LETTER FROM WASHINGTON: Electoral system makes it hard for Trump to win
by Simon Barber
2016-06-30 05:51:22.0
IN 415 BC, Alcibiades, a made-for-reality-TV Athenian with a lot of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in him, revved up his countrymen (the women had no say) to add Sicily to their empire. There being no checks or balances to blunt the passions of the voting demos, off they sent thousands of their finest over the objections of Nicias, a seasoned general who knew better. Few came back. Athens was never again a top-drawer power.
The story, as narrated by the historian Thucydides, was seared into my memory at school, the same school attended by Britain’s lame duck prime minister, David Cameron, and his bloated nemesis, Johnson. Had Cameron learnt a little Greek, he might have been slower to submit a question of no less consequence to a similarly unfiltered national plebiscite.
What moved 52% of British voters to opt for Brexit would appear to be much the same disgruntlement that has led to Trump becoming the Republican party’s de facto presidential nominee.
Happily, America does not choose its CE by referendum.
There is an electoral college to which each state sends a quantum of electors equal to the size of its congressional delegation, two senators plus house members whose number is determined by population.
Electors must vote for whichever candidate has received the most votes in their respective states. The result is not always ideal. The world might be less frightening had the 2000 election been determined on a purely majoritarian basis. Al Gore, not the younger George Bush, would have won.
That would have spared us the invasion of Iraq and the cascade of destabilisation that has ensued throughout the Middle East, triggering the refugee crisis that helped fuel Brexit.
Nor is the reason America’s founders opted for the indirect election of presidents entirely savoury. Slaveholding Virginia insisted on it because it wanted slaves to be counted for the purposes of allocating electoral votes even though the slaves themselves could not vote.
Nonetheless, if you do not yearn for mass deportations, continent-wide walls and wholesale discrimination on the basis of faith, or refuse to believe that President Barack Obama was born on soil other than America’s, or decline to trust a man who does not fulfil his charitable pledges while conning the desperate into penury with false promises of enrichment, a nod to James Madison and fellow drafters of the US constitution would be in order.
They have made it difficult for Trump to become president.
Impossible? No. But the expert consensus, as calculated by www.270towin.com, says Hillary Clinton is just 17 electoral votes shy of the magic number while Trump needs 79.
To assemble a winning combination of states in November he will have to change the minds of women, African-Americans, Hispanics and everyone else he has repelled to get this far. His best hope is in Deer Hunter country. That’s why he was on the stump this week in a Pennsylvania steel town, Monnessen, which in its heyday could have been a great location for the Clairton of Michael Cimino’s 1978 movie.
The characters played by Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep would likely be on oxygen now in a decrepit, underfunded nursing home. Their children would either be long gone, in one way or another, or in line for death by heroin or opioid overdose.
Trump’s speech, on Tuesday, was uncharacteristically short of outright mendacity and hate-enabling.
He spoke almost coherently to the condition of his audience, as the Quakers would put it. Elect him president and he would turn back the clock to the halcyon past when a man could make a decent wage in a satanic mill, drink beer and shots to oblivion between shifts and go shoot a deer at the weekend.
Whether it was ever that halcyon is another matter.
Clinton gave her economic speech on Monday in neighbouring Ohio.
If you believe capitalism needs rescuing from capitalists, here was substance to get excited about.
What Clinton understands is that trade wars are no way to revive growth and productivity. Business has to stop using close-to-zero interest rates to finance stock buybacks that enrich stock owners and the 1%.
Rather it must start using low rates to invest in the future and pay employees, whose consumption represents 70% of gross domestic product, wages that free them to consume.
Franklin Roosevelt, his enemies said, was a traitor to his class. May Clinton prove as great a traitor to her donors.
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington
Letter from Washington
IN 415 BC, Alcibiades, a made-for-reality-TV Athenian with a lot of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in him, revved up his countrymen (the women had no say) to add Sicily to their empire. There being no checks or balances to blunt the passions of the voting demos, off they sent thousands of their finest over the objections of Nicias, a seasoned general who knew better. Few came back. Athens was never again a top-drawer power.
The story, as narrated by the historian Thucydides, was seared into my memory at school, the same school attended by Britain’s lame duck prime minister, David Cameron, and his bloated nemesis, Johnson. Had Cameron learnt a little Greek, he might have been slower to submit a question of no less consequence to a similarly unfiltered national plebiscite.
What moved 52% of British voters to opt for Brexit would appear to be much the same disgruntlement that has led to Trump becoming the Republican party’s de facto presidential nominee.
Happily, America does not choose its CE by referendum.
There is an electoral college to which each state sends a quantum of electors equal to the size of its congressional delegation, two senators plus house members whose number is determined by population.
Electors must vote for whichever candidate has received the most votes in their respective states. The result is not always ideal. The world might be less frightening had the 2000 election been determined on a purely majoritarian basis. Al Gore, not the younger George Bush, would have won.
That would have spared us the invasion of Iraq and the cascade of destabilisation that has ensued throughout the Middle East, triggering the refugee crisis that helped fuel Brexit.
Nor is the reason America’s founders opted for the indirect election of presidents entirely savoury. Slaveholding Virginia insisted on it because it wanted slaves to be counted for the purposes of allocating electoral votes even though the slaves themselves could not vote.
Nonetheless, if you do not yearn for mass deportations, continent-wide walls and wholesale discrimination on the basis of faith, or refuse to believe that President Barack Obama was born on soil other than America’s, or decline to trust a man who does not fulfil his charitable pledges while conning the desperate into penury with false promises of enrichment, a nod to James Madison and fellow drafters of the US constitution would be in order.
They have made it difficult for Trump to become president.
Impossible? No. But the expert consensus, as calculated by www.270towin.com, says Hillary Clinton is just 17 electoral votes shy of the magic number while Trump needs 79.
To assemble a winning combination of states in November he will have to change the minds of women, African-Americans, Hispanics and everyone else he has repelled to get this far. His best hope is in Deer Hunter country. That’s why he was on the stump this week in a Pennsylvania steel town, Monnessen, which in its heyday could have been a great location for the Clairton of Michael Cimino’s 1978 movie.
The characters played by Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep would likely be on oxygen now in a decrepit, underfunded nursing home. Their children would either be long gone, in one way or another, or in line for death by heroin or opioid overdose.
Trump’s speech, on Tuesday, was uncharacteristically short of outright mendacity and hate-enabling.
He spoke almost coherently to the condition of his audience, as the Quakers would put it. Elect him president and he would turn back the clock to the halcyon past when a man could make a decent wage in a satanic mill, drink beer and shots to oblivion between shifts and go shoot a deer at the weekend.
Whether it was ever that halcyon is another matter.
Clinton gave her economic speech on Monday in neighbouring Ohio.
If you believe capitalism needs rescuing from capitalists, here was substance to get excited about.
What Clinton understands is that trade wars are no way to revive growth and productivity. Business has to stop using close-to-zero interest rates to finance stock buybacks that enrich stock owners and the 1%.
Rather it must start using low rates to invest in the future and pay employees, whose consumption represents 70% of gross domestic product, wages that free them to consume.
Franklin Roosevelt, his enemies said, was a traitor to his class. May Clinton prove as great a traitor to her donors.
• Barber is a freelance journalist based in Washington
