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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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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