Matt’s Marvelous Mailbag seeks to provide marginally adequate answers to much better questions about politics, economics, social life, theology, or any potpourri you see fit to have answered. Send questions to mailbag.bereans@gmail.com.  

We’ll have a much shorter mailbag this week seeing as the food-induced comatose of that blessed holiday we call Thanksgiving is only now beginning to fully withdraw its spell-binding power from our psyches.  To that end, let us away with what sentience we still possess to the mailbag.

Q: Stephen asks: “How would you defend the electoral college to those who suggest it is an antiquated artifact of bygone political processes?”

A: There are a couple of related points to tackle here.

1. While I think both sides have likely done this at some point in their lives, there has arisen primarily on the left a growing hypocrisy with regards to our governing bodies.  The electoral college worked just fine in 2008 and 2012, but apparently it simply made a grievous error in 2016 in electing Donald Trump (who, lest we be unfair, we should remember posed his own questions about the validity of the electoral college at several points, though he ultimately benefitted from it).  This isn’t a particularly new critique from the left, it just seems to have raised its head once again, and the hypocrisy is no less rank now than it was several years ago.  The same line of talk has been applied to the Supreme Court, which was a paragon of virtue in the left’s eyes when it steamrolled state sovereignty in Obergefell v. Hodges but now is being called into question because the issue of abortion could theoretically be kicked back to the states to decide.  All this to say that there are plenty of people who like the electoral college when it leads to victory for them and dislike it when it leads to defeat.
2. Something similar to this idea popped up recently in Knucklehead Row* (New York Times opinion column) from Paul Krugman (chief knucklehead) where he most piously bemoaned the fact that “real America” and “Senate America” seemed not to represent each other before taking another cheap shot at the Trump’s win in 2016 without the popular vote.  Gee, if only we had a body that represented America on a more direct level…oh wait a minute, we do.  It’s called the House of Representatives, and it’s been around for 230+ years.  If Krugman had the good fortune of accidentally stumbling into a Civics 101 course or hitting his head on a history book, he would have realized that this design was intentional to prevent large, metropolitan states and cities from steamrolling the country’s minority, rural areas.  Krugman seems to want that, though, which makes him much less of a liberal and more of a tyrant, whether or not he realizes this.  Just listen to this line: “The Senate, which gives each state the same number of seats regardless of population — which gives fewer than 600,000 people in Wyoming the same representation as almost 40 million in California — drastically overweights those rural areas and underweights the places where most Americans live.”  Duh, a thousand times I say, duh… of course it does; it’s called the Great Compromise, Paul.  Look it up.
3. Realistically, the electoral college is one of the last bastions of federalism in the country, and it’s a crying shame that it has come to that.  The thing that a lot of people forget is that America is not just one homogenous, national unit but a collection of differing states, each with their own personalities, goals, priorities, values, etc., all under a national banner.  That’s why we are a federal republic and, as a result, have both national and federal design principles in our system.  The House provides an immediate, constantly cycling, national voice.  The Senate originally was supposed to be the slow-moving, deliberative body of diverse state interests.  The Presidency, through the electoral college, provides a sort of balance of national and federal interests; federal because it is decided ultimately by state electors, but national because it involves citizens in the vote and requires a majority of the state electors.  Ideally, this design was supposed to consign government to a less active role in everyday life and provide enough barriers to getting things done that true consensus would be required for legislation to be passed.  Somewhere in our history, our view of government changed to make it both the economic engine and the vehicle of social progress, goals the Founders did not originally impose on it.  What people like Krugman are pining for is ultimately a tyranny of the majority where no barrier stops the ‘progressive’ agenda, and anything that strays from the ‘righteous path’ is immediately declared verboten.

In the end, I think people are just generally sore losers when it comes to the electoral college, and they immediately reach for the worst option of removing it.  All this being said, however, I’m an amicable type so let me propose one thing that could perhaps be an improvement.  Without removing the electoral college, it might be worthwhile to try some ranked voting schemes to ensure that one candidate is ultimately and truly getting 50% of a state’s vote and thus their electoral votes.  There are a couple of ways to do this, but the easiest way is to just have voters rank their candidates 1-2-3-etc.  If your #1 gets the least of number of votes, your vote transfers to your #2.  We repeat this process of transferring votes from the lowest vote-getter to the #2s and 3s and 4s until one candidate has 50%.  That way, you can vote Vermin Supreme and still rest easy that your vote will still end up mattering long after he’s disqualified.

So, in conclusion, there are plenty good reasons to keep the electoral college and lot of bad reasons to throw it away.  This list is by no means exhaustive, and there’s plenty more reading you can do to gain a better understanding.

Though if you’re truly strapped for time, I suppose you can just offer this as a rebuttal:

That’s actually the only question I’ll go over for this week, true to my promise above.  That being said, I want to make a recommendation for C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain as a good reading recommendation.  I found myself looking at an 8 hour road trip yesterday, and I worked my way through the entire audiobook version in one sitting.  You have not lived until you listen to five straight hours of C.S. Lewis while streaking through the Appalachian mountain range.  Anyway, ’til next time, keep sending in those questions (mailbag.bereans@gmail.com, and let me know what you think in the comments below.

* I can’t take credit for this term unfortunately.  Credit must go to the eminently funny and talented Andrew Klavan from the Daily Wire.