If you don’t like the electoral college it may partly be because you are WEIRD – western, educated, industrialized, rich (by world standards), and democratic. This means that in a red state, your values likely differ from a majority of your fellow state citizens and that your perspective differs from the democracy-phobic founders who put the electoral college in place to prevent straight up democracy that would negate the will of rural states in favor of national rule. In the 2016 election, even though he had fewer votes overall, Trump won a majority of votes in 2,626 counties to Hillary’s 487. From a more localized perspective, it would be strange for someone who has the support of so many counties to not be the winner.
We have given so much power over our lives over to the executive branch bureaucracy that it is hard for us to imagine that local rule is more important or that it is important to ensure that all *kinds* of people have an impact on the national election no matter how many people represent the “kind.” So many Americans are aligned with the values of professor Netflix and the national news media that they are disconnected from their neighbors and care more about the national will and the national historical story than the local- the electoral college seems like a quaint barrier to an unqualified good, democracy. But democracy is a dangerous form of government for minorities (two wolves and a sheep voting for what’s for supper) and fear of it is what drove the way American government was designed, to put checks on majority rule locally, to completely negate the tyranny of high-population centers nationally through the electoral college, and to only allow state legislators to elect senators. That last protection was chipped away by the 17th amendment. The electoral college is one of the few protections left.