Two geriatric candidates are vying for the White House in an undemocratic system.
Democracy in America? “Bah! Humbug!” Ebenezer Scrooge would say. This iconic fictional protagonist, created by Charles Dickens, would have a characteristically sarcastic view of American democracy today. He would have a point. After all, how can a country claim to be democratic when in a crucial election a winner can lose and a loser can win? In the year 2000, Al Gore received 48.4% of the national vote but lost the presidential election to George W Bush who received 47.9%. In 2016, Hilary Clinton received 48.2% of the votes cast, but lost to Donald Trump’s 46.1%. Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes than Trump, but still came second. How can this happen?
To understand you have to go all the way back to the 1787 Constitutional Convention held in the US State of Philadelphia, which decided how the president should be elected. The delegates debated the issue for months, with some arguing that Congress should pick the president and others insistent on a democratic popular vote. In the end they compromised on a process called the Electoral College, in which nowadays 538 electors are divided up among the states. Small states receive a minimum of 3 electors, and the large states many more. Dig deep, however, and you’ll find a strong element of racism in their final decision. The creation of the Electoral College was a workaround for the persistence of slavery in the United States.
The undemocratic nature of the Electoral College has been debated for years. According to the US Congressional Research Service there have been more than 700 attempts to reform or abolish the system, the first being just 25 years after it was created. All attempts were thwarted by vested interest. The reformists nearly succeeded in 1969, when the House of Representatives voted by an overwhelming 338 votes to 70 to send a constitutional amendment to the Senate that would have dismantled the Electoral College in favour of a directly elected president. But their hopes were dashed when a group of Southern senators blocked it with a filibuster. This is sometimes referred to as “talking a bill to death” and is another old convention that many argue should be abolished.
So why is the Electoral College still tolerated? Part reason is that historically the party in power tends to benefit from the system and the minority party has little chance of changing it. The Electoral College is embedded in the Constitution and it therefore requires a two-thirds supermajority in Congress plus ratification by three quarters of the states to enact any changes. As the least populated states have a guaranteed three electors, they are always unlikely to support change and lose power. For example, the small state of Wyoming has 3 electors for a population of 532,668 citizens (1 for every 177,556) whereas Texas has 32 electors for a population of almost 25 million (1 for every 781,250). Do the maths and you’ll find that an individual vote in Wyoming counts nearly 4 times as much as one in Texas. Hardly democratic.
But it gets worse. In the majority of states there is a “winner takes all” system, in which states award all of their electors to the candidate who wins the state-wide popular vote. So, a Republican candidate who wins 1 more vote than his Democratic rival, gets all the electors for that state in the Electoral College. This system also encourages a process called political gerrymandering, in which the dominant party in a state redraws district lines to favour its own candidate, making it difficult or even impossible for the rival candidate to win an election.
Even worse is racial gerrymandering, when district voting lines are drawn to prevent racial minorities from electing their preferred candidates. Several decades ago, white majorities in some states began to realise that over time they would become the minority, because of immigration and higher birth rates among people of colour. Race then became the prime factor in drawing district voting lines so that people of colour were “packed” into the same district in greater numbers than necessary to elect their candidate of choice. Alabama, in particular, has a sordid record of using racial discrimination in order that its white citizens can hold on to power.
It’s against this backdrop that President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will go head-to-head in the presidential election on 5 November. The winner will be the one who receives the votes of more than half of the 538 electors in the Electoral College and will therefore become the 47th President of the United States of America. The curious thing is that most voters want neither Biden nor Trump on the ballot paper. Recent reports suggest that some 70% of Americans don’t want a 2020 rematch and that they don’t just dislike one candidate, they dislike both. One reason is age; Biden will be 81 years old and Trump 77 years on the date of the election. If elected, Biden would be 85 at the end of the term and Trump 81.
President Biden sought to dispel concerns about his age by giving a fiery State of the Union address in Congress on Thursday – the speech of his life according to some. Polls taken immediately after the event show that he was largely successful, with more than 60% of those interviewed expressing a positive reaction, adding that Biden’s policies will “move America in the right direction”. Before the address, many Americans saw Biden simply limping along the campaign trail, worried that his age and listless demeanour were dragging him down. But the Biden who turned up on Thursday was a completely different kind of animal, in the view of CNN’s David Gergen: “passionate, feisty, focused and eager to put the gloves on”. His colleague Sophia Nelson agreed: “in my opinion age is an asset” she said. “We need calm, not chaos. We need the wise, not the wild. Biden has in spades what former President Trump lacks: the steadiness of having lived a life of service amid great success and great loss”.
True to form, Donald Trump slammed Joe Biden multiple times during the speech as angry, mentally disturbed and misrepresenting all the facts. “But he got through it and is still breathing and they didn’t have to carry him out in a straitjacket”, said a cynical Trump. “Other than that, I think he did a terrible job”. But Trump has his own multiple problems. In all he faces 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts, including fraud, defamation, the use of hush money to silence women who accuse him of sexual assault, and wilful retention of classified documents. The list goes on and on. Any one of these could potentially result in a prison sentence, with the possibility of Trump having to campaign for the presidency from behind bars. His lawyers are desperately trying to delay court appearances until after the vote on 5 November when, if elected, Trump could pardon himself.
Such is the state of democracy in America today. Two geriatric candidates are vying for the White House in an undemocratic system; one accused of being old and listless, the other accused of multiple crimes that could land him in jail. American democracy really is a case of Bah! Humbug!
John Dobson is a former British diplomat, who also worked in UK Prime Minister John Major’s office between 1995 and 1998. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Plymouth.