Good to see you guys on here. Wish I’d kept up the blogging, but work steamrolled me for months on end, so I had to quit. Now that the election’s over, I thought I’d post these perhaps overly granular ideas here.

I posted on Twitter about this, under my other alias — OK, my real name — and might also do so on my other blog and FB page. So maybe the Mister Jones mask is slipping. But fuck it.

Lurking around FB, etc., I’m seeing people — HRC supporters, like me, feeling crushed and angry — saying stuff about “the red states”: how shockingly many there turn out to be, how the red states suck, and should be ashamed, have betrayed the country, how these people will now refuse to even travel to Ohio or Pennsylvania, how horrifying it is to learn how vast and monolithic the hatred is, etc.  . . .

This is one of the many things that I hate. The goddamned Electoral College.

That’s the map these people are looking at, of course: the Electoral College map. And despite being generally “college educated,” they don’t seem to get what it does and doesn’t show about political feeling throughout the country.

I’m amazed to find that because the EC — touted on news-TV because it’s so easy, the map so fun to fill in — generally awards a totality of electoral votes to whoever gets the majority of popular votes in a state, these upset people — and believe me, I feel the upset — think Ohio, say, is in essence monolithically right-wing and California, say, is deeply liberal. And because these people are, in fact, coastal elites, they also deduce that mainly only the embattled coasts voted for Clinton in this election. Most of the rest of the country thus becomes that vast, “red,” monolithic heart- and hinterland out there, shockingly bigger and more hostile to liberal and progressive ideas, to women, to immigrants, than anyone could have thought, and just generally a good place to stay away from.

Which of course only worsens the devastating problem that liberalism already faces: many ordinary Americans believe, with plenty of justification, that coastal elites look down on them and want to push them around. Hence, in part, and in its worst form yet, Trumpism.

But if these disappointed liberals would stop looking at that stupid EC map, which is designed — I mean the EC itself was, at the founding! — to paper over the realities of American democracy, they might begin to get a picture of how the country really feels and acts politically. If you look away from the map, certain facts emerge that make it a lot harder to pull into your little tribal silo and bitch about, say, “Ohio,” or “the country.”

Begin by looking at the country as a whole. These people I’m talking read the EC map as exposing the majority of the country as overwhelmingly rightwing. But hello: she won the popular vote. Not by much, but she did win it.  More voters countrywide wanted Clinton for president than Trump for president.

So there’s another thing to hate about the goddamned EC: if we’d gotten rid of it, we’d have our first female president now, and we wouldn’t have Donald Trump.

Then look at what’s going on in the states. In Ohio, supposedly so horribly “red,” she won 44% of the vote. In California, so blue, Trump won a full third. Clinton won almost a third of the vote in Cambria County, PA, a place I chose to look  at because I’d thought nobody there would vote for her.

But let’s go to New York — so blue, so liberal, and especially, one presumes, truest blue in the southern tier. What’s this? In groovy Brooklyn, one in every five voters chose Trump? He killed in Staten Island — not even close. He took Suffolk handily and almost took Nassau. It’s actually kind of amazing that Clinton won Nassau, a sign of demographic shift.

So are these liberals who now hate Ohio so much that they refuse even to travel there also planning on boycotting the Hamptons? Are they staying out of certain sections of California?

This kind of liberaloid idiocy in political thinking has been encouraged by the very mechanism that has also robbed us — for the second all-important time in sixteen years! — of majority rule in  our choice of president: the God damned abomination that is the Electoral College. This year it’s also robbed us of the first woman president, of sanity instead of madness, and of any hope for some kind of stability, even for progress, in our national politics, the very thing more Americans voted for.

The American people, by the narrowest of margins, chose Clinton for  president over Trump. The Electoral College denies the American people its choice, even as it plays into the anxieties and straight-up snobbism of supposedly intelligent liberals assessing the country’s politics.

Stop showing us that fucking map.