Here’s the scary way Trump could win
without the electoral or popular vote

by
Stephen Marche

Comments By Sherman

In a contingent election
Trump could lose the popular vote,
lose the electoral college,
lose his murder, rape, treason, insurrection,
adultery, theft, tax evasion and lying cases
and then—stupid and unfit as he is—

still end up being the next US president!

In an ordinary time, under ordinary political conditions, the specter of another Trump presidency would be strictly the stuff of nightmares. The former president is facing: 

• • 40 criminal charges for his mishandling of classified documents
• • interrupting his campaign next summer to defend himself in court
• • 34 felony counts of falsifying business records he faces in New York
• • the rape defamation lawsuit, which will begin in January, and which he will almost certainly lose.

Wait a minute! 

The judge warned Trump that he could not threaten anyone. Since leaving that courtroom Trump has threatened everyone! Why did the judge not have him arrested for contempt of court as she warned him she would do?

Probably because she and her family
have been threatened.

Don’t forget the first misses Trump
who “fell” down her own stairs and died,
at home, 1 day before she was scheduled
to testify in court against Trump. 

Right. Of course that’s what happened.

Living with Trump still out of prison
is just like the horrors
of living with Hitler or Alphonse Capone.
Yep. Just like that.

Trump needs to be put into solitary confinement immediately
and left there. 

Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!

In current polling, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are tied nationally; no Republican nominee has emerged to challenge Trump. But, as we have been learning pretty much continuously since 2000, the will of the majority of the American people no longer matters all that much in who is running their country.

The difficult-to-comprehend and elaborate mechanisms of the US constitution relating to elections, once matters for historical curiosity, have now become more and more relevant every year. 

In 2024 there is very much a way
for Donald Trump to lose the popular vote,
lose the electoral college,
lose all his legal cases
and still end up president of the United States
in an entirely legal manner.
It’s called a contingent election.

A contingent election is the process put in place to deal with the eventuality in which no presidential candidate reaches the threshold of 270 votes in the (worthless, stupid, outdated) electoral college. 

In the early days of the American republic, when a two-party system was neither desired nor expected, a contingent election process was essential. It isn’t any more. In this day and age, the popular vote is all we need.

The electoral college
should be abolished.

The first contingent election was in 1825. The year before, Andrew Jackson, the man from the $20 bill, had won the plurality of votes and the plurality of electoral college votes as well, but after extensive, elaborate negotiations, John Quincy Adams took the presidency mostly by offering Henry Clay, who had come third in the election, secretary of state. Jackson, though shocked, conceded gracefully. He knew his time would come. His supporters used the taint of Adams’s “corrupt bargain” with Clay to ensure Jackson’s victory in 1828.

Jackson was a patriot. He put the country’s interests ahead of his own, to preserve the young republic. The United States is older now, and the notion of leaders who would put the interests of the country ahead of themselves and their party is archaic. The 2022 midterms were unprecedented in terms of how many election deniers were appointed to serious offices.

“Many 2020 election deniers and skeptics ran for office in the 2022 midterm elections, with 229 candidates winning their elections,” a University of California report found. “A total of 40 states elected a 2020 election denier or skeptic to various positions, from governor to secretary of state to attorney general to congress.”

The American people are already disinclined to believe in the legitimacy of any election that doesn’t conform to their own desired outcome any more, left or right. In 2016, at the inauguration of Donald Trump, the crowds chanted “not my president.” As of August, the percentage of Republicans who think that 2020 was stolen is near 70%.

So the possibility of the electoral college releasing a confusing result, or being unable to certify a satisfying result by two months after the election, is quite real. The electoral college, even at its best, is an arcane system, unworthy of a 21st-century country. There have been, up to the year 2020, 165 faithless electors in American history—electors who didn’t vote for the candidate they had pledged to vote for.

In 1836, Virginia faithless electors forced a contingent election for vice-president. If the 270 marker has not been reached by 6 January, the contingent election takes place automatically. And the contingent election isn’t decided by the popular votes or the number of electoral college votes. Each state delegation in the House of Representatives is given a single vote for president. Each state delegation in the Senate is given a single vote for vice-president.

The basic unfairness of this process is obvious: California with its 52 representatives, and Texas with its 38 representatives, would have the same say in determining the presidency as Wyoming and Vermont, which have one apiece. State delegations in the House would favor Republicans as a matter of course. In the struggle for congressional delegates, Republicans would have 19 safe House delegations and the Democrats would have 14, as it stands, with more states leaning Republican than Democrat.

All that would be required, from a technical, legal standpoint, is for enough electoral college votes to be uncounted or uncertified for the contingent election to take place, virtually guaranteeing a Republican victory and hence a Trump presidency.

It would be entirely legal and constitutional.

It just wouldn’t be recognizably democratic to anyone. Remember that autocracies have elections. It doesn’t matter who votes. It matters who counts.

In 2021, I published a book about American political decline, The Next Civil War, which examined the structural crises underlying the collapse of the American political order, but I didn’t include a chapter on the electoral system because it seemed too far-fetched, the stuff of historical figments. Those deep structural crises are now, rapidly, overtaking the electoral system itself. A contingent election would be, in effect, the last election, which is the title of the new book I co-wrote with Andrew Yang about exactly that possibility. The rot is advancing faster than anybody could have imagined. Figments from history are now hints to the future.

Polls aren’t worth much at the best of times but this year they are particularly meaningless. Democrats have taken comfort from a recent New York Times/Siena College poll that showed how the Republican advantage in the electoral college, which was 2.9% in 2016, rising to 3.8% in 2020, has diminished to less than a single percentage point, according to the most recent data. None of it matters.

The real danger of 2024 isn’t even the possibility of a Trump presidency. It’s that the electoral system, in its arcane decrepitude, will produce an outcome that won’t be credible to anybody. The danger of 2024 is that it will be the last election.

Stephen Marche is a Canadian essayist and novelist.
He is the author of
The Next Civil War and
How Shakespeare Changed Everything.

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