Our president has reportedly promised to pardon his subordinates if they break the law while following his orders to get the Big, Beautiful Wall built, which you can file under Things That Would See Any Other President Subjected to Impeachment Hearings. But it seems that as long as Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House, the most severe repercussions he'll face are Concerned Statements. No need to use the constitutional tools at the Speaker's disposal in order to uphold her and her colleagues' oath to protect that Constitution. Beat him in 2020 will be the rallying cry.

In fairness, a new poll from Quinnipiac would seem to indicate the odds of that happening aren't bad at all. The major Democratic candidates would all trounce the president in the national popular vote, you see.

Biden 54% — Trump 38%

Sanders 53% — Trump 39%

Warren 52% — Trump 40%

Harris 51% — Trump 40%

Buttigieg 49% — Trump 40%

Though this poll indicates these candidates would get substantially more votes than Trump in an election, it doesn't actually mean much in our electoral system. Getting more votes is only roughly correlated with winning the presidency. This is because we are still mucking about with the Electoral College, a grotesquely undemocratic mechanism which has seen the candidate who won more votes lose the election in two of the last five contests.

Here’s an argument against the Electoral College. Pool Getty Images

The College makes the election a state-by-state competition where each state's number of Electoral votes is the combined number of representatives and senators it has. Because the Senate is also an undemocratic institution, where Montana's 1 million residents have the same number of senators as do California's 39.5 million people, the Electoral College has the effect of making some people's votes count more than others. Specifically, it gives the residents of rural areas more power than residents of more densely populated urban areas. It also renders the votes of the vast majority of Americans who don't live in Swing States essentially meaningless. That goes for New York or California, but it also goes for Alabama and Mississippi. Presidential candidates can ignore the vast majority of Americans while concentrating almost entirely on Michiganders or Pennsylvanians.



Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed this out last week:

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I see Fox News is big mad about abolishing the electoral college.



So let’s talk about it.



1) If the GOP were the “silent majority” they claim, they wouldn’t be so scared of a popular vote.



They *know* they aren’t the majority. They rely on establishing minority rule for power. — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 23, 2019

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2) This common claim about “if we don’t have the Electoral College then a handful of states will determine the presidency” is BS.

a. It’s the *EC itself* that breaks down power by state, pop vote decentralizes it



b. The EC makes it so a handful of states DO determine elections — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 23, 2019

All that abolishing the Electoral College would do is make everyone's votes count equally. It would not lead to candidates only campaigning in urban areas—there aren't enough votes there to win. But Republicans well know they've secured two presidents thanks to the College since 2000, and they're not going to give up a mechanism that entrenches their minority rule easily. So naturally, Bloomberg's Sahil Kapur reports, they freaked the fuck out at AOC:

Silenced! Twitter

Again: going to a national popular vote would not "silence" Republicans or residents of rural areas. It would merely make their votes count the same as everybody else's, and force presidential candidates to appeal to broader swathes of the American population. But this could have the effect of forcing Republicans to appeal to constituencies outside their base, a concept the party abandoned years ago in favor of voter suppression, hyperpartisan gerrymandering, and appeals to white identity.

(It's around here where The College Defenders will pop up with arguments about how we're a republic, not a democracy—which Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times brilliantly dismantled this week—or worse, weird patronizing crap about how you can't change the system just because you lost. Stop trying to remedy the injustice which happens to benefit me politically because it could benefit you politically.)

Anyway, the freshman congresswoman did not hesitate to produce The Receipts.

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I’m so glad the President and I agree that the Electoral College has got to go. https://t.co/aXn4IgwJjv — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) August 27, 2019

There is always a tweet, mostly because the current president has few fixed beliefs beyond They're Killing Us on Trade and What Benefits Me, Personally, Right Now?

This is all chatter, of course, until the Democratic Party can rise to sufficient power, with leaders who have sufficient vision and courage, to make foundational reforms to the system. The platform should include getting the money out of politics and breathing life back into the voting rights of citizens—primarily people of color—who have been stripped of it. That effort has gone to another level since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and Republican legislatures went gangbusters. The Democrats' H.R. 1 was a great start on this, but any long-term plan to make the United States a more truly representative democracy should include destruction of the Electoral College. One person, one vote. That's it.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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