Nearly a decade has passed since Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in one of the most stunning election nights in American history.
Clinton still can’t get over it.
And now she’s gone on Netflix to call a cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution an “abomination” — and the reason she gives will leave you shaking your head.
Clinton Unloads on the Electoral College in New Netflix Series
A new five-part Netflix docuseries called The American Experiment drops June 24, and it features Hillary Clinton doing what she does best — complaining about 2016. The series is directed by Brian Knappenberger and executive produced by Tom Hanks, and it pulls together interviews with a long list of politicians and public figures including Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Al Gore, and Nancy Pelosi.
Clinton’s contribution? Attacking the system that has governed presidential elections since the founding of the republic.
“Well, I personally think the Electoral College is an abomination,” Clinton says in the series, adding, “For obvious reasons.”
The “obvious reason,” of course, is that Donald Trump won 304 electoral votes to her 227 in 2016. That’s it. That’s the whole argument. The system worked exactly as designed, Trump carried Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and Clinton lost. She’s been relitigating it ever since.
This isn’t new territory for Clinton. Back in 2017, she told CNN the Electoral College “needs to be eliminated.” What’s new is that she now has a Netflix platform, a sympathetic director, and Tom Hanks’ name on the marquee to give the grievance a fresh coat of paint.
What the Founders Actually Built — and Why
The left-wing critique of the Electoral College has been around for years, but it always conveniently ignores why the founders built it in the first place.
Alexander Hamilton defended the Electoral College in Federalist 68, arguing its process is a safeguard against “cabal, intrigue, and corruption.” James Madison warned in Federalist No. 10 that under a purely popular government, a majority faction could trample the rights of everyone else. The whole point was to prevent a handful of densely populated regions from dictating the outcome of every national election.
And that’s precisely what would happen if Clinton got her way. Her 2016 popular vote margin came almost entirely from California and New York. Strip those two states out and the picture looks very different. Abolishing the Electoral College wouldn’t make elections more democratic — it would hand permanent power to two coastal states and tell everyone in the middle of the country that their vote doesn’t count.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) piles on in the docuseries, claiming “the founders themselves were not in love with the Electoral College” and that “it was defective from the beginning.” But what Lofgren calls a defect is actually a feature — a deliberate protection for smaller states and rural communities who would otherwise be invisible in a pure national popular vote.
The Electoral College forces presidential candidates to build broad coalitions across diverse states with different economies, industries, and needs. Without it, you’d never see a major-party candidate set foot in Iowa, Nevada, or Wisconsin again. The whole campaign would be run in Los Angeles and New York City, and the rest of America could go pound sand.
Netflix Timed This to Counter Trump’s Semiquincentennial Celebrations
The timing here is worth noting. The American Experiment drops right as the country is celebrating the 250th anniversary of its founding — the same milestone President Trump has been honoring with his Freedom 250 events. Knappenberger says the overlap wasn’t intentional. But the series features Clinton calling the Constitution’s electoral framework an abomination, a Democrat congresswoman saying the founders built something “defective from the beginning,” and what amounts to a sustained argument that the American system is broken.
That’s the backdrop against which Netflix chose to release this. Make of that what you will.
Knappenberger told Variety he wanted Clinton’s perspective because she is “one of only five people in American history to lose the presidency after winning the popular vote.” Fair enough. But Clinton isn’t just a historical curiosity — she’s a figure who spent years pushing the Russia collusion narrative, who blamed FBI Director James Comey, who blamed the media, who blamed sexism, who blamed everything except the candidate and the campaign. Letting her attack the constitutional structure that determined her loss, without any of that context, isn’t history. It’s therapy with a production budget.
Democrats Have Been Trying to Rig the Rules for Years
The push to eliminate or work around the Electoral College isn’t really about fairness. It’s about locking in electoral outcomes that favor the Democrat Party permanently. If Democrats could win every presidential election simply by running up the score in California and New York, they’d never have to compete for a single working-class vote in Ohio or Michigan again. That’s the goal. The popular vote argument is the strategy, dressed up as principle.
And it fits a broader pattern. The same party pushing to scrap the Electoral College also wants to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices to guarantee favorable rulings, add Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico as states to guarantee four new Democrat Senate seats, and push amnesty for millions of illegal aliens who would reliably vote Democrat for a generation. Each of these proposals would permanently tilt the electoral map and lock Republicans — and the voters who support them — out of political relevance. None of it is about democracy. All of it is about power.
Clinton calling the Electoral College an “abomination” fits neatly into that project. The constitutional structure she’s attacking is the same one that gives a farmer in rural Pennsylvania the same meaningful voice in choosing a president as a hedge fund manager in Manhattan. That’s not a flaw. That’s the whole idea.
But don’t expect Netflix, Tom Hanks, or Brian Knappenberger to frame it that way.
The Larger Picture
There’s something almost sad about watching a woman who lost a presidential election nearly a decade ago still working this hard to explain away the result. Clinton has had plenty of time to reflect. The conclusion she keeps landing on is that the rules were wrong, the system was broken, and the country owes her a different outcome. Not exactly a profile in grace.
Meanwhile, the man she lost to just finished celebrating America’s 250th birthday as a two-term president. Donald Trump built a coalition that reached across the Rust Belt, won back working-class voters the Democrat Party had written off, and did it all through the same constitutional system Clinton now calls an abomination.
The Electoral College didn’t fail in 2016. It worked. And the voters who put Donald Trump in the White House — twice — don’t need a Netflix docuseries to tell them their votes were illegitimate.
Sources: Variety; The Federalist; Netflix Tudum; Pew Research