It would be "whitesplainin'" if I went too harsh on Ta-Nehisi Coates: especially since there are people like Darryl Pinckney, Cornell West, and Adolph Reed who do the job much better than I can. I am not sure how Coates would explain how someone like me with a JD from University of Maryland and an LLM from the University of Exeter ended up with the shitty law career I had.
Seriously, I applied for a job that was advertised in the ABA journal for someone with pretty much all my credentials, yet I never had so much as an interview. I found out later that a large law firm had placed the ad. It was something called a job cert ad to try and prove there were no US citizens who had the qualifications the firm's candidate had for an H1B visa.
I threw a spanner in the works of that process.
That is a digression into immigration law though, but the point is that there are more than enough jobs which aren't filled for a lot of reasons. That is despite what one person pointed out: that he, as a US Citizen, taught the people who received the H1B visas. His point was that there was likely to be someone in the US who had the qualifications to do the jobs that the H1Bs were being issued for.
The real issue is that Coates frames everything in terms of race, but that should make him even more aware of
the fact the Electoral College was created to preserve slavery: why else would smaller states be afraid of larger states having too much power?
But what has me going is
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. Coates neglects two events which could have clued him in to the possibility of a Trump presidency. The first being the 2000 election, where the popular vote loser became president. This was with more shenanigans than happened in 2016 as the disputed Florida election ended up being decided by the US Supreme Court.
Obama's reign was another bellwether event. How could he miss that there was some sort of deal between Obama and Clinton which would result in Clinton being the 2016 Democratic Party nominee? It was obvious that the democrats preferred to lose with Clinton than win with Sanders. And Obama somehow "defeating" Clinton should have gotten Coates' racial radar tingling.
But it wasn't really that Clinton was unpopular since she won the popular vote by one heck of a margin. She lost in the racist Electoral College. But that is something everybody is ignoring: especially Coates. So, while white people are upset about Russians, Coates is hyper-aware of the "racial divide". But do either really exist? Is there another explanation which isn't Russians or race?
One the other hand, Clinton lost to a black man and would have lost to a Jew had the system not been rigged in 2016. If that wasn't a big warning sign that Trump stood a chance: I don't know what would be!
I am not sure what part my ancestors played in Bacon's Rebellion, but I know there were some who were in Virginia at the time. That was the real watershed event where the powers that be learned that using race was good for keeping the people down. Sort of like using fear of immigration to stir up the masses (I would wager the person who got the job I mentioned earlier was a white, European).
Anyway, the divide has always been class in the US, but it was easier to keep the classes down when they looked on another group as somehow inferior.
Anyway, the warning signs were out there, Mr. Coates, you were too busy being distracted by race to see it coming.
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The Afro-Pessimist Temptation
First off, there are 2,250,000,000,000,000 possible outcomes with the Electoral College system! (Long explanation on that), but it didn't take too many states to flip for Trump to have won. That means it was a real gamble to run a candidate as unpopular as Clinton since there were no guarantees that New Hampshire, Nevada or Virginia wouldn't have voted for Trump. Or that Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin would vote for Clinton.
There were four states, New Hampshire, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which were all decided by less than 1% in 2016, with Michigan the closest. That state was won by about .23% - that’s only 2,300 votes per one million votes cast. Donald Trump won three of these four states, none of which had been won by a Republican in a generation. Those 46 electoral votes put him across the 270 he needed to win. Interestingly, despite a fairly competitive election, only four states were decided by 5% or less in 2012; that number grew to 11 in 2016
The thing is that winning any of one of those four states would mean Trump would be President. Or that Trump's electoral college win could have been much higher! Remember the popular vote has no relation to the Electoral College numbers. All one needs is to get the largest number of votes to get ALL the Electoral College votes in most states.
There would still be a possibility that Trump could have been president even if all four of those states have voted for Clinton (and Delaware and Nevada had voted for Trump). That is because the Electoral College result would have been a tie (269-269). That means the election would be sent to the House of Representatives with each state delegation getting one vote (a similar activity takes place on the Senate side to pick the Vice-President). In the case of a tie, the election for President is decided in the House of Representatives, with each state delegation having one vote. A majority of states (26) is needed to win. Senators would elect the Vice-President, with each Senator having a vote. A majority of Senators (51) is needed to win.
It would have been highly likely in the case of a tie that the election would remain undecided after the Electors voted. That means Congress would meet in joint session on the first day in January to count the electoral votes (this count happens whether the election is close or not). If no candidate has reached 270 Electoral Votes, then the House and Senate take over and elect the President and Vice-President, respectively.
It seems likely Trump would have been president given the current US legislature is solidly Republican had there been a tie.
Toss in it is possible to win the Electoral College with only 11 States (California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina and New Jersey). However, nobody has been elected President since 1900 by winning fewer than 23 states. (Take the quiz at 270towin to see where I got these figures)
Anyway, While the democratic party is responsible for picking a loser like Clinton, it seems to be more that the anti-democratic nature of the US elections needs to be addressed. After all, the only way the Russians could have influenced the US presidential election would be to have somehow created the Electoral College since that is what really put Trump in office.
See also: