On October 29, Dennis Kanin, Class of 1964 and member of the Roxbury Latin Board of Trustees, delivered a Hall on the history of presidential elections in the United States, and on what we might look for in the days and weeks ahead as our nation elects its next president. Dennis spoke about the rationale behind the implementation of the electoral college and how it exists today. Opening his talk, he stated, “I am charged today with explaining how and why we elect our nation’s chief executive differently than every other country in the world.”
Before touching on the history of the Electoral College, Dennis explained that every election is about more than just the election of the chief officer, but also about key members of the House and Senate. He highlighted several unique facts about this election, with various unprecedented situations at play, such as the potential first woman president or the only time in history other than Grover Cleveland that a president has served in a non-consecutive term. With this context, Dennis began to discuss the roots of the way elections work in the United States. “We do not elect our chief executive based on which candidate gets the most votes,” he explained. The founding fathers implemented the Electoral College as a compromise, a vote that would not be determined by popularity alone nor by trying to standardize the drastically different population distribution per state. However, according to Dennis, in the 2000 election, the president-elect won the electoral votes but lost the popular vote for the first time. This happened again in 2016, bringing into question the process’s efficacy.
Dennis went on to describe the various scenarios that might play out on election night, explaining battleground states and, in the cases of Nebraska and Maine, swing jurisdictions. In both the 2016 and 2020 elections, the victory or loss of the Electoral College majority was incredibly narrow and, had a few thousand votes been cast differently in certain states, the outcomes would have looked entirely different. The narrow margins we’ve seen in recent history are also potentially in play for this election. “Next Tuesday, a few of you will cast your first vote for president, and all of you will have a chance to see history in the making.”
He concluded that whatever happens on election night, though, democracy is what makes the United States such a unique and strong country. “For the sixth time in seven consecutive presidential elections, this will come down to the wire,” Dennis stated. “Tuesday, we cast ballots in the 60th election for president of the United States, the oldest democracy in continuous existence in the world,” Dennis said in closing, and it relies on an informed citizenry to maintain the country’s proud tradition of free and fair elections.
This was Dennis’s seventh time, over several decades, providing a Hall on elections and offering Roxbury Latin boys a primer on the dynamics of the United States Electoral College. He has been active in government and politics for decades, beginning in the year of his graduation from RL when he secured a job with the Democratic National Committee and Lyndon Johnson’s re-election campaign. He later spent years as a campaign manager, and later chief of staff, for the U.S. Senator Paul Tsongas.
