Remember Paul LePage? Don’t worry, the only people that do traded in their Ku Klux Klan hoods for “Make America Great Again” hats. He’s the former governor of Maine who once claimed that “guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” come to Maine from New York and Connecticut to sell drugs and “half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave,” the New York Daily News reports.
Well, he’s back in the news for saying some equally dumb shit. During a radio interview on Tuesday, Le Page argued that the Electoral College is necessary to keep white people in power.
“What would happen if they do what they say they’re gonna do is white people will not have anything to say,” LePage told WVOM after being asked about destroying the current system used to disenfranchise black voters when electing presidents.
The Daily News notes that WVOM carries such nonpartisans broadcasts from the likes of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
“It’s only going to be the minorities that would get elected,” LePage said. LePage doesn’t believe that every vote should count because that would give entirely too much power to larger states like “California, Texas and Florida.”
The 70-year-old Republican, who now lives in Florida, because of course he does, served two terms as Maine’s governor and was trash while in office.
According to the News, LePage had “one of the highest disapproval ratings among governors nationwide during his last year in office. He’s no stranger to racial controversy, either.
In 2016, LePage called Latinos the “enemy” during a bizarre press conference.
“The enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin,” he said.
From the Daily News:
On March 1, a proposal to elect U.S presidents with a popular vote rather than doing so through the Electoral College process will be considered by the Maine legislature.
LePage called the bill “insane” and worried that white people, who make up more than 61% of the nation’s population and have accounted for all but one of the nation’s presidents, are “gonna’ be forgotten people.”
Critics including Ohio Sen. Vernon Sykes have argued the Electoral College marginalizes black voters.
“(We have) an Electoral College that says to this entire voting block of people, ‘You all are voting in high numbers, high turnout across the board... But in the end, that does not matter because we’ll have this elector, maybe they’ll do what you’ve done, maybe they won’t,’” he told PBS during a 2018 interview.
A nationwide proposal called the National Popular Vote initiative has been approved by 12 states accounting for 172 electoral votes, including New York. It cannot be enacted until states with a combined 270 electoral votes agree that every voter’s ballot should count equally.
The Electoral College has served as a safe space for Republicans as there have been four times where the people voted for one candidate and the Electoral College selected another and each time that has benefited the Republican candidate, according to the AP.
Most recently Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College to Russia’s finest operative.