One of the architects of the GOP’s losing campaigns against Barack Hussein Obama says it’s time to abolish the Electoral College.
Stuart Stevens, who also toiled for Bob Dole’s losing effort against Bill Clinton in 1996, claimed in USA Today this week that if Republican want to become competitive and win the popular vote, the electoral college must be abolished to force them to compete.
Indeed, he wrote, scrapping the Electoral College might well be the only way for the GOP to survive long-term.
Racial Appeal
Stevens began his spiel against the Electoral College by citing his presidential campaign expertise, noting that the GOP candidate has won the popular vote just once since 1998. That was 2004.
So having worked on five presidential campaigns, three of them losers, he’s “now convinced that it is not only in the country’s best interest to end the Electoral College, but that abolishing it might be a key to the long-term survival of the Republican Party.”
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Stevens continued with the usual racial math to suggest that the GOP must move left to appeal to minorities hooked on government subsidies,
In 1980, Ronald Reagan won a sweeping landslide of 44 states with 56% of the white vote. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost with 59% of the white vote. In 2016, Trump won with 57% — but only because the black turnout rate in a presidential election fell for the first time in 20 years and third-party voting rose.
Since 1964, the Republican Party has increasingly become a white party. In 1956, 39% of African Americans voted for Dwight Eisenhower. In 1964, less than 7% voted for Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. Black support for the Republican Party fell off a cliff that year and has never come back.
For a while, it looked like Republicans could make strong inroads into the Hispanic vote with Bush topping 40% in 2004. But that dropped to 31% for John McCain in 2008, and that’s where it has been languishing.
Yet if, as Stevens himself noted, blacks abandoned the GOP after Goldwater rightly opposed, on constitutional grounds, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, then the only way for the GOP to regain those voters is by rejecting the Constitution and trying to buy the black vote with unconstitutional measures.
Is that what Stevens thinks the GOP should do? If not, then why mention it?
Beyond that, as Steve Sailer wrote in Taki’s magazine after Trump’s victory in 2016, GOP strategists such as Stevens don’t understand the math:
The reason George W. Bush was desperately hoping to win the Electoral College 271-267 was not that he had lost the nonwhite vote 77-21, but that he had won the white vote merely 54-42.
If Bush had earned 57 percent of whites, he would have captured the Electoral College 371-167.
But what if adding three more points among whites had cost Bush, say, eight points among nonwhites? Bush still would have won 310-228.
Thus, if the “math is simple and compelling,” as Stevens wrote, because “America is becoming a less white country,” which means the GOP “is facing a crisis,” then one answer to the its demographic problem is limiting immigration from the Third World. Another might be encouraging tax policies that encourage more children.
But that’s not Stevens’ argument. He thinks the GOP must “change,” and thus, the Electoral College must go. As long as the GOP can lose the popular vote but win the presidency with the Electoral College, it won’t change.
Under the EC, it is possible, though increasingly difficult, for a Republican candidate to win the presidency without substantial nonwhite support.
As long as the Republican Party believes it can win as an overwhelmingly white party, it will never feel the political pressure to change. Parties rarely voluntarily change as part of some long-term strategy to improve future results. Parties change because they are facing defeat and/or extinction if they don’t change.
Without an Electoral College, the Republican Party would be forced to grow or die.
What Type of Change?
Question is, what change does Stevens have mind? GOP support for open borders? Mass immigration from the Third World on the grounds that immigrants are “natural Republicans?” Support for failed welfare state programs and “free college” and Medicare for All?
He doesn’t tell us, but his assumption is that if the GOP changes, it will draw more minority voters. And that means the GOP must out-liberal the liberal Democrats.
Stevens doesn’t want the GOP to “change” for the better, but instead to change by moving left to appeal to angry minorities, whose political interests do not lie in a party that, at least on paper, backs federalism and limited government.
Stevens offered other weak arguments for scrapping the Electoral College, such as it’s “outdated and doesn’t work,” but his key message is to change the GOP with the goal of moving it left. It’s a message the leftist media have been sending for years.
Perhaps someone who helped two liberal Republican candidates notch shattering losses to an even more liberal Democrat isn’t the best strategist to give advice.
Stevens is an advisor to liberal William Weld, the failed Libertarian presidential candidate who thinks he will defeat Donald Trump for the GOP nomination.
Photo: Besjunior / iStock / Getty Images Plus
