Probably it's silly to expect a generally consistent and levelheaded approach from our president-elect. It would be a fool's errand to try and reconcile, for example, the tweet concerning how there should be no recounting of ballots (because the voters have spoken) with the tweet concerning how he actually won the popular vote (if the fraudulent votes are subtracted). I suppose the cheaters are too devious to be detected. Or something. Kellyanne Conway could explain it. Here she is being straight with Fox News viewers:
This election was not close. It was not a squeaker. There is a mandate there, and there is a mandate for his 100-day agenda, as well.
It appears that Clinton's final margin in the popular vote is going to be north of 2.5 million, and, in terms of percent, at least 2 full points. According to David Wasserman, of the Cook Political Report, the current count stands at 65,316,724 for Clinton to 62,719,568 for Trump, 48.2% to 46.2%. I suppose "mandate" is an elastic term.
Just because I am a crybaby Democrat doesn't prove the whole system isn't rigged in favor of Trump and the Republicans. There are three branches to the federal government. The executive branch will be occupied by Trump and his appointees, on the strength of his 46-48 "victory" at the polls. With respect to the judicial branch, this means, for example, that Trump will be filling the current vacancy on the Supreme Court--a vacancy that only exists because Republican senators refused to grant a hearing and a vote to Merrick Garland, whom President Obama, having been re-elected to a 4-year term in 2012, nominated last March. The decisions of the Supreme Court apply to all of us, without regard to the state in which we happen to live, and the extra 2.5 million of us who would have preferred that Clinton make those appointments are just going to have to knuckle under to the will of the minority.
Then there is the legislative branch, which is made of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
In 435 House elections, Republican candidates received 61,483,071 votes, compared to 58,255,286 for Democrats--51.3% to 48.7% of all the votes, if you discount ballots cast for third party candidates. This popular vote margin yielded a 241 to 194 advantage in terms of actual seats in the House, which is a 55-45 Republican majority. So a 2.6% margin of the people's vote resulted in a ten point advantage in actual representation. This kind of mismatch is an ongoing theme. In 2014, Republican candidates got 53% of the votes and 57% of the seats. In 2012, Republican candidates got 49% of the votes and 54% of the seats. (Yes, a small Democratic "victory" among the country's voters yielded a 54-46 Republican majority in the House of Representatives.) Before that, the mismatch is less pronounced, which points the way to the cause: the Republican sweep of 2010, a census year, put them in charge of an unusually large number of state legislatures, and they used the power to draw congressional districts in a way that guaranteed Republican dominance. It's estimated that, given the current configuration of districts, Democratic candidates would have to win a 10-million ballot victory with voters to have a chance at regaining the majority in the House. More here, here, here, and here.
The "people's House" doesn't refer to anything currently in existence. It's the Republicans' House.
What about the Senate? Lots of us were hoping that Democrats would get to 51, or even 50, which, had Clinton won the presidency, would have made for a voting majority (ties in the Senate are broken by the vice president). But Republicans ended up losing just two seats (assuming they prevail in the upcoming runoff in Louisiana, a very red state), and will have a 52-48 majority. Democratic Senate candidates actually won more votes than Republicans this year, but, as has been pointed out, that's not a very good measure of public opinion, since only a third of the seats were up for election. Further skewing the aggregate vote for US Senate is the fact that California had a senate election in which "the Republican" got no votes, since there wasn't one on the ballot: instead of having a Republican primary and a Democratic primary, the Golden State has one primary election in which the top two finishers move on to the general election, and the top two finishers were both Democrats. (Republicans should hope that the maxim concerning how America's future arrives first in California doesn't always hold, because the state's Republican party seems to have been euthanized.)
The issue with the Senate is that every state, no matter how big or small, has two. So this year in California Democrat Kamala Harris won with more than 7.4 million votes, while in South Dakota Republican John Thune won with about 265,000 votes, and soon as they take their seats and commence voting themselves they'll almost always cancel each other out. But the number of people who stand behind this 1 to 1 tie is tilted wildly in one direction. If you want to know how this all works out at the macro level, a reasonable exercise is to determine how many Americans are represented by a Democratic senator, and how many are represented by a Republican. Since each state has two senators, let's just stipulate that each one represents half the state's population. If you assume that the Republicans will hold the seat still pending in Louisiana, and consider Independents Angus King and Bernie Sanders as Democrats (since they caucus with the Dems), then it turns out that 52 Republican senators represent about 140 million Americans, and the 48 Democrats represent about 175 million Americans.
Now, I know that the US Senate, with its inherently undemocratic features, was devised by the sainted Founding Fathers. But they didn't do it because it was just, or wise--the "they" here referring to the best and wisest of them, as opposed to the ones who, being from states with small populations, just wanted to boost the power of their home state. Here is Alexander Hamilton on the topic, in Federalist Paper No. 22:
Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the national deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third.
The only part of this that isn't true is the last clause. For the next two years at least, the Republicans are going to be in complete control of the national government. They have the presidency (though more Americans voted for the Democrat), they have the Senate (though more Americans have chosen to be represented by a Democrat), they have the House (which, on account of a gerrymandered map, they will continue to have into the foreseeable future), and, because they have all that, they will be filling the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, with judges friendly to their views. Yet for some reason the majority, "upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties," seems okay with this hocus pocus.
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