Thread by @davidfrum

To underscore the point

Obama averaged 52.0 % in two presidential elections

Trump averaged 46.5 % in two presidential elections

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1334623664474628097

And yet the Trump people think there's something difficult to explain about Trump losing swing states

These tweets triggered an electoral college discussion in the comments below. FWIW, here are my own electoral college thoughts ...

1) The point of the electoral college as designed in 1787 was to entrust the selection of the president to a small group of eminent persons. That plan went moribund about 1800. Nobody defends it now. All the other defenses are after-the-fact rationalizations, not reasons.

2) Since 1787, many features of the US system have been adopted by other advanced societies: bills of rights, supreme courts, federalism. Nobody has ever emulated the EC, it's too obviously irrational. If proposed today, it would be laughed to death.

3) That said, not everything about the EC is bad. Anyway, the US is stuck with it for the foreseeable future, so there's little point wasting energy banging away at its flaws. Like having two Dakotas, it's an artifact of US history to be mitigated but probably never corrected.

4) Here, though, is the real danger of the EC. In every democracy, it's possible for a candidate to lead the government despite winning fewer votes. In a multi-party system, eg, parties that finish 2nd & 3d can join forces to form a coalition against the party that finished 1st.

5) In a Westminster style parliamentary system, votes can be distributed in such a way that the "winner" gets fewer votes than the "loser" - as eg Justin Trudeau's Liberal party got fewer total votes than the Conservatives in the Canadian federal election of 2019.

6) In the US, not only did George W. Bush win the presidency with fewer total votes than Al Gore - but John Kerry came within inches of returning the favor in 2004, and Gerald Ford nearly did it in 1976.

7) Unlike those other minority chancellors, prime ministers, and presidents, Donald Trump insisted on claiming more than just "I win by the rules, the rules are sometimes weird, and I'll of course be respectful of the great number who voted against me."

8) Trump kept claiming to have won - not only a legal office - but a vast popular mandate that allowed him to ignore all other laws and rules. Thus he claimed ....

9) ... that impeachment was an illegitimate attempt to "overturn the people's will" - even though of course impeachment is as constitutional as the EC that elevated him ... and even though "the people" had actually rejected him decisively in 2016.

10) America is a very imperfectly democratic polity. But American politics is suffused with democratic ideas - including that the president is a unique representative of "the people." That's why it is so important to stress Trump's 3 million loss in 2016 and 7 million in 2020

11) He wanted to legitimate himself as "the people's president" - a favorite phrase of his daughter, who liked to play populist even while basing her own power and legal privileges on dynastic royalism.

12) "The people's president" was just what Trump never was. He was a constitutional fluke, imposed on a country the majority of whose people disliked and disapproved of him every single day of his presidency.

13) The Electoral College made Trump president. Those are the rules, even if stupid. But Trump was never willing to *accept* the obligations of the rules, even as he grabbed the benefits. He tried to cheat his way to a second term by trashing more rules. He failed or is failing

14) As the cheating plot fizzles, doomed by the mighty weight of votes against Trump (and not helped by the delusions and incompetence of the Trump legal team), Trump die-hards keep trying to prove things by citing yard signs, boat parades - everything *but* ballots.

15) So it's necessary and important to pound back at the core lie in the pro-Trump case: yes, it was conceivable that Trump could have fluked into office a 2nd time. But always *against* the wishes of the great majority of the American people.

16) For that reason, I keep reposting the % figures that show Trump less popular than Gore, Kerry, Romney, and Hillary Clinton - and vastly less popular than Obama and Biden. It's not only to beat back Trump's anti-constitutional claim to vast power based on a fictional mandate

17) It's also to insist that Americans are a people and a nation. Under the inherited rules, California counts for less than Wyoming, got it. That's a legal fact, like the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. But to Trump's other pretensions, the answer now and always is: 46%.

18) And I put that answer in chart form, right here:

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1334626194231336961