The lyingest liar who ever lied will rally supporters in the Bronx Thursday. In promoting his Crotona Park rally, Donald Trump previewed his message: to “ease the financial pressures placed on households and re-establish law and order in New York!” There’s even a falsehood embedded in those simple phrases: Contrary to Trump’s claims that New York is a hellscape, it remains one of America’s safest cities, safer than most places that trend Trump. Despite there being progressive prosecutors in most boroughs, murders and shootings are trending down this year.
We’ve got problems, to be sure — New York’s bail laws wrongly don’t let judges consider a defendant’s risk to the community, and DAs from Manhattan’s Alvin Bragg to the Bronx’s Darcel Clark err plenty — but they’re not the ones in the former president’s fever dream.
All that said, don’t count us upset that criminal defendant Trump is daring to take his sordid roadshow to a heavily Democratic area. In these pages on Tuesday, Bronx Congressman Ritchie Torres took umbrage at the visit. Torres is right about a lot of things, including that it hurts to watch Republicans slashing food aid for the needy while pleading government poverty. We don’t concur with him that Trump’s “too dangerously delusional to be anywhere near the Bronx.”
Indeed, America would be a politically better place if Republicans more often tried their darndest to make their case in Democrat-dominated states, and vice versa — if we actually talked to and tried to persuade one another. There’s an understandable reason why that hardly ever happens, and it’s called the Electoral College.
Except in Maine and Nebraska, that very stupid system sends all of a state’s support to the winning candidate whether winning with 50.1% or 99.9%, which means that it’s a waste of a candidate’s time and campaign money to try to appeal in a sure-to-lose or sure-to-win state. Thus the obsessive focus on a handful of in-play swing states that determine the outcome. As RFK Jr. supporters should realize, the Electoral College can also give spoiler candidates an especially powerful role in helping throw states to one major candidate or another.
A far better system would count the votes of, you know, actual citizens who cast their ballots, requiring candidates to appeal to voters all across the country. The nation is actually edging toward such a system as more and more states sign onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, pledging to send all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote. Right now, 17 states and the District of Columbia, representing 209 electoral votes, have made the pledge. We’re about three-quarters of the way to sanity, with the last quarter sure to be the hardest. Godspeed.
In the system we have, President Biden will make few campaign trips to solidly Republican Utah or Louisiana or Texas; he’ll visit New York to raise money, but barely to campaign. Trump may swoop into the Bronx for a stunt to prove that there are MAGAites in every corner of the country, but it doesn’t make sense for him or his campaign to invest limited time and resources in states he’s guaranteed to win or lose.
So we remain one nation, politically divisible — and divided along more lines than you can count.