What would the Founders think of presumptive President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral vote victory, earned in the face of a popular vote loss?
Hint: It’s not what many media commentators would have you believe.
We can find a small clue to the Founders’ feelings in something Benjamin Franklin said as he left the Constitutional Convention. As delegates departed from the old Pennsylvania State House, a Philadelphia matron saw Franklin and called out: “Doctor, what have we got, a Republic or a Monarchy?” Franklin’s response was quick and memorable: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
His statement has gotten muddled over time, of course. Too often today, Franklin is misquoted as saying: “A democracy, if you can keep it.”
This simple misstatement stands at the heart of misunderstandings about America’s unique presidential election system. Throw in recent media allegations that the Electoral College (allegedly) exists only because of slavery, and it’s no wonder that so many people are confused.
The truth is that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were students of history, and they were well-versed in the works of many political philosophers. Thus, they knew that pure democracies can be dangerous: Such systems allow bare or emotional majorities to tyrannize others. The Founders didn’t want this! Simple majorities should not be able to rule without any regard for minority groups.
James Madison expressed it more poetically:
“[A common passion or interest will] be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.”
Such simple democracies, Madison concluded, are “spectacles of turbulence and contention . . . and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
The Founders were determined to create something better. They vowed to “preserve the spirit and the form” of democracy even as they “secure[d] the public good and private rights against the danger” of emotional mob rule.
No small task!
They solved their problem by creating a Constitution that contains many checks and balances to protect minority groups (especially the small states). The state-by-state voting in the Electoral College is just one of these safeguards. Indeed, George Washington would praise such unique features in the new republic as an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
The American experiment in self-governance has served the nation well for more than two centuries. Should we be concerned now, simply because the Electoral College has selected a popular vote loser twice in the last 16 years? Is the institution a partisan one, somehow biased against the Democrats?
Emphatically, no. But the Democratic Party has a choice: It can complain endlessly about the Electoral College, or it can take time to learn why the electoral system didn’t reward its popular vote victories in 2000 and 2016.
Similarly, journalists have a choice: Will they aid and abet attempts to take down the Electoral College? Or will honest reporters chase down the reasons that the Democratic Party couldn’t build the type of coalitions that have historically been rewarded by our Electoral College system?
The problem this year seems to stem from one simple factor: Democrats have been ignoring the concerns of middle class voters, choosing instead to place an overemphasis on liberal social issues. Rather than building coalitions and attempting to understand people, they’ve been labeling dissenters “bigots,” “racists,” or “deplorables.” Needless to say, such an approach leaves the party too heavily reliant on one type of liberal voter. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Hillary Clinton won huge landslides in the liberal states of New York and California. As much as 17% of her roughly 62 million votes came from only those two states. Without them, Trump is winning the national tally by about 3.5 million votes.
A similar mistake was made by Grover Cleveland in 1888. He won a popular vote victory based on massive landslides in six southern states. But should only six states really be able to tell the rest of the country what to do? The Electoral College didn’t reward his narrow focus. Cleveland himself seems to have realized his mistake. Four years later, he ran a campaign with more broad-based appeal, and he was elected President in 1892.
Democrats will serve themselves best if they follow in the footsteps of Cleveland. The party can and will thrive if it takes time to understand a greater variety of voters and to reach out to people across regions, subcultures, and industries.
The Electoral College rewards those who do the best job of coalition-building in any given year. The Founders would doubtless be proud to still see those incentives in place today.
