Welcome to Kurt Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by Carolyn Rene DuPont. She is professor of American history at Eastern Kentucky University. And she is the author of the new book, distorting democracy, the forgotten

history of the Electoral College and Why It Matters today available from Prometheus Books.

Professor DuPont. Welcome to Current Affairs. Thank you so much for having me on.

Well, you take us back to a really, truly, one of the most fascinating moments in perhaps the history of the world,

which is the moment where the country, this country, under the Articles of Federation is kind of crumbling, something that's

going wrong, and something has to be done. The whole thing has to be reconstituted. And it's very

uncertain what's going to happen next. And you try and place us, you know, in your story about

the electoral college in that moment. So about the Electoral College in that moment.

So tell us why you start in that moment.

Well, of course, the Electoral College was created by the Constitutional Convention when it

met in 1787. And I wanted to tell this story because I wanted my readers to understand what a precarious moment was. And,

you know, historians, we love to use this word contingency. It's a contingent moment.

Anything could have happened. And I think that Americans very often have this sense of

inevitability when it comes to our Constitution, that it was almost

dropped from heaven. You know, there was Moses and the Ten Commandments, and then there was the U.S.

Constitution, and they basically got here the same way. And so I wanted to show the framers as they

wrestled with the best issue, the best way to choose the president.

And I think that by restoring the uncertainty and the difficulty of that conversation,

we can understand that the electoral college was simply the best solution they could come up

with at the time for a very difficult issue. It was a

pragmatic choice, not a choice born out of revolutionary principles, our noble ideals,

or some high-minded political philosophy. And so, yeah, that's why I started there.

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