When your response to actual American history is "LOL Whatabout Trump." You don't need much reading from the Founding period to be familiar with their concerns about Athenian-style direct democracy, eg, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/ …https://twitter.com/brianbeutler/status/1108021153694666753 …
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In the long run, of course, it was the Electoral College that enabled a not-overwhelming majority in the North to act collectively to elect Abe Lincoln. Lincoln got 54% of the vote in states he won, 26.3% in Douglas states, but 0.9% in Breckenridge states, 0.7% in Bell states.
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True, Lincoln won a popular plurality, and 1860 is not really the best case for national acceptance of an election result. But the point is that the Electoral College works *against* a united regional bloc like the antebellum South that has fallen out of the national mainstream.
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Well into the 20th century, states in the South voted in far greater lockstep than elsewhere. FDR in 1944 won 93.6% of the vote in Mississippi, for example. But that counted no more than Dewey winning 50-49 in Ohio & Wisconsin. That's good!
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Our American system *as a whole* -not just by design by by experience- forces the patient building of broad, diverse political coalitions over time to effect significant change. If the system is flawed, it's when the process is overrun by novel short cuts (eg administrative fiat)
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If you think that an American government elected by national popular majority would have abolished slavery before 1860, you probably have not read much American history from before 1860. The same is largely true of Jim Crow.
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Let us also recall that a candidate who gets only an Electoral College plurality means a president selected by the House. Happened once (1824) & went badly. We've had a *lot* of popular vote pluralities. Only in 1876 did the loser (maybe) win a popular majority.
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Had the Founders selected presidents by national popular vote, they'd almost certainly still have had the House choose when there's a plurality. Under that system, W wins in 2000, Trump in 2016. And stopping W & Trump is 100% of the point of this argument.
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The Founding Fathers were wise & practical men. They were not infallible & knew that. Progressives' real problem is Article V: Founders made it impossible for a faction, even a majority faction, to amend the Constitution to its own factional advantage. So this is all pointless.
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That column is notably careful to ignore Randolph's proposal, excise Sherman's critique of a national popular vote, & generally frame the South as the sole, unified critics of popular election solely for slavery reasons, He ignores quite a lot.https://twitter.com/GScottShand/status/1108063140804210688 …
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2016 electoral votes, states/DC w/ 3 EV: R 15, D 9 4 EV: D 15, R 5 5 EV: R 10, D 5 6 EV: R 30, D 6 7 EV: D 14, R 7 8 EV: R 16, D 0 9 EV: R 18, D 9 Given the D advantage of 24-20 in the smallest (3 & 4 EV) class, the real D grievance is with the small-to-midsize states.
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Another thing people miss in the "Electoral College means a lot of places get ignored" argument: the primary process gives many of these same voters a big voice. Northeastern Republicans played a pivotal role in nominating Trump, rural black Southerners in nominating Obama.
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South Carolina may not matter in November, but it matters a whole lot to who is on the ballot in November.
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In 2008, Hillary lost the primary on delegate-count grounds after winning California, New York, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and New Jersey.https://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/1108709436619702272 …
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Back of the envelope math, off Census Bureau 2018 population estimates: doubling the size of the House would, without any other changes, raise the 4 largest states from 28.4% to 30.6% of the Electoral College, while reducing the 15 smallest states & DC from 10.6% to 8.8%,
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There's a number of historical problems with the "Electoral College was created to protect slavery" narrative. Left-wing historian Sean Wilentz looks at one of those, specifically, how the Constitutional Convention actually voted.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/the-electoral-college-slavery-myth.html …
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Worth noting as well: Madison, who raised the slavery issue at the Convention after authoring the original Virginia Plan (under which Congress elected POTUS) was later willing to compromise on popular election bc he was optimistic about growth of the southern electorate.pic.twitter.com/zIwxKq6tuN
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A fair amount of the slavery-at-the-Constitutional-Convention stuff also relies on an ahistorical projection of the post-1830 dynamics backward onto the men of the 1780s. Neither slavery's opponents nor its defenders were as zealous at the time, nor as assured of the future.
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The Founding generation took concrete steps against slavery & was optimistic about its long-term abolition, but there were still northern slave states in 1787 (NY, NJ), & northern opinion was still a long ways from trying to ban slavery in the South.
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The dismal fate of Ben Franklin's anti-slavery petition to Congress in 1790 shows how far from mainstream it was, at the time, to use federal power to ban slavery in states where it existed, rather than rely on state bans & federal territorial bans. http://www.ushistory.org/documents/antislavery.htm …
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That history may seem irrelevant to what happened at Philadelphia in 1787, but it's not. The context of where elite opinion stood on slavery in 1787 informs the realistic scope of what the delegates' hopes & fears were.
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Me
@NRO: What the Electoral College Saves Us From https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/what-the-electoral-college-saves-us-from/ …pic.twitter.com/OkR9Z5IIMl
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Another example I didn't have room for: 1888. The ex-Confederate states (not very ex, in 1888) voted 61-37 for Cleveland. Rest of the country went 50-46 for Harrison. Cleveland won only 1 state (CT) that wasn't a slave state in 1860. Cleveland won pop. vote by 0.83% & lost.
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Should Cleveland have won that election? He lost the six largest states. His regional appeal was so narrow, as an incumbent POTUS, he couldn't even win the state where he'd been Governor 4 years before & that had made him POTUS.
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Cleveland carried the national popular vote, 48.6% to 47.8%, solely b/c he won Texas by 41 pts. He won 82% in SC, 70+% in MS, LA, GA. Did that make him a more legitimate representative of a majority of the voters than Benjamin Harrison, who won only 1 state (VT) with > 58%?
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End of conversation
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