Warning: The following blog entry may contain political comment!
It appears that Donald Trump will become the next President of the United States of America ... and – according to some observers – the de facto leader of the so-called 'Free World'.
Having watched the two main candidates go through the process of being selected as their party's candidates, and the, having followed their subsequent campaigns, it seemed to me that the American people had a difficult choice to make.
One candidate was a professional politician with lots of experience of how government works at the highest level, but seemingly little real connection with the majority of the population ... and the other was a multi-millionaire property developer and 'reality' TV star with no experience of government. One was apparently unable or unwilling to use secure modern communications technology, with the result that electronically-held confidential information was put at risk ... and the other seemed incapable of telling the truth or apologising for anything that he might have done wrong. Neither had blameless or spotless lives before they became candidates, and both have been accused of dubious - and even potentially criminal - behaviour.
Neither candidate came to the contest without considerable 'baggage' ... and it was how potential voters viewed the relevance or importance of that baggage that determined which of the two they would vote for. One thing that did become very apparent was that a significant section of the population no longer holds the professional political class in anything other than contempt ... and this is a phenomenon that is also noticeable in the UK. To people like this someone who seemed to reflect their distrust of the 'system', and who promised that he would restore prosperity and pride to their nation, must have been an attractive candidate. That candidate's personal failings could be dismissed as being of little importance in the grand scheme of things, and not that dire in contrast to the 'crimes' with which their 'crooked' opponent has been accused.
If I had been an American voter, I must admit that I would have found it difficult to decide which of the two candidates to vote for. The choice would have to come down to which candidate was the 'least worst' of the two ... and my personal choice would have been to reluctantly vote for Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump.
One interesting aspect of the US Presidential election was the fact that individual voters don't actually cast direct votes for either candidate; it is the Electoral College that actually votes for the President. Each state has a number of Electoral College votes, and the number of votes each state has is based upon its population. All that state's votes go to the candidate that the majority of the state's voters have voted for. It is therefore possible for one candidate to get the majority of the national vote and the other to win the overall contest because they get the majority of the Electoral College votes.
This apparently odd system is a result of fears on the part of the writers of the United States Constitution that a simple majority voting system would lead to what Alexis de Tocqueville called 'the tyranny of the majority'. James Madison had a solution to this problem ... the inclusion of an Electoral College in the process of electing a President. According to Alexander Hamilton in THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, the Electoral College is there to ensure that a president is chosen 'by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favourable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice' and that 'the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.'
I wonder what Madison and Hamilton would have made of this recent Presidential election campaign, the two main candidates, and the ultimate winner.
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