-- regardless of whether there is any real chance of blocking Trump, the electors should vote exactly how they want in order to join the army of small protest acts that collectively help to undermine the legitimacy of the incoming president. Writes Beutler:
Not only is there some precedent for this kind of protest voting, but it, and similar statements of no-confidence from within official channels, will be an important source of resistance to a presidency that poses an enormous threat to small-l liberalism. There are certainly norms that shouldn’t be ignored for the purposes of weakening Trump, but this isn’t one of them.
Trump opponents will ultimately need a clear resistance strategy, but in a leaderless environment, they have been floundering in the dark for more than a month now, grasping for short-term anti-Trump resistance tactics.
None of them has been particularly effective, but we have learned through these efforts that Trump is highly sensitive about the fact that he lost the popular vote by a margin of millions, and his Electoral College margin is historically low. He and his supporters want to claim a mandate, and feel threatened by the awareness that he will preside over a term of minority rule.
Thinning that electoral majority even further, through GOP protest votes, would be a small but useful public testament to both his unfitness for office and the lack of public confidence in his ascent to power. For the time being, this is what official resistance to Trump will look like: numerous battlefronts, some invisible, each inconsequential, but that have a real impact when taken together.
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