One of the principal narratives that we have been steeped in is this: “Trump is the candidate of the people, Clinton is the candidate of the establishment.” In the days since the election, I have even heard vehement Clinton supporters say or post things that implicitly support this narrative. They have lamented that “the American people” were willing to either support or overlook misogyny, racism, and xenophobia.
But the truth is: we weren’t.
The truth is: there is a candidate who was supported by “the system,” and that is Donald Trump.
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Okay, first of all: elections and human beings are both incredibly complex. There are a lot of factors that this argument is not going to take into consideration. I am not even going to mention the impact of “the media” and whether they count as being part of “the system” or not. Nor am I going to say anything about the DNC, or the long-standing cultural dissatisfaction with government in general, or the billionaires who fund campaigns, or the impact of third-party votes. Someone else can write those articles. I’m sure someone else already has. Actually, I’m sure someone has written this one, too.
Wyoming has a population of approximately 584,000. It has 3 electoral votes. That is one electoral vote for every 195,000 people.
California has a population of approximately 38,800,000. It has 55 electoral votes. That is one electoral vote for every 705,000 people.
If Californians were represented at same rate as Wyomingans (???), it would have 199 Electoral votes. That alone would hand Clinton the presidency.
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I live in Coos Country (pronounced like “co-op”, not like “goose”), which is both the largest county in New Hampshire and the least populous. We have around 31,000 people spread out over 1,801 square miles. In comparison, the town where I grew up, Derry, New Hampshire, has a population of approximately 33,000 in its 36.5 square miles. And Derry is hardly a bustling metropolis.
Coos County is essentially the Wyoming of New Hampshire counties.
If elections for Governor were conducted the same way as elections for President, Coos county would be overrepresented. We would not have the same number of electors as Hillsborough or Rockingham county - that would be absurd - but we would have a greater than proportional number of them. And the result would be that this very white, very conservative area of the state would have more of a say in the policies that impact the entire state than we should.
If this sounds like giving votes to empty space, it’s because it is.
This map has been making the rounds since the election. It ostensibly shows that the majority of the country did vote for Donald Trump. And yes, on a primitive, monkey-brain level, it does show that. The map is very red. If I stand ten feet away from it, all I see is red. And it even made me, a liberal who voted for Sanders in the primary and Clinton in the general election, consider for a second that maybe it really is unfair for a small portion of the country to impose our views upon the rest, that I should just accept that Trump is a President who appeals to the majority even if I think his policies will be disastrous.
But what a map like that does not show is the fundamental fact that there are more people in many of those blue areas.
We all know that intellectually, of course. We all understand that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and lost the election. But I don’t think that we spend enough time discussing why.
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It is not a coincidence that the only two times in the past hundred years that a candidate has won the popular vote but lost the election, that candidate has been a Democrat. The system is set up that way.
A quick (and possibly patronizing) review of eighth grade civics: the number of electors that each state receives in the Electoral College is based on the number of representatives it has in Congress. Only one of the houses of Congress, the House of Representatives, considers the population of each state. In the Senate, each state gets two Senators. Wyoming, with its population of 584,000, gets two; California, with its population of 38,800,000 gets two as well. Equality!
This set-up was a compromise between the large (well-populated) states and the small (less-populated) states. But there are a couple of important things to remember:
- In 1787, the states were much more sovereign entities than they are today. The idea of having a federal government at all was controversial. Regardless of how you feel about it, it is impossible to deny that the federal government has grown significantly in size and power since the founding of the country.
- The Constitution required that the majority of states ratify it, and there was reason to worry that Rhode Island, Delaware, and other small states would not vote for a Constitution that gave them only proportional representation in Congress.
- At the time, the most populous state, Virginia, had approximately ten times the population of the least populous state, Rhode Island. (Today, California has around seventy times the population of Wyoming.)
- Small was synonymous with less populated; large was synonymous with more populated. A map that was mostly red when more people voted for the blue candidate was not a possibility. (By the way, the 2012 and 2008 election maps look pretty darn red from ten feet away, too.)
The end result is that we have a Senate that is not proportional, which means we have an Electoral College that is not proportional. The important question is: who benefits from this? In the late 1700s, the answer was rich people. James Madison made this pretty darn clear when he argued that “landowners ought to have a share in the government” and the Senate should be “so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”
In 2016, I believe the answer has changed. Although one very rich man has obviously benefitted from the Electoral College very recently, in general, the people whose votes count the most are those who have the fewest neighbors. People who live in states with low populations are, objectively speaking, those who have the most votes in the Electoral College. (Yes, there are other factors. No, I’m not addressing them.)
There are a couple different ways to break this down:
- First of all, the list of the least populated states is very similar to the list of the least diverse states in the country (with the exception of Washington, D.C., which does actually get 3 electors despite not being a state (despite wanting to be one really, really badly.))
- Second, though there are notable exceptions like Vermont and Texas, the general pattern is that “red” states have lower populations and “blue” states have higher populations.
- Finally, and most importantly, the states with low populations are all full of the people we are all accustomed to hearing called “regular Americans."
What is a regular American? It’s one of those terms that means absolutely nothing and everything at the same time. It’s the sort of person you see at the grocery store. (The regular grocery store. Not Whole Foods.) They didn’t go to college. Or if they did, they don’t act all high and mighty about it. They’re just a regular person, you know? They like regular things, you know?
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| A place where regular Americans do not shop. |
You know exactly what I mean.
Right about now, if you supported Donald Trump, you love these regular Americans. If you supported Hillary Clinton, you’re probably frustrated and disgusted by them. (If you supported Gary Johnson or Jill Stein, you've been feeling smugly superior to them for years.)
These reactions all buy into the narrative that Donald Trump was elected because he was the populist candidate. He appealed to “regular Americans” in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and that is why he won the election. But what he really embodies is a sort of pesudo-populism, a claim to speak for “the people” when there is a whole swath of regular people who are being ignored, discounted, or suppressed.
This is an American political tradition that goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, who painted himself and his party as the voice of “the people” because he had the support of southern farmers. Of course, if you know anything about agriculture in the 18th century, you know that there was a significant group of people in the South who were undeniably below farmers in the social hierarchy. Jefferson’s hypocrisy as a slave-owning theorist on human liberty is so well-known that it is practically cliché. And I certainly do not mean to equate the atrocities of slavery with present-day Republican policies. But I believe the basic structure of the “candidate of the people” narrative has not changed much.
Here is why I believe that Donald Trump’s claim to populism is not based on anything empirical. Let’s imagine for a second that he had won the popular vote and Hillary Clinton had won the election (ignoring the fact that the system is set up in a way that makes that a virtually impossible outcome.) We would still be hearing this same rhetoric from the right about how “the American people” had elected him. In fact, I expect that some version of the narrative would persist even if he had lost both the popular and the electoral votes. “The establishment candidate and her elitist supporters have ignored the will of regular Americans,” they might say. “The system is rigged.”
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Well, the system is rigged. The system is rigged to favor whichever party can appeal to the majority of the country - in terms of geography, not population. It is rigged to favor whoever can make the map turn a certain color. Because, on some level, we all kind of believe that means something.
