The New York Times last month published a column that called for the Electoral College to be abolished as liberal news organizations continue to plea for an end of the system used to determine the president, but a staunch defender of the Electoral College believes critics are simply acting on behalf of the Democratic Party.
"The left has come to hate the Electoral College because it works exactly the way it's supposed to, really. That's the irony of all of the attacks that you see from The New York Times and the rest of the left-wing punditry out there," Save Our States founder Trent England told Fox News Digital.
Saves Our States is dedicated to defending the Electoral College at all costs. England founded the organization in 2009 and aims to preserve the state-by-state process that he believes is necessary to allow all Americans a say in who runs the country. However, as Democrats are harmed by the process that gives a voice to rural Americans, coastal elite media members have regularly sided with their allies in the Democratic Party.
"We particularly try to work to stop something called the National Popular Vote Campaign, which sounds very innocuous, but really is trying to get state legislatures to manipulate the way the Electoral College works in a way that is partisan, in a way that really is fundamentally against the constitutional system that we have and they could throw presidential elections into even more chaos than we've seen in the past," England said. "The Electoral College means that New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco don't run the country."
The longtime left-wing goal of abolishing the Electoral College has been amplified in recent years after Republican candidates such as former President Trump have managed to win the presidency despite losing the popular vote.
"That's why we have an Electoral College. The founders said, ‘You know, hey, the popular vote, like that sounds like a reasonable way to do elections, but the problem is in a really big, really diverse country, you could wind up with the giant population centers, whether those are big states or big cities or big media markets, really having a lot of control over everybody else in every presidential election," England said. "So they said, ‘Let's spread this power round. Let's come up with something which became the Electoral College.’"
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England believes power being taken from voters in media population centers in coastal cities and given to what many liberals dismiss as flyover states is exactly why the left "hates" the Electoral College.
"It means that New York and therefore, The New York Times, don't have as much power as they would otherwise have, right? The San Francisco Chronicle... the L.A. Times, all of those left-wing outlets, they don't get as much power because Iowa matters. Oklahoma matters. West Virginia matters," he said. "All of these places matter… it's amazing the Electoral College works to do exactly what it's designed to do, and that's actually why people hate it so much."
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New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie recently penned, "There’s a Reason Trump Could Try to Overturn the Results of the 2020 Election," which declared Americans should "scrap the rules that make subversion a tempting option to begin with" instead of simply patching holes in the current process. Throughout the piece, Bouie essentially used the events of the Jan. 6 riot to push the notion that the Electoral College needs to be scrapped because it offers an incentive to "meddle" with the process.
"The most important safeguard for our electoral system isn’t a particular set of rules and arrangements, but political actors who accept defeat, honor the results of an election and allow the winner to take and exercise the power to which they’re entitled. And it is a serious, possibly existential problem for American democracy that a large part of one of our two major parties just doesn’t want to play ball," he wrote.
The left has gone after the Electoral College for years, but Trump’s 2016 win put a newfound spotlight on the concept after he lost the popular vote. The topic has been debated on "The View," Howard Stern claimed he would end the Electoral College if he successfully ran for office and defeated 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton has suggested switching to the popular vote. The Washington Post’s editorial board bluntly called for it to be abolished in 2020 and The New York Times published a piece calling to "let the people pick the president" that same year.
Author and Washington Post columnist Max Boot faced a wave of mockery last month when he slammed America’s state of politics and called for the nation to abolish the Electoral College.
England pointed out the Times and other liberal institutions were supporters of the Electoral College back when it benefited the types of minorities preferred by Democrats. He said it still helps "minorities in rural areas and small states" but the left looks the other way when it comes to giving a voice to groups such as farmers and coal workers. Along the way, England felt the Times "become sort of wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party" and changed its view.
"All of the sudden, they look at this just in terms of does it help or hurt Democrats? And they think it hurts Democrats. So they think it's terrible," England said. "If Republicans were seen to benefit from the Electoral College and things were reversed, I think that you would hear exactly the opposite from the left."
Fox News' Aalexander Hall contributed to this report.
