Second place should not be a ticket to the White House
With Republican President Donald Trump on his way out of office, the next target for Democrats is something equally erratic: the Electoral College.
So zany is the system of electing the president by units of votes from each state that Trump himself ripped it in November 2012.
“The Electoral College is a disaster for a democracy,” he tweeted.
Trump had it right, but his denunciation of the Electoral College didn’t last long. He was happy to flip-flop when the “disaster” put him in the White House.
Trump in 2016 lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton. She bested him by more than 2.8 million votes.
Trump won the presidency because he received the requisite number of electoral votes by carrying more states than Clinton.
A disaster was forgotten or ignored. Trump declared himself the winner by a landslide.
This year, Joe Biden not only defeated Trump by more than 7 million votes nationally; he won the decisive Electoral College. Biden received 306 electoral votes — 36 more than the number needed to be elected president.
Trump continues to say the election was rigged by Democrats. He also claimed he could prove it but never did. He never will unless he can find a tribunal more friendly to him than the Proud Boys and talk-show hosts on Fox News.
Democrats will find it was much easier to knock out Trump after one term than it will be to defang the Electoral College.
New Mexico, 14 other states and the District of Columbia already have approved laws to elect the president based on the national popular vote. But these states remain a minority for change, their laws gathering dust in a few pages of the code book.
Even if more states agree to undercut the Electoral College in favor of a popularly elected president, lawsuits are sure to strangle the prospect of change for at least another two or three election cycles.
Republicans have good reason to oppose all efforts to elect the president through the national popular vote.
In this century, only one Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote. That was George W. Bush in 2004.
Democrats took the popular vote in the other five presidential elections since 2000. Yet Democrats lost two of those elections because of the Electoral College.
Like Trump, Bush in 2000 was elected president after losing the popular vote by a close margin to Al Gore. Bush won the Electoral College 271-266 after a protracted recount in Florida.
Defenders of the existing system claim it gives voice to residents of sparsely populated states. Junk the Electoral College, they say, and giant population centers will command all the attention of presidential candidates.
The truth doesn’t match their warnings.
Biden and Trump held more campaign events in Maine, a small state with four electoral votes, than they did in California, the most populous state with 55 electoral votes.
Both candidates knew Biden was sure to win California and take all its electoral votes. They didn’t bother visiting.
But Maine is one of two states that distributes its electoral votes by regional returns. Nebraska is the other.
Trump took three electoral votes in Maine and Biden won one. Biden also won one electoral vote in Nebraska by carrying the Omaha-based congressional district.
Candidates for president in the general election don’t bother paying attention to a winner-takes-all state unless polls show it will be closely contested. This was why Biden and Trump this year held 47 campaign events in Pennsylvania, the most of any state, according to National Popular Vote, an organization pressing to end the Electoral College.
Had a pandemic not held the country in its grip, Pennsylvania would have hosted Trump, Biden and their running mates several times a week from July until November.
The prospect of a close race also explains why Nevada hosted more general-election campaign events this year than New York, Massachusetts and Illinois combined.
If the popular vote decided the presidency, a few states wouldn’t dominate the presidential campaign. More important, a candidate who lacks the support of a majority of voters couldn’t win the presidency.
For now, Republicans in New Mexico appear rock solid in their support of the Electoral College. Every Republican legislator in 2019 voted against the bill to elect the president by popular vote.
Like Trump, they could be persuaded to do an about-face.
What would it take? A long, tear-filled night when a Republican presidential candidate had to deliver a concession speech after getting the most votes.