The American people are effectively done with the Electoral College.
They want a popular vote and that probably isn't a surprise to you.
What might be surprising though is how quickly they're moving to be ever
more opposed to the Electoral College continuing.
So here is the overall numbers from a relatively recent poll from Pew Research,
63% to 35% say change it to whoever receives the most votes wins, which
I think is an interesting novel concept for what is supposed to be a democracy.
Anyway, 35% are still in favor of keeping the Electoral College.
When you break it down, interestingly, if not necessarily surprisingly,
the younger you are, the more likely you want it to be based on actual votes.
The older you are, the more likely you want it to be the Electoral College,
although even 65 plus do want the Electoral College to be abolished.
And there's of course a pretty strong partisan reaction.
Liberal Democrats overwhelmingly want to be based on the popular vote,
conservative Republicans, 66% want the Electoral College to continue.
Although notably, one out of three self described conservative Republicans also
wanted to just be based on the vote and let's keep it real about why some of them
are saying they still want the electoral college, it ain't philosophy,
it ain't ideology, it ain't quarter their values.
They believe that that's the only way that they can win and
they're kind of onto something that is seemingly over the last couple of decades,
basically, the only way they can win national elections.
And so this has nothing to do with consistency or values or principles or
anything like that, this is political opportunism,
they would go for democracy if democracy would go for them.
Democracy has turned their back on them, and so
they have turned their back on democracy JE that's the way I read that.
>> Similarly with police, is a running theme.
They run off of certain things that is their principles and the basis for
their belief systems until it is no longer beneficial to their political expediency,
their power, their positions to get that power.
Once that ends, my God, police, democracy,
we've seen it openly how they talk about they wanna change those things.
I know is one particular lady that talked about, if we're gonna have a dictatorship,
I wanted to be Donald Trump.
And says that with all of the fever and
anger that she can muster inside of her body and completely unapologetic,
is not gonna go home and say, yeah, maybe I shouldn't have said that.
It's no, I totally believe in that.
So, now again, this is one of those situations where even when the country,
the folks voting at least in the country, the ones who had the majority of the power
to vote and it was exclusionary of so many other folks.
They have been fine with the, with a direct and open popular vote then,
because they were only allowed to have those folks vote,
it was still exclusionary, but they could have written it off as it was us.
But as those things shift, as people are given more and more rights, the type of
folks that like to oppress people, see the expansion of rights as their rights being
taken away, as if there's just this limited amount of rights in the country.
And then once everyone gets it, there's get taken away.
That comes from someone who likes to wield that power to have only certain rights to
keep others from having it.
They think, my God, I'd be treated like the folks that I've always treated
a certain way, this is an absolute no, n.
That's why of course, what two-thirds of these conservatives that think this way
don't want that, but that one-third they're the crazy ones that actually think
their policies are are things that people like and I don't know where they're going.
I think this is all the pundits on Fox news, but they might know better too.
>> Yeah, I think either the Republicans is right on.
But interestingly, I teased at the beginning of this,
this isn't just about this poll, this is about how fast it's moved and
it's even moved for some of those Republicans which is pretty interesting.
Back in January 2021, 55% said they support getting rid of
the Electoral College, so it's moved from 55% to 63%, 8 points and
this ain't some small little policy that you're moving a lot of people on.
8% of the country moved on one of the most core structural
components of our government in 1.5 years, basically.
Perhaps because they realize how at risk our democracy is, by the way,
while a majority of Republicans continue to say that they should keep
the Electoral College that has moved.
So 42% say that they support moving to a popular vote.
It was 37% in 2021,
it was 27% in the immediate wake of the 2016 election.
And so 27 to 42% it's still not a majority, but that is pretty fast movement
for something pretty big, but also, by the way, is not a super new issue.
It's not like nobody was thinking about the Electoral College before 2016,
there are many republicans who probably thought they had a fairly
hardened concrete view on this.
We went through 2000,
we went through the concerns about 2004 that presidential election.
And yet still many of them are moving.
And so I think this is something that we need to continue to push on,
any change like this is gonna be super difficult, but we can engage in
these fights while we also pay attention to more topical stuff day by day.
I think we can manage to do both of those things.
>> It has to be something that they're gonna push and
make sure they say regularly and with a clarity.
Because of course it's gonna get tactics or
looking to usurp power again because of projection.
>> Yeah, 100 percent.
[MUSIC]