The weirdest thing about the United States is that, more than 200 years ago, a bunch of enslavers came up with an electoral system that routinely misfires and puts the losing candidate in the White House. And we’re expected to treat their work as if it were divinely inspired.
— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) June 4, 2023
"Routinely" in this case means once in over 130 years.
I know a lot of readers are shouting "2000!" at the screen, but you cannot use what happened twenty-three years ago as an example. Al Gore won the popular vote and may well have been on track to win the electoral college as well. We will never know because the Republicans staged a successful attempt to prevent a fair election, done with the cooperation of the courts and to a large degree the mainstream media.
There has been a huge and for the most part successful attempt by the press to shove what actually happened in 2000 down the memory hole. This is not exactly surprising given that it was such a shameful chapter in American journalism. Faced with the subversion of a presidential election, pretty much everyone just went along and pretended everything was okay. This tacit approval of Bush V Gore laid the groundwork for much of what has gone wrong with his country in the following years.
The relevant comparison here is not between 2000 and 2016; it's between 2000 and January 6th and while there are tremendous differences between the two events, the most important was that the attempt to overturn the election in 2000 succeeded.
The Establishment press would go on to be largely silent and in some cases openly supportive of the buildup to the Iraq War, the swift-boating of John Kerry, Citizens United, McConnell refusing to allow a duly elected president to appoint a Supreme Court judge, and various other attacks on democracy. By 2016, we actually saw a collaboration between the New York Times and Steve Bannon in promoting Clinton Cash.
Yes, the Electoral College is an awful system (though we may see a differing opinion on that in the not-too-distant future [here's the link. -- MP]) and you could argue that it helped the Republicans steal the election 23 years ago, but as threats to our democracy go, it does not rank that highly. Furthermore, the one aspect of the EC that has caused the most trouble over the past 30 years is the easiest to fix. Not only is All or Nothing apportionment of votes not in the Constitution, it isn't even universally practiced among the states. Taking that away would greatly reduced the likelihood of another president losing the popular vote by a substantial margin and still winning the presidency.
In its current state, the debate over the Electoral College consists almost entirely of performative concern, pseudo-seriousness, and handy excuses for not addressing real threats, the kind that require some measure of courage to take on. Apologies for using the same paper in two different examples, but when the New York Times did an article on voter suppression, they gave both sides of the argument above the fold then took over 20 paragraphs get around to pointing out that all of the evidence and data contradicted the GOP's claims.
The Electoral College is a bad system and was a necessary factor in the disastrous outcome of the 2016 election (though Lord knows there's lots of blame to spread around for that one) but journalists and political scientists need to stop blaming it for the 2000 election and they need to start taking responsibility for all the other more dangerous and more immediate threats to democracy they've been giving too little attention. For all the hand wringing over the possibility of normalizing Trump, everyone seems to forget how much norm breaking the press has already overlooked.
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