By GEORGE HALVORSON
I have been railing against the Electoral College (and the Senate) as anti-democratic forever, and no one much cares. Turns out George Halvorson noticed–Matthew Holt
We all need to remember that Joe Biden got 11,110,258 California votes in the last election and we need to know and remember that Donald Trump got 6,006,409 votes in that state.
Kamala Harris is on the same track as Biden in every survey and that means she will beat Trump by at least five million votes in that state and she will win the national vote total by at least that many votes because the other vote counts are basically tied and have many fewer voters than California.
The vote differences in other states like Arizona and Georgia are a few thousands votes but only California and New York have million vote differences and she is clearly winning by millions of votes in each of those states.
That means that Trump is guaranteed to lose the popular vote total again by millions of votes.
It’s not clear yet if they can somehow create an electoral college win from those vote totals but it is very clear and absolutely guaranteed for him to be millions of votes behind to start that process.
Large numbers of Americans will be extremely angry and upset if he loses the popular vote by almost ten million votes and somehow manages to get into the White House with that huge loss and pretends that he actually earned that victory with real votes. He will obviously be the biggest loser on the popular vote because there’s no way to make up the California and New York numbers.
That loss is absolutely guaranteed because those two states are doing for Harris exactly what they did for Biden and they are both even less supportive of Trump than they were against Biden.
The people who see him lose by ten million or more votes and then somehow claim and win the White House will probably protest that result with very visible descriptions of their unhappiness and anger and his ability to lead credibly in the face of that anger will probably be badly damaged and clearly labeled with brand damaging and clear description of what happened.
It would probably be better for the country if the electoral college results followed the actual popular vote.
Election night is going to be interesting.
The huge popular vote win will be visible very early because both California and New York numbers are so inevitable and so overwhelmingly against him that we won’t have to wonder or guess about those numbers at any point in the process.
The news media should be ready for that massive popular vote difference because we know now that those numbers are absolutely going to happen.
George Halvorson is Chair and CEO of the Institute for InterGroup Understanding and was CEO of Kaiser Permanente from 2002-14
