Joel Mathis

I think about Federalist Paper No. 68 sometimes: The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessa

Republicans defending Donald Trump from impeachment keep making a curious argument: Of course, Donald Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, received nearly 66 million votes . That's ... more. But she lost the Electoral College, which places more emphasis on where voters cast their ballots than the number of votes a candidate receives, and Donald Trump won the presidency. Ever since, Republicans have argued for the rightness of the Electoral College by arguing the founders had antimajoritarian designs on protecting the people's rights, and it's a lousy argument  -- one I guarantee they wouldn't be making if they'd lost two elections in 20 years despite winning the popular vote (just as most Democrats would also be on the other side of the issue) -- but fine. That's what makes the "63 million voters" argument against impeachment so interesting. It relies on a particular kind of democratic legitimacy that Donald Trump hasn't earned

A reader: seems to me a popular vote for president elect would never give your state a say in who it would be. No city in your state has enough population to sway the popular vote. Me: As it stands, no candidate ever comes to entice the votes of Kansans during the general election anyway: Everybody knows the state's electoral votes are in the bag. So we are ignored entirely, our wants and needs never pandered to. That might change in a popular vote situation: States would cease to matter, but individual votes would be more meaningful. All those hundreds of thousands of Kansans who vote, fruitlessly, for Democrats, every four years would suddenly find their votes meaningful. Given the closeness of so many of our recent elections, a smart candidate might then be inclined to mine votes where he or she previously hadn't: An extra thousand votes in Western Kansas might suddenly make a difference they never had before. Popular vote has its weaknesses, no doubt. But the Electoral Co

The weakest argument for the Electoral College goes something like this: The top ten states population is about 165 million total. 119 million people counted so far as of today voted in the 2016 presidential election. This is why the electoral college was created. So that the other 40 states matter! Otherwise the candidates just go to where the biggest populations are. Yeah. Otherwise, we'd have candidates spending all their time in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio — the fourth, sixth, and seventh-most populated states, respectively.  Oh. Wait.  The truth is already this: Kansas never sees a presidential candidate during the general election campaign. New York and California do, a little bit, but only because those are great places to raise funds. Otherwise, they're so solidly Democratic that it's not worth the time or money to bother with them. What's more likely is this: Abolishing the Electoral College opens up the map. A Democratic vote in Kansas becom

Interesting : Nate Cohn of the New York Times estimates that when every vote is tallied, some 63.4 million Americans will have voted for Clinton and 61.2 million for Trump. That means Clinton will have turned out more supporters than any presidential candidate in history except for Obama in 2008 and 2012. And as David Wasserman of Cook Political Report notes , the total vote count—including third party votes—has already crossed 127 million, and will “easily beat” the 129 million total from 2012. The idea that voters stayed home in 2016 because they hated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is a myth. We already know the Electoral College can produce undemocratic results, but what we don't know is why — aside from how it serves entrenched interests — it benefits the American people to have their preference for national executive overturned because of archaic rules designed, in part, to protect the institution of slavery.  A form of choosing the national leader that — as has happe