Our presidential election system is a mess

If you opened up your newspaper and read that Joe Biden was campaigning in California, you’d think that something had gone terribly wrong with his campaign, or perhaps with the world as a whole. What could cause this madness? Why on earth would either of the party’s nominees visit a state that is home to about 1 in 8 Americans?

Yet when you read reports such as this one from the Washington Post, nothing seems odd at all:

“Last week’s Republican convention had just concluded when Joe Biden’s top strategists began hearing from worried Democrats. They told the officials that President [Donald] Trump’s singular focus on a ‘law and order’ message, coupled with images of violence in cities, threatened Biden’s standing, particularly among white voters in the industrial Midwest.

“Over the past few days, Biden has offered his response, reorienting his campaign. He delivered a forceful anti-Trump speech in Pittsburgh, afterward bringing pizza to a firehouse. He began giving newfound attention to Minnesota, a state Democrats haven’t lost in nearly 50 years, and his campaign is eyeing potential trips to Wisconsin and Michigan.”

I’m not talking about the “worried Democrats,” which are a constant, nor am I referring to the fact that the presidential race hasn’t actually changed since the Republican convention. It’s the fact that the Biden campaign — or anyone else, for that matter — should actually care what voters in Minnesota are thinking, any more than we do about voters in any of the other 49 states (plus D.C.!).

As the article explains, “Central to Biden’s success is maintaining the support of voters like Kevin King, a 59-year-old retired Marine from Alexandria, Minn.” Which is both perfectly true and utterly bonkers.

Because we’re so familiar with the first part — swing voters in swing states, they’re the ones the campaigns worry most about — we seldom stop to remind ourselves how ludicrous it is that the inclinations of King (who I’m sure is a perfectly nice guy) should matter any more to Biden and Trump, and all the people who work for them, than Frederick Flapjack of Bonner Springs, Kan., or Maryanne Moxytoes of Scituate, R.I. Or you.

We’ve heard this all before, you may be saying — another complaint about the Electoral College. But we have to remind ourselves — particularly given the fact that in two months we could have yet another election result in which the candidate who got more votes does not become president — just what an abomination this system is.

By all means, we can devote extreme scrutiny to the moves the campaigns are making in the Midwest. That’s one area where they are focused, after all. But every time we do, the fact that it’s an affront to every democratic value should be at the top of our minds.

Right now, almost no one outside of deranged Trump partisans thinks the president will win the popular vote in November. His only chance for victory — and it’s a good one — is to once again assemble the right combination of state wins to get him 270 electoral votes. Which would mean that in half the presidential elections of the last 20 years, the vote loser wound up winning the White House.

In other words, it’s not just an unusual occurrence, something that was always possible but we seldom had to worry too much about. It’s now a regular feature of presidential elections.

Turnout projections are running at around 150 million this year (137 million voted in 2016), which would mean that if Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight is right, Biden could win by 3 million to 4.5 million votes and still have less than a 50 percent chance of becoming president. If Biden won by 4 percent to 5 percent, or 6 million to 7.5 million votes, Trump would still have a 1-in-10 shot of prevailing.

The proper response to that isn’t to say, “Well, whaddya gonna do? It’s always been that way.” The proper response is unending, incandescent outrage.

I’d like to think that even if the situation were reversed and it was Democrats who were given a giant thumb on the scale by the Electoral College, they’d still be eager to get rid of it, since that’s what anyone who has even the barest commitment to democracy simply has to believe. And it’s conceivable we’ll find ourselves in precisely that situation in the near future.

I’ll pledge right now that if that should happen I’ll keep raging against the Electoral College. Because we could have a different future.