JOHN KING: Welcome back.
The election was 40
days ago, 40 days ago,
but Donald Trump's victory
is not yet official.
Tomorrow is the next big
step in that process.
The Electoral
College, the electors
meet across the country.
This is how it turned
out on election night,
306 for Donald Trump,
232 for Hillary Clinton.
Now, the electors
need to meet state
by state to make it official.
A little bit of a
history lesson here.
Some people like it, some
people don't, but the Electoral
College goes back to
the Constitutional
Convention of 1787.
The idea, protect the
little guys essentially.
They established to give less
populous states influence
in presidential elections.
Now we call them
fly over states.
But the founders
set it up this way.
Each state selects
its own electors.
They cannot have any involvement
with the federal government.
So if no one gets 270
votes, what happens then?
Well, we don't expect
that to happen,
but it will go to the
House of Representatives.
One vote for each state.
26 votes to win in the
House of Representatives.
Now, again, nobody
expects that to happen.
But occasionally there
are so-called rogue
or faithless electors.
The biggest example
after the 1872 election.
Ulysses S. Grant
won and won big.
Horace Greeley died
after the election
before the electors met.
So 63 electors were
so-called faithless, but
understandable in that case.
Will there be a big
defection tomorrow.
There's a lot of lobbying
of the Trump electors,
but we don't think so.
More likely, maybe a
little more than normal.
Here's what normally plays out.
Back in 1988, one elector
from West Virginia
cast his vote for Lloyd
Bentsen, not Michael Dukakis.
There was one Al Gore elector
in 2000 who abstained,
and one John Kerry elector
in 2004 who instead
cast the vote for John Edwards.
This is the more
likely scenario.
President Obama says sure
the Electoral College is
controversial, but he
says Democrats should not
focus on the
process, they should
focus on the party's message.
