Donald Trump, promiser of “a beautiful wall,” out-hoped the progressives who thought they owned it. Voters concluded that an ideology-free businessman would turn hope into change better than yet another bearer of liberal orthodoxy.
Among the reasons for Mr. Trump’s win is the corrosive state of the nation’s culture, from the opioid crisis to political correctness. The notion that Donald Trump might help rehabilitate the culture would strike many as laughable.
Maybe so. But Donald Trump seems to have been genuinely moved by the opioid crisis he discovered in New Hampshire and elsewhere. That kind of exposure is another argument for the 50-state Electoral College.
Our electoral system, up and running since 1789, forces candidates to meet people living in a large, regionally complex country. Running for president may attract self-inflated personalities, but there is only one person looking into the faces of and listening to uncounted pleas on the campaign trail—from Iowans, Floridians, Ohioans, Mainers—and that is the candidate.
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