The Electoral College is an “abomination,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claims in The American Experiment, a Netflix miniseries premiering on Wednesday.
“Well, I personally think the Electoral College is an abomination,” Clinton says with a laugh in an interview for the series. “For obvious reasons.”
Clinton won the 2016 presidential popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots but lost the overall election to Donald Trump because of the system, put in place by the Founding Fathers.
“I knew I would be asking former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton about one of the most painful moments of her life,” director Brian Knappenberger told Variety of the moment in the forthcoming series. “She has rarely spoken candidly about that election night and we’re really happy she talked about it for the series. She has a unique perspective as one of only five people in American history to lose the presidency after winning the popular vote. The 2016 election also stands out because Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in the popular vote by such a significant margin.”
Other political figures defend the Electoral College in the series.
Former Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona says there is “virtue” in the process because it’s part of a system that spreads power between the federal and state governments.
“The states have considerable power,” Flake says in the show. “The states run elections. That is a good thing to decentralize that kind of power.”
Clinton, whose 2016 loss was considered a shock upset, has opened up about the election before, but rarely in such pointed terms, criticizing the constitutionally mandated structure of the process, which gives each state Electoral College votes based on its number of representatives in Congress. The system gives smaller states a disproportionate number of Electoral College votes because every state has two senators, regardless of its population size.
In a 2017 memoir, What Happened, Clinton instead blamed the loss on a combination of sexism, racism, and blowback from the emails scandal, as well as Trump’s skill at turning politics into an outrageous form of entertainment.
“I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions,” she wrote in the book, “while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans’ anger and resentment.”
About 56 percent of Americans would approve of amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with the popular vote, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll.
In April, Virginia became the 18th state to join the National Popular Vote Compact, a group of states that agree to award their Electoral College votes to the winner of the nationwide popular presidential vote.
The compact doesn’t take effect until the states that have signed on possess a cumulative total of 270 Electoral College votes, the threshold required to elect the president.
