Election Day: 8:31pm

Chuck Todd, lord help me, just brought up an interesting point. If our method of electing a president is confusing to foreigners when you try to explain it to them, maybe it should be changed. He’s right. The Electoral College is a poor leftover from a time when only landholding men could vote, and when it took George Washington the same amount of time to travel 100 miles as it took Julius Caesar. The Electoral College has been the source of the most egregious violations of the will of the American electorate. The time when the president should be elected by direct popular vote is long past. Any concerns that candidates would focus too much on urban issues is belied by the fact that America’s largest cities equal a far smaller percentage of the population than would be needed to win an election.

As it exists, right now, the majority of votes that are cast in this country today will have little effect on the outcome, because they were cast in states whose electoral votes were not in doubt. Doing away with the Electoral College would make a Republican vote in New York, and a Democratic vote in Utah, matter.

The House was just called for the GOP, which is no surprise. That chamber has been gerrymandered to death. There will be no Democratic majority in the House until either demographic changes make it inevitable, or the courts call bullshit on the gerrymandering.

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