Is CNN Trying To Undermine The Electoral College After Trump Won?

Since the election, and particularly in the last week, CNN has taken a not-so-subtle stance against the Electoral College, the body that casts the final vote and elects the President of the United States.

Since Hillary Clinton lost the electoral vote but won the popular vote on November 8th, the Democrats have been pushing hard to undermine and attempt to abolish the Electoral College so their Queen Bee can have what they considered her rightful crown.

After the election, CNN tweeted out this misleading video which casts the Electoral College as an old pro-slavery relic and not as a system to ensure small states are not so drastically at the mercy of highly populated states:

Constitutional law professor explains how Electoral College was established as compromise between free, slave states https://t.co/cx60bGoc3e pic.twitter.com/a6d8YWybGb

— CNN (@CNN) November 24, 2016

Did CNN bother trying to find a Constitutional law professor to explain the importance of the Electoral College even without slavery as an issue? No.

In the wake of the election, in which the result was something none of them planned for, CNN has decided to push the agenda of the ignorant anti-Electoral College agitators who are upset they lost and promote it by pushing out this kind of biased information they know will get retweeted and shared by people who only know how to chant “One man. One vote,” and not to see the deeper reasoning our Founders had for adding a buffer between a straight popularity contest.

It’s interesting to see how the tone at CNN has changed just recently.

A month prior to the election, here’s what CNN’s Chris Moody said about the Electoral College:

Instead of setting up a presidential election system through direct democracy, the nation’s founders established the Electoral College in part to ensure the entire nation has a more equal say in the choosing of a national president. In a time when the states were more autonomous and the federal government didn’t have as much power as it does today, the framers wanted to offset the chance that a single populous state or region would put forth a “favorite son” candidate that would almost exclusively represent the contender’s home state and disregard the needs of other parts of the country.

Seems like CNN was pretty onboard prior to the election with what the Electoral College was actually established to do, and that it has a legitimate place in our electoral system.

Then, there was this CNN interview with California Rep. John Garamendi, who displays he knows relatively little about the history of the Electoral College or how it works. Host Brianna Kielar asks Garamendi about whether or not he is concerned about destabilizing the system by abolishing the Electoral College, which “has been in place for years and years.” Rep. Garamendi responds, “Yeah, years and years proving several times it doesn’t work well.”

Ms. Kielar barely makes any attempt to push back and make Garamendi defend his remarks on the Electoral College.

Rep. Garamendi’s statement that “it doesn’t work well,” (not to mention consistently saying “electorial“) is embarrassingly ignorant because on the occasions the Electoral College decided the winner, the system worked exactly as the Founders intended. 

It has, for the most part, confirmed the winner of the popular vote, dissuaded cries of corruption that could otherwise impede the peaceful transfers of power we enjoy in the United States. In the four instances it has gone against the popular vote in the last 240 years, it has only ever ushered the party of the sitting president out of the White House.

It’s also worth noting that the Electoral College is the most “fair” way to represent the nation as an amalgamation of individual states. California or the Northeast corner of the United States could put up candidate after candidate and ignore the sentiments and desires of large swaths of the interior of the country generation after generation.

Lastly, a mild warning. We get far too wrapped up in the idea that what has been and is now, always will be. If the country is to move toward a straight popular vote, where even liberals agree that the “flyover” states would have a hard time influencing an election, what reasons would small states have to continue to want to be a part of a country that is ruled by the coasts?

The Electoral College was the Founders’ best answer to that issue. History is longer than one’s lifetime. CNN should remember that before joining the fray to dismantle a system that works just so one person can win the presidency.

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