Electoral College Fail Number Six...
As of now, an estimated 2.2 million vote edge for Hillary Clinton...
And that's without adding in the effects of 2nd Jim Crow voter suppression...
.@nickgourevitch @LoganDobson at the moment, Clinton 63.4m, Trump 61.2m
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) November 9, 2016
The big stories of last Tuesday are two:
Big Story: Hillary Rodham Clinton won the vote--more Americans chose her for their leader than chose Donald Trump.
Big Story: The electoral college failed to do its proper democratic job for the sixth time in 58 elections--and a 10.6% failure rate is much too high.
Anybody who does not focus on those two big stories is not being your friend.
Hillary Rodham Clinton won the vote over Donald Trump. You can be terrified at the fact that she won the vote by such a narrow margin--and you should be. But when you say that on November 8, 2016 that Donald Trump and Trumpism won the vote, you are telling a lie: it now looks like Hillary Clinton is going to wind up with 1.4% more votes than Trump. Americans who voted chose Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.
Why, then, is Trump the president-elect?
Because the electoral college failed. Again.
The United States has held 58 presidential elections. In six of them--Adams-Jefferson in 1800, Jackson-Quincy Adams in 1824, Tilden-Hayes in 1876, Cleveland-Harrison in 1888, Gore-Bush in 2000, and now Clinton-Trump in 2016--the winner of the popular vote has not become president.
That is a 10.3% failure rate.
That is unacceptably high.
Political democracy is not an especially good way of choosing technocratically competent leaders. Political democracy does not effectively guard against rent-seeking--rather, it guards against some kinds of rent-seeking but not others. You can say that a political democracy is unlikely to repeat a choice of a technocratically incompetent leader. You can say that aristocracies and oligarchies are more vulnerable than democracies to being captured for the particular form of rent-seeking that is carried out by a particular social caste that has preferential access to the levers of political control. But that is all you can say.
Choosing technocratically competent leaders and guarding against rent-seeking are not the reasons why democracy has an advantage.
Democracy has an advantage because it short circuits the process of coup or revolution to throw the bastards out by violent means. It short-circuits this process because it was the people--most of the people who voted, that is--who put the bastards in. Thus the majority must blame itself before it starts looking for others to blame.
It is for this reason that it is very dangerous to have an institution that is a failure point in that it generates a non-majoritarian choice of leader in what is supposed to be a democracy.
A 10.6% chance of failure--and that is the rate of electoral college failure in the United States since its founding--is way to high.
So the big stories of last Tuesday are two:
Big Story: Hillary Rodham Clinton won the vote--more Americans chose her for their leader than chose Donald Trump.
Big Story: The electoral college failed to do its proper democratic job for the sixth time in 58 elections--and a 10.6% failure rate is much too high.
Anybody who does not focus on those two big stories is not being your friend.
