There’s a meme going around social media that you’ve probably seen mocking the ninnies who can’t stop crying about the electoral college. Of course it’s the case that this is just a bunch of sore losers complaining that their team only lost because the rules weren’t fair, and mocking them is fine, but that’s not the point. This meme, in attempting to explain the purpose of the electoral college, states that "there are 3141 counties in the United States. Trump won 3084 of them. Clinton won 57." This is an absolutely shocking piece of information, and it very well should be, since it’s completely false. While I’m certainly no fan of the horrors of unbridled democracy, and I certainly believe that the people promoting it need to be refuted at every turn, it’s at least as important to make sure that we’re refuting them with the truth and not with our own comfortable lies.
There are 3112 counties or "county equivalents" in the United States that reported voter data for the 2016 presidential election. Of those counties, 2622 of them went for Trump, and 490 for Clinton. This is a massive majority in favor of Trump, of course, but it’s nowhere near the absurd figure of only 57 counties for Clinton. For pity’s sake, Clinton won 33 counties in California alone. She won enough counties to generate the famous Clinton Archipelago, after all, not the Clinton Invisible Dot Coalition.
The overall point remains the same, of course: it simply is not immediately and intuitively obvious that overwhelming support in a few concentrated urban centers somehow generates a mandate to lord over vast swathes of territory. There is nothing obviously just or righteous about the idea that winning the popular vote either could or should be a requirement for winning the presidency, and it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the people who contend otherwise to provide an actual argument. All this is true. But beating them down with logic and history is sufficient on its own; we shouldn’t fall to the temptation to try to beat them with more devastating made-up facts and emotional hypochondria.
That the electoral college is antidemocratic goes without saying. It surely is. It is so by design. When the Constitution was written, democracy was not held in very high regard; the founding fathers were, by and large, quite familiar with Aristotle, and tended to agree with his view as expressed in book three of his Politics:
Having determined these points, we have next to consider how many forms of government there are, and what they are; and in the first place what are the true forms, for when they are determined the perversions of them will at once be apparent. The words constitution and government have the same meaning, and the government, which is the supreme authority in states, must be in the hands of one, or of a few, or of the many. The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one or of the few, or of the many, are perversions. For the members of a state, if they are truly citizens, ought to participate in its advantages. Of forms of government in which one rules, we call that which regards the common interests, kingship or royalty; that in which more than one, but not many, rule, aristocracy; and it is so called, either because the rulers are the best men, or because they have at heart the best interests of the state and of the citizens. But when the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name — a constitution. And there is a reason for this use of language. One man or a few may excel in virtue; but as the number increases it becomes more difficult for them to attain perfection in every kind of virtue, though they may in military virtue, for this is found in the masses. Hence in a constitutional government the fighting-men have the supreme power, and those who possess arms are the citizens.
Of the above-mentioned forms, the perversions are as follows: of royalty, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy. For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all.
(Aside: Jowett was an amazing translator, and he made those stubborn old Greek texts sing in English, but I’m always compelled to wonder if translating "τῶν ἀπόρων" as "the needy" is perhaps smuggling in a bit of unintended meaning. Neither here nor there.)
The framers had the specific goal of preventing the nation they were founding from devolving into democracy. This is why they attempted to draw all three of Aristotle’s "good" governments together and bind them into one, in the hopes that the tension they exert against one another would keep them all from collapsing. In the office of the president is Aristotle’s kingship, in the senate is his aristocracy, and in the house of representatives his "constitution." This system of government was called Federalism, and it was the unique contribution the Americans made to the history of politics. The idea behind it was that the new country was not a centralized mass of pulsating evil power, but a federation of "free and independent states."
This is pertinent to the electoral college because, in the American federation, the smaller free and independent states refused — and rightfully so — to bind themselves into domination by the larger states (Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania — how little things have changed). Meanwhile, those large states, also rightfully, asserted that, by virtue of their greater population, they were entitled to a greater say. The result was one of the great compromises of history, with the creation of a bicameral legislature, one half of which represented the states as sovereign and equal entities, and the other half of which represented the people en masse. Alongside this innovation came the electoral college, which was designed to commingle the interests of the states qua states with the interests of the people, such that neither side could dominate the other. The larger states would have more influence than the smaller states, but it wasn’t intended — by design — that the smaller states would be disenfranchised entirely. Without the electoral college, the people not living in the Clinton Archipelago would lack any relevance at all, whereas, as things stand, they do occasionally demonstrate that disregarding and sneering at them can be costly.
The progressives were able to destroy the bicameral legislature a hundred years ago, but they never managed to get rid of the electoral college. Don’t let them get away with it this time either. But don’t let them destroy the truth either.