Hands off the Electoral College

OPINION:

With Donald Trump’s crushing victory this past Tuesday, schemes to get rid of the Electoral College are off the table — for the next several years, at least.

It could have been otherwise. On the eve of the election, Jen Psaki, former spokeswoman for President Biden, fell for the last-minute suppression polling meant to give the impression that Kamala Harris was going to win in a landslide. A famous Iowa pollster claimed Mr. Trump would lose the GOP stronghold by 3 percentage points. In the only result that mattered, he won by 13 points. 

While Ms. Psaki thought victory was at hand, she telegraphed what Democrats were planning to do had they been given four more years. She proposed an end to what she called the “broken system” we use to select the commander in chief, inviting fellow MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell to lay out the strategy on her program. 

“There is a massive voter suppression operation created by the Founding Fathers,” Mr. O’Donnell said. “Think about how many more Californians would vote if they thought their vote mattered. How many more millions of votes would Kamala Harris get in the state if those voters thought their vote actually mattered.”

The framers of our constitutional republic set up a system to take the views of residents of all 50 states into consideration when choosing leaders. This has the intended side effect of preventing coastal elites from making those decisions for everyone else — to Mr. O’Donnell’s dismay.

Democrats have long enjoyed an advantage in large metropolitan areas, and their mistake is assuming what’s true today will be true tomorrow. Mr. Trump didn’t win the popular vote because he convinced rural voters to turn out in large numbers — even though they did so. Mr. Trump won because he broadened his support in nearly every demographic category.

Almost every neighborhood in New York City gave 5% to 10% more of their votes to the Republican candidate in 2024 than in 2020. In Chicago, Mr. Trump’s share of the vote increased by 10 points.

Urban voters are starting to realize that things might be better if Democrats aren’t running the show, particularly with respect to crime. Every county in California voted yes on Proposition 36, which rolls back some of the soft-on-crime measures that Ms. Harris helped put in place. It won by 70%.

Ballot measures that would have allowed prisoners to avoid work, raised the minimum wage, imposed rent control and allowed cities to borrow more money all failed in one of the most liberal states in the nation.

Those crafty founders knew the losing side in political contests might try to give themselves a permanent advantage, so they insisted important changes could only be made with a constitutional amendment. This is a formidable barrier that keeps shortsighted politicians from messing with the careful balance between big and small states.

In 1977, political scholar Martin Diamond testified with his dying breath to the founders’ genius.

“In any election, some states are scanted,” he explained in a Senate subcommittee hearing. “They change from election to election, because this is a dynamic, flexible Electoral College. … The marvelous thing about the Electoral College is its demographic responsiveness.”

We just saw Mr. Trump prove the truth of that statement. He redrew the electoral map and achieved what myopic talking heads considered impossible. The 2024 election result is proof the system works.