Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Part I

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Election Day 2024 Has Finally Arrived: What to Watch For As the Results Roll In (All Too Slowly in Some Cases) Tonight

Well, indeed it is election day finally here, although tens of millions of Americans have already voted, tens of millions of Americans are likely to go to the polls today. And there is at least a projection of a pretty big turnout in terms of historic turnout percentages and raw numbers headed into a presidential election. And that is because just about everyone in America who is watching this election and understands what’s at stake, they understand that there are big issues in play.

And thus, as I discussed yesterday if there are people at this point who are undecided, it must be because they are profoundly uninvested in the issues and thus in the future of this nation. But here’s something very interesting. As we go into election day, what are we being told? We’re being told what we’ve talked about for days, and that is that the election is incredibly close. So close, as I warned yesterday, that you shouldn’t take any numbers for granted.

You should take none of these numbers at face value because it takes time to assimilate these numbers responsibly and we’ve run out of time. But that doesn’t mean that the candidates and their parties and their campaigns have run out of time or that figures in the media have run out of time in terms of pressing the case that the momentum is headed one way or the other. Frankly, we just don’t know, but we’re about to know. Just about every major newspaper and news source, the streaming news channels and all the rest, they are telling us that the race is close and they’re trotting out some numbers in order to try to play some kind of numbers game.

But at this point, it is a game. The only numbers that count at this point are the numbers that come down to votes, and that’s where the counting is going to become really, really acute. We’re going to talk in just a moment about why the setup is as it is, why our constitutional order is as it is, why we are actually voting in a context that will eventually produce an Electoral College result. That’s why we are so concerned with the vote state by state. But that’s the way it is. More on that later. Let’s just think about when we will know anything concrete from these states.

Well, you’re not going to stay up all night given the way presidential elections work. You don’t need to stay up all night wondering which way California is going to go. It’s on the West Coast, but I can tell you with absolute confidence that it is going to go for the Democratic ticket. And that’s simply because the numbers are already there.

Meanwhile, let’s come back, say to the east. Let’s look at a state like Alabama. Well, I think I am going to call that one Alabama is going to go for the Republican ticket. Now you say, “Why are you so confident?” It is because just of the numbers on the ground, including party registration, previous elections, you can pretty much also figure out that the Trump campaign really has had not much hope of carrying California. There may be some bluster, but the numbers aren’t there. And frankly, the Harris-Walz campaign has not been too concerned about fighting over Alabama because the votes there, well, they’re not going to get them.

So we come back to the so-called swing states. And right now in 2024, the most important of the swing states, starting with the most important of them all, we have to start with Pennsylvania, but then we go to Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona. Now, as I mentioned before, there have been in most presidential races like this, two claims made. One is that it’s an extremely close election. Everyone has an interest in telling you it’s an extremely close election. Why does everyone have an interest in telling you that? Well, in this case, I think it turns out also to be true. But the reason why they have an interest in telling you this is that the news media, well, it has absolutely no reason to tell you that this is an election that’s going to be boring.

No, this has to be a nail-biting, thrill a minute election. In this case again, probably so. But when you look at the two campaigns, well, there’s a similar picture here. Have you noticed how many of the surrogates for the campaigns have been pressed by news anchors and others for what they will do when their candidate might lose? And they don’t answer the question? That’s because in politics, that’s considered a fatal fault. You never talk about losing until the election is over. Obviously, two people going head-to-head, one is going to win, one is going to lose. But you know what? Going into the election, no one is contemplating losing, at least on the record. 

And here’s the way that plays out. If you are, say, way ahead, you feel like all the polling indicates you’re way ahead, your candidate is way ahead. Why do you play the close election? It’s going to be close game. It is because you need your voters to turn out. It’s a huge problem when voters don’t turn out.

If they think the thing is already done, the cake is baked, they might stay home. Well, you need them to vote, so you need to tell them this is going to be close. On the other side of the equation, if you believe you are behind or your candidate is behind, you got to say it’s a close race so that your people don’t give up and not vote.

So both sides know they got a problem if they’re too much ahead, some of their people won’t vote. They’re not so far ahead if ahead at all. Then if they’re behind and their people hear that they’re behind, there’s a concession that they’re behind, there’s a motivation for those people just to stay at home because they can’t win anyway. So everyone is going to tell you that the race is very close. I’m telling you that the race is very close. You know the race is very close, but that’s also because of a far more important issue. And that is on the worldview divide, the partisan divide, the cultural moral divide. In the United States, the numbers mean it’s going to be very close.

So here’s what to look for, and I think it’s great when Christian families and Christian friends can gather together and watch the election results come in. It’s a lot more satisfying when at the end of a Tuesday night on election day, you know who has won virtually all the offices and how all the ballot questions have turned out. That is less and less likely. So let’s talk about why that’s so and let’s talk about how we are to process what is going to take place tonight. Let me get to the fun part first.

If you want to see the direction that the election is taking and you want to see verifiable signs of which way the vote seems to be trending, you need to look at two states. Those two states are Georgia and North Carolina. You need to be watching Georgia and North Carolina because they’re both mentioned as swing states. You heard that already. Both of them are swing states, but both of them also have election laws and mechanisms that mean results will come in pretty fast.

And those results should be known by some time, well, around say 10 or 11 on Tuesday night. If not before by that time, you should have a pretty good indication of how the vote is going in North Carolina and Georgia. Now, both campaigns seem firmly to believe that if their candidate wins both North Carolina and Georgia, they just might come close to running the table. So if you win one but not the other, well, at that point it’s going to be a longer night. Indeed, the election results are not going to be known in full until we get too late in the week if then, and I must say, I find that a tragedy. It is an embarrassment to a constitutional republic that has all the powers of technology and counting available to us in the year 2024.

This is an embarrassment, but it is because of a good principle. At least that good principle is the voting mechanisms are left up to the individual states. That’s far better than having the federal government run this kind of thing from some centralized authority. But that being said, some of the states are better at it than others. And some of the states have adopted systems, laws, and procedures that make it much more difficult to count the votes.

I think one interesting culprit in this case is the state of Pennsylvania. And again, it is the most important swing state of all the swing states this year. Both campaigns know it. But it could be that we will not know the winner in Pennsylvania until not only days after the election. But frankly it could be a week or so. They’re warning us about this already. Folks close to the ballot counting system there in Pennsylvania, say, the chance of knowing how the Pennsylvania vote is going to end up on Tuesday night. Those chances are virtually zero.

I’ll just go back to say I think Pennsylvania bears responsibility for this. I think the fact that they have adopted legislation that says that votes can’t be counted until election day when so many people are voting early and so many people are voting by mail. I think that is a huge inexcusable problem. Pennsylvania, you have a problem. You knew it years ago, so the fact that you haven’t solved it means that the electoral majority there in Pennsylvania, in the state government doesn’t want to solve this problem. You know who you are.

Now moving across the country, time zone by time zone another key swing state is Michigan, and at least by sometime tonight, we are likely to know the vote in Michigan and that can be hoped for. At least authorities in Michigan are indicating they think the ballots are mostly going to be tabulated and reported sometime tonight. So as you look at Michigan in that sense, it’s to be compared with the state of Wisconsin, a neighboring fellow swing state, also very important to this election. But authorities there are saying that it is unlikely they will have any kind of final numbers tonight. It’s more likely that they’ll be coming in tomorrow, if not later.

Again, that’s a problem, but at least they’re not saying it’s going to be a week from now. As you move across the country, again, it matters how folks vote in Alabama and Mississippi, but you know that already both campaigns know how that’s going to turn out. And you also look at states such as Illinois. It hasn’t gone Republican statewide for a presidential election in some time. You can go further out and find some similar states. Of course, you get to the West Coast and there you are, Washington, Oregon, California, deep, deep democratic blue.

So one of the fun things you can do as a Christian family or as Christian friends gather together is you can get a map, you can put state by state the number of electoral votes, and as the results come in and as the map becomes clarified, you can have the fun of watching how the American presidential election system works. Of course, there are other races. We’re going to have to be paying a lot of attention to the house races, not only because of the importance of a house race to an individual congressional district, but because control of the house is so vitally important and both parties are vying for it.

Same in the United States Senate, although it looks at least at this point like Republicans have an advantage, and at least unofficially Republican authorities are indicating that they hope for 53 Republican seats in the Senate. That could turn out to be vitally important regardless of whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump is elected president.

If Donald Trump is elected to another term, having a Republican majority in the Senate, it’s going to be absolutely key, absolutely crucial to getting his appointments through and other presidential matters, including treaties as well. When it comes to the House of Representatives, as I said, the financial power of the house is just absolutely massive. So we’re going to be watching that. Of course, state by state, there are other issues. Of course, there’s several governorships that are on the line, but more important from a Christian worldview perspective is going to be looking at the 10 states in which you will have a statewide vote on a matter related to abortion.

In most cases, a proposed amendment to the state constitution, liberalizing abortion laws, so much is at stake here. Human life and human dignity are at stake here. So we’re going to be watching those results very, very closely. Sadly, the pro-abortion movement believes that it is in the lead in at least nine of those 10 states. The one state in which it might not be in the lead in terms of really believing it can go over the line is the state of Florida where a very bad proposal about a constitutional amendment is on the line, and it probably has majority support, at least according to polling, but it requires a 60% vote in order to successfully amend the Constitution. And we can certainly hope and pray it does not reach that.

Okay. So you’re putting together your map of the states. You’re assigning the electoral count. You’re looking at the big questions. You have the 10 states that are looking at abortion measures. You’re going to be following all of this through the night. Some of the results will be known tonight, some of them will not, and that can be frustrating, but we’re all in the same situation. We’re going to have to wait and see as the votes come in. And honestly, we’re going to have to watch how it’s all done because there are huge issues at stake, huge voting counts at stake, but we are talking about state by state.

Part II

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The History of the Electoral College: Why Our Constitutional Republic Does Not Rely on the Popular Vote for President

And one of the big issues of discussion we need to turn to now is the fact that there are so many people saying that we need to end the Electoral College. We need to change the way we elect presidents of the United States and move as a democracy towards direct democracy with every single vote just adding up to a popular vote. And thus, whoever wins the majority of the popular vote becomes president. Okay. We don’t do it that way. Why not? 

Well, in order to understand this, we need to go back to the Articles of Confederation and the young government of the colonies trying to work together in a national sense. Under that document, one of the limitations of the document, by the way, the nation was not going to be able to move forward and under that constitutional system simply because the Articles of Confederation produced a very weak federal government, too weak for the nation to be able to continue to grow.

It was already facing a debt crisis. It had no one who could make the really hard decisions. That would require an executive, and there was no strong executive under the Articles of Confederation. So for that reason, a group began to meet, planning for a potential new constitution and a new constitutional order for the United States. They met at first under extreme secrecy, but the discussion about the possibility of a new constitutional order began to gain momentum, and those who had locked themselves away were locked into some very hot controversies, questions and constitutional quandaries.

So okay, one of the first questions is, “Do you have a strong chief executive?” And the answer was yes and no because the last thing Americans wanted, if you go back to that period in our founding era, the last thing they wanted, was to overthrow a king only in order to end up with another. And so they wanted an elected executive. And eventually of course, we came up with the three separate branches of government, but there were battling impulses that simply had to be met. And some of this was, do we want a really strong government or do we want a government at the federal level that’s just strong enough?

Well, the Articles of Confederation produced a government. It clearly wasn’t strong enough, but the last thing they wanted was a unitary federal government in which every power would eventually end up in federal hands. They didn’t want that either. And so they wanted a government that would work, and that eventually produced the three branches of government. As we know today, the legislative branch, that’s Congress. But that was also controversial because is this a chamber of, say, slow action and deliberation, or is it a fully representative body in which you have something like direct democracy? And the answer is, well, it ended up both. The settlement was both.

We have the House of Representatives and you have the Senate. The House of Representatives from the beginning was a popularly elected body. That is to say voters vote directly for members of Congress. They do so by congressional district. But in the beginning, the Senate was not popularly elected. Members of the Senate were instead elected by state legislatures. That was changed through constitutional amendment. And now members of the United States Senate are also elected by direct democracy, direct democratic vote. A winning plurality if not majority of votes in the respective states.

But then that leaves you, you have an appointed judiciary, you have an elected house direct representation. You have an elected Senate now also directly elected by the people of the respective states. But what do you do with the presidency? How do you end up with an executive branch and how do you make sure that it has enough power, but not too much power? But what about the big states and the smaller states? They both have an interest and the big states need the small states in order to have a union, but the small states, they’ve got to avoid being extinguished by the big states. And so that’s why you end up with every state having two members of the United States Senate regardless of population and why you have the house seats apportioned by population and that based upon respective tenure cycles in the US census.

That’s why a state like California with a really large population has over 50 congressional seats whereas the states of Wyoming, South Dakota, Vermont, Delaware, and Alaska each have three. That means two senators and one representative. So you are looking at a situation in which every state has two senators, but they have differing numbers of members of the house depending on population. So those five states actually have one more senator than they have members of the house because their population only sustains one member of the house for the entire state.

But every state gets two senators. And guess what? That means that many people in a state like California say that’s not fair because California has a population of 39 million whereas say a state like Wyoming has a population of 586,000, but they each have two senators. Well, that was the arrangement that was reached in the constitutional negotiations so that the big states would also, with the small states, enter into a common compact.

They have two seats. Every single one of the states, two seats in the Senate, the upper house, and they have seats in the lower house which are assigned by proportionate population. When it comes to the Electoral College, the election of presidents of the United States, the big question was, “Well, which way is it going to be? And the answer was both. The settlement was eventually reached. There were those who were arguing for the direct election of presidents of the United States, simply by majority vote. The same way you elect say a congressman, you would elect a president. The states would be all just grouped together in one national vote and whichever candidate gets the most votes would be president.

But that is a very dangerous situation. But hold that thought for just a moment. The other idea was that Congress or some very small group would elect a president because after all, you don’t want the wrong person getting into that office. And so the eventual settlement that led to the Constitution as ratified called for presidents to be elected by electors. They would be gathered into what was known as the Electoral College. And at the level of the Electoral College apportioned by the total number of congressional seats plus the two senatorial seats, that would mean that state would have X number of Electoral College votes. The Electoral College would be the combination of those votes in such a way that whoever gained a majority, and right now, that means the winning candidate has to have 270 electoral votes.

That’s 435 seats in the House of Representatives plus 100 seats in the United States Senate plus three seats in the Electoral College, three votes in the Electoral College assigned to the District of Columbia. So that’s 538 if you’re doing the math. The candidate who gets to 270 is the candidate who’s going to win.

Now, why is that better than the direct election of a president? You’ve got people who are calling for it. Erwin Chemerinsky recently published a book entitled No Democracy Lasts Forever. He’s the dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, very liberal figure. And over and over again when he talks about the need for a change in our constitution, he refers to the founders having a “strong distrust of democracy.” Well, indeed, there’s a strong distrust of direct democracy that is to say whoever gets the most votes is just elected to office regardless of what the office is and regardless of how the electoral system is put together.

One of the big problems in the founding of the United States is that many people had absolutely no way of knowing much of anything about the candidates themselves, certainly a candidate for president of the United States. By the time the constitutional order was put together with the Electoral College as a backup protection, the necessity that the winner of the presidency must win a majority in the Electoral College meant that there had to be some security that this person could well serve as president of the United States. That takes us back to the fact that the man around whom so many of this was arranged, certainly the model of the first president was George Washington.

And there were those who voted for the eventual constitutional order with the Electoral College believing that George Washington might be the first and last president elected by that kind of vote. Whereas in other cases, the failure to secure a majority in the Electoral College would mean that the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives, and the idea was maybe that’s the way it should work. Well, the reality is the Electoral College has changed somewhat.

It is now state by state generally apportioned, so that the person who wins the state, that is the presidential election. If Donald Trump wins the state, he gets all the electoral votes. If Kamala Harris wins the state, she gets all the electoral votes. Whoever gets to 270 first will be declared to be president of the United States. But there are two states that actually apportion the Electoral College by Congressional District. But only two, and in those states, only two of those seats are really in play.

Part III

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No, the Presidential Election Should Not Be Based in the Popular Vote: The Electoral College is an Essential Strength of Our Constitutional Republic

Going to a direct election of the president of the United States would have some undoubtedly unintended effects. For one thing, we would lose a very strong constitutional backup because the way the Electoral College works, it’s not just a plurality of the votes, it is the necessity of a majority of the votes. And you could say, well, that’s one of the reasons why we have a two-party system. And the answer would be yes, that is basically why we have a two-party system and why when you have a multi-party election and you could just go back to the 1990s, think Ross Perot, that becomes a complicating factor.

But no one outside of those two parties has won the presidency since the emergence of the modern party system. And our constitutional order, with the one exception of the nation of Iceland, in terms of modern nations, the United States has the longest serving intact constitutional document, and that’s because I believe its strengths are so apparent. The Electoral College, I believe is a strength. And eliminating the Electoral College and moving to something like what will be called direct democracy and electing presidents means that you will have much more volatility.

For one thing, you would sense that there must be a requirement to have a majority not merely a plurality. So in this kind of system, you would likely have more than two candidates because why not? In virtually every system where this kind of open system pertains, you do have multiple candidates, and that means that it is less likely at any time that you would have someone win an absolute majority, but you don’t want a chief executive that doesn’t have the election by a majority, so you would probably have to have a runoff. Can you imagine voting today and then coming back, say a month from now to have to do it all over again? I don’t want that either.

One of the reasons you hear some people say that they would like to replace the Electoral College is, “Well, they say, look at the electoral map right now.” You are talking about seven swing states. Look at where the two campaigns have been spending most of their time. It’s not going to be in a state, not on the swing state list. You’re not going to see these folks down in Florida. It’s going to go Republican. You don’t see them in a state like Mississippi. It’s going to go Republican. You don’t see them in a state like Massachusetts. It’s going to go Democratic.

Same thing when you look at some other states. They’re going where there’s an opportunity to decisively change the electorate and to win. 

And you say, like the governor of Kentucky recently said, Andy Beshear, a Democrat. He said he wants to call for the elimination of the Electoral College because Kentucky is being slighted. And Kentucky is being slighted. There’s virtually no reason for either of the campaigns to come here. Donald Trump won in Kentucky by a massive two-digit margin in 2016 and in 2020. There’s a reason why the vote in Kentucky is really not in question. The governor of Kentucky was more or less saying it’s not fair that the candidates are spending so much time in this limited number of swing states. If you got rid of the Electoral College and went to a popular vote, they’d have to campaign in all 50 states. And the answer to that is, “No, that’s ridiculous. The exact opposite would happen.” If all the candidates have to do is to pile up numbers, then they’re going to do so where the numbers are. You’re not going to see them in Kentucky ever. Kiss that idea goodbye.

Instead, what you’ll see is the major party candidates without the Electoral College spending all their time in the regions of massive population. They’re also going to be spending time in regions where you would have economical media saturation. They’re going to be spending time where the voters are and the fishing is good. And that means that the state is complaining about being neglected now would be even more neglected then. I do think it’s interesting that most of the people who want to get rid of the Electoral College are coming from the political Left. And you can pretty much predict this. It is because they are frustrated at the Constitution in many ways. They don’t like the Senate either. And so many of the same people calling for an end to the Electoral College are calling for an end to the proportionate representation in the Senate. It’s not fair that Wyoming has two senators and California has two senators.

Well, yes, it is fair because otherwise no one would care what anyone in Wyoming thinks. No insult to people in Wyoming. I’m pulling for you, brothers. One of the greatest recent defenses of the Electoral College was offered by the late US senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was a Democrat and he made a really impassioned defense of the US Constitution and of the Electoral College and the speech he gave on the floor of the Senate.

He said this, “The single great problem that Republics have always dealt with is,” as he said, “how to persuade persons in power to leave power.” He pointed to our constitutional system and he pointed to the value of the Electoral College. He warned that destroying and eliminating it would lead to the fracturing of the United States of America. He concluded by saying this, “I hope the day does not come when tearing the Constitution asunder. We effectively diminish the role of the president of the United States to a man or woman so narrow in his or her base that the opportunity to continue in office, the desire to do so because of the intensity of factions there that brought the person there in the first place, and the narrowness of base that threatens that incumbency proceed to animate in the presidency the most unpresidential and anti-Republican of temptations.”

Senator Moynihan eloquently concluded, “We have prospered and endured. Let us hope we shall continue to do so.” There is work aplenty before our public councils. Let us get on with that work and leave the Constitution be.” In other words, Senator Moynihan said, “You don’t like the Electoral College? Then get rid of it, but once you get rid of it, you’re immediately going to want it back.” Well, we’re going to see the Constitution at play in a map of the Electoral College, well, today and likely for some days to come. Big issues are at stake and we know it. And so today I have to end The Briefing by saying, not only should Christians think about these things in a way that is truly Christian, we need as Christians to pray for the fate and the future of our nation. And no day is that more pressing than today.