Let's do the math and ponder a rather modest national settlement relocation program.
Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote by 2.5 million votes, a healthy margin singularly provided by California, which she won by a whopping 4.2 million votes.
Meantime she lost the Electoral College because she was nipped in three Rust Belt states--Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin--by a combined 83,000 votes. That's fewer people than regularly assemble in those states for Big 10 football games.
Clinton's was the second Democratic loss in 16 years in the electoral college despite a popular-vote victory.
Obviously, then, the Democrats have a problem. They can't consistently convert their national voting advantage to actual presidential election. But it is a simple problem, merely of population distribution.
Democratic voters, sticking to their own kind, are entirely too concentrated in California, where they have votes to burn and the electoral bounty is finite no matter how massive the popular victory.
If a mere 100,000 of those California Democratic voters had resided instead in those three decisive Rust Belt states, and been apportioned strategically among them--let's say 55,000 in Pennsylvania, 30,000 in Wisconsin and 15,000 in Michigan--then Clinton would have held California overwhelmingly while also winning the electoral college by 278-260.
California would hardly notice losing 100,000 Democratic voters, barely 1 percent of the Democratic turnout in that state on Nov. 8. Ceding 100,000 Democratic voters in California would have reduced Clinton's victory margin in that state from a smashing 4.2 million to a smashing 4.1 million.
If a mere 100,000 California Democrats acted in the national interest--that of saving the country from an irrational, dishonest, dangerous, unfit and preposterous president--and strategically relocated themselves to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin in time for the next election in 2020, then chances would be improved that the nation could confine the current calamity to four years.
In this digital age of a more mobile economy less dependent for professional activity on location, there easily are 100,000 California Democrats who could rent lodging in one of the three decisive states, declare residency, do their jobs in digital remoteness, endure the cold and save their country.
I know Santa Barbara is an Eden. But Madison is nice. Philly's suburbs are all right. I wouldn't go to Flint right now, but Michigan has some choice venues. People are trying to bring Detroit back.
Anyway, these folks could head back to California after the election.
But wouldn't all that make a mockery of the electoral college and the wise designs of our founding fathers?
In a way, yes. But in another, not so much. Things are always changing, and the United States is now a place where state boundaries matter less. Donald Trump himself rails against industries leaving the country, but not against individual state inducements to industrial prospects that encourage job movement from one state to another.
We are more a singular and cohesive nation now, connected by interstate highways, airplanes and mouse clicks. And we remain a blessedly free country--pretty much, if less after Nov. 7--where citizens may live where they want for the reasons they danged well please.
There are worse reasons to move than the good of the country.
We needn't abolish the electoral college. Democrats could just play it a bit.
Am I serious or kidding? I'm not quite sure.
Either way, I'm making this point: Democrats ought to be able to win the presidency when they dominate the national popular vote by this much, but their problem is that they have become entirely too clannish.
What I suggest could work both ways, of course. Republicans have votes to spare in certain states--Arkansas, for one--and GOP devotees in those places could themselves relocate to Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin where they ... forgive me ... could trump relocating Democrats.
We'd wind up with a national chess game, or musical chairs.
But the point is that California, itself one of the world's largest economies, could spare the exodus of 100,000 Democrats much more easily than Arkansas could spare the exodus of 100,000 Republicans, appealing though the notion be.
I'd hate to lose the readers. But they could subscribe online and not miss their daily blood-pressure spike from back home.
Or there is this: Arkansas has nearly 400,000 Democratic voters whose ballots amount to futile whistles in the wind. A hundred thousand of them could move to the three states in question.
As someone said the other day: Democrats who are fleeing to Canada need to stop and stay put in Michigan.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/06/2016