The Electoral College Is STILL A Travesty

 Paul Campos (who is emerging as one of my favorite writers) has a nice math demonstration of how close the election was (despite not being close).

It's looking like Biden will end up with a popular vote victory in the neighborhood of 6,000,000 votes and a percentage win of 4% 51-47. Only Obama's romp in 2008 will have been bigger this century, or indeed since 1988. Biden won a crushing landslide in terms of the amount of people who voted.

In terms of the Electoral College, it's much, much closer. 

Biden's wins in Michigan and Pennsylvania are much more robust than Trump's were four years ago. Nominating the boring white guy from Scranton worked as intended. He won Wisconsin by roughly the same number of votes that Trump did in 2016. He flipped Arizona and Georgia, albeit narrowly.

Campos some "fun with math" where he takes the entire electorate and puts it into "a mid-major conference basketball" gymnasium that seats 7,226. If you filled that arena with proportional numbers of Trump and Biden voters you would get: Biden 3,685; Trump 3,396, Other 145.  He then asks: "How many voters would have to change side in that arena to create a Trump victory. 

The answer is one.

If those votes switched in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona, and Trump won those states, it would be a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, the election goes to the House and Trump win because Wyoming has the same vote as California.

After the election of 1800, when the obscure rules of the Electoral College created a tie between Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, and Democratic Republicans became ascendant, there was an opportunity to get rid of the Electoral College. The 12th Amendment could've been "bigger."

As it is, we have demonstrated twice in 20 years the extreme inequity in our system of electing presidents. We have largely avoided the catastrophe that Campos articulates, because people move in large numbers - not by state. 

But we could be headed for a reckoning if we have the so-called "Smoother Trump" come along and win office with a clear minority of the vote again.  Some of this is simply a California problem. The state is too large for its own good or the good of the country.