The Electoral College - Preventing Panem (For Now)

Trump also won one electoral vote in Maine

It is among my core beliefs that both political parties have gotten far too materialistic and now largely exist to hand out benefits to their given supporters.  What, pray tell, does this have to do with the Electoral College?

Well, let me put it this way.  Politics have become a bread and circuses giveaway carnival like in Imperial Rome.   Since America now lacks a compelling intangible telos, or reason for being, politicians simply promise the most tangible benefits to their key supporters as possible in a vapid, materialistic zero-sum game.

In other words, without the Electoral College, a populist candidate could simply juice up the voting totals in any given highly populated state with wild promises, win the popular vote going away, and make American political culture even more of an unfullfillable promises arms race than it already is.  The next election cycle would simply see the next round of candidates trotting out even crazier promises, and so on.  The results of this are clearly seen in debt-shackled Europe and unstable Latin America, both of which have this problem.  Don't even remind me of the Roman Empire, which bread and circused itself out of existence more than 1,500 years ago.

What the Electoral College does is solve this - sometimes.  I don't think the Founders quite realized they were going to make things better by doing this, although it may have been in the back of their minds.  But the Electoral College carefully cordons off the bread-and-circuses phenomena into 50 individual boxes.  It doesn't matter if a candidate wins California by exactly one vote or with 87% of the votes - they get the exact same number of electoral votes either way.  Thus, because even American political candidates are still bonked into some semblance of responsible behavior - or, that, at least, there are tangible limits placed on their promising - we occasionally get the less irresponsible party as a result of this quirk.  Arguably the popular vote shouldn't even be tabulated except in individual states, but because the media wants to gin up the "social justice" crowd, they do.

Comme ci, comme ca - until we get someone even wackier than Trump, this system will have to do.