The key to winning will be getting a candidate that Trump supporters will accept
I don’t see Trump supporters accepting any other candidate than Trump.
As for “Trump has the most votes, he should be the nominee” – he also has the highest
unfavorable rating ever recorded (something like 60%). Not exactly something to be shouting from the rooftops.
Also, Trump wouldn’t have nearly the number of votes he has, if all states had closed primaries (i.e. ones where only registered Republicans can vote in the Republican primary and only registered Democrats can vote in the Democrat primary). A lot of Trump’s votes came from folks who crossed over solely to vote for him in the primary.
One of our most cherished freedoms, enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, is that of freedom of association, i.e. the individual right to come together with other individuals and collectively express, promote, pursue and defend common interests. The purpose of a primary election is to choose one candidate from a pool of applicants for each political party to run in an election as a representative of the entire party; a significant number of 2016 primary voters have willfully interfered with the process of one party selecting who will represent them on the November ballot (by crossing over and voting in the Republican primary, even though they have no intention of supporting the full slate of Republican nominees in November). Does anyone seriously think that traditional Republican primary voters share a whole lot of common political interests with Democrats who cross over to vote in a Republican primary one time?
Ummm, yes that’s exactly what it means.
And I like GWB but he should not have been President to begin with as he lost the popular vote.
Ummm, last time I checked, I was a citizen of the United
States of America; I’m not one of the “United *Citizens *of America.” 2000 was not the first time that a U.S. President was elected who received fewer popular votes than his opponent. The “unthinkable” happened twice before, in 1876 (Rutherford Hayes) and 1888 (Benjamin Harrison). And, in 1976, a shift of a few thousand votes in several key states would have given Gerald Ford an electoral-vote victory, but left Jimmy Carter with a popular vote plurality.
The Electoral System is a unifying force that requires candidates to gather support from different regions of the nation in order to win the presidency. The Electoral System is democratic, since it gives states with larger populations more voting power. Finally, the Electoral System works to prevent victories by smaller, lesser-known political parties, and works to prevent elections from being thrown into the House of Representatives.
Eliminating the Electoral College will eliminate our federal system of government and representation and and would lead to the nationalization of our government - to the detriment of the States. The President would be selected either through the domination of one populous region over the others or through the domination of large metropolitan areas over the rural ones.
If the Founding Fathers had intended for the President to be directly elected, they would have written it into the Constitution. But of course they didn’t do that, seeing as they intended to create a government limited in scope and powers.
Power at the national level was split among the three branches, each reflecting a different constituency. Representatives were directly elected by the people (they still are), Senators were chosen by their respective state legislatures (they aren’t anymore, but in my opinion they should be again), and the President was elected by Electors who were appointed by each state (for the time being they still are).
Power was also divided between the national government and the states (though we’ve certainly been seeing less and less of that in the last 75 years or so). There’s a lot to be said for federalism… look at all the regional conflicts that trouble large and diverse nations like India, China and Russia. The Electoral College system at least forces presidential candidates to seek support nationwide, thereby making sure no state is left behind.
Direct election of the president would only reflect the will of a majority. In contrast, the Electoral College provides representation for both the population at large and the states. It thereby tempers and limits the power of majority rule.
I wonder if the activists who seek to eliminate the Electoral College in favor of a popular vote to elect the president (presumably because the EC violates “one person, one vote,” as opined by Sen. Diane Feinstein on Larry King Live) are also willing to abolish the Senate for the same reason. Wyoming, with a population of 533,000, gets the same number of Senators as California with its population of almost 37 million. No “one person, one vote” there… where’s the consistency?
