Every time Democratic Socialist media darling and New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says anything about history, economics or government, I am stunned by her lack of knowledge of those basic topics.
Her latest stunner involves the Electoral College, which she wants to abolish like all leftists still smarting from Hillary Clinton’s electoral vote defeat. The usual cry is that “it’s not fair” that a candidate can win the popular vote and lose in the Electoral College – never mind that all candidates know going in that the goal is to win states, not the popular vote (if Hillary chose to run up her meaningless vote total in blue states Trump already conceded while ignoring swing states whose electoral votes she needed to win, that’s not an indictment of the electoral system, it’s a sign that Hillary shouldn’t be put in charge of anything involving intelligent strategy-making.) But Ocasio-Cortez added a new wrinkle of ignorance, declaring the Electoral College to be “a shadow of slavery’s power on America today that undermines our nation as a democratic republic.”
In fact, the Founders never intended the US to be a democracy. The electoral system was primarily created to prevent corruption by insuring that well-informed people not connected to the Congress picked the top leaders and to prevent factionalism and what James Madison called rule by “an overbearing majority,” using superior population numbers in one state to trample the interests of citizens in less populated states. To balance that, we have a mixed form of government: proportional representation in the House and equal representation of states in the Senate.
In the case of Hillary vs. Trump, here’s a map showing the county-by-county breakdown.
https://brilliantmaps.com/2016-county-election-map/
You can imagine how much civil unrest there would be if all the people in those vast swaths of red were told that the dense populations of the liberal coastal cities were going to pick their leaders, who would likely never even bother to visit there and learn about their concerns (Example: Hillary ignoring the Rust Belt.) That’s why we have the Electoral College, which worked exactly as it was meant to in 2016. It’s not unfair if every candidate knows in advance that that’s how the race is run, and whining about it afterwards is just childish.
Incidentally, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit had a great response to NBC “reporter” Ken Dilanian tweeting after the Kavanaugh confirmation that the idea of North Dakota and New York having the same number of Senators “has to change.” Reynold pointed out that liberals never mention how unfair it is that Rhode Island and Texas have the same number of Senators.
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