Is there a case for a system that sometimes produces undemocratic outcomes? I think so, on two grounds. First, it creates incentives for political parties and candidates to seek supermajorities rather than just playing for 50.1 percent, because the latter play is a losing one more often than in a popular-vote presidential system.

Second, it creates incentives for political parties to try to break regional blocs controlled by the opposition, rather than just maximizing turnout in their own areas, because you win the presidency consistently only as a party of multiple regions and you can crack a rival party’s narrow majority by flipping a few states.

According to this — admittedly contrarian — theory, the fact that the Electoral College produces chaotic or undemocratic outcomes in moments of ideological or regional polarization is actually a helpful thing, insofar as it drives politicians and political hacks (by nature not the most creative types) to think bigger than regional blocs and 51 percent majorities.

Thus the electoral/popular split of 1888 pointed the way to William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt’s national Republican majorities, and the near-splits of 1968 and 1976 pushed us toward Reagan’s nationwide landslides and Bill Clinton’s successful center-left campaigns. Time and again a close election leads to hand-wringing about the need for Electoral College reform; time and again, politicians and parties respond to the college’s incentives, and more capacious and unifying majorities are born.

Does this theory fit our current situation? In a sense, yes. Donald Trump could win the presidency without a popular-vote majority only because both parties have been locked into base-turnout strategies that are partially responsible for our government’s ineffectiveness and gridlock. And to the extent that Hillary Clinton’s campaign leaned into this polarization (writing off many constituencies that her husband competed for), she deserved her electoral-college loss.