Suddenly, the Electoral College Is Posing a Problem for Trump

[applegrove]

Suddenly, the Electoral College Is Posing a Problem for Trump

BY MARK JOSEPH STERN
OCT 15, 20243:31 PM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/trump-electoral-college-edge-shrinks-pennsylvania-wisconsin-polls.html

"SNIP...........

Donald Trump at an Economic Club of Chicago luncheon Tuesday. Scott Olson/Getty Images
Americans of color are apparently moving to the right. Donald Trump is poised to make historic gains with nonwhite voters in November, according to recent polling, accelerating the racial depolarization of the electorate. Polls consistently show that Latinos are continuing a significant shift toward Trump, who already received a surge of Latino support in 2020. Many polls also show Black voters, especially Black men, moving away from Kamala Harris toward Trump. And some data shows Asian Americans drifting rightward, with support for Democrats dropping in younger generations especially. Although all three groups still heavily favor Harris, Trump appears to making real inroads, campaigning for nonwhite support to erode his opponent’s edge among groups at the heart of the Democratic coalition.

But Trump has a problem. Even if he wins over a large number of nonwhite voters, it may not help him secure the presidency. It may, in fact, make no meaningful difference in his quest for 270 electoral votes. Trump is, ironically, crashing into the same roadblock that has stymied Democrats for decades now: The Electoral College overvalues white votes at the expense of racial minorities, giving white voters considerably more influence over the presidential race. Nonwhite voters are distributed inefficiently—for purposes of the Electoral College’s arbitrary geography—in states that are highly unlikely to put either candidate over the top. This biased and anachronistic institution is therefore working as the Framers intended: It was designed to give Southern slave states an edge in selecting the president, and today it gives white Americans an unfair advantage over minority voters by inflating the value of their presidential votes. After harming Democrats for so long, this disgraceful feature of the system might actually hurt Trump on Election Day.

This devaluation of nonwhite votes should not be surprising, since the Electoral College was one of the Constitution’s several accommodations for slavery, and later served as a perpetuation of Jim Crow. A refresher: At the Constitutional Convention, Southern delegates opposed direct elections of presidents. Although the South contained some of the most populous states, a huge portion of the region’s population was enslaved and disenfranchised; Southerners therefore feared that direct elections would give free states a perennial edge. So Southern delegates demanded a compromise: States would vote for the president, with each state receiving the same number of votes as members of Congress. This solution gave slave states an outsize impact on the presidency, because these states had already secured extra votes in Congress by counting their enslaved residents as three-fifths of a person.

This overtly racist solution worked as intended, giving the South an unearned grasp on the presidency until the Civil War. And its advantage persisted even after the abolition of slavery, when Southern states used Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise Black residents. The Jim Crow regime continued to inflate the influence of white voters in the South—where Black Americans earned their states additional electoral votes but could not vote themselves.

.......SNIP"

[JT45242]

1. No way are people of color...Asian. Hispanic or otherwise moving to TFG

Not believable...let's vote to get put ourselves in concentration camps.

[TwilightZone]

2. Slate's headline is a bit misleading.

The article basically says that it might not help him or make a difference, not that it necessarily complicates his path to 270.

[applegrove]

7. The electoral college may be more in Harris' favour.

Normally Democrats have to be beating Republicans by 4% nationally, or so, to win the election and the Electoral College. This time not so much. You are right it still comes down to swing states.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. Okay. I've been hearing or reading this for some weeks now.

I'm white, so I understand I have no clue whatsoever what it is like to be anything else.

However, and nonwhite person or any person remotely female, needs to think long and hard about the things Trump says and does. Not to mention he's on record as using the n word.

[TwilightZone]

5. People vote the way they do for myriad reasons.

Those reasons may be more important to them than issues that we personally believe should summarily disqualify him as a candidate. Financial issues, real or imagined, are often near the top of the list.

Racism and sexism are also not limited to just white men. Mark Robinson comes to mind.

[lees1975]

4. I like reading Slate. But they leave out a lot of important details.

Trump's "gains" among non-white voters, mainly measured while Biden was still running, have somewhat evaporated since Harris became the Democratic nominee. "Many polls" could be a lot of red wave polls, if they're not cited. And in terms of percentages, they're pretty infinitesimal, the one or two I've seen, if they are actually being measured accurately. A citation and some numbers would give this more context. And where are the Latinos who are moving toward Trump found? Or the black men or Asian voters? Asians of Indian descent are moving in huge numbers toward Harris.

Are the percentages cited in these alleged "polls" similar in size to the 8% of Republican voters expected to cross over and vote for Harris? I doubt it's anywhere close to that, but of course, without a citation, we don't know.

I get the point, though. The electoral college is a dinosaur for any one of ten thousand reasons. It serves no purpose except to make the votes of people in Wyoming and the District of Columbia count a lot more than those in California or Texas. However, the likelihood that we will ever see a government that will eliminate it is next to nothing.

[UTUSN]

6. K&R