No, despite all this legalism and delusional wishful thinking from a Sanders supporter, it is not “in play.” Barring some major issue with his health, Donald J. Trump will be the next president.
14 thoughts on “The Electoral College”
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Somebody mentioned this before, but it bears repeating:
Clean up your own house first, democrats and get rid of the super delegates. Maybe next time you’ll have a candidate that doesn’t suck.
Clinton wasn’t chosen by super-delegates, she also won the most non-super delegates.
That said, I think super-delegates are a good thing. A party is not a country, and doesn’t need to pick its candidate the way a country picks its leader. If the Republicans had super-delegates they might have dodged nominating Trump.
“If the Republicans had super-delegates they might have dodged nominating Trump.”
And he won. There is a lesson there.
If the DNC hadn’t been all in for Hillary, Trump would be back to chasing east European super models. Sometimes listening to the voters is a good idea.
She was chosen long before the primary was over, because of her super delegates.
And you chose a candidate who sucked.
Both parties chose the one candidate that the other candidate had a chance of beating. As it turned out, Clinton was more beatable than Trump. Go figure.
In addition to all the other good points listed below your post which refute your thought, there’s the fact that Harridan McHarpy (h/t Schlicter) started out with hundreds of super delegates and that gives the impression of momentum. Right form the start you’d tune into the news and it would be McHarpy 475 to Bernie’s 3 after just a couple primaries. [I’m making up numbers]
There was quite a while there where Bernie was in the ballpark and competitive, if you discounted the supers.
Those supers were not selected by Dem voters: the fix was always in.
Doesn’t seem to bother you. Quelle surprise.
“Liberals” want to stop Trump from being president because they’re worried he is going to start a dictatorship. And we all know how devoted to liberty they are.
And if Democrats have to set up a dictatorship to protect the USA from Trump, that is a price they are willing to pay.
Read the comments at the link and weep for the future of our republic.
SJWs always project. They know what they’d do in his position, and expect him to do the same.
The article’s author could, I suppose, become the first “faithless elector” since Roger McBride, a nominally Republican elector, voted for the Libertarian Hospers-Nathan ticket in 1972 if he votes for Bernie Sanders. Should he actually do so, I don’t think he’s going to have any company. Even if all Hillary’s electors could be persuaded to do likewise, it would still be necessary to flip 37 Republican electors. There isn’t a single Republican elector who would vote for Bernie Sanders, never mind 37.
As for the author’s “Hail Mary” scenario of “drafting” a bi-partisan ticket of some sort that could attract all, or nearly all, Hillary electors and a sufficient number of Republican electors to get to 270, dream on. It is noteworthy that no actual names of actual people are offered by the author as real-world exemplars. That’s because no such people exist.
As for the larger Democratic/Progressive fantasy of abolishing the Electoral College, that ain’t going to happen either. The majority of states have small populations and electoral vote totals. Good luck getting any of them to vote for moving themselves from politically marginal to politically irrelevant.
The Democrats’ problem with the Electoral College is that they have too many voters over-concentrated in too few places and those places are bleeding both population and electoral votes. In a few cases – New York, Illinois and California, mainly – these states are getting safer for Democrats as Republicans are hugely over-represented in the portions of these states’ populations that are fleeing or have already fled. Such “refugees,” especially the “reverse Okies” leaving California, but also the defectors from upstate New York and downstate Illinois, have made a number of other already red states redder as well as more populous. Texas has been the biggest beneficiary but it’s far from alone in this respect.
And fleeing populations diminish Electoral College representation. Right now, California, for instance, has 17 more Electoral votes than Texas. After the 2020 census that margin is going to shrink to, most probably, 10 as Texas gains four or five new Congressional districts and California, for the first time in its history, loses two or three. Expect more hits to New York’s and Illinois’s Congressional delegations too. Florida will trail only Texas as a major beneficiary of this trend.
If Trump is even moderately successful in bringing jobs back to the U.S., in general, and to some inner cities in particular, some of the other heretofore traditionally solid Democratic constituencies may start to defect in addition to the white working class. The black working class, for example. If Trump actually throws out enough illegals to make blacks a factor in the construction trades once more, the Democrats can probably forget about ever winning the Presidency again. They have, in essence, one more shot at taking down Trump in 2020 with the same post-2010 Electoral College map that failed them this year. After that, things get notably tougher with red states picking up 15 to 20 Electoral votes at the direct expense of blue states.
The article’s author could, I suppose, become the first “faithless elector” since Roger McBride, a nominally Republican elector, voted for the Libertarian Hospers-Nathan ticket in 1972 if he votes for Bernie Sanders. Should he actually do so, I don’t think he’s going to have any company.
There was another guy in WA that was promising to do this too. It will be interesting to see who doesn’t vote as their state’s populace did.
Yes, it will.
Personally, I don’t anticipate any non-Trump voting by Republican electors.
Given that the votes of Hillary/Bernie-ites aren’t going to actually decide anything, I am more open to the possibility of “protest” votes among Democratic electors. Never underestimate the appeal of cheap virtue signalling to the self-concept of a progressive.
But that only applies if said virtue signalling is actually cheap. Some states have legal prohibitions against “faithless” electoral voting. I don’t know how many states have such provisions written into law, nor the names of said states nor do I know if any of said laws carry any prescribed sanctions for non-compliance. If there are any “faithless” electoral votes cast as protests, I predict they will be cast only by Democratic electors from states that either have no legal prohibitions against doing so or have no sanctions prescribed for doing so.