Those who are aghast at the idea of Donald Trump becoming president simply have to get over the results of the election.
Protests by Trump opponents continue in some cities, and there have been reports from several schools of student walkouts and other protests. All that is fine as long as there’s no rioting or property damage. Young people are emotional by nature, and their dismay should be indulged for a while.
The latest effort to keep Trump out of office involves the Electoral College. The Associated Press reports that “grassroots campaigns” are trying to persuade presidential electors committed to voting for Trump to change their minds.
The odds of that happening are long, if not impossible. And that is as it should be.
As of this weekend, Trump has 290 electoral votes, while Hillary Clinton has 232. The winner of Michigan’s 16 votes will not be confirmed until the end of November, but Trump leads by 11,000. If that holds, he will have 306 votes in the Electoral College — 36 more than the 270 he needs to be formally elected.
Basically, Trump’s opponents are asking more than 10 percent of his electors to choose someone else. That’s just not going to happen: The National Archives says less than 1 percent of Electoral College voters have been a “faithless elector,” meaning they have not voted as they promised.
Electors typically are chosen by state party officials and are loyal party members. It is inconceivable that more than one or two Republican electors would betray Trump, even if they did not support him during the primaries.
And then, even if by some bizarre occurrence, enough Trump electors voted for someone else and threw the election into the House of Representatives, it’s impossible to see the Republican majority there, with one vote per state, choosing anyone but the president-elect.
The grassroots campaigners say that this weird election year is proof that anything can happen, and that’s true enough. They certainly have the right to start their online petitions.
It just seems like a waste of time. There are more productive things for Democrats and opponents of Trump to do.
Eugene Robinson, a columnist in The Washington Post, had it right last week when he said Democrats need to start rebuilding from the ground up.
Robinson noted that 33 governors are Republican, and in 32 states, the GOP holds majorities in both houses of the Legislature. In Washington, the party has majorities in both the House and the Senate.
This provides Republicans with a deep pool of talent from which to grow future candidates. Democrats have too small a pool, which is one reason that Clinton and Bernie Sanders, who’s more socialist than Democrat, were the party’s only two substantial candidates in 2016.
Trump’s foes can march, demand changes in the Electoral College and start petitions to get electors to vote against Trump. But until they start working to elect more like-minded people at the local level, they’re just dreaming.
