Thread by @jlakely

Here's why these national polls are garbage. Same reason the Electoral College matters — and why the framers of our Constitution established that bedrock of republican govt in 1789: so a few big, powerful states of 13 former colonies wouldn't dominate the rest of the nation. 1/8

https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1316163761791733761

In January 2019, I was sick and tired of hearing about how Hillary won the popular vote, so "the people" really picked her as our president! Her popular-vote victory was a reflection of the nation's will, they reasoned. 2/8

So, I used the NYTimes' interactive vote-total map and looked up the exact numbers for Hillary and for Trump in just three cities — NYC, LA, SF — to see how much Hillary’s obviously huge victories in those cities affected her national popular vote victory of 2,868,686. 3/8

I figured those cities would just give me a good start, but I might have to also throw in Silicon Valley, or screw around with the numbers in the deep blue cities of Chicago, Seattle, Portland and maybe Philly to get the numbers just right. NOPE! My work was more than done. 4/8

Just the cities of NYC, LA, and SF made up more than the entire 2,868,686 margin of victory in the popular vote for Hillary. Those cities gave Hillary that margin with 802,601 votes to spare. 5/8

Hillary's domination in just the Five Boroughs of NYC gave Hillary 58% of her margin of popular vote victory in 2016. Add in LA and SF to combine (arguably) the voting pool of the top-3 most-leftist cities in America and Hillary had 128% of her pop vote margin. 6/8

Can anyone say with a straight face those cities are reflective of America as a whole? The Framers, by design, wanted pres candidates to appeal to a broader swath of the people. That serves to establish legitimacy among the residents of many states, who created our fed govt. 7/8

That's as true for a continental nation of 330M people today as it was for 3.9M people in 13 new states hugging the East Coast 231 years ago when our Constitution and our Electoral College were established. Thanks Framers, for your genius! 8/8