Was pitching Vice President Kamala Harris into the 2024 U.S. presidential race three months and change before election day strategic, calculated, prudent, tactical, clever, shrewd, or planned? Or was it as it appears, the surrender of a beleaguered president trying to unite a fractured party?

Regardless of political party or persuasion, you may feel the fabric of American politics starting to fray. While foreign wars, inflation, a cost of living crisis, taxes, immigration and the economy all characterize past and present campaigns, just 538 men and women will decide which candidate inherits the White House in Election 2024. Called the Electoral College, the term wasn’t mentioned in the U.S. Constitution but rather first propounded upon in American newspaper articles now colloquially referred to as the "Federalist Papers." Alexander Hamilton writes:

The choice of the president should reflect the sense of the people not a political party; their choice should reflect a full and fair expression of the public will; and electors should be elected directly by citizens.

But they’re not. Today, political parties nominate slates of electors at state conventions or central committee meetings. And if the original idea was that electors — the most discerning individuals from each state — were somehow in command of the state’s conventional wisdom, then it follows that their choice would be in lockstep with the state’s popular vote.

Election 2024

Thats because Harris is a creature of institutional politics, not a visionary or an ideologue. Perhaps the most striking distinction between the two candidates.

There were only five million people in America during the first presidential race in 1800, and about 200 newspapers controlled the written word in the public square. Today, social media reaches 239 million users across the United States where videos and pics and memes can replace contextual journalism with impressions. @kamalaharris joined TikTok on Thursday and has three million followers today, spurring coconut tree emojis across platforms following a 2023 speech at a White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Economic Opportunity and Excellence for Hispanics. Harris explains:

My mother used to say: I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people today? You’d think they fell out of a coconut tree! We all exist together in a larger universal context.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first sitting president to speak over the wires in 1920; John F. Kennedy’s physical charm and good looks worked well on television in 1960, and Barack Obama’s use of the Internet in 2008 set the precedent for campaigning in the digital age. However, Donald Trump is the first president to harness the 142 character, insult-slinging, reactionary norm of social media to create an unprecedented and unparalleled political brand. While he delegitimized political correctness with sensationalism, he’s a shrewd infighter who understands ratings.

To wit, Trump's 2016 platform officially condemned the landmark Supreme Court ruling on Marriage Equality, but the new and improved 2024 platform now promotes “a culture that values the sanctity of marriage,” that it no longer wishes to define. A reaction to nearly 70 percent of Americans now supporting Marriage Equality, and sure sign the Party of Trump has moved on.

While the U.S. Constitution does not require electors to vote their state's popular vote, electors who have voted for someone other than the people’s choice in the past have been fined, disqualified, replaced, and even prosecuted by their state. But on 6 July 2020 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Chiafalo v. Washington:

A state may enforce an elector’s pledge to support his party’s nominee—and the state voters’ choice—for President. Electors are not free agents. They are to vote for the candidate whom the state’s voters have chosen.

It is often assumed that the Framers adopted the electoral college because they feared “the people” could be swayed by demagogues. Yet a quick review of the Framer’s deliberations over the summer of 1787 makes clear that the main motivation for adopting the electoral college wasn’t because they distrusted democracy, but rather because they were designing a democratic republic.

Slaves didn’t factor into the population in 1787, as it happens, and the Connecticut compromise ensured equal representation in the upper house. However, our candidate would be wise to look far beyond the Appalachians this year, dear reader, and northward for virtue, liberty and independence.