No. It isn’t. It’s not even close to a national election. It’s an election in about fifteen Electoral College battleground states, and don’t you forget it. I’m going to keep reminding you of this, because if you take away no other lesson from this book, let it be that.
Every time I hear “Hillary won the popular vote,” I cringe.
The correct answer to this is “And?”
Winning the popular vote and $5.45 gets you a venti mocha latte at Starbucks.
It. Means. Nothing.
Every person on the Democratic side who brings up this tired, dumb, irrelevant point again is really in contention for the political Darwin Award.
Here’s a phrase Democrats need to take out of their game plan for 2020: popular vote. Pretend it doesn’t exist. You need to understand the rules of the game, once and for all.
You’re not playing a game of winning the popular vote, and whether you like it or not the game is exclusively about victory in the Electoral College.
Them’s the rules.
Say it with me: “The only game in town is the Electoral College.”
Now say it again, with feeling: “The only game in town is the Electoral College.”
Now say it with your raging, Samuel-L.-Jackson-in-a-Tarantino-movie face: “The only motherfucking game in town is the motherfucking Electoral Fucking College.”
Fight where the fight is. Ignore where it’s not. It’s not in California. It’s not in New York. It’s not in Massachusetts. If the Democratic campaign or a single political committee on the left spends a goddamn dollar in those states or visits them for any reason other than fundraising, they’re helping Donald Trump. The only states in your campaign are the target states on the Electoral College map.
I feel like a Bubba Sun Tzu trying to instruct my Democratic friends who think this is a fifty-state campaign effort. Bless your hearts. The campaign is already over in thirty-five states. Done. Cooked. Kaput. Finito.
You’re fighting an election in ten to fifteen states. Most of them aren’t blue. Some are pretty red and getting redder. (In a later chapter, I’ll outline how to fight and win in them.)
“But muh popular vote” has become such a tiresome refrain that it betrays something more fundamentally broken about the Democratic Party approach to elections. It’s a stark disconnect from reality as it stands today, and the reality you will most certainly face in November 2020. No, you’re not getting rid of the Electoral College in 2020.
Which is of course why the Democrats can’t stop talking about it. (Did I mention they’re bad at politics?)
The major players in the Democratic primary field—and nearly all of the fringe cases, some of whom are now out of the race—bought into the idea that we should abolish the Electoral College and spent valuable time on the stump in the spring and summer of 2019 talking about it.1
And talking about it. And talking about it.
Elizabeth Warren, Comrade Bernie, Beto O’Rourke, Julian Castro, and Cory Booker all made dumping the Electoral College a tentpole of their early campaigning (as did, among the early dropouts, Jay Inslee and Kirsten Gillibrand). Warren attacked the Electoral College with both passion and commitment: “I believe we need a constitutional amendment that protects the right to vote for every American citizen and makes sure that vote gets counted….And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting and that means get rid of the Electoral College.”2
Even Pete Buttigieg, a man who is demonstrably smarter than most of the field, got on board with this absurdity. In a profile by The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor and Flavor of the Month in the pre-Biden spring of 2019, said: “We need a national popular vote. It would be reassuring from the perspective of believing that we’re a democracy.”3
Leaving aside the constitutional concerns and political impracticality, this is one of those hothouse flowers of an issue that take on a life of its own in a party seemingly dedicated to stoking its base with promises they can’t keep on issues that won’t move votes. Every iota of energy and focus on an issue so esoteric and specialized is wasted. Not only is the Electoral College not going away in 2020, it likely never will.
When it fails to come to pass, it will demoralize and anger Democratic primary voters. They will feel cheated by the system, when in fact it was never going to happen. It’s one thing to promise your daughter a pony. It’s another to promise her a unicorn.
This is the kind of messaging failure that tells working-class Democrats, centrists, and soft-Republican voters in the key states that the Democrats will chase any dumb rabbit rather than talk about things that might, you know, matter to them on Election Day. All the talk of things that can’t happen in 2020 makes me fear for a Democratic base who believe some deus ex machina maneuver will save them. It won’t. In politics, God helps those who help themselves, and devil take the hindmost.
Some Democrats are rubbing their little paws together, imagining some pre-2020 miracle…like the National Popular Vote Compact passes and the GOP forgets to litigate it into oblivion, or that other political unicorn gallops onto the scene and we become a direct democracy. This is worse than fantasy. This is political malpractice.
Donald Trump knows—and so do his little Russian friends—that the Electoral College is the ballgame.
You want to change the Electoral College? Go for it some other time. I think it’s spectacularly dumb, both un- and anti-constitutional, and would have a boatload of unintended consequences. By all means, give it a shot, but rest assured: It’s not going to win the 2020 election as an issue, and the rules of the game are not going to change before November 3, 2020.
This is the kind of thinking that gets you four more years of Trump.