Hillary Clinton Casts Electoral Vote for Joe Biden, Then Calls To 'Abolish the Electoral College'
Hillary Clinton still believes she should be starting her second term in office on Jan. 20.
Of course she’d be re-elected — who wouldn’t want her to be president, save for the Russians, James Comey, Bulgarian teens running fake-news websites, Jill Stein, Alex Jones, the Proud Boys, Juanita Broaddrick, Dick Morris and all of the members of the vast right-wing conspiracy?
Every intellectually honest person acting in good faith, however, would concede she should be taking the oath of office from Chief Justice Merrick Garland (she’d have found some way to make it happen) and we could get to work on the really important problem facing America: eliminating the 22nd Amendment so that she could run for a third term. It’d only be right and fair, people.
That alternate reality didn’t happen, and instead the failed 2016 Democratic nominee spent Monday acting as an elector for 2020 nominee Joe Biden, one of 29 from the state of New York who cast their ballots for the former vice president.
We’ve all had “a case of the Mondays,” but I think we can all agree Hillary’s was probably more acute than most of ours.
Anyway, Clinton used her participation in that hallowed quadrennial tradition of our representative democracy, in which electors appointed based on who won each individual state vote for the next president, to propose it be abolished.
“I believe we should abolish the Electoral College and select our president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office,” the former secretary of state tweeted.
“But while it still exists, I was proud to cast my vote in New York for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
I believe we should abolish the Electoral College and select our president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office.
But while it still exists, I was proud to cast my vote in New York for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. pic.twitter.com/th9qebu9ka
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) December 14, 2020
Four years after her debacle of a run, Clinton apparently still believes her loss to Donald Trump is a salient argument — if not the most salient argument — against the Electoral College, a mechanism devised by the Founders that helps balance regional interests and promote national cohesiveness in an expansive democracy.
I can’t believe we’re going over this again, but let’s just give you a quick primer on why this is rubbish.
Yes, Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes over Trump in 2016. Raw votes on a national level being irrelevant, this means Trump didn’t bother campaigning in two of the three most populous states in America — California and New York, which are traditionally blue.
The other most populous state is Texas, which is traditionally red. That should balance it out somewhat, right? Well, not exactly. See, Clinton was thoroughly convinced she had a shot at winning the Lone Star State. Clinton dropped millions into ad buys in Texas, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Trump won the state by 9 points.
Her campaign also spent money to get out the vote in Arizona, Indiana and Missouri, according to NPR — three states that were decidedly unpromising for Clinton.
The Clinton campaign also transferred millions to the Democratic National Committee, which used it to get out the vote for her in Chicago and New Orleans. Now, Illinois was going blue and Louisiana was going red; this was already a fait accompli.
Why spend resources like that? Politico reported it was because DNC head Donna Brazile wanted “to drum up urban turnout out of fear that Trump would win the popular vote while losing the electoral vote.” Ironic, that.
So, yes, Clinton’s popular vote numbers were inflated, perhaps at the expense of her Electoral College numbers. After all, while her campaign was doing all of this, it ignored states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Not that it couldn’t have afforded to spend there: Clinton’s campaign raised more than twice the money Trump’s did, according to Bloomberg. Even with the money and resources Trump was able to use from his personal fortune, this came nowhere close to closing the gap.
Clinton, in short, didn’t lose because of the Electoral College. And lest we forget why we have the Electoral College, there was also this map, showing exactly how America voted at the county level in 2016:
This electoral map showing county wins in the 2016 election is a visual reminder of why the Dems want to get rid of the electoral college. Presidential elections shouldn’t be controlled by just a few, large states. #willofthepeople pic.twitter.com/dbMnJLpFoA
— Deb E (@debspov) March 19, 2019
The assumption is that if you change the rules, the game stays the same and the Democrats keep winning in perpetuity. But that’s not how it would work. Instead of visiting key swing states, candidates would visit America’s 10 or 15 biggest conurbations — and target their pitches thusly.
For a country that’s 3,000 miles coast to coast, it’s just a little problematic if the election is decided in a handful of cities, especially when those cities happen to be disproportionately on the coasts.
But that’s not really Hillary’s argument for abolishing the Electoral College. It’s more personal and less nuanced than that: Why is she a lowly elector voting for Joe Biden when the electors should be voting for her?
Forget about whether the Founding Fathers owned slaves. We’ve found the real treachery from those patriarchal fiends, one that crushed the hopes of a uniquely deserving woman 227 years later.
Of course, if she really has such a problem with the Electoral College, she could have very publicly declined participation in the first place. You needn’t wonder why she didn’t.
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