For all the talk by my liberal friends about getting rid of the antiquated Electoral College, the idea that a bunch of underpopulated states whose residents are mostly shit-eating farmers, racist truck-driving rednecks or other folks who don’t understand the importance and value of eating kale and using gender-free toilets, simply isn’t true.
No matter how the total popular vote works out, it takes 270 electoral votes to win the big kahuna every four years. And if we go back through enough elections for the data to mean anything at all, it turns out that the Democrats go into every Presidential election cycle with a healthy electoral college lead.
No, you say. That can’t be true. After all, every political pundit on our side says that the system is ‘indefensible,’ that it justifies racism, and even more than 60% of the population is ready to throw the whole thing out.
But if we look at the last six Presidential elections, which is certainly enough time to see how and when states changed their electoral college coloration from red to blue or blue to red, we find not only a remarkable consistency on both sides of the political spectrum, but a consistency which clearly favors the blues.
Beginning in 2000 and going through the election last year, the Democrats have won the same 16 states in every election, giving them 195 electoral votes. The Republicans have won the same 20 states in every election since 2000, giving the GOP 150 totally reliable electoral votes. These 36 states are going to vote either blue or red until the cows come home. Which means that the Democrats start off every Presidential campaign needing 75 more electoral votes, while the GOP has to find 120 additional electoral votes.
After the reliably blue and reliably red states (including DC), we are left with 15 ‘swing’ states, which are the states that have sometimes voted Democratic, or sometimes voted Republican over the last six national elections spanning the last twenty years.
Want to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Go right ahead. But the Democrats will have a much easier time keeping control of the White House in 2024 if they leave the Electoral College alone. In order to rack up 270 electoral votes in the next election, the Democrats need to win five states which they won last year – WI, MI, GA, VA, and PA. If they can’t repeat in WI, MI, and VA, they might as well fold the tent and disappear.
If the blue team can’t repeat in GA, then ME, HN and AZ gets them over the line. If AZ and GA go back to being red, a good ground game in FL still gives them more electoral votes than they need. On the other hand, the fact that the GOP starts off with only 150 guaranteed electoral votes means they have to put up winning numbers in a much larger collection of states. Even if the GOP manages to finish ahead in every swing state, they won last year, they still need to find 84 more electoral votes from the rest of the swing-state list which together only total 117 votes.
That being the case, and since I’m not the only person out there who has taken 3rd-grade math where they teach you how to add and subtract, how come my friends in the liberal media haven’t figured that one out? How come the liberal opinion-makers keep pushing the idea of abolishing the Electoral College when it’s that same Electoral College which starts their side off far ahead in every Presidential race?
I’ll tell you why. Because this is the same group of pundits and political camp followers who couldn’t bring themselves to admit that Hillary Clinton ran the single worst, most mismanaged Presidential campaign of all time. And they couldn’t say what we all knew to be true because they loved the idea of Hillary hanging around after 2016 and shooting off her mouth.
After all, it's not as if we needed Hillary to kick around. We had and for the next week still have Donald Trump.
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