In a ‘contingent election’, he could lose the popular vote, electoral college and all his legal cases and still end up the legal US president
are tied nationally; no Republican nominee has emerged to challenge Trump. But, as we have been learning pretty much continuously since 2000, the will of the majority of the American people no longer matters all that much in who is running their country.
There have been two contingent elections in US history. The first was in 1825. The year before, Andrew Jackson, the man from the $20 bill, had won the plurality of votes and the plurality of electoral college votes as well, but after extensive, elaborate negotiations, John Quincy Adams took the presidency mostly by offering Henry Clay, who had come third in the election, secretary of state. Jackson, though shocked, conceded gracefully. He knew his time would come.
The American people are already disinclined to believe in the legitimacy of any election that doesn’t conform to their own desired outcome any more, left or right. In 2016, at the inauguration of Donald Trump, the crowds chanted “not my president”. As of August, theSo the possibility of the electoral college releasing a confusing result, or being unable to certify a satisfying result by two months after the election, is quite real.
In 2021, I published a book about American political decline, The Next Civil War, which examined the structural crises underlying the collapse of the American political order, but I didn’t include a chapter on the electoral system because it seemed too far-fetched, the stuff of historical figments. Those deep structural crises are now, rapidly, overtaking the electoral system itself.
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