Thread by @studentactivism

It's fascinating to me when people say that without the Electoral College Republicans would never win the presidency, as if Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan didn't each win the popular vote twice, often by wide margins.

The Electoral College delivering the presidency to the loser of the popular vote isn't a bedrock feature of American politics—for the entirety of the 1900s, it never happened once.

The Republicans aren't winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote in the 21st century because that's what the founders intended. It's happening because they keep failing to win broad popular support.

Has the electoral process changed? No. Has American politics changed? A bit, but it's changing all the time. What's really changed is the Republican Party's relationship to the American people—the party is simply clinging to power in the face of mass opposition.

If not for the antidemocratic character of the Electoral College and the Senate, the GOP would have spent the last decade adapting to the changes in American society that they spent the previous two decades refusing to admit.

The Electoral College and the Senate have allowed the GOP to ignore facts that have been obvious for a very long time: Their policies and their candidates are unpopular with the American people, and growing more unpopular all the time.

Without these antidemocratic institutions, the GOP could have adjusted gradually and incrementally to the new America. But that moment appears to have passed.

Which is why gerrymandering and voter suppression are ever more important tools for the modern Republican Party, and why Republican partisans are willing to say ever more openly that the function of the Electoral College is to thwart the will of the American people.

And why the 2020 election is likely, one way or another, to be one of the most momentous in American history.

Just want to say a little more about this, in response to some replies. The problem the GOP is facing now isn't that they don't know how to pivot, or on which issues. It's that their base won't let them.

There's a set of positions you need to take to win a primary election in the Republican Party—as an up-and-comer, or even as an incumbent. And those positions are increasingly incompatible with winning the support of the median American voter.

The GOP has won the popular vote for the presidency just once in the last seven elections—just once since 1989! And they needed the advantages of incumbency to win that one time.

Elite Republicans understood the precariousness of the party's position going into the 2016 cycle. But they had no mechanism by which to undo all the decades of work they'd put into shaping the GOP primary electorate.

And so the 2012 postmortem that Conor excerpts here wasn't ignored by the GOP. It was simply ... repudiated by the party's voters.

Which is one of the reasons why the GOP, if it remains in power, won't moderate its stances anytime soon. And why, if it loses power, we'll be in for a hell of a fight.

Just one more thing: Yes, GOP electeds are complicit in this, in a hundred ways. But there's not much they can do, as individuals, to alter the trajectory of the party.

If you're a Republican senator who hates what the party has become, you can go along with it, you can retire, or you can speak up and be primaried out of office in the next cycle. Those are your options. There isn't a fourth.

I mean, you could theoretically switch parties, but that amounts to retirement—nobody's going to make it through a Democratic primary in 2020 or 2022 as a party-jumping GOP incumbent.

So yes, Republican incumbents bear a lot of the responsibility for what's happening to the country. But their ability to change the party from within is, at this late date, extremely limited.

...and now that right-wingers have found this thread, I've got an influx of people insisting that the Democratic popular-vote victories in six out of the last seven presidential elections were fraudulent—that the Republican candidates "really" won those elections.

We've had nearly seven years of GOP presidents during that time, and long stretches of GOP control of the House or Senate or both. You'd think the Republican Party would have done something about all those stolen elections by now.

But of course this isn't about securing the honesty of elections. It's about preserving your ability to claim that you've been cheated when you lose—about claiming that your political opponents are presumptively illegitimate.

Which is why supporters of the Electoral College so easily jump from "America needs farmers" to "illegals vote in Democrat states" to "the cities are shitholes." As logical propositions these have nothing to do with each other. But they're not intended as logical propositions.

They're intended as justifications for permanent minority rule.