presidential term), Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. The parties must once again vet the presidential candidates if the electors will not or cannot do so.     

In fact, the Democratic Party just did use this system to nominate Kamala D. Harris.  And the Republicans, counting on the will of the rank-and-file party members, renominated Donald J. Trump.

(Below is the current allotment of electors based on the 2020 census.)

Hawley New Year

It didn't take long for events to dictate that 2021 is going to be another bad year.  As if the slowdown in distributing COVID vaccines (which wipes out the optimism their arrival heralded) and the prospect of war with Iran weren't enough, we now have to deal with something most of us - including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell - had hoped to avoid.

U.S. Senator Joshua Hawley (R-MO), who celebrated his forty-first birthday on New Year's Eve, has announced that, on Wednesday, January 6,  when a U.S. Representative objects to a state's electoral college results favoring President-elect Joe Biden when the votes are counted before a joint session of Congress, he, Hawley, will support the objection - which will force a two-hour debate on whether or not to accept the results from said state before the vote count can continue.  Hawley has said that, so far, he plans to challenge Pennsylvania's results, but he's left open the possibility of endorsing as many as six challenges to a given state's Electoral College results, which would likely force Congress going into the wee small hours of Thursday, January 7.  Eleven more Senate Republicans plan to join him.

Hawley says he's doing this to call to attention the widespread concerns of voter fraud and of the failure of states to follow their own election laws, but no one is buying it.  The only widespread concerns of election integrity only exist in the minds of Donald Trump and all those, including Hawley, who curry favor with him. Hawley is either thinking of his re-election chances in 2024 or a possible presidential bid that year.  He wants Trump to have his back.  And Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who didn't want his caucus to endorse a challenge to Biden's win, has lost control of that caucus so much that he caved and told Republican senators to vote their own conscience. 

This stunt will yet further undermine faith in electoral democracy among Americans and set a precedent for future attempts by the Republican Party to overturn the will of the voters.  As for the chances of overturning the election to put Trump back in office . . .  well, in the incoming 117th Congress, and each chamber has to decide individually the validity of a state's electoral vote result one way of the other.  Both chambers have to agree to toss out challenged electoral ballots.  With a Democratic majority  in the House and 48 Democratic senators plus a few Republicans in both chambers who won't go along with Trump's or Hawley's charade, the Biden electoral votes should be accepted and that will be the end of it.  But with so many Republicans forced to go on record as supporting or opposing Trump, it is possible, however unlikely, that every House and Senate Republican will vote to support Trump out of fear of being primaried in a future election by Trump supporters and fear of the power Trump may have within the GOP after he "retires" to Mar-a-Lago.

We can probably count on Mitch McConnell and less extreme GOP senators like Ben Sasse and Susan Collins to support the Biden electoral slates.  After all, they just got re-elected, they won't be up again until 2026, and McConnell, who's beginning his seventh term in the Senate today, probably doesn't care about what happens to him anymore, just like he stopped caring about the country long ago.  Add Mitt Romney to that corner, too.  In the House, you can add Illinois' Republican House member Adam Kinzinger.  But given all of the chaos and disorder Wednesday's electoral vote count in Congress is expected to generate (did I happen to mention the planned Trump rally for January 6 outside the Capitol?), it's likely that many members of Congress will be wearing masks not out of COVID concerns but because they're ashamed to show their faces in public.

As for me, I'll probably just sleep through it. 

Well, maybe, but one thing could keep me up at night in the days leading up to Wednesday.  The same people who assure us that Trump can't overturn the 2020 election are the same people who said that he couldn't win the 2016 election.

Supreme Miscalculation

When Pennsylvania Republicans filed suit to decertify their state's election results, which gave Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes to Joe Biden in the presidential election, the Supreme Court rejected hearing it in a terse, brief statement without attribution.  Was it that that it was a unanimous decision on which they chose to remain anonymous, or was it an anonymous decision on which they chose to remain unanimous?

Trump wanted Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court to provide a full nine-justice membership with three of his own appointees that would rule in his favor in all of the electoral lawsuits he's planned to file in case Biden won.  But even the three amigos of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett are disgusted by Trump's (mis)understanding of the law.  But then, he's no lawyer.

So that's it, right?  Joe Biden is officially President-elect, right?  He officially has 306 votes, right?  Not so fast.  The Attorney General of Texas, with the support of attorneys general in seventeen other states that Trump won, is suing the sates of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to have their results for Biden decertified (these states have 62 electoral votes between them - and Trump has promised to intervene.  This case would go directly to the Supreme Court, though it's unlikely the justices would hear this, too.  Especially with Trump intervening.   And congressional Republicans refuse to accept Biden's win in order to curry favor with Trump until January 6, when the electoral votes - to be cast this coming Monday - are counted.  And maybe not even then - some Republicans plan to challenge the vote count.

Why does Trump persist at this charade that he won?  Because he's an egomaniac, he refuses to believe he could lose at anything, and he refuses to accept the idea that anything he attempts could fail.  Remember my blog post comparing Trump to Madonna?  He reminds me of how Madge would keep starring in movies despite the fact that she couldn't act and that most of her movies would open on a Friday and close the following Thursday.

The bright side? Madge stopped making movies eventually.  Maybe Trump will probably give up this effort to overturn the election, too.  Okay, that won't happen. Even though he won't succeed in getting a second term this time, he's already planning to run for a second nonconsecutive term in 2024.  The KAG (Keep America Great) cult, formerly the MAGA (Make America Great Again) cult, will become the TABA cult - "Take America Back Again."

The COVID vaccines?  Biden's latest Cabinet appointments?  I'll get to all that . . .

Lost In Transition

Joe Biden has his work cut out for him.  Not just in serving as President, but to become President.

Trump refuses to concede the election and he refuses to allow the Washington bureaucracy to accommodate any transition.  He's also undergoing a massive PR campaign to fuel rumors that the election was stolen form him.  Meanwhile, he's suing every state he thinks he should have won to have the results in states Biden won overturned before the electors can be certified to vote in their state capitals in December.  Also, only a handful of  Republican members of  Congress acknowledge Biden's victory.  

And in the fantastic event that Biden actually makes it to being sworn in, he may still have to deal with Mitch McConnell stopping everything.  The Senate race in North Carolina has been called for Thom Tillis, bringing the Republican Senate caucus in the 119th Congress so far to 49 members and proving that North Carolina Democrats are an ever sorrier bunch that their Florida or Kentucky brethren.  (Another adulterer in an adultery-intolerant state, guys?)  Alaska's Senate race has also since been called for Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan.   Now the Democrats' only recourse  is in Georgia.  There, Democrat Jon Ossoff faces incumbent Republican Senator David Perdue and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, the other Democratic Senate candidate, faces appointed Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler in runoffs scheduled for January 5.  Despite the Democrats' new-found strength in the Peach State, the chances of the party pulling off a double win - even against certifiable crooks like Perdue and Loeffler - look exceedingly slim.

Meanwhile, Biden is readying a White House staff and assembling a COVID-19 task force, spelling out his health care agenda (more of that later), receiving calls, communiques, and congratulations from foreign leaders, and putting together a government - without help from a Trump administration that refuses to share vital information with the incoming President and continues to insist that the Donald will be taking the oath of office on January 20, ready to challenge the results right up to the counting of the electoral votes on January 6 under the watch of Mike Pence and in the presence of a Republican Senate as well as a Democratic House.  Expect challenges to the results from each state Biden will have won - especially Pennsylvania.

I wonder if Americans have any idea how appropriate it is that this election took place in the middle of a pandemic.  Biden's win may have treated a symptom, but the disease of Trumpism goes merrily on.    

Get Over It

Well, the Electoral College voted for President.  And even though the official count before a joint session of Congress doesn't take place until January 6, we already know the results - Donald Trump won.  It seems that secret ballots aren't so secret when it comes to electoral votes - the count was made public before Congress had the pleasure of hearing the final tally in person.

And efforts to deny a presidential candidate with enough electoral votes to win a bare majority as constitutionally required worked out very differently than envisioned.  One candidate did indeed lose a significant number of votes to so-called faithless electors, casting a shadow over that candidate's bid for the Presidency and making people realize what a bad idea it was to nominate said candidate.

Unfortunately, that candidate was Hillary Clinton.

Donald Trump lost two electors in Texas, one of whom voted for John Kasich while the other voted for Ron Paul, bringing his total to 304 votes.  But Hillary?  She lost five electoral votes - three in Washington State that went to Colin Powell (a Republican!), one from the same state that went to Native American activist Faith Spotted Eagle, and one vote from Hawaii that went to Bernie Sanders.  She would have lost seven electoral votes if two other electors, one from Maine and another from Minnesota, had been able to vote for Sanders without having their votes invalidated by state laws binding them to their party's nominee.

There you have it: Hillary was so unacceptable that she lost more electoral votes than the Donald, even after all those efforts to cause massive electoral defections from Trump.  Hillary supporters will still insist to the end of the year and through the next four years that their candidate won and she's the legitimate President.

Dear Hillbots:  You lost.  Get over it.  You backed the wrong candidate in the primaries, and now you have to live with the fact that you were instrumental in bringing down the Democratic Party like a house of cards.

And for Pete's sake, stop blaming the Russians.  Even though the FBI now agrees with the CIA that the Russians must have hacked the Democratic National Committee's e-mails, neither agency has produced proof of that.  Also, all of those damaging e-mails have one thing in common - they're true.  And there's no way Putin could have hacked electronic voting booths - they weren't hooked up to the Internet.            

To respond to the inevitable complaint that the Democrats will be strong again and ready for 2020 after having learned the lessons of 2016, when they narrowed their choices for the nomination for President down to an ex-First Lady and a codger, dig this: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Michelle Obama (!) are the Democratic front-runners for 2020.

And Governor O'Malley?  Dr. Stein?  Please consider joining forces and forming a new party together to replace the Democrats!   Because after a lifetime's worth of lessons in 2016, they still haven't learned anything.

President Kasich?

John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, as the 45th President of the United States?  It could happen.

Here's the situation. Some Democratic electors and Republican electors who are fearful of Donald Trump and don't want him to become President want to reverse Trump's 306-electoral-vote majority.  One Texas Republican elector has already whittled away at Trump's majority, saying he will vote for someone else, so he cut it down to 305 (couldn't resist the Billy Joel reference).  Democratic electors, knowing Republican electors will never vote for Hillary Clinton, are trying to get enough Democratic and Republican electors - 37 in all -  to vote for a compromise Republican presidential candidate and deny the Donald a bare majority of 270 votes.  If no presidential candidate gets an electoral majority, the House of Representatives chooses among the top three vote-getters, with each state having one vote.  With the House under Republican control, the hope is for 26 states to vote for the compromise candidate and make him President.  Kasich is the likeliest compromise candidate in this scenario.    

Kasich is no great shakes either - he stopped high-speed rail in Ohio and went after Planned Parenthood - but many people think he'd be a safer choice for President than Trump.

So we'll see.  This should be interesting with regard to the transition from the outgoing administration, as the electors don't vote until December 19 and their ballots aren't counted before a joint session of Congress until January 6 - two weeks before Inauguration Day.  How would President-elect Kasich or whoever President-elect Not Trump would prepare for a new administration in what our British cousins would call a fortnight?  But the prospect of stopping Trump in the Electoral College is still a long shot.    

(Note:  Mike Pence would still be elected Vice President by the Electoral College.  Were no vice presidential candidate to get a majority, the Senate would choose between the top two vote-getters, with each individual Senator having one vote. That happened only once, in 1836.)

Welcome Back, My Friends, To the Election That Never Ends

Just when we thought we'd washed the smell of the 2016 presidential election off our persons, along comes a whole slew of recounts - along with Donald Trump's subsequent paranoia - to stink up America again.

New York magazine reported last week that election lawyers and computer scientists were encouraging Hillary Clinton to ask for a recount of the popular vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all Rust Belt states that Trump officially won.  The lawyers and computer scientists claimed that there might be voter irregularities in the computerized ballot machines and presidential vote counts, as the tallies contradicted polls leading up to the November 8 vote.  Specifically, these experts were afraid that the electronic ballot boxes might have been hacked, though there's no evidence that such a thing happened anywhere; despite concerns of Russian hacking of the vote, the Obama administration is convinced that there was no foul play anywhere in the country, and that there has been no voter fraud.

The three states cited have a combined total of 46 electoral votes; Hillary is 38 electoral votes short of a majority.  She would have to reverse the results in all three states to win with a total of 278 electoral votes to 260; Trump could lose any two of these states to her in recounts and still win.  With all three states in his column, Trump has 306 electoral votes to Madame H's 232.  The Clinton campaign was prepared to let it go, citing the victory margins for Trump and saying that there most likely weren't enough votes that could be reversed and change the outcome. 

Then Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein decided to stir up some serious stuff.

Dr. Stein pushed for a recount in Wisconsin and raised millions of dollars over the Internet to pay for it; she was able to file for one just before the deadline, and so the Badger State is counting the votes all over again.  She is not only working on getting recounts done in Michigan, which just certified its vote totals, and Pennsylvania, but she is threatening to get recounts done in as many states as she can.  She certainly can do that; she's raised more money than she needs.  Hillary's campaign has sent lawyers to Wisconsin to oversee the recount and plans to do the same elsewhere should other recounts go forward. 

Now why would Dr. Stein instigate recounts that could theoretically help Hillary Clinton, whom Stein had repeatedly bashed throughout the campaign?  Well, it certainly isn't to help the Hillary become President instead of the Donald.  Dr. Stein doesn't think any of the results will change as a result of any of these recounts; her point is that, if even the possibility of hacking the vote is there,  then recounts should be done to prove once and for all that there was no hacking, otherwise we'll never know whether or not the vote was legitimate.

Needless to say, Trump and the GOP think this is a colossal waste of time, and Trump himself has made this clear in a series of tweets.  Trump has accused Dr. Stein of raising doubts about the election to raise more money for the Greens, even though Dr, Stein has stated that the money she's collected - $6.5 million - is specifically earmarked for helping to pay for recounts.  Maybe Trump should do what Hillary is doing and send lawyers to the recounting - a recounting, remember, that Hillary never asked for - to show his support for making sure the vote was fair and square.

Astonishingly, Trump has not only dismissed the recounts, he's also opined - without any evidence whatsoever - that he should have won the popular vote (Hillary is ahead by over two million popular votes) because too many people voted illegally.  This does not make a ton of sense, considering that Trump obviously doesn't need the popular vote, having won the Presidency in the Electoral College . . . unless you consider the possibility that he's seeking a popular mandate from an electorate in which 53 percent of voters cast ballots against him.

Dr. Stein may likely emerge as the heroine of the 2016 election.  She's raised more money for recounts than she did for her entire presidential campaign, and she's cast light on the need for the United States to ensure free and fair elections. If she raises more money than necessary, she will dedicate the surplus funds toward election integrity efforts and to the promotion of voting reform, so she's hardly doing to this to help Hillary.  She's actually doing this to help the Greens by garnering favorable publicity for their progressive causes.  Recounts in more states may even get the Greens enough votes to have five percent of the vote nationwide and thus qualify for federal matching funds and automatic inclusion on state ballots in 2020.  It also undermines an already unpopular Trump as he prepares to take office.

And as if that weren't enough, Hillary supporters, who ironically mocked Trump for threatening not to accept the results of the election if he lost, are now urging 38 of Trump's electors to switch their votes to Hillary and make her President instead.  The electors, by the way, don't vote until December 19, and the ballots aren't even counted until January 6.  (If Trump should somehow lose 38 electoral votes to Hillary, then the transition to the next administration will suddenly be very bumpy and very interesting.)  

In the meantime, the recounts are just one more thing to get through.  And when the computer experts who count the votes are finished doing that . . . maybe they can come over to my house and do something about my Internet connection periodically going out.