In the last days of the loud, angry, sometimes bitter 2016 presidential campaign, opinion polls are showing that the race for the White House is getting tighter.
Hillary Clinton’s once-comfortable lead has shrunk in national polls, Donald Trump’s lead in some key states has grown slightly, and forecasters are counting hour-by-hour changes in polls across the country.
The New York Times’ analysis of those polls late Friday gave Clinton an 84% chance of becoming the next President. Nate Silver – a political analyst widely respected for the accuracy of his predictions – said Clinton’s chances for winning are less than that – about 64%.
Other polls in this rapidly changing political environment are predicting an even tighter race, with Clinton’s advantage much smaller, even disappearing altogether.
But vote-counting is not as simple as it seems – not as simple, perhaps, as it ought to be. If the current trend continues Clinton could lose the popular vote – a result of negative publicity about her e-mails and her family’s foundation and her decisions as Secretary of State – but she could still be elected president by winning a higher number of electoral votes in state races across the country. Such an outcome would follow guidelines in the US Constitution. It’s happened before in American presidential elections, and it could happen again.
In an earlier column I wrote about the Electoral College and how it works. I noted that Electors, chosen by political parties in each of the 50 states last summer, will vote on Dec. 19 to confirm – or possibly override – the results of the popular vote on Nov. 8. This Electoral College process has been in place for more than two centuries.
In almost every election since the nation’s birth, voting by Electors has been of little consequence, a mere footnote. Occasionally, however, it has changed the outcome. This is the story of how that came to be, and why it is relevant today. (There’s also the possibility of a surprise outcome this year – but more about that later.)
When the US Constitution was being written, its authors struggled to find a way to select leaders for the new United States. In the late 18th century – the 1780s, right after the Revolutionary War – everything was new, and much was unknown. Americans had rejected monarchy and primogeniture in favor of the democratic values of ancient Greece, and a government modeled after the republic of ancient Rome. But in the new United States there were no democratic traditions, no established patterns of choosing leaders, no “national” norms or social fabric or cultural values or identity, no universally observed rules and systems and procedures. In the absence of accepted traditions, the handful of men drafting a new Constitution were challenged to create muscle and flesh to put on the hopeful but skeletal framework of the Declaration of Independence, written just a few years earlier.
And it was harder than that, this carving out of a new democracy in a place, and at a time, when laws and leadership and governance had no “national” definition. There were no transportation systems, no modern industry, no electricity, no opinion polls, no media except news sheets for those privileged few who could read. It took weeks to send a letter by horseback from one city to another, months for letters to cross the ocean between the US and Europe. Everything important was local, settlements and towns were far apart, and people lived out their entire lives within a few miles from where they were born.
Every adult had just survived a victorious but exhausting revolution against the British Empire. Having rejected foreign domination, the people of the former colonies simply wanted to fulfill their revolutionary goal – to govern themselves, and to be left alone. They were suspicious of power, and those who held it.
In this environment the drafters of the Constitution, fervent believers in democracy, were nonetheless leery of what suspicious and uneducated citizens might do if given the power to elect leaders and make national decisions. “The people,” after all, worked the land, sold dry goods, raised farm animals, lived far from towns and neighbors, and were almost entirely illiterate. How could they be trusted to pick a President?
The Constitution’s authors wanted to create a system that would form a national government while preserving, at the same time, the powers of local, post-colonial governing bodies. They devised methods for selecting national leaders, but built in safeguards that would preserve the achievements of the American Revolution.
They did this in various ways, one of which was to include a provision creating the function of Electors, intended as a buffer between national leadership positions and suspicious and angry voters who could be lured into voting for someone not dedicated to the principles of democracy. Creation of the constitutional function of Electors, after much debate, was accepted as a compromise between those who wanted direct election of a president by the people, and those who wanted the landed gentry in the new US Senate to appoint the nation’s leaders.
General election polls 2016 Clinton v Trump.svg Photo: By Spiffy sperry via Wikimedia Commons
This compromise – reached through long sessions and difficult meetings – gave the vote to citizens but ensured that the national rights of citizenship would be guaranteed for all people. The creation of Electors – now called the Electoral College – set in motion a process that got the new country started. Generations later, it is a legacy of those early compromises that the Electoral College is often seen as outdated and unnecessary – even irrelevant, and perhaps disruptive to the democratic process. But it’s a function that remains in the Constitution, and that one that has an impact on the transfer of power and authority today.
The nation the founders has been for the last several generations the most powerful country in the world. In spite of this achievement we are also aware of the consequences of the inability of the founders to resolve two dilemmas that remain very much with us. Both issues are relevant to the current presidential candidates, their parties, and the outcome of the 2016 election.
I have referenced the first of these 18th century issues as the unification of former colonies into a single nation-state, governed by a strong leader who would work with a legislature to preserve democracy while moving the nation forward. Each of the first 13 states, however, insisted on electing its own governor and legislators, town majors and sheriffs; separately, each of them also elected representatives to a national Congress. These state and national governments worked together when it suited them, but states and local populations held tightly to their autonomy. This division of power and authority between the federal government and the governments of individual states has slowed progress toward solutions for the nation’s problems throughout the nation’s history – a problem that is very much in evidence today.
An outgrowth of this division of authority in inherent in the voting process created in the 1780s, a process for electing the President and Vice President that included the establishment of Electors.
This is the process that was used to elect George Washington to his first term in 1788, and as the nation has expanded from 13 states to 50, it’s the system that we have continued to use for the past 228 years. The Constitution’s prescribed methods for voting have been updated and amended during that period, but one element that has remained in place is the requirement that Electors meet after every presidential election to affirm both the results, and the fact that those results reflect the will of all citizens. In 21st century political life, whether or not all citizens accept those results – and the legitimacy of an 18th-century process – is up for debate.
The second issue, also a topic for continued debate in our time, is the separate-but-equal philosophy that shaped the new nation in the 18th century. In writing this compromise into the Constitution drafters preserved, among other institutions, that of slavery in the southern states – and an economic system that rested on in slavery in northern states, as well. Failure to deal with slavery in the 1780s allowed tensions to increase, tensions that would boil over by the mid-19th century into a bloody Civil War. At the end of that conflict constitutional amendments were passed to free all slaves, and to allow them to vote. But long after its founding the United States continues to struggle with the legacy of slavery – an institution that has been called its “original sin.”
Looking ahead, what’s next? At the beginning we saw the rapid changes in opinion polls, the narrowing gap between Clinton and Trump, and predictions of what might happen if state Electors were called to vote one way or the other.
Of course, we can’t predict the outcome – but here’s a possibility that might truly be a surprise ending to one of the most unpleasant campaigns in modern history.
An analysis was made at the end of the week by political reporters at the Washington Post and other media. They said that no matter who wins the popular vote on Nov. 8, it’s possible that Clinton and Trump could be tied in the Electoral College vote count. That’s right – calculations based on likely voting trends in every one of the 50 states show that each candidate could conceivably wind up with 269 electoral votes, one vote short of the 270 needed to win.
In that case, the Constitution calls for the election to be thrown into the House of Representatives, where each of the 50 states would decide the election by casting one vote. Currently, House Republicans outnumber Democrats in 34 states; Democrats lead in 16. Many Republican legislators don’t like Trump, and some have spoken out against him. But if the House had to settle the 2016 election, would all Republicans vote for their party’s candidate? It’s likely that they would.
In the event of an Electoral College tie – a possibility, looking at current opinion polls in the 50 states – House Republicans might decide the outcome, and Donald Trump could win. He would then be inaugurated as President on January 20, 2017.
