Op-Ed: After a bad showing in the midterms, what story are Republicans telling themselves now?
Republicans say the election results don’t matter. The polls are meaningless. The Supreme Court is illegitimate. Even the Electoral College is illegitimate.
It is a story I have heard many times before, so I am not surprised Republicans keep repeating it. And it is a story that I believe, as a Republican, I have been telling myself for some time. But the party now refuses to tell this story because it no longer seems to be politically advantageous.
In this, Republicans are following their Party’s leadership in Washington. For years, Republican congressional leaders have been telling the American people that they “don’t believe in” the Electoral College. (And for years, I have told them the same thing.)
But now, it seems, Republicans are telling themselves a different story. That’s because the Supreme Court’s role in the system, as the ruling in the Citizens United case established, means that many of the results of many elections are now “unconstitutional” for the President of the United States (if the Electoral College is still in place).
As a result, the arguments Republicans are now making echo those made by President Obama in 2008 in his defense of his first run for the presidency. Obama and the Democrats who supported him were told then that the election would not change anything because the Electoral College system still meant that the will of the voters still would be carried out.
But when the Electoral College system was struck down, the Supreme Court ruled, the President does not have to win the popular vote to earn a majority of the Electoral College votes. In that case, the court ruled the popular vote will still have a “decisive effect” on our elections. This means the President will have more than 50 percent of all the Electoral College votes but not more than 50 percent of the popular vote.
Just as in the Citizens United case, Republican congressional leaders have been telling Democrats and their supporters that they won’t have to worry about the Electoral College system because the will of the voters will still be carried out.
Republican leaders aren’t telling this story because it is true,
