The Electoral College and Why Hillary Lost

The Electoral College voted on Monday and made it official: Donald Trump is our next President.

In the news, there still are moans and groans and gnashing of teeth: Hillary lost. She won the popular vote. Why doesn't that make her the winner? These people are now blaming the Electoral College and calling for its elimination.

This is wrong-headed. This is the United States of America. While in many ways we are one people, we are also an incredibly diverse people. People from different areas of the nation have different needs, opinions, experiences and points of view. We always have. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they took this into account. The compromise they forged created the Electoral College. It allowed states with limited voter turn-out (no need to get into the why of that in this post.) to stand on an equal footing with states with a large voter turnout when it comes to selecting the President and Vice President.

In the 1790s, states like Virginia had a large population but, due to literacy and property ownership requirements, a small voting public. Other states did not place these restrictions on voting: Massachusetts had universal male suffrage and New Jersey, while requiring voters to own property, allowed women to vote. This is according to Original Sin: The Electoral College as a Pro-Slavery Tool by Paul Finkelman.

The problem of large voter states versus small voter states still persists today. The roll of the demographic dice has changed the names and moved states from one camp to the other. Different states still have different concerns and needs, as shown by the recent election.

Highly urbanized states along the east and west coasts are different form the other states. They have fared relatively well since the Great Recession. The old "Industrial Heartland," or more derogatorily, the "Rust Belt" states have not recovered half as well. The coal-producing states have seen almost no recovery and, with cheap natural gas, have seen jobs continue to diminish. The "Farm Belt" states have seen a continuing loss of jobs for the last fifty years, or more.

With a popular vote system, the needs of the areas that are hurting would get buried by the tsunami of votes from the urban states. The Electoral College ensures that smaller voices will be heard.

This gets back to why Hillary lost: she forgot the smaller voices.

• She did not criticize the Obama administration for its failure to aid the Rust Belt, the Coal Belt and the Farm Belt. If anything, his policies made the Great Recession worse for these areas.
• She did not offer a plan to increase employment in these areas, to offer a future for these areas' young people or to preserve the scattered small towns.
• She assumed that she had the Union vote, without offering them anything.
• She epitomized the problem of "Inside-the-Beltway Thinking"
• She was guilty of assuming that urban women's concerns were the same as rural women's concerns
• She did not put forth a meaningful plan to deal with the rural opioid addiction problem, which is very different from the urban drug addiction and substance abuse problems.
• She did not discuss the critical health care shortages in the Rust, Coal and Farm Belt areas.
• All of her comments about immigration centered on those who went to the cities. She ignored those who toil in the shadows on farms, cultivating and harvesting crops that cannot be machine harvested.
• She did not offer meaningful immigration reform. This would have drawn votes from those trying to bring their friends and families into the country.
• Her points on jobs centered around large corporations and urban jobs. She left out the small corporations, family businesses and sole proprietorships that are the backbone of the Coal and Farm Belt economies and are, nation wide, the biggest generators of jobs.
• Worst of all and through it all, she acted as if she was entitled to become the Democratic nominee and to become our next President.

As a result, she lost the "small voice" vote leaving the state-by-state vote totals looking as follows (as reposted from http://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/live_results/2016_general/president/map.html:

Post-Election Blues.... Which way do we go, now???

I just saw this photograph showing the silhouettes of two rhinos walking past each other by wildlife photographer Rudi Hulshof taken in the Welgevonden Game Reserve, South Africa:

I think this photo is the perfect metaphor for the leadership of both of our major political parties in the wake of the recent election:

• For the Republicans — We won, but with Trump. How did we do that? What does it mean for the 2018 elections? How do we hold on to these new voters who supported us? What should we do, now?
• For the Democrats &mdash: How could we have lost? The polls said we had it! What did the Clinton campaign do wrong? How do we correct our mistakes? How do we regain the trust of the Democratic constituency who, in the privacy of the voting booth, chose the opposition candidate? What should we do, now?

My Take:

1. I think the Democratic party erred by selecting Hillary Clinton as their candidate. In the minds of many voters, she represented the past – a cold-warrior from a different era – who has not changed, even though the world (they believe) has changed.
2. Many of my friends and neighbors could not relate to Ms. Clinton. Her message seemed tailored for the East Coast and West Coast audiences, missing the concerns of the Rust Belt, the Bible Belt and the rural and agricultural community. Here, in "fly-over country," she came off as elitist and, as a Washington insider, she appeared more concerned about the Government than about the people.
3. The Democratic party promised a continuation of the recovery from the Great Recession. That recovery, weak as it is, will be one of the lasting legacies of the Obama administration. People across the nation are still living with lower wages, a depressed standard of living and the enhanced inequalities that were the hallmarks of this recession. They want change and they need it now, not five or ten years from now.
4. Donald Trump caught the attention of the "h-u-g-e" portion of the American people still suffering from the after-effects of the Great Recession. He promised these people changes that he probably cannot deliver, such as "bringing the jobs back from overseas." The reality is that if the old factory that closed and eliminated 5,000 jobs comes back, it will be totally automated and employ only fifty, including the gardeners and janitors.
5. Many people think that the Cold War is over. The reality is that it has just shifted phase. The world is still full of "proxy wars," including the Korean peninsula, Syria, India vs Pakistan and now, the Ukraine. Our opponents have grown more diplomatic and sophisticated, but they are still based in Russia, China and North Korea.
6. In many ways, we are still dealing with the collapse of the European colonial era and the double-dealing of our European allies from days gone by. As the European powers withdrew from their colonies, they established "puppet" governments and drew new international borders as lines on a map, without caring for the racial, religious, tribal and ethnic boundaries that historically existed. They lumped traditional and historical enemies into the same new nation, creating governments that are inherently unstable – leaving these nations vulnerable to dictators who promise stability and security.
7. We are also left with the fallout of our own hypocritical meddling in the internal affairs of these new nations. Using both covert and overt force, we have deposed freely elected governments, corrupted foreign officials and established non-democratic governments (see "banana republic") beginning in 1870 and continuing, if Edward Snowdon is to be believed, up to the present day.

All of these issues are tied together at our waistlines – literally – with food and trade. One of our biggest imports and exports is food, in various forms. We export tons of corn, wheat and sorghum. At the same time, we import tons of meat, fruit and vegetables, especially vegetables for our salads. The governmental instability and warfare in many nations disrupts our ability to buy or sell food there. The refugees created often cannot buy our food exports, so just to allow them to eat, we have to give away our food.

The Trump administration and the next few who follow will have to find ways to deal with these issues. We must lead. We must be a strong enough and honorable enough leader that others freely choose to follow us. The use of force, double-dealing and coercion will just create new, more intractable problems down the road.

In this endeavor, our political leaders must be part of the solution. They can no longer sit in their "ivory towers" of privilege and pontificate to us about what is good for us. They are replaceable. If nothing else, both parties have seen that in America, "political elite" is an oxymoron – the "unwashed rabble" who walk into the polls can, and will, "toss the rascals out."