This Friday, January 6, the election will finally be over as Congress counts the electoral votes and makes it official that Trump will be the President.
The questions of his “legitimacy” as President are over. We should now shift our attention to whether we should change the rules of the game going forward.
One thing is clear in this election, big states lost; small states lost; the conservative heartland lost; but the battleground states won, because they are the only states that count.
The problem — at the national level, to win the presidency, Republicans must win “battleground states.” The problem is not the Electoral College, but state winner-take-all laws that are in effect in 48 states. Since 80 percent of the states are either reliably Republican or reliably Democrat (including California), Presidential candidates never ask the voters in those states for their vote.
Make no mistake about it, Trump did not win this last election by promoting conservative principles. He won Florida because he promised not to touch Social Security and Medicare benefits. He won Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin because he promised high tariffs and a trade war to protect the jobs of workers in those states. He and Clinton ignored California and New York (big states), Oklahoma and Alabama (medium sized states) and South Dakota and Vermont (small states), because of the winner take all rule. He made the issues important to battleground states’ his issues. The issues of the voters from all the other states, big, medium and small, didn’t matter.
This “winner take all” rule is not in the Constitution, and was not even debated by the Founders at the Constitutional Convention. It evolved in history to the point that now, you and I (if you live in a flyover state like me) don’t matter to either party. As a Republican in California, and we are the largest number of Republicans in any state in the country, we are the least relevant voters in this country. No wonder many of my friends and colleagues didn’t vote. They know their votes didn’t matter to anybody.
And that means conservative principles get sacrificed. Conservatives tend to live in the Republican controlled states in the South, Midwest, and non-coastal regions of the Democrat controlled states on the West Coast and Northeast. Trump sacrificed our values to win the election. It’s real basic politics, the issues that matter to the voters in the states that change the outcome of the election get attention from the candidates. The rest of us just don’t matter, and neither do our issues.
I agree with Trump. Had the election been a national popular vote election, he would have won. He wouldn’t have lost California by 4 million votes, or New York by 2 million. More important than that, however, my vote (and yours) and my principles (and yours) would have been important in this election. As conservatives, we would have had an advocate promoting those principles nationally, rather than sacrificing them to win swing voters in a few states in the Northeast. We would have had a national discussion about the things we think are important, and Americans, in every state, would have heard why our principles should prevail.
We were lucky in this last election (no one but Trump could have won it), they were stupid (no one but Clinton would have lost). That, however, is not a long term strategy for conservative success. As a movement, we have to appeal to the entire country, on the principles we believe are best for the entire country. I have been an advocate for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (and paid to do so), a state-based strategy to preserve and protect the Electoral College and provide for the election of the person who receives the most popular votes in all fifty states, for five years now, because I believe (1) Every vote in every state ought to be important in every Presidential election; (2) Republicans (and Trump) would win a national campaign on conservative principles; and (3) the country would be better off if elections were based on nationwide conservative v. liberal principles, not battleground state strategies. The Electoral College should be preserved, it should be protected. And the winner take all rule that is undermining the credibility of the Electoral College should be changed in the right way, state by state, as the Founders intended.
As important, the Compact is the only real nonpartisan solution to protect and preserve the Electoral College. It was supported this last year by 154 Republican and 162 Democrat State Legislators. Newt Gingrich and Howard Dean think it is the right thing to do. We need to take off our team jerseys, set aside our knee jerk reactions, and move to a system that makes every vote in every state relevant in every election. That is how conservatives will win, but more important, that is how our country will win. In this last election, big states lost…again, small states lost…again, battleground states won…again. We need to change, but change the right way, the state based way, the Constitutional way.