Just out of interest, do you have any actual historical arguments to support your opinion, or are you simply content to post (apparently incorrect) data regarding the American population in the Constitutional era?
I like that you didn’t acknowledge the Democrats had a similar 30+ year drought (actually 32 year drought) between 1976 and 2008, during which they win 3 Presidential elections without attaining a majority. That’s why your original comment was frankly worthless and manipulative. The electoral college system, the first past the post election system, the winner take all nature for most states, makes it not particularly meaningful at all that you often win without a majority. British parties frequently win a majority of seats in their Parliament but fail to win a majority in the popular vote. Just like us, that’s mostly irrelevant because they aren’t choosing who runs things based on an arbitrary standard like “50%+1 of the popular vote.”
I’m not arguing it’s a bad standard, but it is an arbitrary one, and it’s not particularly special in any way. Your argument that somehow the Republicans have conspired to rule the country by a “minority” interest, is unpersuasive as meaningful in any way, given Democrats do the same thing.
Where are you getting your information from here? My understanding is that Wilson’s proposal actually came after the initial Virginia/Randolph plan had been laid out, which specified election of the executive by national legislature. I’ve never heard the version where Wilson started the debate advocating for a popular vote, this was then defeated, and then they started to consider alternatives. But rather, popular vote was one alternative to the initial selection (which somewhat mirrored the British Parliamentary system where the chief minister is the one who controls the legislature–but differed from it in that the closest analogue for the national executive was the British monarch and not the chief minister); popular vote was rejected, but debate eventually decided that the initial idea of selection by legislature was also flawed and settled on a special electoral council–an idea that actually been a feature of proposals like Hamilton’s plan of government and wasn’t a de novo creation either.
Wasn’t South Carolina a small state?
Did Virginia also push for an electoral college system?
Yes. Fair is a subjective term. I think the electoral college is fair. If you want to pass an amendment, I think that would be fair. We already tried to do this when we went to the direct election of electors but if you want to take a second bite at that apple. Please go ahead and see if you can get 2/3rds of each house and 3/4ths of the states to ratify an amendment that would dilute the political power of half the states. You would need at least half of the small states to ratify an amendment that went against their interests.
The best you can hope for is for states representing the majority of electors to enter a compact that binds their electors to vote for the candidate that wins the popular vote.
I care because your evidence was incomplete and misleading. Plopping out raw population nunbers and somewhat arbitrarily stamping “slave state/free state” is a questionable show of evidence. Plus you never said where you got your numbers or designations from. Looking again at the 1790 census, only 2 states are listed with zero slaves. Why aren’t they the only “free states”? I guess that has to do with how you made your list.
I googled it, I think my numbers are bad. All the sites I google confirm your numbers. Does that change the argument or are you just curious?
I was not confusing with the Connecticut Compromise, you guys just aren’t really aware of the history. Under the Confederation Congress taxes were levied proportionate to the real wealth of the individual states. Real wealth meaning real estate wealth. But States were shitbags then as they are now, and started intentionally lowering the value of their real estate in various ways to lower their tax burden. The Confederation Congress settled on coming up with tax bills based on State populations, but then the matter of slave population came up. Would they count, or not? In the Confederation Congress each state had equal power, so counting them entailed no benefit to slave states since all states had equal representation. But not counting them for purposes of taxes would obviously be a huge boon to the slave states, since some of them had a significant population of slaves. Some of these are also States with significant portions of the country’s expensive agricultural real estate.
It was generally recognized the country would be in bad shape if states like Virginia dramatically lowed their payments to the Confederation treasury by a system which would levy taxes based only on free persons, but it ultimately was agreed they shouldn’t fully count as people, so 3/5ths was the compromise number.
At least some Virginians, come 1787-1788 were actually fine doing away with counting slaves at all. Edmond Randolph’s initial proposal actually enumerated representation in the legislature would be based on free persons in the State. So we have as actual historical fact the former Governor of Virginia proposing a plan in which the State’s slaves would not be counted for purposes of apportioning representatives to the national legislature. Likely New York and Massachusetts would’ve been just fine with that. But Virginia’s Founding Fathers always had a streak of abolition in them, even while they were basically all slaveholders (ex. Jefferson’s desire to put anti-slavery rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence.) States like South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina were much less concerned about slavery as a moral evil and much more vigorous in defending its interests not only during the constitutional convention but over the next 70 years as well.
Given the opening position, the 3/5ths compromise can rightly be seen as largely appeasing the slave states. Since the new system of government envisioned would not be so restricted in the sort of levies it could enact to raise funds, the counting or not counting of slaves for tax purposes was something that people envisioned as being able to pass legislation on or not, and anyway the Federal government was going to have lots of new potential revenue streams versus the limited number of ways in which the Confederation Congress could raise funds (basically write up an estimate of what it believed each state should owe, and hope they agreed to pay it to keep the Confederation’s government, Continental Army and etc running during the war and the skeleton national government running afterward.)
The initial proposal in 1787 was to not count slaves, and some of the slave states successfully attained the 3/5ths number (not coincidentally they settled on the same number that had been used for tax assessments as per the 1783 legislation in the Confederation Congress.)
What evidence has your side presented?
The historical argument is that there was diversity of size on both sides of the slave debate and the EC benefits smaller states.
It’s delightful that you like it. It’s incorrect, though, since Carter won in 1976 with 50.08% of the vote, meaning that you’ll have to start the “drought” in 1977, and in that time, there was only a single Democrat who entered the house, and he did so by winning the popular vote, even if he didn’t win the majority of the popular vote. We’ve had no Republican who entered the White House since 1989 by winning the popular vote.
I trust you now see why these two circumstances are fundamentally dissimilar.
If you’re arguing for an alternative to first-past-the-post, I’m fine with that. I’m not at all fine with the stupid Electoral College continuing to exist.
That said, I recognize John’s request that this thread not be about the merits of the EC. As I don’t have an opinion on the issue of whether the EC was founded to protect slavery, I’ll bow out of participation and just continue reading the interesting posts in this thread.
You should probably explore what the term “between” means.
More still, if you need help with basic date math, it was 32 years and 2 days between the time Jimmy Carter won a majority of the popular vote and when Barack Obama won the popular vote. Would you care to seriously contest that I was mistaken when I said “Democrats had a 32 year drought during which they did not win a majority of votes.”
Since you like to pick apparently arbitrary spans of time, I’ll note since 1972 Democrats have won a majority 3 times (Carter, Obama x2), and Republicans have won 4, Reagan 1/2, Bush I, and Bush II term 2.
I don’t know. You made a whole argument based on your incorrect numbers. Maybe you should go back, look at the arguments you made about how there were only 250,000 slaves, and how there were more free whites in the South than in the North, and see if having the actual correct figures changes your argument at all.
I was mistaken with the numbers but my point remains true using Mhendo’s numbers. My numbers were incorrect but I’m not sure how they were misleading in context. There was diversity of size on both sides of the slave debate.
I don’t think assigning slave state to those states where slavery was legal and free state to those states where it is not legal is “arbitrary” but if you have a different way of assigning slave state vs free state that makes the statement that there was diversity of size on both sides of the slave debate, then I’d like to see how you draw that line.
As to your first question, the place i’m getting my information from is right there in all the links i have provided in my posts.
I never said that Wilson’s proposal for popular election came before the Virginia Plan. That would have been hard, as the Virginia Plan was put together before the Convention actually began. But the fact that the Plan had been drafted doesn’t mean the debate over which plan to put in place was over; in fact, the very purpose of having the Convention was to debate the different plans and proposals and preferences, and come up with a Constitution.
I also never suggested that an electoral college plan was created de novo in the Convention debate itself. My point was simply to observe the rationales and justifications and arguments used to push one plan or another at particular times during the debate.
The fact that the Virginia/Randolph plan had already been laid out does not make it irrelevant that the issue of a popular vote was raised in the Convention. And the fact that an electoral college type system had been previously mooted does not make it irrelevant that Madison used the issue of slavery to buttress his support for such a system.
If you’re arguing that the order of events makes my evidence irrelevant to our debate, i submit that this is a rather obtuse way of looking at questions of historical intent and decision-making.
LOL.
Regarding your first paragraph, i’ll point you to the long, evidence-rich posts i’ve made in this very thread; posts with direct links to transcripts from the Constitutional Convention, to census data, and to secondary literature such as journal articles. Compare that to the wrong numbers that you managed to Google, and see which one makes a more compelling historical case.
As for your second paragraph, it’s laughably simplistic. If that’s going to be the extent of your historical “argument” in this thread, i think i’ll save my breath and respond to the people who are taking the “debate” part of “Great Debates” seriously.
The argument I made was that there was diversity of size of then states on both sides of the slave debate when the constitution was signed. Do you disagree?
I made another observation later in post 42 on based on those incorrect numbers but your objection in post 30 preceded my comment in post 42. Is there a different objection you would like to present to my statement that there was diversity of size between the states on both sides of the slave debate in 1790? Because right now it seems like you are latching onto an admitted mistake on my part to make weight.
I think the biggest advocates for an electoral college was more a cabal of certain Founders, with Hamilton as one of the chief advocates. Hamilton’s proposed plan of government (which was basically never taken seriously by the full convention because it basically just emulated the British system and gave the new executive a life term and vast powers, like the ability to appoint officers to the military without congressional approval, and gave him “royal assent”, i.e. an absolute veto, over legislation), included a special council to elect the national executive separate from the legislature.
I think Hamilton was probably the biggest political advocate of the electoral college, and then a group of Founders liked it for the separation of powers argument versus selection by the legislature. I don’t know that anyone aside from a relatively small minority ever took popular direct election seriously. Madison’s writings, at least to me, indicate he wanted the executive selected by the popular will, and his initial vision was that would be achieved through directly elected legislators selecting the national executive.
The Founders almost to a one from what I can tell struggled with how they wanted the national executive to function, and I think the electoral college is really just simply their compromise mostly focused on separation of power concerns, it had nothing to really do with democratic concerns or etc.
The most common modern arguments about the electoral college are weird things like “if we had the popular vote no one would campaign outside of New York City” (untrue, but also never relevant to the debates we know about in 1787/1788), and “it gives too much power to small states.” The reality of 1787 is when they got around to finalizing how the executive was selected, the Connecticut Compromise had already happened, which basically had already settled the big debate about small vs big states. Popular direct election (which is the only system that theoretically might have given large states dominating power in electing the executive) just wasn’t taken that seriously as an option for “government theory” reasons. As I said, only a small group of founders ever seemed to take the idea very seriously at all. There were a lot of proposals that were quickly shot down during the constitutional convention, or never seriously considered at all–Wilson’s proposal for popular vote and Hamilton’s plan of government being two that were never taken very seriously.
The real debate was “should we have the legislature select the President, or a special body?” Once they settled on a popular body, they mirrored apportionment in it to apportionment in Congress for the simple reason they didn’t want to reopen the debate on the issues that had lead to the Connecticut Compromise in the first place. To our minds it created an “undemocratic” means of selecting the President, but remember to the Founding Fathers it was the most democratic means of selecting a national executive that existed in the world basically ever. I’ve already explained how the House of Orange basically controlled the Stadtholder positions in an undemocratic fashion in the United Provinces, and most other non-monarchical elected leaders of the past were far more undemocratic than the electoral college. E.x. the Venetian Doge just being the head of a faction of an oligopoly, the Roman Consuls being hand picked basically by a very very small subset of Roman Patricians who controlled the Senate.
I don’t believe the electoral college was ever a small/big state issue, because the small/big state issues that affected how the EC was drawn up had already basically been settled, and popular vote wasn’t ever all that seriously considered.
BTW, much thanks for that, too. You’re not so bad at US history for an Aussie!! 
I was specifically curious why you chose to use the phrase, “Having rejected a popular election, however, they had to work out exactly what to use instead.” That makes it sound like popular election was the first choice, and the inference I was gathering from your post was it was shot down by slave interests. There’s no evidence of that. Rather, there’s evidence the Randolph/Virginia Plan had already proposed election by the legislature, that his plan did not specifically benefit slave states, and the proposal to make the President elected by popular vote was a very minority one not supported by many of the free/minimally slaveholding states at the convention. Basically it was a dud for theory of government reasons, had nothing to do with slavery concerns.
My confusion comes from the fact that every state, except Maine and Massachusetts, had some slaves listed on the 1790 census. I am not throwing accusations I am honestly wondering: were those slaves illegal? was there some grandfathering or special excemptions for keeping slaves?
You guys are also missing the mountain for the mole hill. The Founders never would’ve imagined the President as an entity that could just wave a wand and end slavery. In fact, it’s quite clear to my mind, from the actual constitution we ended up with, that even Congress wasn’t an entity that could end slavery. But if any Federal entity could have, it certainly would’ve been Congress, not the Presidency. Lincoln himself basically admitted he was flying blind when he issued the emancipation proclamation, and he knew he needed a constitutional amendment to end slavery, legally, forever.
So the idea that the founders were fighting over how to select the President, out of fear that this would somehow influencing states allowing or disallowing slavery, just isn’t supported by anything anyone has posted, and it’s not supported by history so you won’t find any support for it.
There was no serious movement among the founders that envisioned the national legislature banning slavery throughout the new country, or even having the power to do so. The popular thought was as slavery lost economic viability it would become less and less common and more and more individual states would just phase it out. Then all the blacks would be shipped to Africa (it’s insane how many otherwise very smart white Americans, for 100+ years, from Madison to Lincoln, envisioned a scenario in which transporting so many people and just depositing them on an African coast somewhere was a logistically feasible plan.)
Even the conception of a President’s “legislative agenda” was a creation long after the convention itself. Washington and Adams were both much, much more hands off in legislating for example than later President. Both certainly had “agents” representing their faction within Congress (aka Alexander Hamilton), but they really were generally only minimally involved, more prone to let Congress lead in drafting laws and they might express through back channels support/distaste for given pieces of legislation.
The Electoral College’s role was to select the national executive, and the national executive’s role was basically to do what the British King did. Oversee the military and give a thumbs up or thumbs down to legislation, and appoint some top level government officials to run day to day operations.
I suspect most of the men actually at the convention would be confused you guys are even suggesting the electoral college and slavery are related issues, since in their mind the President had no real role in deciding if South Carolina or Georgia had slaves, and thus the selection of the President certainly wasn’t about that matter either.