Most people paying attention to the news these days are accustomed to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spouting nonsense. Even so, her recent statement decrying the Electoral College as a “racist scam” is turning heads.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez made the comments during a video she made while driving through America’s heartland, and sarcastically commenting on how many voters she could see as she sped through rural areas. After poking fun at these areas, she then states that the Electoral College has a “racial injustice breakdown” because small rural states tend to have a lot of white people living in them.
Those who understand how the Electoral College works are pointing out that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is completely, willfully misinformed. When the United States was formed, representatives from rural states with small populations were concerned that coastal states with large populations would always determine every political outcome. To ensure that this wasn’t the case, the Electoral College was made so that an aspiring president would have to win support from a broad cross-section of the population.
The Electoral College continues to ensure that this is the case; without it, aspiring presidents would spend all their time campaigning in large cities such as Los Angeles, while completely ignoring everywhere else. Race had nothing to do with the formation of the Electoral College. It is not a “democracy-altering fairness provision,” because the United States is not in fact a democracy. It is a constitutional republic, and was intentionally structured as such so that no branch of government — or individual state — becomes too powerful.
Democrats have complained about the Electoral College before — the last time a Republican was elected president. When Barack Obama swept to victory in 2008 with a commanding lead in the Electoral College, these complaints disappeared. Now, however, it’s a different story.
A number of left-leaning states have joined a compact to get around the Electoral College by forcing the state’s electors to vote for the person who won the popular vote in the presidential election. Thankfully, the compact is null and void until the states have at least 270 electoral votes between them. However, the compact isn’t the only threat the Electoral College faces. Leading Democratic presidential candidates such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg have called for the Electoral College to be abolished.
Let’s be honest about all of this — this isn’t about Democrats trying to be more fair. Democrats still can’t handle the fact that they lost the 2016 election. They spent a lot of time coming up with excuses for how they lost; however, now they seem to be turning their attention toward gaming the system. If most of America’s heartland voted Democrat, left-leaning activists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t have a thing to say about it. However, the fact that tens of millions of Americans would dare to vote against the wishes of the coastal elite in is anathema to a party that simply doesn’t want to get to know rural Americans live.
