Hamilton Electors Hijacked the Resistance. Democrats Shoulda Listened To Daniel.*
By John Lumea
Daniel Brezenoff, that is.
Brezenoff is the creator of the spectacularly successful Change.org petition that went up on Election Night and that, within a few short weeks, attracted nearly 5M signatures—4M within the first five days!—and a boatload of tweet-outs from celebrities and other influencers, making it the fastest-growing and most popular petition in Change.org history.
Why did this happen? It happened because the petition had a powerful message for the Electoral College—a message that was simple, clear and true:
1) Donald Trump is unfit to be President.
2) Hillary Clinton won the national popular vote—by a lot.
3) Hillary Clinton should be President.
At around the same time that Brezenoff launched his petition, a different Electoral College effort—the Hamilton Electors project—started appearing on social media and in news reports.
The organizers of this project—Bret Chiafalo of Washington and Michael Baca of Colorado—were Democratic electors who had supported Bernie Sanders in the primary and who, indeed, had gone to the press before Election Day threatening to withhold their electoral votes from Hillary Clinton in the event that they were called upon to serve.
The Hamilton Electors made the following pitch:
1) Republican electors will never vote for Hillary Clinton—but they may vote for a Republican alternative that citizens of all political persuasions would find preferable to Donald Trump.
2) Should enough Republican electors defect from Trump to deny him the 270 votes he needs to win the Electoral College outright, the election will be thrown to the House of Representatives, where elected officials will choose from the top three vote-getters in the Electoral College—and where Republicans control a majority of state delegations. The logic of (1) will apply.
3) Democratic electors should defect from Clinton and draw Republican electors into an agreement to vote for a “responsible Republican” who was not on the general-election ballot.
4) Should the election move to the House, Republicans and Democrats will unite to elect as President the third-choice Republican—even though few, if any, U.S. voters actually voted for this person.
The unspoken message was “Don’t pay attention to that Idealist over there with the millions of signatures behind him.”
The spoken message was: “Pay attention to the Hamilton Electors. We are the Realists in the room.”
THE media obliged.
Daniel Brezenoff’s petition got an initial round of headlines. But, over the course of the last six weeks, since Election Day, it has been the Hamilton Electors who have gotten nearly all of the attention—in part, no doubt, because they were actual electors, which Brezenoff wasn’t.
But, notice: In an effort to justify their attempt to broker a President who wasn’t even on the ballot, the Hamilton Electors sought to delegitimize Hillary Clinton—and, indeed, to make Democratic electoral votes for her seem pointless—by arguing not only that Clinton’s 3M-vote lead over Trump in the national popular vote has no moral purchase, but that the national popular vote itself is a non-issue in the election of the President.
When pressed on this, Messrs. Chiafalo and Baca reflexively and repeatedly mansplained that the national popular vote was to be disregarded, as it is not expressly mentioned in the Constitution. (But neither are most other elements and ideas that these two used to build their case. The part of Article 2, Section 1, that governs the election of the President is only a couple of paragraphs.)
And, for all their professed veneration for Federalist 68, the 1788 essay in which Alexander Hamilton laid out his defense of the Electoral College, the Hamilton Electors never mentioned Hamilton’s first point, from which all the others flowed: an injunction that “the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person”—the President of the United States—“to whom so important a trust was to be confided.”
The Hamilton Electors “reverse cherry-picked” the popular vote out of all significance.
Unfortunately, Brezenoff himself—apparently in a gesture of unity with Hamilton Electors and others hoping to use the Electoral College to “stop Trump”—dialed down his specific appeals to Hillary Clinton’s moral claim to the Presidency.
Brezenoff’s petition continued to call for the Electoral College to vote for Hillary Clinton. But, over the course of the six weeks between Election Day and the Electoral College vote, he mentioned Clinton and the national popular vote less and less.
And, most of the $250,000 he raised was used to produce and publish two pieces—a 90-second video spot and an open letter to electors (which ran as a full-page ad in major newspapers)—that didn’t mention Clinton at all.
Instead, Brezenoff used the same pared-down generic messages — “Vote your conscience” and “Country over party” — that the Hamilton Electors had been reduced to using to reflect the fact that they were unable to deliver on their far-fetched promise of building a “bipartisan” movement around electing a consensus “responsible Republican” that wasn’t on the ballot.
Was Daniel Brezenoff co-opted? Almost certainly, that’s too strong a word.
But it seems obvious that—for whatever reason—Brezenoff felt himself unable to continue to give voice to the most compelling and actionable part of his original message, the part that nearly 5M people signed on to: Hillary Clinton won more votes. She should be President.
That’s a shame.
HERE’S the thing.
Given the Hamilton Electors’ proof-texting of Hamilton himself to push their agenda;
Given the Hamilton Electors’ overreaching claims for their own progress and support, over the course of the 6-week effort; and
Given the actual result…
The Hamilton Electors project looks more and more to have been the private adventure of Bret Chiafalo and Michael Baca.
This adventure—by which I mean not the general effort to urge Republican electors to defect from Trump but, rather, the specific Democratic effort to abandon Clinton and cut a deal with Republican electors for a compromise Republican alternative—sucked up far more media bandwidth and far more time, energy and money of well-intentioned people than it deserved to.
Did there need to be a resistance to the prospect of the Electoral College’s making Trump a TKO President, when the “loser” had received nearly 3M more popular votes nationally? Yes.
But the Hamilton Electors project was the wrong vehicle for the resistance.
It was wrong on strategy and wrong on principle.
Indeed, the Hamilton Electors story was a colossal distraction—and, in terms of its own electoral goals, the project was an abject failure.
Only two Republican electors defected from Trump.
Five Democratic electors defected from Clinton.
One Republican elector voted for the candidate, Ohio Governor John Kasich, that had been heavily promoted by the Hamilton Electors. But, at the end of the day, only one of the seven Democratic electors that had identified publicly as a Hamilton Elector voted for Kasich; and he was replaced.
Three of these Democratic electors voted for Colin Powell. One voted for Faith Spotted Eagle, a tribal leader in South Dakota. And, after all the sturm und drang, the other three voted for—yep—Hillary Clinton.
Not a single alternative candidate had the support of even one Republican/ Democratic pair of electors.
And Donald Trump won with 304 out of 306 projected electoral votes.
ALL of which leads me to wonder…
How might things have played out differently over the last six weeks if—rather than allow their actions to be governed by the anti-Clinton, anti-democratic abstractions of two ambitious, self-important electors with a Facebook page and vaguely messianic pretensions—if, rather than that, Democrats and, indeed, Daniel Brezenoff himself simply had really leaned in to Brezenoff’s petition and its message that, given Donald Trump’s evident unfitness for office, the most straightforward and principled alternative was to elect Hillary Clinton as President?
The fact that the Hamilton Electors posted only one time about Brezenoff suggests that they understood the power of his message and the support that it had generated—and that they wanted to do as little as possible to magnify it.
In the post, the Hamilton Electors tied themselves in knots to try to identify Daniel Brezenoff without mentioning Hillary Clinton—they described him as “the founder of the Change.org petition to have the Electoral College vote for someone other than Donald Trump”—but there actually was a lot of support for Clinton in the Hamilton Electors threads.
In fact, it seems clear from the comments on the Hamilton Electors’ Facebook posts that many “liked” the Hamilton Electors page and shared its posts, believing that the project was an extension of Brezenoff’s petition or at least an allied pro-Clinton effort. (Any why should they have assumed any differently about a Democrat-led effort to stop Trump? It’s not as though urging electors to dump both general-election candidates in favor of an off-ballot Republican that nobody voted for was the most obvious move for Democrats to be making.)
The Hamilton Electors positioned themselves as the great authorities on Alexander Hamilton. But they were able to rationalize their defection from Clinton only by wrapping themselves in a selective version of Federalist 68 that edited out Hamilton’s contention that the Electoral College should deliberate with a view to the national will.
It’s ironic that it is the Clinton advocate, Daniel Brezenoff, who actually had a better appreciation of Hamilton’s complete message. In the letter that was sent to members of the Electoral College with each signature to his petition, Brezenoff wrote:
The Founders created the Electoral College to balance two important values: the will of the people, and the need for a President who is fit for office.
Brezenoff was right. But Messrs. Chiafalo and Baca (and their closest cohorts) were prepared to sacrifice the former in a wild goose chase for the latter.
Here’s what’s rich: Having spent the last six weeks telling anybody who would listen that the national popular vote is insignificant, the Hamilton Electors released a statement on Monday afternoon—following the news that Donald Trump had won the Electoral College—that
(a) cited Hillary Clinton’s lead in the national popular vote as an index of Trump’s illegitimacy (and, by inescapable inference, Clinton’s own legitimacy), and that
(b) offered a de facto endorsement of reforming the Electoral College via the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
The statement points out [emphasis mine] that “Trump’s three million popular vote loss in November…highlights the lack of support for Trump within what is ostensibly his own party” and notes, more broadly:
“[T]oday’s result…underlined the urgent need for political and electoral reform in the country. Such reforms may including significantly altering the Electoral College in favor of selecting future U.S. presidents by those who win a national popular vote.”
Where was all this interest in the national popular vote over the last six weeks?
To be honest, I’ll be quite happy if this is the last that we hear from the Hamilton Electors for a very long time, if ever. That probably is wishful thinking on my part. At a minimum, though, the story-starved media should think long and hard before giving these guys any more undeserved attention. They already have had their 15 minutes.
Keep an eye on Daniel Brezenoff, though.
He got it right the first time. He probably will do so again.
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* The Hamilton Electors project afforded many people the opportunity to learn about the history of the Electoral College and to gain clarity about its apparent strengths and actual weaknesses. The project also provided an opportunity for politically engaged citizens, including myself, to form and develop new friendships—friendships that, no doubt, will be new building blocks of the community that must now, finally, mobilize to effectively abolish the Electoral College as we know it. I am grateful for all of these good things. The preceding commentary should not be seen as saying otherwise.
