Micron said:
That I don't get at all. Clinton won the popular vote (AFAIK, she got about 2 million more votes than DT).
I know we have a lot of folks on this forum who simply do not understand the US form of government. Forgive me for being the perpetual pedant, but it is worth explaining.
It is of absolutely no consequence that Hillary got a majority of the votes in total. What matters is WHERE she got the majority. Let's start with a simple statement: If Hillary had gotten a simple majority of votes in every state, she would be president. No question, nothing else to say about that particular "What If" scenario.
The truth is, Hillary DID NOT get a simple majority of votes in every state. Where she won a state, she won big. Where she lost a state, Donald won in varying degrees from moderate to huge wins. But that balance between federal and state power means that the individual states matter. The system is not evenly balanced. It is weighted to prevent the smaller states from always being squeezed out of the discussion.
The Electoral College is a part of the mechanism of checks and balances. In this case it acts as a check against "the tyranny of the majority." As an extreme example (and one that is unlikely to actually occur), whites outnumbered blacks after the Civil War. It would have theoretically been possible for white voters to reinstate slavery of blacks. That would be abhorrent, of course, but the point is that if you only went by simple majority, atrocities like that COULD occur in some aspect of federal laws. Anti-gay measures, for example.
We have to remember that at the time of the USA founders, "states' rights" was a HUGE issue that threatened to tear apart the as-yet incomplete union of states. It is no small coincidence that we are called "the
United States of America." At the time of the founding of the USA, the states were independent and had separate sovereignty. The trick was to get them to give up some of their sovereignty to form a union with other states. Take a look at the power issues within the European Union now, which is another case of attempting to unify formerly sovereign states. When we talk about the Civil War, the northern side was called the "Union" army. The name was descriptive of their primary cause - to prevent dissolution of the union of states.
There was a really big debate in the Continental Congress in terms of balancing federal vs. state power in order to form that union originally. Because of the compromises, some fairly obscure methods were used to get enough states to vote in favor of the formation of that union. Remnants of that compromise are still in effect today and this is why some folks don't understand what happened in the presidential election of 2016.
A telling indicator of this attempt to balance things out is the structure of the House and Senate. The House of Representatives is based almost purely on population. A state with a larger population gets more representatives. The Senate is definitely immune to population differences but can be sensitive to regional or geographic issues. Therefore, to become law in the US, a bill must pass the House (meaning "popular appeal") and must also pass the Senate (meaning "regional appeal").
