The strange career of the Electoral College

I don’t want to use that cliched metaphor of the frog slowly boiling in the pot of water, which I’m told is actually false as a biological matter, but . . .

I’m old enough to remember when — about 25 years ago — it was still very much the conventional wisdom that a presidential candidate losing the popular vote but getting elected via the Electoral College would constitute something along the lines of a constitutional crisis. It was something that hadn’t happened in modern times, although there had been a couple of close shaves.

Then 2000 happened, and all of a sudden the old CW went right out the window. This has now happened in two of the last six presidential elections, and very easily could have happened in four of six, including 2020 and 2004. In the latter year Kerry would have won the EC with a few tens of thousands more votes in Ohio, even though Bush the Lesser outpolled him by something like three or four million votes nationally.

The situation has now become so extreme that it’s simply taken as The Way Things Are that Donald Trump has essentially zero chance of winning the popular vote against Joe Biden, and indeed is practically certain to lose it by many millions of ballots. Nevertheless, because of the increasingly dysfunctional distribution of the American population, Trump retains a very real chance of getting re-elected president.

Again, I want to emphasize that not that long ago the idea of a presidential candidate losing the national popular vote by eight or ten or twelve million votes, yet getting elected anyway, would have been considered radically unacceptable — a sign of a profound failure of the entire system.

Now I wish to introduce the following idea: If the nation’s population were distributed in such a way that the candidate favored by a majority of white voters was losing in this way to the candidate favored by a large majority of non-white voters, this would be considered completely unacceptable by all Very Serious Observers, because obviously you can’t run a country in which minorities are in the minority but elect their favored candidate anyway. I mean that’s obviously insane on its face.

That Trump could lose next year by ten million votes and still be elected president doesn’t provoke this reaction among the power elite and its media lackeys because white supremacy is so deeply encoded in American culture that even this radically anti-democratic outcome barely provokes any protest from Anyone Who Matters. And this is because it’s not actually anti-democratic, if you just assume, mostly but not always unconsciously, that white votes should count for more than non-white votes.