Romney Advisor: Eliminating Electoral College Would Force GOP to Adapt for the Better

‘As long as the Republican Party believes it can win as an overwhelmingly white party, it will never feel the political pressure to change…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) One of Mitt Romney‘s top strategists during his failed 2012 presidential bid to oust Barack Obama has come out in favor of a controversial, left-driven push to end the Electoral College.

The initiative to switch to a popular-vote system for electing the president has been met with heavy skepticism, particularly as Democrats have openly encouraged illegal immigrants to steal their way into the country by the thousands on a daily basis.

Even if those illegals themselves are ineligible to vote, the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause—passed in the aftermath of the Civil War—ensures that groups favored by Democrats’ socialist-friendly policies are only a generation away from securing permanent leftist majorities.

Some radical liberals seeking the presidential nomination, such as former Obama Housing Secretary Julian Castro, have even endorsed open borders that would eliminate any check on how Americans defined citizenship.

Those calls would be likely to grow even louder should schemes like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact succeed.

But former Romney adviser Stuart Stevens claimed in a USA Today op-ed published Monday that being forced to adapt to such a new world order would actually be healthy for conservatives. 

Stevens is currently working on former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld‘s campaign to pose a GOP primary challenge to President Donald Trump.

Employing a common trope on the Left to tie Republican values to whiteness—and, accordingly, link any opposition of leftist policies to racism—he said that the GOP was doomed to fail in its current trajectory due to demographic shifts.

“As long as the Republican Party believes it can win as an overwhelmingly white party, it will never feel the political pressure to change,” Stevens wrote.

“Parties rarely voluntarily change as part of some long-term strategy to improve future results,” he said. “Parties change because they are facing defeat and/or extinction if they don’t change.”

Even at the risk of pushing the entire political system farther leftward, Stevens said that the need to adapt would ultimately preserve some vestige of the Republican Party by forcing it to adopt more progressive attitudes on race-based issues.

Naturally, he blamed President Donald Trump for entrenching the GOP in what he deemed an unhealthy and unsustainable set of beliefs.

“Donald Trump is defining the Republican Party as a white grievance party, settling the score for the great injustices being wrought on America’s white middle class,” Stevens said.

“That was just enough to win in 2016 with the decline in black turnout and the rise of third-party voters, but losing a campaign by 3 million votes should be a serious warning sign for anyone who cares about the health of a center-right party in America.”

Trump and others—such as the Public Interest Legal Foundation—have questioned the legitimacy of the claims that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 popular vote, noting that voter fraud is rampant in blue places like California, New York and Illinois that have since fashioned themselves into “sanctuary states” for illegal immigrants.

Stevens, however, dismissed the notion that a popular-vote system would shift political influence disproportionately to the more populous blue states, thus forcing candidates to ignore rural and conservative-leaning areas.

Oddly, he cited the failed Senate campaign of former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, to support his point.

“The benefits of campaign appearances are far more about driving a message than the acquisition of votes in that particular market,” Steven said. “… O’Rourke campaigned in each of the 254 counties in Texas despite the fact that 84% of Texans live in urban areas.”

Stevens also puzzled, inexplicably, over why blue states like California had not established their own Electoral College systems if it was so effective at maintaining a representative democracy—ignoring that such a measure would require the far-left establishment there to yield some of its existing power.

“The Electoral College has never performed as intended, with electors acting as a deliberative check on the whims of a national election,” he said. “In practice, its only function is to allow for the possibility that the choice of a plurality of American voters will be thwarted and subject America to minority rule.”