“Of special significance to me is that we won the majority of the American people,” Joe Biden said Wednesday, adding “Every indication is that this majority will grow.” “The vice president has won more than 50 percent of the popular vote,” Biden campaign manager reinforced on a call on Thursday. “Biden is piling up a popular vote mandate for ending Trumpism,” the Nation announced in a headline the same day.
Whether Biden won the Electoral College or not remains a contested question at the moment. But for some time, the Democrats have worked to delegitimize election results in which the Electoral College frustrates the result suggested by the national popular vote for president.
In 2013, for example, a George Mason University law student authored an academic piece purporting to legitimize the constitutionality of the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact,” a scheme in which participating states agree to overrule their voters if they fail to vote for the candidate who won the national popular vote.
Under this scheme, for example, a state such as Michigan or Pennsylvania, which signed the compact, could toss aside votes for a Republican candidate if the Democrat ran up enough votes in Democratic strongholds of California and New York to achieve a popular vote victory. (As a matter of fact, the bulk of Biden’s current popular vote margin could be attributed almost entirely to California.)
Democrats never gathered enough support to amend the constitution or even to secure a majority of Electoral College vote-holding states to formally launch the circumvention of the Electoral College. Not officially, anyway. But was that ever the point? As we watch the vote-counting shenanigans unfold in battleground states, Democrats fighting to align the Electoral College result with the popular vote have been assured that they are pursuing a greater democratic good.
In March, the New York Times continued to lay the groundwork for this moment. “The Electoral College is worse than merely useless,” the Times editorialized. “Its primary function is to malapportion political power, and it does so—indeed, has always done so—with strikingly awful consequences.” In
July, the influential Brookings Institution (which played a key role in undermining the 2016 election with the Russia collusion hoax) wrote, “The Supreme Court’s ‘faithless electors’ decision validates the case for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.”
The Washington Post recently published a “study” whose authors warned that “the damage would be substantial,” if another election results in a win for a candidate who lost the popular vote.
We don’t know if the multiple allegations of irregularities will pan out. After four years of the Russia collusion hoax, we need to be disciplined about producing evidence to support allegations of election illegitimacy. But for some time, the media has conditioned the American public to believe that it harms democracy to allow the Electoral College process to diverge from the popular vote. Thus, the lack of media curiosity in investigating allegations of irregularities should be understood in the context of what left-leaning media consider to be the “greater good” of the popular vote.
Democrats believe they have the legitimacy of a Biden popular vote win. Changes to rules, counting procedures, observer access to counting, and voter eligibility feel like illegitimate election shenanigans to Republicans. But not to Democrats. They’ve been conditioned to believe the real election illegitimacy is the Electoral College itself. Big Tech has worked to suppress voter fraud allegations through censorship rather than working to dispel them with greater transparency.
Because the Electoral College has been delegitimized in the minds of so many Democrats, they don’t feel the need for transparency in the electoral processes of individual battleground states.
If Biden achieves an Electoral College victory, Democrats and their allies in media will continue to brush off allegations of irregularities that, if the situation were reversed, would receive considerable attention as they did in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race and the North Carolina ballot harvesting controversy.
In Democrats’ minds, Biden won the popular vote and that’s all that should really matter. The successful public relations campaign against the Electoral College means there will be little outrage over compromising a process that the Democrats already consider illegitimate.