WTF. Our voting system is so fundamentally broken and all any party needs to do to get a government majority without a popular majority is to push on the cracks. No foreign interference necessary, though, it helps.
The USA is so heavily gerrymandered that the vast majority of congressional races don't even need to hold actual elections, the outcome is 99% certain. There are 10 seats in the up-coming midterms which could be considered competitive out of 435. [0]
For the presidential election, the electoral college makes it possible for a candidate to win the presidency with a mere 23% of the popular vote.
_Possible_ does a lot of work for you here. You have to assume all the losing states vote at 0% toward the winning party and all winning states vote at 50%+1 for that to happen. Something that is absurdly unrealistic given that California only voted 65% Biden and 35% Trump in the last election.
The EC doesn't favor one party over the other except for the fact that Democrats refuse to move their national politics to the center to win the EC and use words like "populist" to describe the candidates that do.
Realistically, the popular vote "problem" you bring up isn't the issue with the EC. The issue is that it allows candidates to ignore the vast majority of the country, causing all candidates to cater to the same minority of the population. There's nothing wrong with the EC except that the states are mostly "winner-take-all", essentially gerrymandering the presidential elections.
There are a lot of things I'd like to see done to increase the veracity of our elections (ranked choice voting, open primaries, etc.) but, I think, if we could solve or make progress in the reduction of gerrymandering it would make a sizeable difference in the quality of politics in the country. And, notably, gerrymandering is very much a "both sides" issue, ask Californian politicians if they would favor splitting California EC votes proportionally by vote. That would make California more represented in Presidential elections and would also force candidates to try and win votes in California, moderating national politics. The only downside would be to the Democratic party itself.
However, the first-past-the-post issues you're talking about have very little to do with gerrymandering? EC / Senate politics are unrepresentative of population-majority preferences due to where people have decided to put themselves; House politics are unrepresentative due to how the districts for each seat are drawn. Gerrymandering is the political manipulation of the latter.
Senate politics aside, winner-take-all EC states are mostly gerrymandered to the majority party. It has exactly the same effect as gerrymandered house districts. some states are just not worth putting any effort into winning for the losing party and all focus/money/attention/politics is aimed at persuaded a small subset of constituents, the only difference is scale.
The inaction of the party in power to undo the winner-take-all EC model in a uncontested state shares the same motivation (more power to the party) and has the same outcome (worse representation for the people).
Using the example of California because it's a one-party state (so the advantages and disadvantages are more clear), if they were to proportionally allot EC votes, it would be good for every single Californian. The national Democratic party would move toward California Democrat values and the same situation for Republicans. And, since the state is so blue, it might even provide some incentive for the national Republican party to try and persuade purple Californians, moving them even further left. That's also good for California Democrats. People are led to believe that it would be worse for them, as individuals but that isn't the case. It would be better for _everyone_ in California if California wasn't winner take all.
The only group that it's bad for is the Democratic party.
I’m trying to be generous in my interpretation here but are you using “trickery” to include the gerrymandering and voting restrictions Democrats spend most of their time on? In particular, I’d like some citations about who is saying specifically what about “interference”.
I would argue there’s a lot of creative interpretation of how much “interference” actually happens. Democrats are pretty much starting from the position that, due to demographics, the only way Republicans can gain the upper hand in national elections (or particular state/local elections) is through trickery and the assistance of foreign government meddling. Hence why before and after every election we’re warned repeatedly about foreign interference in our elections. And you would be lying if you said that if the expected red wave materializes that there won’t be large amounts of ink spilled over how Russia pulled it off yet again.
Yet if Democrats were to unexpectedly come out on top in a few days, do you think the same people going on about foreign interference would insist that we have to see what role it played in helping certain Democrats win their respective races? Somehow I doubt it. Which is why I think “interference” is a very useful political tool. It’s vague in nature, if we’re being honest it’s impossible to measure its impact, and it serves a very useful purpose — to cast doubt on the victories of political opponents.