August 20, 2021
How Big Is the Angry Majority?
By John Green
In an article last week, I posited that the silent majority in America is angry and becoming loud. A reader — we'll call him Lloyd — sent me the following: "Trump-supporters are neither silent nor the majority ... and if we had a straight-up popular vote of what the majority of the people want, you'd never win again."
I believe that's a challenge to my assumptions. Are conservatives really a majority, or are they just using the Electoral College to occasionally cheat the "will of the people" to win as a minority?
The second part of Lloyd's statement implies that Republicans have an unfair advantage due to the Electoral College. Leftists frequently charge that a Republican winner is illegitimate because he lost the popular vote. This charge was made against George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016. To be blunt, it's a silly claim based on faulty logic. Candidates compete according to the rules defined in the Constitution — and unless amended, those rules include the use of the Electoral College. There is no evidence that supports the claim that a different candidate would have won had different rules been used. That's not at all different from claiming that the Kansas City Chiefs would have won the Super Bowl if they'd been playing hockey instead of football. If the electoral rules were different, the candidates would have campaigned differently. Republicans have lost the popular vote not because they can't win it. They've lost the popular vote because they weren't trying to win it. In our system, the popular vote is irrelevant.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/how_big_is_the_angry_majority.html
