The Election Aftermath and Popular Vote

As you might have noticed, I went dark during this presidential election. It’s not that I didn’t have anything to say, but rather that every topic was a dead horse that the media was already beating en masse. I, like most of the rest of you, thought that this current political circus was nothing more than monkeys flinging poo at each other for fifteen months and in the end I wasn’t happy about ANY of the candidates. But before I digress I’d like to talk about the election and its immediate aftermath.

Yup, Donald Trump won a quite improbable victory on election night, really sometime early the next morning, and went from candidate Trump to President-elect Trump. This is not insubstantial. This was the direct result of a guerrilla campaign waged by a relative outsider, with no political experience against someone who’s been a fixture in state and federal government since the 70’s. He tapped into the despair and wants of the middle class, which has been shrinking steadily for the last twenty years, and through catering to them was elected, by what appears to have been a razor-thin margin in certain states.  At the very least that victory must be acknowledged for the political coup it was. Very few, almost no one, in the main stream media was predicting any type of Trump victory over the vast Clinton machine. Just what he is going to do with the presidency and how he is going to impact the country, well we’re just going to have to find out.

However, for a certain section of voters, most of the far left, and the media these election results were nothing short of catastrophic, an election Armageddon that is going to bring America to its knees. The rage quit in all of these special flowers came to the surface as they rioted (the media engaged in verbal rioting), had their classes cancelled for grief counseling, puppies, safe spaces, and coloring books, and have been a general nuisance at the best and near seditious at the worst. Their rhetoric, vitriol, and whiny crap are all over social media, YouTube, etc…even three weeks after the election. You can search for videos and watch everything from inconsolable crying to violence in the streets. (A quick note, in America violence is not the answer when your candidate doesn’t win, that kind of crap is relegated to despotic countries.)

To hear them lament, which has given me some Schadenfreude satisfaction to be sure, this is the worst thing to happen since 2000 when Bush “stole” the election from Gore. It has been compared to the tragedy of 9/11…as if the two are comparable in any way, shape, or form. They’ve proceeded to point out that Clinton won the popular vote, as if that factoid means something, and that President-elect Trump should be considered illegitimate at the very least, and at the far end of the spectrum would like Clinton to be seated as the President regardless of the Electoral College, which they see as a sexist, racist, and antiquated system put in place by old white men who were mostly concerned about keeping something, from I’m not sure what, from happening. They have openly called for the subversion of the constitutional method of electing a president for their own wants under the guise of free speech and not my president.Some have gone as far to suggest misusing the 25th Amendment to stage an actual coup…this is how much they hate either the right or Trump. Jill Stein, a green party candidate idiot who nationally got less than 1% of the vote, is raising money and demanding recounts in the states that Trump had the smallest victories. What is she trying to prove, I don’t know because no recount has ever over come even a 2,500 vote difference much less, 11,000, 22,000, or 70,000 vote leads. However, for all these actions there is a response to the attempted de-legitimization of Trump’s victory.

To set things straight. America is not a direct democracy, we are not representative republic, instead America did the first thing of its kind ever in the history of man and became a representative democracy. Yes, there are slight differences, and to see them discussed one must only read the Federalist Papers, number 10 deals with the differences exactly. This America, when founded was an entirely new type experiment. After all, it was James Wilson, one of the drafters of the Constitution and later a Supreme Court Justice who defended the Constitution in 1787 and said that in a democracy (i.e. representative democracy) that the sovereign power is “inherent in all the people, and is either exercised by themselves or by their representatives.” No one had ever tried this before, and the nearest comparable model was ancient Greece. Additionally, the United States is a constitutional democracy, in which the courts restrain in some measure the democratic will. It was by this that the electoral college became a compromise by the founding fathers to bridge the gap between direct democracy and representative republic and enshrined it in the 12^th Amendment in 1804 (after problems with Article II Section 1, Clause 6 in the elections of 1796 and 1800). A quick read of Federalist Paper 68 will give you more insight on the father’s thoughts on an electoral college.

But, the states don’t exist to work for the federal government, the federal government was a creation of several sovereign states, and to that end is ultimately answerable to them. That is why the senate has equal representation of all states regardless of size or population, because all states are sovereign and equal and that is the way they set up the federal government (contrary to the Vox belief that smaller states are unequally represented in the Senate). Additionally, that is why the house has unequal representation, because those people are representatives of the overall population of their respective states, to give them equality of voice. All of this was done to avoid the well-founded fear of “the tyranny of the majority” as coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America,  where the great mass of people in a few well populated states exercise a greater level of democracy than less populated states…which is what the left is now clamoring for.

They’ve said that a lack of voters cost her the election, fewer people turning out, blah,blah, blah…well, in 2012 129,075,630 people voted. In 2016, while the counts aren’t complete the total stands at 135,151,313. In other words over 6 million more people voted this presidential election than in the last one, a net result so far of +4.7% from four years ago. And while it is true that voter turnout was down in a handful of states (5: IA, HI, MS, OH, WI) the turnout was up in 45 states and the District of Columbia.(1) So, when the pundits and the media say the voters didn’t turn out, that’s not the truth. The voters turned out, they just weren’t voting for Clinton in the same percentages they voted for Obama. Yes, Clinton won the popular vote by what will probably be somewhere in the 2-2.5 million vote range, and that plus $5.75 will get you a Starbucks. Packing both coasts with liberals apparently won’t get the job done without winning some of the middle.

The left and their lackeys are making the argument that Clinton should ascend to the presidency based on these numbers despite the fact that Trump won 30 of the 51 popular votes held on Election Day, federalism in action. They would wipe out the will of 60% of the states on the fact that Clinton received 4.17 million more votes in California than did Trump. (I only mention California because a vocal group of them now want to secede, to form a socialist utopia, sanctuary country where everyone is wonderful I guess) As if it the fault of Trump and the GOP that the left has created the spaces of solid liberal voting blocks that don’t control the vast majority of the electoral votes, while the GOP is spread out through the majority of rural America. They say that Clinton won a plurality of the votes in the popular vote, 48.2% to Trump’s 46.3%. I have another take on the matter, Clinton won a plurality indeed, but the majority of voters 51.8% (69,999,201 voters) rejected her vision for America.

This is the beauty of our system. That one candidate can win the majority of states’ approval in the Electoral College and take the presidency without winning the popular vote. Majority tyranny be damned. Long live the republic, even when it doesn’t give you the results you think you deserve.

(1) Wasserman, David. The Cook Political Report. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133Eb4qQmOxNvtesw2hdVns073R68EZx4SfCnP4IGQf8/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true