Hillary Clinton has a new platform for a familiar grievance. In the Netflix documentary The American Experiment, the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee calls the Electoral College, the constitutional mechanism that has selected every American president since George Washington, "an abomination."
Her exact words, as Breitbart reported: "Well, I personally think the Electoral College is an abomination. For obvious reasons."
The "obvious reasons" need no decoder ring. Clinton won the 2016 popular vote by nearly three million ballots, 65,853,514 to Donald Trump's 62,984,828, and still lost the presidency, 227 electoral votes to 304. Trump carried Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a combined 80,000 votes, and those three states made the difference. Nearly a decade later, Clinton is still relitigating the outcome, this time from a Netflix soundstage.
The documentary was directed by Brian Knappenberger, who told Variety that he expected a charged conversation when he sat down with Clinton. Knappenberger framed her participation as a rare moment of candor:
"She has rarely spoken candidly about that election night and we're really happy she talked about it for the series. She has a unique perspective as one of only five people in American history to lose the presidency after winning the popular vote. The 2016 election also stands out because Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in the popular vote by such a significant margin."
"Unique perspective" is one way to describe it. Another is sore loser. Clinton has spent the better part of a decade questioning the legitimacy of elections she and her allies did not win, and doing so with a freedom that would earn any Republican a permanent "election denier" label from every major newsroom in the country.
Clinton's dissatisfaction with American election outcomes did not begin with Trump. As far back as 2016, she claimed the Supreme Court "took away a presidency" in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case that ended the Florida recount and handed George W. Bush the White House. In 2017, she said she would not "rule out" questioning the legitimacy of the election she had just lost.
By 2020, Clinton was still at it. "We still don't really know what happened," she said of the 2016 contest, four years after the fact, long after every recount, audit, and intelligence review had concluded.
She was not shy about applying the same logic to other Democrats' defeats, either. Clinton declared that Stacey Abrams "would have won" Georgia's 2018 gubernatorial race "if she had a fair election," adding that Abrams "should be governor" but was "deprived of the votes she otherwise would have gotten." No court or election authority ever validated that claim.
Clinton is hardly alone among prominent Democrats in targeting the constitutional structures that produced outcomes they disliked. Kamala Harris once floated scrapping the Electoral College entirely as part of a broader push to reshape the judiciary and the rules of presidential selection.
The system Clinton dismisses as an abomination was established by the founders in 1787. It has governed the selection of every president for more than two centuries. Its purpose, ensuring that smaller states retain meaningful influence and that presidential candidates must build broad, geographically diverse coalitions, is not an accident of history. It is a deliberate structural choice.
Five presidents have won the White House without winning the popular vote: John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016. The earliest case is instructive. Andrew Jackson won 40.45 percent of the popular vote to Adams's 32.74 percent, a far wider gap than Clinton's 2016 margin, yet Adams prevailed by 15 electoral votes. The republic survived.
None of this history appears to interest Clinton. Her complaint is personal, not principled. She did not call the Electoral College an abomination when Barack Obama won it twice. She did not campaign to abolish it before she lost.
The broader pattern among Democratic leaders is hard to miss. Barack Obama recently criticized the founders themselves at a high-profile public event, joining a growing chorus of party figures who treat the Constitution less as a governing framework and more as an obstacle to preferred outcomes.
When Republicans question election results, the political press treats it as a five-alarm threat to democracy. Entire news cycles are built around the phrase "election denier." Congressional hearings are convened. Social media accounts are suspended.
When Clinton does it from a Netflix documentary, it gets packaged as a "unique perspective."
The double standard is not subtle. Clinton spent years saying 2016 was stolen, rigged, or illegitimate, using softer language, perhaps, but arriving at the same destination. She told audiences the Supreme Court stole a presidency. She refused to rule out challenging her own loss. She insisted, years later, that "we still don't really know what happened." She validated Stacey Abrams's refusal to concede a gubernatorial race. And now she has branded the constitutional system itself an abomination, on camera, for a global streaming audience.
This is not a woman who has moved on. Clinton has continued to weigh in on Democratic strategy and failures, positioning herself as a kind of elder stateswoman whose counsel the party ignored at its peril. But the counsel always seems to circle back to the same grievance: the system was unfair to her.
Clinton won 48.2 percent of the popular vote in 2016. Trump won 46.1 percent. That is a margin of roughly two percentage points, meaningful, but not a mandate. And the Electoral College does not pretend to be a national popular-vote contest. It never has been. Candidates who understand the rules campaign accordingly. Trump did. Clinton did not, or at least, not well enough in the upper Midwest.
The combined margin in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin was 80,000 votes. That is a thin margin, but it was earned under the same rules both candidates agreed to when they entered the race. Calling the system an abomination after losing under it is not a constitutional argument. It is a personal one.
Clinton's willingness to attack the foundations of American governance has drawn pushback before. Her public criticisms of the current political order have repeatedly invited scrutiny of her own record, a record that includes a private email server, a contentious foundation, and a 2016 campaign that paid for opposition research later used to obtain surveillance warrants against a political rival's associates.
And yet the lecture continues. Clinton has positioned herself as a guardian of democratic norms even as she dismisses the constitutional structures those norms rest upon.
Knappenberger said he was "prepared for fireworks" when he asked Clinton about 2016. What he got was something more revealing: a former presidential candidate, nearly a decade removed from her defeat, still unable to accept that the rules she lost under are legitimate.
The Electoral College is not perfect. No human institution is. But it has functioned for more than two centuries, survived contested elections far more dramatic than 2016, and forced candidates to appeal to a broad cross-section of the country rather than run up the score in a handful of coastal population centers. Calling it an abomination does not strengthen the case for reform. It reveals the motive behind the complaint.
Clinton's "obvious reasons" are exactly that, obvious. She lost. The system that produced her loss must therefore be illegitimate. It is a logic that, applied consistently, would delegitimize every institution that fails to deliver the outcome a powerful person wanted.
The founders built the Electoral College to prevent exactly that kind of thinking from concentrating power. Two hundred and thirty-nine years later, it is still doing its job.
