Practical Politics

Okay, Taylor Swift isn’t playing around. She informed her millions of online followers that she’s overtly supporting Kamala Harris for POTUS in 2024. She has urged them to follow her lead and vote the same way.
Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas, just did the same. They just made a clarion call to the pop music world to support the Harris-Walz ticket.
Okay, where’s Beyonce? Why do we have to be “late all the time”? Sure, she let the Harris folks use her very popular “Freedom” record for the DNC in August. It was a perfect fit and she had refused any such permission to the Trump folks. But shouldn’t she come out front and urge her followers, many of whom are young Black men, to pull the Harris lever in November (unless they vote earlier)?
Again, this election will not be won out front, based on the popular vote. Republicans have not won such a contest since George W. Bush’s elections, and even before then it was a haphazard affair. The Republican Party has not been a majority party in this country basically since the Voting Rights Act of 1964. That’s not how they roll. As usual, this will be a small ball election where the margins in the states –especially the so-called swing or battleground states–will be determinative. Those votes will mainly be in the thousands, sometimes the hundreds. Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, etc., may be decided by a mere handful of votes. And those small margins may again determine who is the next POTUS and who isn’t.
It is important to note that John Legend, Barack and Michelle Obama, Megan Thee Stallion, Shonda Rimes, Spike Lee, and of course Oprah, all names of great Black personalities in today’s world, have not been shy or absent in their enthusiastic endorsements of Kamala Harris for POTUS. But, c’mon y’all. There are many, many more who should be stepping up. Now is not the time for inaction, pettiness or silence !! Make no mistake, Trump will not win the popular vote. In fact, chances are there will be a popular vote landslide for Harris, since that has been the pattern for the last 2 decades or more. But such a result, alone, will not determine the winner, as it should.
What happened to the movement to change the way the U.S. chooses its POTUS? It was (and still is) called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) and is, actually, still alive and well. As of 2024, the movement has in fact garnered 209 of the 270 states’ electoral votes needed for the interstate agreement to go into effect.
As has been discussed in this column several times, the National Popular Vote movement emerged in late 2006 and has slowly gained ground since then. To repeat, the movement aims at ensuring that the presidential candidate who wins the majority of the popular vote cast nationwide every four years will in fact be the individual elected president. The 16 states and the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.) that have so far agreed to the compact have pledged that all of those states’ electoral votes will be given to whichever presidential candidate wins the popular vote nationwide, rather than the candidate who wins just the most votes in each of those states. So far, none of those states (or D.C.) have reneged on that vote, but the pact is not yet operational.
This National Popular Vote agreement is the future for our presidential elections and cannot get enacted soon enough. This country needs a POTUS elected by the majority of the population of this country, not a minority candidate elected by chance or skullduggery.
After the 2024 election, we should get this compact finished and enacted. Democracy will continue in the U.S.A. in spite of what Trump says about a dictatorship.
And Black folk, c’mon ! Step up, Speak out and Show out! Let’s win this thing !!!
Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). It is the stepparent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.
DISCLAIMER: The beliefs and viewpoints expressed in opinion pieces, letters to the editor, by columnists and/or contributing writers are not necessarily those of OurWeekly.