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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Actual history of the Electoral College at the Phil Convention was complicated; there were multiple proposals & delegations like Virginia were split. Delegates from Massachusetts & Connecticut vocally opposed a national popular vote; Randolph (VA) wanted POTUS picked by Congress.
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Dan McLaughlin Retweeted b-boy bouiebaisse
This sort of reductive narrative that the Electoral College was 100% about slavery and the North's unified desire for a popular vote was defeated by equally unified Southern slavers is a serious distortion of that history.https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1108027266460774400 …
Dan McLaughlin added,
b-boy bouiebaisseVerified account @jbouieHere is Madison discussing why he thought popular election of the president made sense. His only reservation was the fact that the southern states held so many slaves that they would not be able to bring their populations to bear on the choice of president! That's it! pic.twitter.com/xzCb1UvZsTShow this thread5 replies 16 retweets 60 likesShow this thread -
In reality, of course, the compromises that created the Electoral College, the Senate, and the House were not independent of each other. Large vs small states, free vs slave states, elite vs popular democracy, all were different fault lines. Everybody made concessions.
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Roger Sherman of Connecticut was one of the vocal opponents of direct national popular election of the president. This sort of pseudo-history just assumes this was because Connecticut was a Southern slave state. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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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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Trump won 7 of the 10 largest states.
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