No Bad Things Happened Under Trump

One of the articles of faith among the Church of Trump is that no arguably bad thing that is happening now would happen if Trump was president. Of course this "what if" thinking can never be proven. The world is a complicated enough place that you can be sure that the same exact set of circumstances are rarely duplicated in different time periods. Presidents of both parties are famous for taking credit for all the positives that occur during their administration, but not the blame for the negatives. Certainly a president's policies, both foreign and domestic, will affect how the business community and foreign leaders conduct themselves. Room must be given, however, for the simple fact that leaders will make decisions that are best for them, notwithstanding a United States president's policies or rhetoric. Trump, the narcissist that he is, gave outsize credit to his own abilities to influence events, both nationally and internationally. As I have said before, he was fortunate to have inherited an economy that had been on the upswing, following the same trends as his predecessor, President Obama, had during his second term. He likes to emphasize that he started no new wars during his term, but falsely states that he is the only one in decades to have done this and also falsely states that he "had no wars" during that time. What are the facts?

If you go back to World War II Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Obama also started no new wars, although most of them, like Trump, had wars taking place during their time in office that they inherited from previous administrations. During Trump's time, while no new wars were begun, the war in Afghanistan was still going on. We had troops in Iraq and Syria fighting ISIS.  He had the heads of a branch of Iran's military assassinated. Trump claims that the world was at peace while he was president, specifically pointing to the Russian war in Ukraine and the Israeli war in Gaza as something that wouldn't happen if he were around. But is this evidence of Trump's preventative powers? While the main invasion of Ukraine did not take place until after Trump left office, Russia had been fighting to annex Ukraine's eastern provinces for several years. Are we really supposed to believe that Putin would delay his own revanchist plans in order to please his pal Donnie? Or that Putin was afraid of what Trump's reaction might be? A response "like the world has never seen" might make for a popular tweet, but was there any substance? Doubtful. His "fire and fury" tweets directed at the dictator he first mocked as "little rocket man" and later exchanged love letters with, didn't appear to have much affect, since the rockets continued as did the nuclear tests. 

The expanding conflict in the Middle East is also supposed to be happening now because Biden is allegedly "weak" while Trump's "strength" would have meant that Hamas would never have initiated the October 7th attacks. Thinking this way ignores the deliberate moves by Netanyahu and his allies to make a Palestinian state impossible, including propping up Hamas itself; the deliberate moves by Hamas to use their own civilians as pawns in their ideology; the constant chipping away at Palestinian land in the West bank by Jewish settlers; the provocation by Hamas of recurring rocket attacks and the decades-long buildup of hatred between elements of both Israel and the Palestinians who each have their no-overlap view of the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan and the creation of Israel. These moves aren't happening because they give a shit who the U.S. president is. They're all fanatical idealogues and make their decisions based on what works for them. You can be sure that not only is the United States not part of Hamas' calculations, but would likely see direct American involvement as confirmation of their them-against-the-infidels mindset. 

Things happen in the world that don't revolve around who is sitting in the Oval Office.

But since these things are happening, not in a campaign speech imaginary world, but here and now, I'm satisfied that the person who is sitting in the Oval Office is able to handle them. 

 

Electoral College - Again

In light of the attempt by Nebraska Republicans to change the way we allocate our electoral votes, it's time to revisit the Electoral College (EC).

Every state is allocated electoral votes based on the number of members of Congress representing each state. Since every state is guaranteed at least one representative in the House of Representatives and all states have two members in the Senate, the minimum number of electoral votes a state can have is three. 48 states award their votes to the winner of a plurality of votes in the presidential election. (A plurality refers to whoever gets the most votes, which is not necessarily a majority. Since third party candidates can and do run, the winner in a state often garners less than 50% of the vote.) Nebraska and Maine do it differently. They allocate one vote to the winner in each congressional district (Nebraska has 3, Maine, 2) and two votes to the state's overall winner. They regularly split their votes, with one EC vote going to the state's second place candidate. This practice recognizes to some extent the voice of the minority party's voters in both states. 

Nebraska Republicans, who have a large majority in the supposedly nonpartisan one-house legislature as well as the governorship, are pushing to eliminate this setup in favor of the winner-take-all arrangement in most states. They are supported in this by former president Trump and other national Republicans. Since District 2 in Nebraska has voted Democratic in several recent elections, awarding one of five EC votes to the Democrat, Republicans are attempting to give themselves any advantage that they can. (Funny how they're not pushing Maine to do the same - since majority Democratic Maine sometimes allocates one EC vote to Republicans). Nebraska Governor Pillen describes this effort as one to unify Nebraskans. News flash: unity comes from people agreeing on issues, or deciding to set their disagreements aside, it does not come from erasing the voice of dissent from the majority view. 

Despite being in a small minority (2 out of 50) of states who don't allocate EC votes according to winner-take-all, I'm of the opinion that all states should adopt a similar method of allocation. I've always thought that getting away from winner-take-all awarding of EC votes would get the EC vote closer to the actual votes (otherwise known as the popular vote) and eliminate the oddity that we have seen twice in the last 6 elections of the winner receiving fewer votes than the loser  - recently I did the math to see if my intuition was right. 

The assumption that I made was that the ideal situation was slightly different than the Nebraska-Maine method, mainly due to the difficulty of locating congressional district totals in any of the other 48 states. My projections assume that states would allocate electoral votes proportionally based on the percentage of total votes cast that each candidate receives, rounded to the nearest whole number. In a few cases the rounded allocations did not match the total electoral votes, so in each case the odd EC vote was awarded to the overall winner. In no case had the majority candidate received so many popular votes that the minority candidate received no EC votes. 

In the 2020 presidential election the EC results were 306 (Biden) to 232 (Trump). This was exactly the same margin by which Trump won in 2016, with fewer actual votes than Clinton. By using my formula for allocating EC votes the totals would have been 272 - 262, with 4 EC votes awarded to 3rd party candidates. (In reality, since there were generally more than one 3rd party candidate on the ballot, it's possible that their EC votes would round down to zero). In the real world Biden's EC totals deviated from the popular vote by over 5%; in my imaginary world his EC vote total would be within a half percent of the actual percentage of votes. More importantly, the votes of the minority party would actually count in states that are effectively run by one party. In California, for example, whose 55 EC votes always go to the Democrat, despite around 35% of the voters supporting Republicans, those Republicans would represent 18-20 EC votes. In Texas, instead of all 38 electors voting Republican, it would likely be 21-17. Similar scenarios in Florida and New York. 

One of the arguments that Electoral College advocates make is that the big cities would dominate in a poplar vote system. To a certain extent that's true since there's a lot of people in them. But one way to look at it is in a popular vote scenario, or a setup as I've described they would have less influence in places like California and New York since the rural, conservative-leaning voters in those states would now have their votes counted. In our current system New York City dominates the whole state where almost 40% of the voters cast their ballot for Trump...and saw their votes evaporate in the winner-take-all system. In Nebraska and Maine, with their allocation system, the urban voters in Nebraska and the rural voters in Maine haven't been disenfranchised. 

If I had my way I would go even further and change the makeup of the House of Representatives, which would in turn affect the Electoral College. When the Constitution was enacted each House district was of equal size, with every state guaranteed at least one representative. As the population grew the number of representatives increased as well. Until 1929, when the total number was frozen at 435. Since the population has not stopped growing, the average population of a House district has not only increased, but has become very uneven. Wyoming, the smallest state is guaranteed one representative for their population of around 500,000 while in California the average district has close to 800,000 people in it. This gives disproportionate weight to the votes in small states.  Put another way, each of Wyoming's EC votes is weighted at 3.69 times one California vote. (Based on EC votes divided by total population).

If we take Wyoming's population as the size of a Congressional district and divide each state's total population by that number and round to the nearest whole number The House of Representatives will increase in size from 435 to 671. There are still some small state biases due to the fact that EC votes take into account the 2 senators each state is entitled to. A way around that might be to calculate the electoral votes proportionally first, then subtract the two senators to get the House representation. That's unconstitutional though. Projecting what the EC totals would have been if this framework had been in place in 2020 gives Biden the win 347-323, plus four 3rd party votes. This is around 0.2% off from the actual popular vote totals. 

This idea has the benefit of not requiring a Constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College and brings the EC votes in line with the national popular vote. A drawback is that since elections are governed locally it could not be imposed federally - everyone would have to simultaneously have to do it, which is unlikely. I cannot see any of the states that are safely in one party's column to want to dilute their power unilaterally. 

The Electoral College is in the Constitution - I can't see that changing, but there is nothing in the Constitution that mandates how the EC votes are split.