The fact is, a very large segment of the country doesn’t
espouse the same beliefs as people on the far left. There is no large bloc of
voters who call themselves “Socialists,” which is still a dirty word to
millions of people, and it’s certainly true geographically. If you don’t
believe me, take a look at this map from the last election. Do you see a blue
wave there, or do you see a handful of blue raindrops splashed amid a torrential
red thunderstorm?
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| Click to enlarge |
I’m not saying a blue wave isn’t coming in the November
mid-term election. I sincerely hope it is, but I remember “expert” predictions
that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election in a landslide, and I went to
bed November 8 thinking there could be Democrats in the White House for the
rest of my lifetime, only to wake up to the horror of Donald Trump.
Blue wave? I’ll believe it when I see it.
I keep hearing about all of the “gains” Democrats are making
in our election landscape, but coming in second in a series of special
elections is called “losing,” not winning, and in politics, as in sports, the
winners advance and the losers go home. Coming close to winning a House seat in
Ohio doesn’t get you a place at the table. It’s the red guy who will join the
majority in Washington and eat with the big dogs while the blue guy can only come
back and try again a few months later.
My fear is that a string of these losses and close calls will
not serve to energize the Democratic and Independent voters it will take to put
the Blue Team back in charge of Congress, but instead could actually demoralize
them into staying home – once again – on Election Day. This is especially true
in light of the troubling fact that any time a Democrat has a chance to win a
red district, the most unpopular president in modern history shows up for one
of his unhinged “look at me” anti-media pep rallies and the Republican holds on
to win.
That’s what they call the “Bully Pulpit” that sitting
presidents enjoy, and we’ve never had a bigger bully employing it than the one
we have right now.
A lot of people think the problem goes back to the Electoral
College, a Constitutional provision written by our founding fathers in the late
18th Century when it took days to get from the Carolinas to
Washington on horseback and there was no effective method of mass
communication. The Electoral College was created in part because the founders believed
that ordinary citizens spread across a vast continent – without cell phones, Google
or even radio and TV – would lack
sufficient information to make an intelligent choice for president and vice
president, and thus the job should fall to more highly educated electors
from every state.
Little did they know that as late as 2016, about half of all
Americans who voted would become disciples of Facebook, Instagram, Russian troll
bots, the Fox News network and a pathological liar spreading conspiracy
theories and propaganda via Twitter, and therefore would still lack sufficient information to make an intelligent choice
for president and vice president.
As you know, the Electoral College enables a presidential
candidate who receives a lesser number of popular votes to win an election by
accumulating the right number of electoral votes in a handful of so-called “swing”
states. For example, if, say, an unqualified real estate mogul with no
knowledge of government could carry a bunch of historically conservative
heartland states and then find a way to also win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania
by a razor thin margin – a margin smaller than the number of votes cast for
Green Party candidate Jill Stein – he could ascend to the White House over a
better, more popular and more qualified opponent.
Yeah, that actually happened in 2016.
So the answer is to abolish the Electoral College, right?
To do that, you would need a Constitutional amendment passed
by two-thirds of the House of Representatives and two-thirds of the Senate and
ratified by three-fourths of the states. For the likelihood of this happening, please
refer to the 2016 election map shown above.
Aside from the unlikely scenario that such an amendment
could even get through Congress, consider the logistics behind it. Whatever
party is in the White House would have gotten there because their candidate won
the Electoral College. That’s hardly an incentive to change the Constitution.
Also, there are disparities built into our system of
government that might have made sense back in 1787 but are hard to reconcile today.
For example:
* California has nearly 40 million people and operates the
world’s fifth largest economy, recently surpassing the United Kingdom and trailing
only the U.S., China, Japan and Germany. California represents 12% of the
population and 16% of the nation’s job growth, yet it sends only two U.S. senators
to Washington.
* By comparison, Wyoming has a population of 574,000 and also
gets two senators. The same is true of South Dakota, population 878,000; North
Dakota, 755,000; and Alaska, 738,000. Even Montana, with slightly more than 1
million people, elects two senators even though it has barely half as many
people as West Virginia and far fewer than Greater Pittsburgh.
I’ll do the math for you. Wyoming, the two Dakotas, Alaska
and Montana have a combined population of 4 million, or one-tenth that of
California, yet combine for 10 Senate seats to California’s two. When it comes
time to count Senate votes, five deep red states are 5X greater than one very
blue one, and states like California, New York and Illinois are effectively neutralized
by the scarlet waves of grain.
True, everything I just wrote here would become moot if the American
electorate would (1) make an effort to educate itself on the issues, (2) put
partisanship away in favor of patriotism, (3) take the time to show up and vote
and (4) cast aside those single-issue social ballot traps and vote in their own
best interest.
When that day arrives, I promise to come back here and admit that
everything I wrote was absolutely wrong…but not one minute before that time. Until then, you'll be holding your breath, right?
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