John Rachal's Blog

The title quote is from Mike Duncan, historian of Rome, in a droll reference to Julius Caesar

Having railed against the electoral college for about twenty-five years—the rough equivalent of my screaming some private grievance across the solar system to the good citizens of Neptune—I spent an afternoon calculating what would be the theoretical lowest percentage of the popular vote necessary to win a presidential election. Armed with the eligible voter population of each state, the electoral votes of each state, the minimum number of electoral votes needed to win the election (270), and a calculator, I selected a collection of less populated states and the District of Columbia whose electoral votes would add up to 270, divided the eligible voter population of each of those states in half, and added one single vote for each state, which would tip all of that state’s electoral votes to a single candidate (Maine and Nebraska, which both divide their electoral votes, being exceptions—a solution to the electoral college problem that I proposed in an earlier blog, presuming all states did so). I then added those states’ eligible half populations plus those critical single extra votes, that is, 50% plus one vote for each state, to get the lowest eligible total population necessary to yield 270 electoral votes. Then I took that number and divided it by the total eligible voting population of the United States and thus arrived at the minimum number of voters necessary to elect a president. Never mind that a friend I consulted to confirm the legitimacy of my method looked it up on the internet and immediately found that some other fellow had done almost the same thing, using instead the number of actual voters from each state in the last election, and came up with about the same number as I did within a percent or so. So much for my afternoon of superfluous labor.

The percentage of the popular vote necessary to win an American presidential election was astonishingly and alarmingly low: 22%. It varied somewhat by which states you chose; at first, I used random states, and got 27%, but then I restricted the calculation to lower population states and got the 22%. I don’t pretend to explain that difference, but there you go. So even in a two-candidate race, a person could win the presidency with less than a quarter of the popular vote. An acquaintance dismissively told me that that would never happen, given the near impossibility of the 50% plus one vote requirement. My response to her was that of course that would never happen. But if the presidency could technically be won with 22% of the popular vote to an opponent’s 78%, just consider how much more likely it would be to win it with 49% to an opponent’s 51%. Indeed Trump won with 46.1% to Clinton’s 48.2%.

Five times in our history the presidency has gone to the person with fewer popular votes, defying the very definition of democracy. One out of nine presidents received less votes than his opponent. That certainly is the most egregious, indeed outrageous, reason to change the way the Electoral College works: majority rule is the sine qua non of democracy. But there are other reasons. The current Electoral College means that Democrats’ votes in solidly Republican states and Republicans’ votes in solidly Democratic states do not count for anything in the actual outcome, since that outcome is determined by the electoral votes rather than the popular vote. It means that people’s votes in “battleground” states, and even in individual precincts within those states, are dramatically more important than other people’s votes. Instead of looking at the totality of the popular vote, we must look at sometimes minuscule and potentially litigable margins in a few selected states. For example Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2,864,974 votes, but lost three battleground states—and thus the Electoral College and the presidency—by a collective 77,744 votes in those three states. Those folks’ near 78 thousand votes were worth more than those other folks’ 2.86 million votes. Put another way, each of those 78 thousand voters was worth thirty-seven of those 2.86 million voters; or yet another way, the former’s votes were thirty-seven times as important as the latter’s.

It also means that candidates largely ignore states they know they will win or lose in order to concentrate on the battleground states, where they know those 78 thousand votes could make all the difference. Vladimir Putin knows this also, so rather than waste his cyber resources on all fifty states to influence the election, he conveniently can sow his seed mostly in the fertile fields of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and eight or nine other purple states.

The organization Common Cause has entered the lists against the Electoral College. Their solution is to require that once the popular vote is known, all electors must cast their votes for the winner, effectively keeping the Electoral College and avoiding a constitutional amendment to eliminate it, and giving all electoral votes to the popular vote winner. Rather than being determinative, the Electoral College would merely rubber stamp the popular vote. This is more elegant than my original solution—splitting the electoral vote for each state—by essentially slicing the Gordian knot in half rather than trying and failing to untangle it. Republicans will oppose any change, since the status quo somehow leans Republican, and that for them is more important than majority rule. In fact, in view of voter suppression efforts, majority rule is the enemy to them, except when they are in the majority. But even with a Democratic Senate, House, and presidency, I wonder if there is the will to make “American democracy” a valid term.

The following post originally appeared on my Facebook page and is slightly amended here. The title quote is the question lawyer Joseph Welch asked Senator Joseph McCarthy during the House Unamerican Activities Committee hearings in June of 1954.

I have tried over the last few years to keep my FB page a politics-free zone concerning my own political commentary, preferring to relegate it to an unvisited blog. However, in the Oscar Wilde tradition of being able to resist anything except temptation, I confess to occasionally commenting on others’ political posts, but I well know that the earth will continue to turn without panting to hear my political bon mots. Nevertheless, Mr. Trump’s attack on military personnel as “losers” and “suckers” is so profoundly offensive and so self-evidently disqualifying for a pretender to Commander-in-Chief that my personal disgust with this despicable man is no longer containable, and so I will speak here for my father (1914-1951), a career U.S. Marine joining at 19 and serving in China in the ’30s and in the Pacific in World War II, and dying at 37 of cancer when I was three.

In Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in TheAtlantic.com, he relies on six separate anonymous sources (presumably some sources for some statements and other sources for other statements) who confirmed that Trump used those words in describing military personnel, especially ones who were wounded, died, or were captured. Naturally Trump has denied it, mendacity being his first line of both offense and defense. If an article appeared saying that Ronald Reagan had said it, or that WW II veteran George H. W. Bush (whom Trump called a “loser” for allowing his plane to be shot down) had said it, or that his son George W. Bush had said it, we could all easily dismiss it as the ranting of a left-wing blogger, or maybe even a far right-wing blogger pining for a Trump. It would be better, of course, if Goldberg’s sources had spoken on the record. But for this president, it absolutely rings true. We know that he got a doctor to keep him from military service saying that he had bone spurs in his feet. We know from an interview with smut-meister Howard Stern in the late 1990s that he joked that vaginas were “potential landmines” and thus avoiding venereal diseases was “my personal Vietnam.” We know he had an Iago-like envy of John McCain and disparaged him publicly by saying “I like people who didn’t get captured.” Now, thanks to Goldberg’s article and his sources, we know that Trump was outraged that flags were being flown at half-mast for McCain’s funeral: “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” he complained to aides.

On Memorial Day in 2017, Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery with Marine four star General John Kelly, whose son died in Afghanistan at age 29 and is buried at Arlington. According to Goldberg’s sources knowledgeable about the visit, Trump and Kelly were standing beside the grave, and with astonishing lack of sensitivity or empathy, Trump said to Kelly, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” We also know that when Trump was in France in 2018, he cancelled a scheduled visit to the World War I Aisne-Marne American Cemetery at Belleau Wood—sacred ground to Marines—and asked, according to Goldberg’s multiple sources with firsthand knowledge, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The private reasons not to go were the “losers” buried there and his unwillingness to get his hair wet. The publicly stated reason was that since it was raining the helicopter couldn’t fly and the Secret Service wouldn’t take him—two more lies, absurd in their simplicity. Also on the same trip, in a different conversation, he referred to the 1800 Marines who died at Belleau Wood and are buried at the cemetery as “suckers” for getting killed. And finally, if one other Trumpian quote disdaining service to country and valorizing the unfettered pursuit of wealth is needed, there is this: After then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford gave a White House briefing, Trump asked his aides, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” The idea of service to country is alien to Trump. He seems to be constitutionally incapable of moral reflection, asking only what’s in it for him, meanwhile taking pride in being neither a sucker nor a loser by finding, all those years ago and with Daddy’s help, a way to evade the military service that would possibly have gotten him killed as it did over 50,000 other Americans and would definitely have detoured him from his profits in commercial real estate.

My dad, United States Marine Corps master sergeant and another Arlington Cemetery resident, would quite possibly, perhaps probably, have been a good lifelong Republican, and we would likely have had a round or two of political arguments. But he was not a sucker, and he was not a loser, and the man who as Commander-in-Chief apparently thinks he was is not fit to spit-shine his boots. Semper Fi, Dad—a concept totally beyond the moral grasp of Donald Trump.