Thanks for linking to your article; I read the whole thing and I thought it was fascinating and stimulating. I’m not sure it’s the complete answer to our problems, mainly because the cultural changes that could make your system work would also be enough to make our current system work. I’ll probably ask you some other questions in a response under your original article.

For my article, I’ve really tried to focus people in on the basic argument, because it seems like a lot of people haven’t really grappled with it. It doesn’t matter whether Clinton’s popular margin of victory was a landslide or not (and I didn’t claim it was); it doesn’t matter whether Trump was a viable candidate or not. What matters for the argument is that Trump needs more people to vote for him this time, and he very likely won’t find enough of them. He mainly won last time because Democrats stayed home, and this year they intend to come out in force. But there were many smaller reasons he won as well, things like the email hack and the FBI investigation. And those things either won’t happen this year, or won’t have the same impact as they had in 2016.

Trump maximized his voter turnout in 2016, and won against a severely depressed Democratic turnout. To win against a normal Democratic turnout in 2020, he would need to convince more people to vote for him. But his support is down across the whole country, so he’s likely to have fewer voters, not more.