Perhaps it would help if they rescheduled the show and named it Much Later in the Morning, Joe.
Syndicated columnist Mike Barnicle, a regular on MSNBC's Morning Joe, struggled yesterday not just with the pronunciation of Electoral College but with a Civics 101-level understanding of how it works.
Barnicle's confusion in the matter came one day after electors cast their ballots in state capitals, thereby making it official that Donald Trump will become the next president. The results will be formally announced Jan. 6 during a joint session of Congress.
Add this to the growing list of bogus claims by sore-loser liberals since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton --
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Mike Barnicle, why do we even have these electors? (alluding to faithless electors). If you're going to have an Electoral College and we can have that debate, if you're going to have an Electoral College it needs to be automatic. As Jeff Greenfield said, who wrote the book on the Electoral College, this is just absolute nonsense. A lot of people think the Electoral College itself is antiquated and they have a lot of great arguments for that, but again, if you're going to have it, then the people's vote have to count and it needs to be pledged. We're not back in, you know, 1789 here. People know who they're voting for, they make that decision whether we respect their decision or not, and the electors should affirm that.
BARNICLE: Well, there's no doubt about that, Joe, and there's no doubt about the fact that the Electrical -- the Electrical -- the Electoral College ...
MIKA BRZEZINSKI (tossing lifeline): Little early ...
BARNICLE: ... is an anachronistic element of our political culture. I mean, there's no rhyme nor reason why the state of Wyoming should have nearly equal weight or equal weight in terms of electors as the state of California, given their population. But it is what it is.
Tongue-tied, factually wrong, and capped with a cliche -- vintage Barnicle.
True, there isn't rhyme nor reason for this, which is why it isn't so -- as of our most recent presidential election, and based on the population count from the 2010 census, the largely rural and sparsely populated state of Wyoming held three electors while the sprawling behemoth we call California tallied a whopping 55. Only in Barnicle's fantasies does this constitute "nearly equal" or "equal weight."
Notice how Barnicle picked reliably red Wyoming to juxtapose against predictably blue California -- the better to suggest that the Electoral College is skewed in favor of Republicans -- when he could have cited solid Democrat-voting Delaware or Vermont instead, each also having only three electors.
Wyoming and California possess equal weight when it comes to electors if only the two for each state, representing their United States' senators, are counted. But once their numbers of House members are included, representing each state's population, the number of electors soars for California but barely budges for Wyoming.
Begs the question as to how many other liberals base their opposition to the Electoral College on a flimsy understanding of its straightforward math.
