I had thought the subject of the electoral college had died out until the next presidential election in 2020, but this excellent Frontpage Mag article defending the system recently comes not too long after a New York Times editorial on November 7 that had taken precisely the opposite view, recommending that the electoral college be jettisoned and the presidential election held by pure popular vote. I had made my views clear around a year earlier in the wake of the November 2016 election and recycled those in a response to the Times editorial:

“In the EU, four countries (Germany, France, UK, Italy) have more than half the population of the 28-member bloc. There is no way that Belgium or Greece or Denmark, say, is going to allow the Big Four to have their way through a pure popular vote given the deep differences among the member nations.

“That’s how Alabama and North Dakota and Alaska feel about NY and California. Thirty states chose Trump vs. 20 for Clinton, for better or worse. I don’t see how Clinton could have claimed legitimacy in that case. The electoral college may need reform, but a popular vote in a continental-sized country makes no sense to me.”

That may have been too brief to get the point across, but it generated a large number of comments, some of them pretty outrageous. Continue reading →

I’ve noticed in my travels that when people are asked where they’re from, most will respond “Japan” or “France” or “Kenya” or such. The big exception, as usual, is Americans, who rarely say “America”; instead, it’s New York or Ohio or Tennessee. That is, their identity is tied up in their states. That makes perfect sense, of course, given the huge distances, both geographic and cultural, in a continent-size nation. No one says “Asia” or “Europe” or “Africa”, so Americans are in that sense in line with the norm.

It occurs to me, then, that all this talk of jettisoning the electoral college system for the popular vote is, regardless of last month’s results, missing the point. Continue reading →