In my own case of course, Donald Trump is not my president and is unlikely to ever be my president. This is because I am a citizen of Australia and Trump’s influence over Australia is likely to remain indirect. Curiously though, indignant hashtags notwithstanding, he is not the president of anyone else either, at least not for the moment.
The US Federal government is quite similar to Australia’s and for the very good reason that Australia largely based its system on the US during the various constitutional conventions that occurred in the late 19th century. Both countries have bicameral parliaments (parliament being ‘Congress’ in the case of the US), with the lower house being largely the introducer of legislation and the upper house being largely a house of review. In both cases the lower house is the House of Representatives and the upper house the Senate. The US Senate has greater powers than its Australian equivalent, but there are great similarities between the two.
Also in both cases, a member of the House of Representatives (commonly known in the US simply as “the house”) represents a certain geographical area and each area has approximately the same number of people. In the US these areas are known as Congressional Districts and in Australia they are Electoral Divisions or Electorates. Also similar is the Senate where in both cases there are a fixed number of Senators per state. In the US there are 2 Senators per state, but in Australia there are 12.
It is at the Head of State level that the two system diverge most greatly. In Australia we live under a monarchy and therefore our head of state is the monarch. In general the monarch has very little involvement in the governing of the country and the monarch’s representative (the Governor General or GG) acts as the head of state for almost all formal occasions. In recent times the Queen has actually made a point of staying away from certain events in order that the Prime Minister or GG can act as head of state in her absence.
All this means that the role of Head of State in Australia is largely a ceremonial one and the person who would be considered most powerful political figure is in fact the head of government, the Prime Minister, rather than the head of state. The Prime Minister is not directly elected, but is simply the senior figure of the ruling party in the lower house, by convention the leader of the party. The closest US position would be the majority leader of the house, a powerful position no doubt, but hardly with the equivalent profile as the Australian Prime Minister.
In the US of course there was no question of adopting a foreign monarch as head of state, the whole War of Independence had been fought to ensure that the States were able to control their own destiny and therefore a US Head of State would be required. While the final outcome that we see today seems obvious and natural, it was far from a certainty as the founding fathers debated various approaches. A key factor in the US approach was the importance of the states and the rights of those respective states, the country was not a single entity, but a collection of like minded entities, hence the United STATES of America. The states were very keen to preserve their own rights and smaller states especially did not want to find themselves coerced by larger states that might have quite different priorities and interests than their own.
Of course the larger states at the time of independence; Virginia, Pennsylvania and to a lesser extent, Massachusetts and North Carolina, were also keen to protect their self interest. The Senate, often known as the state’s house in Australia, offered some balance for the smaller states and those smaller states were keen to apply this to the presidency as well. The larger states on the other hand were more inclined toward a simple popular vote. In the absence of this, the larger states were suggesting a vote of the joint houses of parliament, which would still give the more populous states an advantage through the house of reps, but would be tempered by the Senate. The initial compromise, known as the Virginia Plan, indeed had the joint congress appointing a President, but this was unsatisfactory to most and was only ever intended to be a stop-gap.
The house of reps provided population-based representation and the senate provided state-based representation, how should the President be elected? There was some discussion of a simple popular vote, but the smaller states and especially the states where slavery was an important economic factor, were unlikely to agree with this. On the other hand, the appointment of the President by congress raised concerns about the independence of the Presidency and concern at the extent to which the President would be beholden to the houses of Congress. There was quite some wrangling over these issues and much was written (take a look at the Federalist papers if you ever have a chance, they are all online) and even more was said. The end result was a rather brilliant blend of the two positions. Each state would be assigned a number of electors in proportion to the size of that state.[1] Each state would allocate votes to electors in whatever manner that state saw fit, with most states awarding all of their votes to the electors winning a plurality of the vote.[2] The electors would then meet to cast votes for the President.[3]
One of the effects of the system was that a presidential candidate could not achieve a victory by appealing to small areas with large population centers. For example at the time of independence, over half of the US population could be found in just 4 of the 13 states; Massachusetts, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. It would be easy to imagine a candidate focusing all of their efforts on these states and ignoring the remaining states. By allocating a set number of votes to each state, the candidate was effectively forced to consider those smaller states.
The electors, once the votes are tallied, make their way to a designated spot (usually the state capital) at a designated time (the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December[4]) and cast their votes for their chosen candidate. There is the freedom for electors to vote for a candidate other than their pledged candidate, a phenomenon called a “faithless elector”. There have been a few occasions in the past where electors have voted for someone other than the candidate they were supposed to vote for and the penalties for doing this are minor or nonexistent. In recent times, this has usually been as a result of an error (for example in the 2004 election, one candidate voted for “John Ewards” rather than John Kerry) or a protest (for example in the 1988 election, an elector cast their vote in the opposite order to that pledged as a protest against Washington DC’s lack of congressional representation) and in no instance since 1796 have faithless electors affected the outcome.[5]
On January 6th,[6] once all the electors have voted and the results sent to the houses of congress, the joint house meets to ratify the voting of the electors and any objections are deliberated on. There have been objections raised in the past on several occasions, but any objections must be supported by at least one Representative and at least one Senator. During the deliberations following the 2000 election, there were objections raised by Representatives, but no Senators could be found to support the objections.
So all of this brings us to Donald Trump not being my President or anyone else’s either.
Much was made of the fact that Clinton won the majority of votes overall (the popular vote) but that Trump still won the election. This was in fact, largely due to circumstances explicitly seen by the founding fathers. Clinton did win almost 3,000,000 votes more than Trump across the US, but this was due to Clinton’s voter base being largely made up of large numbers of people in small areas. For example Clinton convincingly won California with over 60% of the vote and New York with just under 60% of the vote. In California alone she won over 4,000,000 more votes than Trump.[7]
In fact you could say that Trump “gamed” the system. His campaign in New York was, to borrow a phrase, low energy at best and his campaign in California was essentially nonexistent. Trump knew full well that his chances of victory in those states was low and chose to ignore them, focussing instead on the more marginal states that could actually make a difference.
Trump is calling his victory a “landslide” which is something of an embellishment, but with 304 electoral votes in 30 states compared to 227 votes in 20 states, on the face of it, it could reasonably be called a comfortable win. An important point though is that Trump had narrow wins in many of the states that he won, only 80,000 votes across the 130,000,000 cast needed to change hands across three states for the election to go the other way. Once again though, this is an example of how Trump worked smart. He saw opportunities to win electoral votes and went after them. He saw states where he had no hope and ignored them. The popular vote meant nothing to him and he cared nothing for it.
Following the elections and the #notmypresident campaign, there was a push for the electors to overturn the result. Various celebrities campaigned with their most sincere voice and accompanied by solemn music to encourage electors to vote for anyone other than Trump. The idea behind this was that Alexander Hamilton had said in the Federalist papers discussing the electoral process that the electors should reject any candidate “not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications”. The movement became known as the “Hamilton Electors” and at one point claimed up to 30 Republican electors that would vote for a candidate other than Trump. In the end though there were only two, both in Texas, and they made no difference to the result. Curiously enough there were actually 5 faithless Democrat electors, four in Washington state and one in Hawaii. The total of 7 faithless electors is the largest number since the 1912 election.
The official ratification of the electoral vote came on January 6th without incident and so, while Donald Trump is #notmypresident, I expect that - barring anything unforeseen - he will be President of US citizens come the January 20th inauguration.
So why did Donald Trump win the election? Partly because he played it smarter than his opponent. Trump, perhaps because of his business background, recognised that there is no point running a good race and losing. He went for the win early and stayed focussed on activities that would give him the win. Primarily on campaigning in states where a win was possible, but also on ignoring states where a win was out of the question. He had much less funding than his opponent (Trump spent about $900 million compared to Clinton’s $1.4 Billion) but managed to get as much coverage as his opponent, partly because of some of his outrageous statements.
Trump also obtained an advantage from the liberal elite in much the same way that the Brexit campaign enjoyed an advantage bestowed by the same people. I’ve written about this before and maintain that there is a backlash from the ordinary people against the educated elite that would seek to dictate terms to them. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Clinton’s statement that half of Trump’s supporters were “deplorables”.
I want to be sure here that I quote Clinton in context, so I’ll give you the quote a little more fully;
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
A key issue in the campaign was immigration. Many American voters were concerned about the rate and type of immigration and Clinton, by using the terms that she did, attempted to shut that debate down. If you’re concerned about immigration, you must be xenophobic or Islamophobic. If you’re not in favor of same-sex marriage, you are homophobic. If you don’t agree that women are a downtrodden minority, you’re sexist. There was no possibility for a rationale argument on these matters as the Democrat opinion was the moral one and, ipso facto, any opposition was immoral.
In this way, by using emotive terms and claiming that their side of the argument was a moral one, the Democrats shut down the possibility of any engagement on these subjects. They shamed anyone supporting Trump on moral grounds rather than engaging in any meaningful discussion. This left Trump supporters unwilling to declare themselves as such and we had a phenomenon very similar to the “shy tory” that we’ve previously encountered in British elections, whereby polls are skewed by respondents unwilling to declare their true allegiance. This was the case in the US, with every poll predicting a Clinton win right up to the election.
So what happens now? Well, for the next four years we will have a Trump presidency and depending on who you listen to, this will either lead to a complete breakdown of society with openly racist, sexist, xenophobic bigots running the country or it will lead to a resurgence of the US as The Donald Makes America Great Again.
I suspect neither of these scenarios are true, but four years from now we’ll know a lot more. One thing I do hope for is that the left in general and the Democrats in particular have learned a lesson. That the way to convince people is to engage and have a conversation, not to lecture and moralise. Shutting down a conversation is no way to win over ordinary people with genuine concerns. I hope they’ll understand this, but I suspect they won’t. Certainly Meryl Streep did not seem to get it.
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[1]The number of electors is the same as the total of the number of Senators plus the number of Representatives. In the smallest states, such as Wyoming, there is only one Representative meaning these states have a minimum of three electors. The largest state at present (by population) is California, with a total of 2 Senators and 53 Representatives(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_and_secession_in_California). This leads to the anomalous situation where Wyoming has around 150,000 voters per elector and California has 500,000 voters per elector.
[2]While most states allocate their electors on a “winner takes all” basis, the state is free to decide to adopt another system. In Maine and Nebraska for example there is a sort of proportional representation with an elector assigned to each congressional district. Once the vote is tallied, a number of electors are allocated based on the rules of that state. These electors are then “pledged” to the preferred candidate.
[3]Electors are chosen by the relevant candidates party. Their role is limited to meeting after the election and casting their votes. That’s it.
[4]Basically this allows time for the horse and carriage to make the arduous journeys to and from DC with news of the result.
[5]The 1796 election was conducted under previous rules whereby electors did not specifically vote for a President and Vice President, but the Vice President was the candidate with the second highest number of votes. Faithless electors, responding to a rumor that Alexander Hamilton planned to install Thomas Pinkney (the VP candidate) as President. The outcome was that the VP ended up being the presidential candidate for the opposing party, the first and only time that the President and Vice President have been from different parties.
[6]Again allowing time for the horses to rest and make the journey back to the Capitol.
[7]By population, California is the largest state by far (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population#States_and_territories), holding 12% of the total US population and being as large as the smallest 22 states combined.
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Photo courtesy Gage Skidmore https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/30020836983
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