'The View' Co-Host Navarro Says US Is Ready for a Woman President Because One's 'Already Been Elected'
One of the co-hosts of ABC’s “The View” claimed Friday that America elected a female president in 2016.
Ana Navarro, a Republican at odds with President Donald Trump, cited Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin over Trump during a discussion over whether a female candidate could win the presidency in 2020.
“I frankly think — this question, it gets asked over and over again,” Navarro said.
“Can a black person be elected? Well, we elected one already, twice,” she said. “Can a woman get elected? One won 3 million more votes already. A woman has already been elected.
“She didn’t win the Electoral College, but she was elected.”
Navarro was pointing to the fact that in 2016, Clinton posted an overall popular vote margin of 2.8 million votes over Trump.
However, according to figures reported by CBS News, Clinton’s margin over Trump in New York was 1.7 million votes and her margin in California was 4 million votes. That means that in the other 48 states, Trump had a solid popular vote majority as well as winning the Electoral College by a vote of 304-227.
Navarro has made her preference known in the 2020 campaign, having authored an Op-Ed on CNN in support of former Vice President Joe Biden.
“He is normal,” she wrote. “After the chaos and turmoil of the last three years under Trump, ‘normal’ sounds really good to me.”
Clinton herself has said that the rules of the game under which a presidential election is conducted mean that the popular vote is meaningless.
“We have to hope that whoever ends up nominated can win the Electoral College,” she said earlier this month, according to The Hill.
“I think several of our candidates could win the popular vote but as I know … that’s not enough,” she said.
In fact, due to the large numbers of Democrats in high-population states such as New York and California, no Republican has won the popular vote since 1992 with the exception of former President George W. Bush in 2004.
Democrats have been seeking to use that to their advantage by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and the use of the popular vote to decide elections.
In a USA Today Op-Ed, Trent England, executive vice president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, said that step would be a disaster for rural America.
“Should rural and small-town Americans be reduced to serfdom? The American Founders didn’t think so. This is one reason why they created checks and balances, including the Electoral College,” he wrote, noting that “the Electoral College makes it impossible for one population-dense region of the country to control the presidency.”
England said Clinton’s loss exemplified how the Electoral College protects one slice of America from controlling the entire nation.
“This is why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016,” he wrote. “Instead of winning over small-town Americans, she amassed a popular vote lead based on California and a few big cities. She won those places with huge margins but lost just about everywhere else. And the system worked. The Electoral College requires more than just the most raw votes to win — it requires geographic balance. This helps to protect rural and small-town Americans.”
His bottom line was that the Electoral College “requires geographic balance and helps protect Americans who might otherwise have their voices ignored. All Americans should value constitutional protections, like the Electoral College, that remind us that the real purpose of government is to protect our individual rights.”
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