In recent days, at least three 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have called for getting rid of the Electoral College. In 2016, it handed the Oval Office to Donald Trump even though he lost the national popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million ballots.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Peter Buttigieg all have advocated junking the college without walls as anachronistic, and obviously contrary to the Supreme Court concept of one man (and one woman), one vote.
O'Rourke agreed, saying benignly, "I think there's a lot of wisdom at that." Many millennials no doubt would call the proposition a no-brainer.
By giving short campaign shrift to lopsided Democratic-voting states like California and Republican-voting states like Mississippi, Warren notes, Trump was able to zero in on Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. He cobbled together enough electoral votes in those states to beat Clinton in electoral votes 304-227.
Thus, for the fifth time in our political history — and more critically for the second time in our last five presidential elections — the loser of the popular vote ascended to the White House. In this dubious distinction, Trump joined George W. Bush. Both went on to have disastrous and unpopular presidencies, but that reality is beside the point in terms of our national concept of a functioning democracy.
The other three presidents elected without a majority of popular vote were John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Adams was elevated over Andrew Jackson under a new 12th Amendment to the Constitution, wherein each state had one vote of House and Senate members assembled.
The question now is whether the erratic and reckless presidency of Donald Trump will in the next two years persuade the increasingly partisan Congress to correct the founding fathers' mistake and prevent elections of the president by electoral minorities.
As long as the U.S. Senate remains in Republican hands, killing this institution that is contrary to our democracy's core is no more predictable right now, than is impeachment or resignation of Trump under Democratic or broader political fire.
But the practical argument for it is more imperative now than ever before, with a demonstrably corrupt, serial-lying and personally immoral man occupying our highest public office and staining its reputation, and the nation, with each passing day.