These are astonishing numbers. America showed up at the polls, despite relentless efforts by Trump and his fellow Republicans nationwide to suppress the vote.
Biden had 7 million more votes in this election than Trump. That is by any and all measures a landslide victory. But the truth is he needed virtually all of those votes to secure the win. Unbelievably, Trump would have won in November if only a few more states went his way - even with an enormous deficit in the popular vote.
Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen recently noted that Trump had come very close to winning this election, despite getting trounced by voters.
“A flip of just some 73,700 votes in those three states [Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia] and Trump would be making plans for a second term — and we would all be taking about a ‘red wave,’ ” he wrote.
The simple moral to this story? The Electoral College needs to be abolished. It doesn't work. It needs to be thrown on the scrap heap along with such other tired American ideas as blue laws, Jim Crow, segregation, flagpole sitting, The Whig Party, Pet Rocks, trickle-down economics and Gangnam Style.
Despite what our well-meaning Founding Fathers said about the Electoral College, it no longer works for the United States of America. When it comes to national elections, the idea of one American/one vote is indisputable. There should be no other way. Every vote should carry the same weight.
The Electoral College is undemocratic. It permits the election of a candidate who does not win the most votes. That's the definition of counter-intuitive. And it's precisely what happened four years ago.
Trump was elected in 2016 with almost 3 million fewer votes than Clinton. It was a travesty. His re-election in 2020 would have been a tragedy.
One voter-one vote has its own set of issues, especially in the smaller states that currently are given too much clout but would have far less say in an election whose winner is the one who simply got the most votes.
But there's no other way. For one night in November every four years, do not think about living in a state. Just think about living in America. Giving power to the loser is wrong no matter how you spin and slice it.
One person. One vote. In a national election, this should be the defining tenet. It isn't perfect, but it's a lot closer to perfect than the Electoral College, which has become a demonstrable disaster.
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