And the Democrats’ confusion doesn’t stop there. They are also whining that Clinton won the popular vote, and some have even suggested that maybe the time has come to abolish the electoral college. The electoral college is the thinking person’s way to elect a president. It’s so important to our democratic process that it even gets two mentions in the Constitution — in Article II and again in the 12th Amendment. Thankfully, it would take a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college.

I know this post is a little dense, but it’s important, so bear with me. At the risk of insulting well-informed readers, to amend the constitution, there must be a “two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures.” Assuming it’s not instituted by a constitutional convention, since no constitutional amendment has ever been approved that way, Congress would propose an amendment in the form of a joint resolution, then “the Archivist submits the proposed amendment to the States for their consideration by sending a letter of notification to each Governor along with the information material prepared by the [Office of the Federal Register]. The Governors then formally submit the amendment to their State legislatures” and the “proposed amendment becomes part of the Constitution as soon as it is ratified by three-fourths of the States.”

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If you want to study the process in more detail, you can read the federal register’s full explanation of the constitutional amendment process. It’s a fascinating, circuitous process, but I don’t see it happening. It is interesting to see the Democrats, who are usually so quick to call things they don’t like a “threat to democracy,” flirting with changing something as fundamental to our American democracy as the electoral process in a way that would essentially exclude the vast interior of the United States and predicate future election outcomes on the urban population centers the Democrats typically favor.

Historians will argue about the significance of the popular vote for years to come, and political pundits will continue to dissect the reasons why Clinton lost the 2016 election. Instead of trying to undermine the legitimacy of the electoral college, championing a pointless recount and crying into their pillows, Democrats would be better served by taking heed of what no less than President Obama said at a White House news conference following the election: “I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW Hall… There’s some counties maybe I won, that people didn’t expect, because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.” In other words, instead of worrying about the electoral college, the Democrats should start worrying about their ability to connect with middle America.