The real America

I take as proven and irrefutable that President Trump is a racist (call it white nationalist or white supremacist if you prefer), so I won’t offer evidence. It is pointless to argue the case both with his supporters and with his opponents, since the former aren’t interested in evidence and the latter are already convinced. Even National Public Radio, usually shy of controversy, is referring this morning to Trump’s tweets about black politicians as racist. A racist is as a racist says and does.

The question is whether racism is politically advantageous or not. The best numbers I’ve seen on this subject say not. Even among white males, who constitute his core support, Trump is not breaking 50% approval. His overall approval rating has never broken 50%, and in fact he got only 46% of the votes in the 2016 election.

That is possible for a winner because:

• third party candidates in 2016 arguably deprived Hillary Clinton of some key states;
• the electoral college, where states have votes equal to their number of representatives plus their number of senators, favors less populous, more rural states that are predominantly Trump supporters.

The United States does not have a one-person, one-vote system for presidential elections. Someone living in Wyoming has about three times of the weight of someone living in California in electing the President. Odds are Trump will get an even smaller percentage of the popular vote in 2020 than he did in 2016, because populous Democratic-leaning states like California and New York will vote overwhelmingly against him, whereas Texas and Florida (both of which went for Trump in 2016) will continue to be fairly close, whoever wins.

If Trump wins without a majority of popular votes in 2020 it will be the third time since 2000 that has happened, with increasingly wide popular vote margins for the Democratic loser. That is a formula for minority, racist rule even before we take into account racist efforts to suppress voting by non-whites. Let’s ignore for the moment the racist drawing of Congressional districts by Republican-dominated state legislatures, which doesn’t directly affect the electoral votes, and the effort to undercount non-whites in the 2020 census, which does.

America is a young country. But it is an old governing system. No other written constitution has been in effect for more than 230 years. The electoral college is a feature of the original. It cannot be changed without a constitutional amendment, which is unthinkable, since the states that gain political weight in the electoral college would not agree to surrender their privilege. Its anti-democratic feature can be defeated by a compact among states to give their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. Such a compact is in process of adoption, but it seems unlikely to be in effect by 2020.

So the 2020 election will be an unfair referendum not only on Trump but on racism, as well as the misogyny and xenophobia that accompany it. I’d like to think that the outcome is predictable, even if the playing field is not even. Any American who believes people are born with inalienable rights should have no problem voting against Trump. Anyone who doesn’t believe that–who believes instead that a white skin, male genitalia, or birth to an American parent conveys entitlement beyond that of other citizens–should vote for Trump. The 2020 election will reveal the real America.