Simple electoralism as a method of even maintaining what most “progressives” see as social progress is rife with paradoxes and contradictions. Urbanization was supposed to produce a more liberal and cosmopolitan populace and thus a more liberal polity across the global, yet while urban populations are more educated and urbane in the way most liberals view those term, the politics of the world have become more and more nationalist.
In the United States, increasing, there are some very naive arguments about the electoral college, if it were just eliminated the country would be better represented. The problem with this is that this pretends that executive is who represents the will of the country, and that elections would still not largely be decided on a state level, over which Democrats have no control. They can’t control it either without a significant in either appeal or the demographics of the non-urbanized areas of the country because federal elections are still under state control as long as they do not violate any other provision of the constitution. This is set out by the constitution itself modified by the 14th amendment.
Furthermore, this hyper-centralized areas over large states with multiple cultural regions have a poor track record for stability even if they have one-party rule. The reason for this is actually obvious, large portions of the country are more dispersed and thus have almost no chance of their local polity influencing the dense urban areas that effect the government.
The media market of the US has already led to increasing dominance of national level candidates. For example, New York has had little pull on the executive most of its history, its internal politics being so vast but so different from the rest of the country. While Hillary Clinton is not a New Yorker, but a kind of inverse carpet-bagger, she has represented New York interests since her tenure in the Senate and the past two and a half decades have been spent in New York and/or Washington, DC. Trump, although an outsider and sort of an accidental celebrity, is also an outsider born and bret from New York. The fact that his has been missed is itself telling: much ado was made about Rudy Giuliani’s limited success in the 2008 election because of his New York origin and the history of that city being distrusted by the rest of the country. We have seen candidates moves from Governors to Senators in the past 20 years, and now, we see Senators to celebrities.
The nature of the managerial class in the US is difficult to discern as is the nature of the pundits that serve it. For example, Andrew McGill’s” Clinton’s Popular-Vote Lead Will Grow, and Grow, and Grow” at the Atlantic, where he points out that estimates in a lot of blue states have to push the numbers up with mail-ins and absentee ballots going towards Clinton in heavily blue areas: New York, California, and Washington in particular. He concludes,
…. California is due for a record turnout, and possibly other states are as well. It’s too soon to tell, he cautions, if Clinton’s total haul, which sat at 61.3 million as of the afternoon of November 13, will match or surpass the 66 million votes Obama received in 2012.
But let’s be clear: While these uncounted votes may grow Clinton’s popular lead, they absolutely will not change the course of the election. That math is settled; Trump holds an insurmountable lead in swing states, which turned his popular defeat into a sizable electoral victory. All the votes in liberal-leaning New York and California will not change that.
However, these ballots will knock the legs out beneath the argument that Clinton failed to mobilize Democrats. Yes, she’s no Obama in 2008. (Neither was Obama in 2012.) But county-by-county results indicate Democratic voters flipped for Trump, not that they stayed home. “We just saw massive shifts in the industrial midwest from ’12 to ’16, and those are the same voters,” Wasserman said. This is the conclusion Democrats must face, and in the absence of other data, it’s the one they’ll have to live with.
I am not quite sure what the point of this is. 47% of the electorate still did not vote, but more Rust Belt Democrats flipped sides? No, I have gone into the specific material and economic reasons that may be, but we does one get by seeing that more people in densely urban areas voted for Clinton, even though Trump got higher percentages of the minority vote than the last Republican candidate? That the electoral college is the sinister villain tying the country to rails in front of a moving train? That despite her relative unpopularity fear of Trump mobilized more voters on the West Coast and abroad to vote for her? That she is somehow a viable candidate in the populist mode? And even if she was, the decimation of the Democrats at every other level of government outside of coastal areas doesn’t really promise that should would have half the power to redirect thing as Trump could have if his party remains loyal.
Furthermore, things get more complicated quickly. A post with the somewhat clickbait related tile of No Hillary Did Not Win the Popular Vote at Fermenting Politics, the gist of this is that we actually do not have means of knowing who won the popular vote in every state. The Nixon in a Pants Suit versus the Cheeto Benito is Round Four of the Title Division has heavy disincentives on voting in certain states:
Because the goal of the game is to get to 270, not to see who is the most popular nationwide, campaigns are no concerned with the total number of voters. The Electoral College is not part of the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). You don’t get extra points for running up the score. So, it doesn’t matter whether you win Florida by one vote or one million votes, the value of winning Florida remains 29. Team Blue wins California regardless of the number of voters it amasses there. So if you are Team Red, you probably have supporters in California. But whether they vote or not, they cannot affect the color of California. They therefore have a dis-incentive to go out and vote because they can’t be the Hope and Change they want to be. Likewise, Team Blue will waste no resources on encouraging voters in Texas, because it will remain Red.
So saying Clinton won the popular vote nationwide is comparing apples to mangoes. The system is not set up to determine the most popular, merely to ascertain who got what number of Electoral Votes. So the numbers being bandied about claiming Clinton “won” the popular vote are misunderstanding what the numbers mean. It is simply the total of people who voted in the election, regardless of whether their individual vote counted.
The more people understand the electoral college, the more people in certain areas know their vote is irrelevant and stay home. The encouraging of strategic voting by both mainstream and third party candidates often leads to more knowledge of this fluke in the system and people age out of the system.
This is going to make electoralism in the US very difficult without some fundamental re-conceptions of how one engages in politics itself. I hope to start thinking on these questions soon and looking at the international picture. After all, nothing happens in a vacuum, even a depressing American election.
Symptomatic Commentary 