If Gore had not been blocked from the presidency by Jeb Bush's Florida (with its' goddamned hanging chads in the ballot) and the right wing Supreme Court purposely dragging its' feet then saying "there is no time":
The threat of hijacking airplanes would have been taken seriously.
Iraq would NOT have been invaded, 9/11 or no 9/11.
The Kyoto Protocol (greenhouse emissions treaty) would have been honored instead of dumped, which is what baby bush did.
The Army Corp Of Engineers would have had resources for dike maintenance in New Orleans leading up to Hurricane Katrina, instead of going on pointless errands in Iraq.
These are but a few of the major sliding door points, there are MANY others.
Yet lazy, stubbornly ignorant narcissistic idiots still insisted and to this day insist that bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe.
These non-voters see their blood-soaked hands and sigh in contentment at their mediocre idea of purity.
Gore lost the election for a lot of reasons and Florida was certainly the most important, but honestly it's the electoral college. No one wants a far right president but they don't have a choice because 10% of the electorate has completely overtaken the Republican party and it's just MAGA now.
There's definitely issues with the EC, but you're bringing up a feature not a bug.
The executive branch wasn't supposed to be an extension of the legislative. The office of the president wasn't supposed to be a "super duper senator". The blame for where we're at is entirely in a defunct congress. With a presidential office that is genuinely executing, not the forefront of, legislation, the checks and balances in congress start to make a lot more sense.
And regardless of the way it's supposed to be, we've got to work with what we've got, I get that. But the US is huge and wildly different. I'm not particularly rural, but took a friend of mine born and raised in NYC out to a friends cabin once. Offered to give em a ride on the ATV. They were excited, I grabbed my jacket, and came out to them sitting on the ride-on lawnmower, all ready to go. To flip it around, I have very little business giving an opinion on what minimum wage in a major metro should be (although after a recent visit to sanfran my guess is about $1,000/hr...).
My point being, an over correction the EC will 1) see a ton of opposition that makes it unfeasible, and 2) ultimately be fairly destructive. The challenges in different parts of this country are worlds apart, and we do a TERRIBLE job understanding one another, mostly by design because it helps reelection. Threatening the EC without a replacement that takes the concerns of otherwise under-represented folks into consideration will feed into this partisan crap more that it has already, entrench identity politics further, and just accelerate things.
Oh I don't disagree, it can be done and is clearly an issue, I just think we have to be careful on how. The EU probably has good framework given how different it's members are