Democrats lost due to bad choice of candidate: American analyst

Due to their bad choice of candidate, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton lost the vote of the Electoral College for the White House to Republican Donald Trump, according to Myles Hoenig, an American political analyst and activist.  

A majority of US Democrats are in favor of putting an end to the Electoral College system, after Clinton lost the November 8 presidential election despite winning the popular vote by more than a million votes, according to the Huffington Post/YouGov poll, released on Thursday.

Sixty-six percent of Democrats are in favor of discarding the Electoral College for a popular vote system to elect the US president, while 14 percent want to keep the current system in place, the poll showed.

“Admittedly, this is not an easy subject to tackle. Twice in very recent history the Democratic nominee for president lost the race due to the results of the Electoral College, in 2000 and 2016,” Hoenig, a Green Party candidate for Congress, said in a phone interview with Press TV on Friday.

“In 2000 it was the Electoral College that ultimately gave the win to George Bush, but it was really due to Democratic Party incompetence, poor strategizing, and Republican rigging and manipulation of the process that won in the end,” he said.

“This most recent example with Clinton vs. Trump may be the better example for why the Democrats want to eliminate this process for selecting the president,” the analyst stated.

Electoral College system

Americans vote in each state at a general election to choose a slate of "electors" pledged to vote for a party's candidate who is elected president should they receive an absolute majority of electoral votes among the states. However, the winner does not always correspond to the candidate who won the popular vote.

Democrats have denounced the Electoral College system as an “outdated, undemocratic system” that does not reflect modern American society, after Democratic nominee Clinton won the popular vote last week but lost the Electoral College to the Republican rival, Trump.

In the popular vote, Clinton has won 62,829,832 votes compared to Trump's 61,488,190, or 47.9 percent to 46.9 percent, respectively, according to an analysis from the independent Cook Political Report Thursday.

However, Trump won 290 of the total 538 electoral votes, compared to Clinton’s 232. It takes 270 Electoral College votes to win the White House.

Dems have bigger problem than Electoral College

Hoenig said, “The argument that the Democrats make is based on how the numbers work out in the end. If it were to go to straight popular vote, then potentially the favorite son or daughter of a state like California, Texas or New York could easily amass more votes than many small states together.”

"Although the votes in the Electoral College are somewhat proportional, the numbers of actual popular votes can skew the outcome. And how the number of electors per state is chosen does favor the smaller states,” he added.

“For example, hypothetically, if a state like California gave the winning candidate 5 million votes but many small states together gave that same candidate a combined 6 million, yet still lost enough of the state’s race, California’s electoral votes would outweigh the winning popular vote. This is basically what happened but not in the Democrats’ favor and why they are fighting this now. If the situation were reversed, either the Republicans would be clamoring for a change or just remain silent,” he stated.

The commentator noted that the “Democrats have a bigger problem than the Electoral College. Yes, they won the popular vote overall but failed to energize the entire voting population to win in each state. Their choice of candidate was their primary reason for losing. True the states’ electoral votes combined worked against Clinton, but only so because they didn’t have a candidate capable of winning those states.”

“It’s always easy to shift blame when you don’t want to accept responsibility for your own failings,” Hoenig said in his concluding remarks.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk