This will happen again for the upcoming election also…
The American political system thru the Electoral College has enabled the Republicans to game the system to their advantage…
Joe Biden will need to get a good margin electoral win….
That is because Republicans WILL still maintain power in the American South and in Congress…
If Joe Biden maintains his steady lead in national polls over President Donald Trump through Election Day, Democrats will win the popular vote for the seventh time in the past eight presidential elections — something no party has achieved since the formation of the modern American political system in 1828.
And yet, if Trump can restore his competitiveness in a handful of closely contested swing states, that might still not be enough for Biden to win the White House.
The prospect that Trump could win the Electoral College and the presidency while losing the popular vote a second time — something no president has done — underscores the extent to which the 2020 election is emerging as a stress test for a core pillar of American democracy: the belief that majorities, in most instances, should rule.
In fact, over the past two decades, underlying features in the American electoral system that benefit small states, such as the Electoral College and the two-senator-per-state rule, have allowed Republicans to repeatedly win control of the federal government while a majority of voters preferred Democrats.
Though Republican nominees have won the popular vote only once in the five presidential elections since 2000, the GOP has controlled the White House for 12 of the 20 years since then. Similarly, Republicans have controlled the Senate more than half the time since 2000 even though GOP senators, when attributing half of each state’s population to each senator, have never represented more people than their Democratic colleagues, according to calculations by Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the think tank New America.
The American political system has long contained features designed to constrain the ability of majorities to impose their will — what John Adams, among other founders, called “the tyranny of the majority.” But the current situation is unusual in that it has consistently empowered a minority to drive the nation’s agenda, notes Paul Pierson, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley.
“What’s distinctive now is not that majorities have a hard time getting their way; it’s that minorities have [the ability] to get their way,” says Pierson, co-author with Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker of the recent book “Let Them Eat Tweets.”