Clinton Popular Vote Win No Mandate For Trump: Don’t Let Him And His Gang Reverse Our Progress
Let’s talk about the “He won so get over it” argument. I was not an advocate of either an Electoral College or a 23rd Amendment (Congressional) solution. Quite honestly, I feared either would be sufficient grounds for our already deeply divided Union, to undergo another tragic civil war.
My feeling was that it will fall to us to resist all attempts by Trump, and the Republican majority Legislature, to reverse our progress, and wait it out, hoping that his inevitable failure would push his supporters in our direction. I see this as our only viable option. No option at all, really. Rather our only available course of action.
But a lot of the argument has changed, recently. As of Election night, Hillary’s lead in the popular vote was a scant 220,000. That’s nothing. That’s not even within the acceptable margin of error. At one point in my writing, I said that she had a smaller lead than Gore had over Bush, in 2000. But since then, her lead has significantly increased. As of about 2-weeks ago, she was up by over 2M votes. I saw a report yesterday, saying that she is now ahead by 2.5 %.
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Here’s where things start getting interesting.
That 2.5% is not taken from the usual 20% turnout. Or even from Obama’s record-shattering 30%. That figure is taken from a whopping 45% voter turnout. The single most contested – most voted in – election in our nation’s history.
This election was actually a “negative referendum.” That is to say, that approximately 20.5% of all registered voters turned out because they were so vehemently opposed to a Hillary Clinton Presidency, they would violate a lifetime of non-participation. Conversely, approximately 25% were so deathly afraid of a Trump Administration, that they too would deign to vote against him.
The truly critical issue here is the size of the turnout. That makes her 2.5% lead a profoundly large number of voters.
So, basically, no matter how you slice it, Trump’s win was certainly no mandate. But moreover, it really calls into question, if we can see it as a win at all. We are a Constitutional Republic, and according to the rules of that republic, the Electoral College carries the day. But in the face of such an overwhelming popular vote, we may truly have reason -and perhaps, duty – to question the integrity of the College itself.
[…] From David P. Greenberg at MadMikesAmerica: […]
The electoral college has been obsolete since the telegraph was invented – duh. Some bullshit system we got, eh Edith?