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55% favor eliminating electoral college without realizing what that means

After the 2016 presidential election, a new Rasmussen Reports national survey found that 55% of likely U.S. voters favor eliminating the Electoral College so that whoever wins a majority of the popular vote wins the election – without understanding how much of an awful idea that actually is.

Interestingly given the election results, 58% of Republicans, heading into Tuesday night, were slightly more supportive of eliminating the Electoral College, compared to 55% of Democrats and 51% of voters not affiliated with either party. Since the election, many of Clinton’s supporters have openly called for the system to be eliminated.

Seriously?

Skepticism of the Electoral College became elevated because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 election but lost to Donald Trump in an electoral landslide. Former Attorney General Eric Holder told Bill Maher that he is pushing for the abolishment of the Electoral College:

So why is abolishing the electoral college such a terrible idea?

First, going to a national popular vote would not have gotten Hillary elected. The Trump campaign would have executed a different strategy had the electoral college not been around. He would have stumped for votes in New York, California and Washington State, among others, to energize voters there to get out to the polls strengthening his popular vote totals. The GOP GOTV efforts would not have been so heavily concentrated in battleground states. He would have captured the popular vote while the mass media would have cried “if only we still have the electoral college, Hillary would have won.”

And then there are the maps…

Every Republican “forgotten person”, stuck in a firmly democrat state, should pull up the 2016 election map of their state that shows how every county/precinct/district voted on November 8th and then ask .. if that map doesn’t make sense, why would you want that same problem magnified on a national level? Here are some particularly instructive examples:

New York (awarded its electoral college votes to the blue candidate (Hillary):

new-york-distribution-of-votes

Illinois (awarded its electoral college votes to the blue candidate (Hillary):

illinois-vote-trump

Maine (awarded the majority  of its electoral college votes to the blue candidate (Hillary):

maine-trump-vote

Looking at how those districts/counties/precincts voted, you’d think those states went for the red candidate, but we all know that didn’t happen and isn’t likely to ever happen as long as population centers like New York City, Chicago, and Portland decide for the whole of the state – but that’s fair … right?

Here are the 2012 presidential election results by precinct:

201-election-results-by-county

Who do you think won that election? You guessed it – the Democrat (represented by blue areas)

Anyone looking at the map would ask how the heck Obama won that election.. the answer is that the 44th president of the United States ran a popular vote campaign in states that mattered. He spent resources in urban areas so that that concentrated mob could overwhelm the voices of the rest of their states. President Obama didn’t need to win the majority of areas, just the large city centers in those states with lots of electoral votes. The problem wasn’t the existence of the national Electoral College, it was that states have not adopted their own versions of it.

The founders of the nation studied the history of the Greeks and Romans and knew that pure democracy always led to the majority disregarding the will of the minority. Basically, once you go full on sheeple and are part of the 50.1% coalition, you could implement anything you wanted, the rest of the country be damned!

If you live in a blue state but live in a  red county and vote Republican or live in a rural area of a liberal bastion, you know exactly how this feels.

The founders understood this phenomenon and sought to prevent it on a national level.

Imagine if the entire election were decided by New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Raleigh, Miami, Austin, Cincinnati, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, …  you get the point. Politicians would only care about the needs, desires, and demands of the people in those cities. No one else would matter. The huge population centers would decide everything for everyone even if those choices were destructive to others – to a point.

So what happens when certain areas become so entrenched in group-think that they don’t know how to do anything but support their group’s messages? What happens when a state fully ingests the party line and believes that no outcome, save one, is possible? They become irrelevant.

New York’s requests are ignored by D.C. as democrats know that New York’s non-NYC areas won’t come out in large numbers to vote in national elections because New York City will silence voters across the rest of the state.

Similarly, Californian conservatives will be hard to mobilize as they know Los Angeles and San Fransisco’s progressively-indoctrinated population decides how the state’s electors go.

This is the tyranny of the majority that pure democracy fosters.

Perhaps the answer isn’t that the national Electoral College needs to end, but that states need to implement something similar.

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Rich Mitchell

Rich Mitchell is the editor-in-chief of Conservative Daily News and the president of Bald Eagle Media, LLC. His posts may contain opinions that are his own and are not necessarily shared by Bald Eagle Media, CDN, staff or .. much of anyone else. Find him on twitter, facebook and

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4 Comments

  1. Thanks for this, Rich. I don’t believe most truly understand the Electoral College and until recently i was included.I’m still vague as to who and how they are chosen. I do know that a ‘stacked deck’ is easy enough with just a majority and if ‘population’ was the only marker states like Idaho, Wyoming etc wouldn’t have a voice. I do feel that with the shifting population and influx of new, sometimes dubious new voters that it may require some adjustment of numbers.

    Also, Rich, your continous updates and downloads throughout this election have been appreciated

  2. Oh, stop it. Of course the national government should reflect the preferences of its majority. Protecting minorities does not mean letting them consistently overrule majorities. There already is disproportionate representation of residents of small states in the Senate. The Electoral College has outlived its purpose, which was questionable to begin with.

    1. “Oh stop it”? How seriously condescending is that?

      Your comment actually proves the need for the electoral college. By assuming that the majority who voted represent a true majority, you embrace mob rule – or the tyranny of the majority, but what happens if we take the electoral college out of it?

      California is an excellent example. Because LA and San Fransisco so overpower the non-metroplex areas, those more rural, more conservative voters tend to forego the elections as they feel overrun by the city-center progressives. That creates a pseudo-popular vote win. Since the electoral college is in place and those voters feel that the cities are too strong to fight, they just don’t vote.

      Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio saw non-city voters that realized they might be able to overpower Detriot, Philadelphia, and Cleveland in their state and managed to do so. In California, where mob rule reigns supreme, it’s not possible and those voters just stay home. That creates a false popular vote win where none should have existed.

      If rural voters no longer feel suppressed by the inner-city masses and that their votes won’t get canceled, they’ll be more energized to vote and the popular vote will no longer be so metroplex weighted.

      As we educate voters about this phenomenon, these false popular vote majorities should fall away.

      But the need for the electoral college isn’t about internal state results, it’s about preventing only populous states from deciding the election for the entire nation. California, Texas, Florida, New York – the rest of you be damned!

      That is the Tyranny of the majority.

  3. The electoral college is a check and balance against a big city mobocracy that tells everyone outside the city how to live their lives while funneling all sorts of wealth (via taxation) from outside the city into the city… That’s basically how the burrOcrats and Obama have governed for the last eight years. It’s also why, after Trump campaigned for the votes of those outside the big blue cities, Hillary didn’t win in 2016.

    There are examples of where winning the most things doesn’t win the ‘game’. The electoral college is somewhat like the scoring in tennis. One must win six games to win a set, it takes being the first to win 4 points by two points to win a game. One can lose some games without winning a point, while winning other games by two points. The winner of a match may not have won the most points, but they’ve won the ‘important’ tough points and tough games. The loser may have won more points, but lost the match… Happens with some frequency, even in the professional ranks (see below).

    Wimbledon Upsets:
    Safin def. Djokovic 6-4, 7-6, 6-2
    Schuettler def. Blake 6-3, 6-7, 4-6, 6-4, 6-4
    Kudryavtseva def. Sharapova 6-2, 6-4
    Tipsarevic def. Roddick 6-7, 7-5, 6-4, 7-6
    Dancevic def. Nalbandian 6-4, 6-2, 6-4
    Zheng def. Ivanovic 6-1, 6-4
    Tanasugarn def. Jankovic 6-3, 6-2
    Radwanska def. Kuznetsova 6-4, 1-6, 7-5

    No one who lost above had a hissy crybaby fit about losing, they understand there’s rules to the game that define how to win and they got beat…

    One common strategy in tennis matches (as in politics) is to win the important games and work just hard enough in the games you lose to tire out your opponent while saving your energy to win the ‘important games’. In politics, this may mean working hard enough in big cities to make the opposition work hard to win their home big city turf, meanwhile you go out and win the votes outside the big city and fly over country. The Ocrats make this easy for Trump by governing in a fashion that they made life harder for those outside the big city with regulations, Obamacare expenses, and more. As Trump has shown, there’s more ‘games’ (and electoral votes) to win focusing on winning the votes of those outside the big cities…

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