The meaningless popular vote

Liberals are whining about how Hillary should be president because she won the popular vote. To them, the pesky Electoral College has robbed them of victory.

This is nonsense for many reasons, including:

1. It's typical liberal hypocrisy. If the situation were reversed, they'd be screaming that the Electoral College is the law and it's essentially treason to question it.

2. The Electoral College IS the law.

3. It's also hypocritical because in the days leading up to the election, they ridiculed and savaged Trump for theoretically not happily accepting the results of the election.

4. People keep talking like the Electoral College system has failed because it has yielded a different result than the popular vote would have. But this is misguided. The Electoral College isn't designed to necessarily yield the same result as the popular vote. Surely this is obvious. Nobody would concoct a complicated system to yield the same result as the popular vote. They'd just use the popular vote.

5. The Electoral College wasn't created merely to facilitate voting in a society with eighteenth century technology. Much like the Senate and the House, it was created to provide a balance between power for the people and power for the states (which is why each state gets a number of Electoral College votes equal to its number of senators plus its number of representatives). It exists to prevent a handful of population centres from determining the results of every presidential election.

6. Hillary and Trump knew the rules going in. They knew you had to win the Electoral College. And they campaigned accordingly. Saying now that "I would have won if the rules were different!" is utterly irrelevant. Anyone can dream up a new set of rules that would have made them win. Yawn.

7. But even if we accept the thought experiment that the winner of the popular vote should be president, how can liberals claim that Hillary would automatically have won? Under that system, both Hillary and Trump would have campaigned differently. We really have no idea how that would have played out. The liberal position is a fantasy where the rules are new but Trump (and only Trump) is constrained to play exactly as if the old rules were in effect.

8. A second reason it's unfair to say that Hillary would automatically have won the popular vote under these new rules is that not only would candidate behaviour be different if the popular vote system were in place, voter behaviour would be different, too. How many conservatives didn't bother voting in California because they knew their vote was irrelevant? But under the popular vote system, their vote would count. I realize that the reverse argument could be made in conservative states, but that doesn't cancel this concern. California's huge population (and New York's, etc.) skews things in the liberals' favour. There are vastly more disheartened conservative voters in California than disheartened liberal voters in Kansas. You might have counter arguments, but the point is that we can't say that if the popular vote system were in place, voters would be guaranteed to behave the same way as they do now.

The moral is: liberals are hypocritical sore losers who need to grow up.