Enough time has passed to have final, concrete numbers on the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election. Here are the facts.

• Donald Trump won the Electoral College with 312 electors to 226 electors for Harris.

• Trump received roughly 77.3 million votes, while Harris received 75 million votes. That’s a difference of 2.3 million votes. Trump won 49.8% of the popular vote, while Harris won 48.3%.

• In 2016, Trump received 63 million votes; in 2020, Trump received 74.2 million votes.

• For comparison, in 2016 the Democratic candidate received 66 million votes (identical to the total votes Obama received in 2012); and in 2020, the Democratic candidate received 81.3 million votes. In 2024, the Democratic candidate only received 75 million votes.

A popular but misguided consolation is to accentuate the narrowness of Trump’s victory over Vice-President Kamala Harris. The difference in their popular vote totals is about 1.5%, and to invoke this statistic feels like desperate foraging for silver linings. ‘Close’ only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes, as my drill sergeant would say. Beside being cold comfort, the insistence that this was not a landslide election or that Trump only won a plurality (shall we talk about Bill Clinton?) fails to appreciate the far more pertinent results in this election. Here are three takeaways that suggest Donald Trump’s victory was more significant than his popular vote differential conveys:

1. The dysfunction of Trump’s first administration, combined with his inexcusable and nationally televised behavior on January 6th, 2021, should have been worth a loss of at least 6 million votes for Trump. Yet Trump increased his vote total from 2020 by 3 million votes. That means 3 million people who did not vote for him in 2016 or 2020 nonetheless voted for him after witnessing his first administration and Jan. 6th. His malfeasance and abuse of office did nothing to degrade his support — quite the opposite.

2. By contrast, Kamala Harris fell more than 6 million votes below the popular vote Joe Biden achieved in 2020. Adjusting for population growth from 2016-2024, her total of 75 million is essentially on par with the Obama-Clinton coalition of the 2010's. That means since 2012, the only Democratic Presidential candidate who has increased the size of their coalition has been Joe Biden. In 2024, the Biden voter coalition effectively collapsed, with some voting for Trump and the rest staying home or leaving the top of their ballot blank.

3. Finally, presidential elections are not decided by popular vote totals: they’re decided by campaign success in swing states. Everything hinged on whether Kamala Harris could win Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Georgia. She didn’t need to win all of those states, but she needed at least some of them. She failed to win a single swing state, going 0-8. Since that is the practical aim of presidential campaigns, I do think it is fair to say that, on the merits of successfully playing the game, the Trump campaign dominated the Harris campaign.

In the months since the 2024 Election, there have been endless ‘post mortems’ trying to understand why the Democrats couldn’t sustain the Biden coalition. The helpfulness of such hindsight has been mixed, but a few have been revealing, and in this essay I want to look at two particularly illuminating conversations.

The first conversation we examine came the day after the election on the 06 November 2024 episode of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Host Desi Lydic reflected on the election with New York Times columnist Tress McMillan Cottom. I encourage readers to watch the whole video. The second reflection comes from the Radio Atlantic podcast, in a conversation between host Hanna Rosin and guests Anne Applebaum and McKay Coppins, both writers for The Atlantic.

The following excerpts serve as a kind of mirror to those Americans who celebrate the right to vote. This analysis is unavoidably discomforting, even painful, because the voices in these conversations—all women with track-records reliably liberal or even progressive—unwittingly testify that there is something deeply wrong with American democracy. That something is also something these women all value and advocate for: the voters. You cannot have a democracy without an electorate, and yet Trump was re-elected not primarily because of biased media or Russian interference, or because Harris was a bad candidate or ran a poorly planned campaign — no, Trump won because of what voters are: irrational masses who decide from our gut, not our hearts or heads.

I.

The immediate burning question for left-of-center supporters after Election Day 2024 was why Democrats failed to sufficiently connect their candidate and message with voters, particularly in swing states. Daily Show host Desi Lydic put that question to Tress Cottom from the Times, and here’s how Cottom responded,

Cottom: [People] weren’t nearly as terrified as I think that Democrats assumed that they would be of a Trump re-election. Especially with young voters, and we’ve seen how well Trump did with young voters. It isn’t that they didn’t remember Trump’s presidency. A lot of people misremember it. They misattribute what they remember as positive to Trump, when in fact it was just government working the way government should or that they survived COVID, but they misattribute that to Donald Trump and he is happy to take credit that he doesn’t deserve. That is also very helpful; he’s shameless in that regard. So people misremembering, misattributing their memories to a positive Trump era really worked in his favor.

Cottom’s assessment goes beyond reporting demographic data from exit polls to speculating about the psychology of Trump voters. She describes young Trump voters as either misattributing positive experiences to Trump—experiences his policies and leadership did nothing to create—or she suggests they misremember what life was like under a Trump presidency. Such hasty speculation is a bit presumptuous and condescending, and I can only imagine the offense Trump voters might take to such comments.

But suppose what Cottom says is true. If voters decided whether to vote for Trump or Harris on the basis of confused memories about life under Trump and poor judgment about the causal relationship between Trump and societal consequences, then they did not act as informed and conscientious voters. They made a decision on the basis of bad information and fallacious judgments.

Worse, she claims confused voters the kind of people that a “shameless” person like Donald Trump can manipulate. Knowing that people will misperceive his words and actions, Trump exploits the false picture of the world these voters believe.

If Cottom’s speculation about the people who voted for Trump is true, isn’t it a reductio highlighting the absurdity of the popular vote? A ‘reductio’ is an argument showing that a person’s beliefs end up contradicting themselves. We cannot advocate for getting out the vote and then complain when the voters make poor decisions. Poor choices are what we humans make when we’re overworked, underpaid, and underprepared for monumental decisions. When a demagogue comes along promising to make all our problems go away or to blame our ills on some ominous group of people, tired humans capitulate readily to such passion-inducing, incendiary, and ultimately utopian speech.

Cottom acknowledged Trump’s ability to manipulate the voting population, and later in her conversation with Lydic she admits just how easy it is to dupe voters.

Cottom: [Trump’s] weird gift is he knows what people really want—not what they say they want, not what they report to a pollster, not what they say at Thanksgiving dinner—what he has been consistently good at since he entered into electoral politics is he goes to the heart of what they really want. They want to feel like they’re winning even if everything around them says they’re losing. They want to feel like someone is fighting for them even when it’s obvious he’s only fighting for himself. They want to think that they are on the precipice of owning a great country at the height of its history. He is willing to tell people anything, and that is very useful when you’re trying to tap into people’s deep anxieties and their desire to be deluded about reality.

Desi Lydic: It doesn’t have to be factual, he doesn’t have to actually have a policy in place, he can just say, “Oh, the border? I’ll fix it.”

Cottom: And this really flummoxed Democrats who kept saying, “But where’s his plan?! Where’s his plan?!” People don’t care about plans as much as we thought they did. And truly, I think that is a lesson for us. Professional politicians and administrators and the people we elect, they should know plans, and certainly they should exist out there for us to know about them. But I think most Americans just want a really good story about how their lives are going to be better. In this election, whether that story resonated with you or not, Donald Trump’s story was simple, and you could remember it, and you understood it: “Things are bad, I will make it good.” Everybody get’s that story – it’s fairy tales 101. You can’t counter that with policy proposals. I know we wish that’s how people made decisions but it’s not. People make decisions from gut and instinct and feeling.

According to Cottom, the American electorate and Donald Trump are a particularly explosive combination. We are a people beset with anxieties willing to be deluded into hope as a means of pacifying these anxieties. Donald Trump is someone willing to say anything to assuage our anxieties as a means to power. While less than a third of the nation fell for his fear-mongering and nostalgia for national greatness (he received 77 million votes out of 250 million eligible voters, about 31%), it was sufficient to achieve the Presidency.

I’m especially struck by Cottom’s notion that many people want to feel like someone is fighting for them, even if in reality Trump is only fighting for himself. She’s essentially claiming that a sufficient portion of the American electorate is not interested in truth, only in how they feel on a daily basis. As long as I feel good, who cares what reality is like? Echoes can be heard of the basic social state in Thomas Huxley’s book Brave New World, where citizens are kept suspended in perpetual bliss and inner peace through a happiness drug called ‘soma.’ What matters is feeling good about one’s life, not the goodness of our shared reality. Perhaps the deepest of all our anxieties is a fear that the reality of the world is bleak and hopeless, so the best we can do is exchange the world for a fantasy.

There are echoes as well of the situation Plato warns about in his political dialogues. When we act out of fear or gluttony, Plato thought, we’re acting on the basis of appearances, of how the world appears to us. Appearances are created by our subconscious but also by the powerful plutocrats and advertisers and politicians who bombard us with images, soundbites, and 24/7 temptations and hysteria. Under the oppression of appearances, we live by what allows us to achieve some measure of interior calm. Against this resigned consolation, Plato advocated for a politics of the real, that we must concern our activity not with how we feel, but with whether the real relations between us are just and good. What matters most is the reality of our lives, not the appearance of how things are, our feelings about existence.

People ruled by feelings and appearances do not vote with their heads or their hearts, but with their gut. To make decisions with our head is to exercise our reason, to decide on the basis of conscientious deliberation using the necessary information, trusted sources, and reliable methods, all aiming at the common good. To make decisions with our heart is to rely on a rightly-ordered emotional and instinctual life to guide us, where we live by humility, compassion, curiosity, and that mysterious scruple in our spirit called our ‘conscience.’

There is another part of our selves that often can dominate our lives. It’s the source of our desires and our fears, and that is the gut. When we decide from our gut, we are often in a state of either panic or craving, and we act in a manner that we feel will move us either further from a threat or closer to the objects of our desires.

The gut does not motivate us from reliable information about our situation; rather, our gut is an impulsive reaction within ourselves to alleviate psychological discomfort. Fear reactions often arise from feelings of alienation or insecurity, e.g. “If we just deport all of those kinds of people, I’d feel safe again.” Craving reactions can be rooted in feelings of lack and incompleteness, e.g. “If everyone would just accept me as I am, then I’ll be living the life that I want.”

People who vote with their gut, not the heads or hearts, are people who care less about plans and more about being told a good story, as Cottom said. A plan requires exercising our reason; understanding how to address the oncerns of a nation involves bringing our heart to politics. But gut reactions do not aim at changing things for the better; they instigate performative actions that make me feel better inside myself. So Donald Trump comes along and says, effectively, “Things are bad; I’ll make them good,” and our gut screams, yes, yes, that’s what I want, things have been so bad and I want to believe someone is finally going to make them good!

Cottom’s instincts here are backed up by sound social science research on voter behavior. Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, recently had this to say on the Mindscape podcast with Sean Carroll,

“This is something I have talked to Democrats [about]. The Democratic Party fully believes that if Americans just knew what kind of policies they had enacted, everybody would be rational and would vote for them because of those policies. And everything I've ever studied basically says people don't care about policies, though. They don't. They feel like they want to feel like you're fighting for them, that you're part of their team, that you're going to win. And the policies themselves are not that important to people. But somehow in the Democratic Party, there's a sense of like, well, if we play on emotions, then that's like crass politics, right? We're not going to stoop to the level of emotion, of emotional manipulation. But that's all politics is. It's all emotion. It's literally that feelings don't care about your facts. Right? It's not facts don't care about your feelings. You cannot convince somebody with facts to be not angry. It's impossible. And there's no way to argue against emotions with these sterile policy points.”

We have a conundrum. According to Plato, the only way to achieve justice within society is to carefully deliberate upon the facts using our reason informed by our heart to developed plans and policies carefully tailored to the concrete contextual needs of the society. By contrast, during a popular vote our most important decisions—who will be our leaders and what fundamental laws we will have—are made by people who, en masse, are often incapable of discerning the facts or exercising reason, and who are easily beguiled by silver-tongued devils selling feel-good fairy tales about how things will be great again.

We want justice, and yet many of us have incorrigibly bound ourselves to a kind of blind faith in the gut-instincts of the delusional and craven masses.

II.

The day after The Daily Show conversation, Hanna Rosin and guests Anne Applebaum and McKay Coppins discussed the election on Radio Atlantic. In this first exchange between Coppins and Applebaum, the topic of voter responsibility is raised. If we are voting with our gut, do we have a responsibility to be more rational?

Coppins: [W]hile we can sit back and look at the broad scope of history, it is clear that not all voters who went in to vote in these last few weeks were thinking about democracy. But I think it’s also good to point that out because Donald Trump is going to claim a mandate, coming out of this election, and say: I swept the swing states. The voters want me to have all this power. He’ll implicitly say, They want me to abuse my power. They’ve given me permission to do whatever I want. And I think that it’s worth noting that for a whole lot of people who voted for him, they just wanted him to make groceries cost less.

Applebaum: Yeah, but that’s not really an excuse. I mean, you are, as a voter, obligated to know what the person you’re voting for stands for. And the responsibility of the president of the United States is not merely to control inflation. The president also has a lot of power over the U.S. government, over U.S. institutions, over American foreign policy, and by deciding you don’t care about those things, you do give him that mandate.

Anne Applebaum believes that only caring about a single issue like lowering cost-of-living does not excuse voting for bad leaders and policies. We have a responsibility to know what the person we’re voting for will reliably do once in office. We cannot vote to lower the cost of groceries and say to ourselves, “But who knows what they’re actually going to try and do.”

Consider an analogy. Suppose what I want is for more housing to get built, and so I weaken safety requirements for residential structures. More homes get built, but they are unsafe and a number of families suffer injuries or even death as a result. While I didn’t intend for anyone to get hurt—I was just trying to build homes—I still had a responsibility to consider the full consequences of my decision to weaken safety requirements.

Applebaum rightly details that Presidents do not just lead aspects of a nation’s economic policy; they also are instrumental in military policy, foreign policy, natural disaster response, distributing social services, and enforcing domestic laws. Voting for someone who will do what you want economically but who will also abuse power or neglect their legal obligations is an irresponsible trade-off by voters, Applebaum seems to think.

Yet it’s hard to justify her expectation in the face of the aforementioned psychological facts about voters. We need responsible voters who are capable of judging lots of complex issues simultaneously and who are fully informed about the character and goals of the people they vote for. Is it fair to expect people to achieve this level of responsibility en masse in large scale elections? Pietistic notions of civic duty won’t cut it.

Even the most optimistic election champion will find themselves daunted by an additional complication Coppins and Applebaum highlight in recent American elections:

Coppins: The other thing that I think we’ve seen is that a big purpose of propaganda and disinformation is not even just to convince people that a certain thing is true but to almost exhaust their ability to tell the difference between what’s true and what’s not, and make them cynical and fatigued and disinclined to even try.

I remember in 2020, I spent a lot of time covering disinformation in the campaign. And that was the thing that I would encounter when I talked to Trump voters. It wasn’t so much that they believed everything he said. Some would even acknowledge that he would lie or exaggerate. But they would throw their hands up and say: Yeah, they all lie, right? Who even knows what’s true? And that, I think, is the thing that we need to guard against over these next few years.

Applebaum: That is the essence of Putinist propaganda. It’s not so much that you’re expected to believe everything he says about whatever, the greatness of Russia or the horror of Western civilization. But you’re expected to become so confused by the multitude and number of lies that you’ve been told that you throw your hands up in the air, and you go home, and you say, I don’t know anything. I can’t be involved in this. I don’t want anything to do with politics. I’m just going to live my life.

And that turns out to be a really, really successful form of propaganda, probably more successful than the old-fashioned Soviet thing of telling everybody that everything is great, which you can disprove pretty easily.

Our popular culture has become lie-saturated; we’re bombarded with falsehoods that foster a general culture of distrust in society at large. Trump’s goal is not to get you to trust him, but to get you to not trust anyone. In a world like ours, resignation to not vote or to vote by coin-flip become default attitudes, and Trump is very successful at manipulating the narrative in this culture of widespread, vague distrust.

So even if the American electorate was suddenly spurred by a scruple of civic duty and sought to become more responsible voters, the information landscape is structured by design to poison our confidence that we can become well-informed rational voters.

III.

There is no way to square the factual nature of voter behavior in recent American elections with the enthusiasm Democrat supporters and left-of-center activists have for getting out the vote. They operate under a fantasy of equality and empowerment in which they imagine the enlightened masses rising up at the ballot box to endorse all manner of liberal and progressive agendas. This fantasy gets shattered in nearly every election or in the subsequent policy decisions of the incoming administration and Congress. Yet like moths to a flame, by the next election they’re back out canvassing neighborhoods, stumping for candidates, posting yard-signs, and helming call centers.

Even moderates and Never Trump Republicans echo Democrats’ message that the best strategy for opposing the abuses of the Trump administration is to get out the vote in 2026 during the mid-terms to try and wrest control of Congress away from the Republican party. Yet it was the vote that gave MAGA Republicans control of Congress in the first place!

At the heart of their beliefs pro-democracy advocates harbor an irresolvable contradiction: they support the right to vote and yet it is because of the right to vote that we keep suffering bad leaders and destructive policies. They insist on the right of everyone to participate in the decision-making process and then are flummoxed when they find themselves in a nation of people making bad decisions.

Those of us who oppose Trump’s administration but support the civic duty to vote need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves, “Is this really the best way to select leaders and set policy agendas?”

Uncovering the source of the contradiction amongst election enthusiasts is not difficult. Most left-of-center and progressive folk have a historical affinity—nay, an almost religious reverence—for women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement led by Black Americans. Both periods of our nation’s history featured traditionally disenfranchised Americans fighting through great sacrifice and suffering to be included in the “one person, one vote” enfranchisement. To not support voting and the right to vote feels (there’s that gut again!) to many like spitting on their legacy. Because of the Left’s historical affinity for women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement, they are deeply committed to the right to vote as the ‘bedrock of democracy,’ even in the face of the wild irrationality, disinformation, and financial corruption of the electoral process.

We are not going to have a better politics in this country until we can jettison this contradiction from our political thinking. Because right now the thing that is killing American democracy . . . is democracy.

We can break the contradiction if enough of us stop using our gut and start using our heads to reflect soberly on the idea of voting. We have to learn how to think two things at once.

The first thing we must think is to celebrate the achievements of women’s suffrage and civil rights legislation. Within any political system where some people are excluded from the franchise of full rights, privileges, and responsibilities as citizens, we must advocate for the full enfranchisement of all people into the body politic. Citizenship has no meaning if there are ‘second-class citizens.’ That’s not citizenship, but subjugation. So we can value women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement as enfranchising previously disempowered people.

The second thing we must think is that we can nonetheless critique the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of the citizenship franchise itself when it fails to serve the common good. So while we celebrate the right to vote for women and minorities previously denied the right to vote, we can and must critique the right to vote itself. Popular elections are a inadequate method to select leaders and determine policy goals. Popular elections enslave our nation to the whims of the mob and their gut.

Liberals and progressives are most at fault for our present dilemma. Their cognitive dissonance about the contradiction at the center of their beliefs has made the right to vote into a kind of fetish, immune to critique and revision. Acting from their gut, the American Left is afraid that even tolerating criticism of the right to vote implies rolling back the franchise to once again exclude women and minorities. Yet as we just saw in the discourse samples from The Daily Show and Radio Atlantic, the critique has already been admitted. It’s only fear of the unknown that is preventing Democrats and their supporters from drawing the unavoidable conclusion: the right to vote has enfranchised an uninformed and foolish electorate to decide our most important political questions.

If we truly care about upholding the legacy of women’s suffrage and civil rights legislation, then we must recognize that true justice is enfranchising people into a system that serves the common good, not the rich and famous. The election of billionaire celebrity Donald Trump is undeniable evidence that the right to vote serves the rich and famous, not the common good. Will Never Trumpers, moderates, Democrats, liberals, and progressives have the courage to face the contradiction at the heart of their politics and oppose the right to vote?

IV.

Like all things, people can give up something more successfully if there is a clear alternative to take its place. If we abandon the right to vote because it perpetuates a corrupt system in which we as an irrational and delusional mass population elect people like Donald Trump to office, what would take its place? How would we select leaders and decide policies? Thankfully, an alternative is ready-to-hand.

Consider another political space in which very important decisions get made —criminal jury trials. We all understand that in a criminal jury trial, the fate of people’s lives hang in the balance. We risk sentencing innocent people and we risk letting off guilty people. It’s very important in criminal proceedings that we get right who is guilty and who is innocent.

Yet no one advocates for a popular right to vote in a criminal jury trial, where the entire county or state or nation casts a vote. That would be disastrous! We’ve all been through so-called ‘media trials’ where some famous case is closely watched on television and the internet. Recent examples include the O. J. Simpson trial, the Depp v. Heard defamation case, and the Kyle Rittenhouse prosecution. In each of those trials, ordinary citizens closely scrutinized the broadcast proceedings, and many people vigorously debated what the verdict should be on social media platforms.

Imagine if someone had called for an enfranchisement of the general public to sit on the jury in each of those trials. Whatever we think of the actual verdicts in those cases, subjecting them to a mass vote would have taken us further from justice.

When a jury is selected, they are vetted by the judge and the attorneys present for their virtue and competence to serve as impartial jurors. Moreover, the judge regularly excuses them from the court room and edits the court record to filter what information the jury has access to. The goal is to ensure that the jurors have all the relevant information, the best information, and none of the disinformation. What they witness is very different than what those of us watching on television encounter. Once the parties rest their respective arguments, the jurors are sequestered to deliberate away from the heat and frenzy of the media spotlight.

While juries are far from perfect and could do with some reform, they are superior to subjecting criminal verdicts to a popular vote. None of us believe we have a right to vote in a criminal trial, because we’re all comfortable with a random selection of twelve peers serving as ‘the public’ on our behalf at the trial.

Elections are no different. Just as a media trial heavily biases and confuses the wider population as to how guilt or innocence should be determined in a criminal proceeding, so the ‘media trial’ of political campaigns leads us to vote with our gut not with our heads and hearts. In like spirit, we should abandon the acrimonious and pugilistic nature of elections by giving up the right to vote, and instead allowing for a randomly selected cohort of peers to select leaders and set policy directions.

In other words, we need to abandon mass elections in favor of a system of electoral colleges.

An electoral college is simply a cohort of citizens temporarily selected to vote on a single slate of candidates and issues, after which the cohort is dissolved and the electors return to their ordinary lives (just like in jury trials). Instead of giving everyone the right to vote, all citizens participate in a lottery to become an elector. Electors are selected by lottery to serve in electoral colleges for local and state elections, and for the presidential electoral college that is already provided for the U.S. Constitution (although it has not been given operational autonomy in more than a hundred years).

No popular vote, no polls taken, no blitz of campaign ads and rallies, and no billions of dollars spent on campaigns.

A randomly selected electoral college would be much more representative of the electorate as a whole than a popular vote, which is heavily skewed by the self-selecting portion of the electorate that actually shows up to vote (generally between 55-60%).

Just like in jury selection, the randomly selected delegates would be vetted using proxies for virtue and competence. Once selected, electors can be provided with crash courses in civics, national policy issues, and given an opportunity to interview relevant experts and candidates.

Switching to a system of electoral colleges would allow for small groups of highly-competent people to become highly-informed on the relevant issues. The college could be sequestered with no outside media access, guarding against both media distortion and lobbyist corruption.

At the local level, an electoral college might meet for three days, with electors receiving mandatory paid leave from their normal occupation for each day of service, plus a small stipend. At the state level, maybe the college meets for a week or two. The presidential electoral college in each state might meet for three weeks, where they would vet a slate of candidates regardless of party affiliation.

Just as we don’t all need to vote on criminal verdicts, so we don’t all need to vote in every election cycle. We would all have an equal chance of being randomly selected for service, and just as in jury trials, people with undue interests or evident biases or demonstrable lack of virtue would be excused from serving. Those who remain would be given the means to become much more informed about their voting decisions, and they’d have the leisure time for sustained deliberation. Members of a college would debate with each other throughout the session and even form voting coalitions, though at the end everyone would vote their conscience and every vote would count as one.

Obviously there are a host of details to work out, but the simple plan is clear — take the model of the presidential electoral college in our nation’s Constitution and generalize it to all elections. The electoral college is in the Constitution; the right to vote is not.

Certainly many readers will feel a sense of defensiveness or possessiveness about the right to vote. Humans are naturally loss-averse, so we’re generally unwilling to give something up once we have it. All I ask is that you recognize the feeling you have of entitlement to a right to vote is your gut talking, not your head. You don’t have that same feeling about having a right to vote in every jury trial. That’s because it’s not a right you already have. With time, the feeling will pass on the right to vote in every election.

If we want to become a people who select leaders and set policy with our head and heart, not our gut, then we need to admit that we cannot do this in the feeding frenzy of popular vote elections, influenced as they are by mass media, and multi-million dollar campaigns. The popular vote only benefits the rich and famous. We need to create environments where we are at our best when we vote, not at our worst. The popular vote consistently brings out the worst in us. An electoral college will at least give us a better chance to be responsible voters.

Switching to a system of electoral colleges scales down our decision-making process to something manageable. Such a process would be more fair than popular vote elections, it would lead to more responsible voting behavior, it would ensure a better quality of voter, and best of all, it’s the kind of system that won’t select leaders like Donald Trump. If we want to honor what women and minorities have fought for in American political life, then we need an electoral college that serves the common good, not a popular election that pacifies our gut.