The fight to protect liberal democracy is not only a fight overseas, as I wrote in my previous post. At home in America we face a democratic deficit that would make us raise our eyebrows if it were the case in a different country. At every level of government, the Republican party has fought — and succeeded — in tipping the scales to overvalue their own voters and impose minority rule.
The Electoral College
We elect the president through an archaic process called the Electoral College, which allocates electors on a winner-take-all basis within each state. Instead of merely tallying the total number of votes in the country and choosing a winner by popular vote, we instead immediately write off ~40ish states as too Democratic or too Republican to matter, leaving the actual election up to a few swing states that could feasibly go either way. So not only does someone’s vote in swing state Arizona carry more importance than someone’s vote in reliably Republican Tennessee (even though both states are worth 11 electoral votes), some states have a disproportionate amount of power due to the sheer mathematical way we determine a state’s electoral college allotment. Each state’s electoral college value equals the number of their seats in the Senate plus the number of seats in the House, so some states are disproportionately valued in the electoral college.
For example, according to the Washington Post after the 2016 election,
“Wyoming has three electoral votes and a population of 586,107, while California has 55 electoral votes and 39,144,818 residents. Distributing the electoral vote evenly among each state’s residents suggests that individual votes from Wyoming carry 3.6 times more influence, or weight, than those from California.”
Rural (and generally whiter) states carry more weight than their urban (and more diverse) counterparts, and since Republicans tend to perform best in rural communities (with Democrats performing better in urban areas), the Electoral College quite literally overvalues Republican voters compared to Democratic voters. It should come as no surprise that since the year 2000, two of the three times a Republican won the Presidency, they won without winning the popular vote. Bush lost the popular vote by approximately 0.5% in 2000, and Trump lost it by 2.1% in 2016. And according to 538, there’s a 9% chance that Trump wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote. (For comparison, he only has a 4% chance of winning the popular vote.) We need the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to instead elect the popular vote winner, and we need it yesterday.
The Senate
The Senate is arguably even less democratic than the Electoral College. By giving two seats to every state, it clearly overvalues less populous (and frequently Republican) states. And since the Senate acts as the more important legislative body, responsible for Supreme Court confirmations among other duties, it is incredibly difficult for Democrats to win a majority. During the impeachment trial, we saw this come to the fore as senators representing 153 million Americans outvoted senators representing 168 million Americans to block additional witnesses at the trial. Even worse, the Senate under Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to be fair, has embraced another arcane tradition called the filibuster to essentially prevent legislation from passing with fewer than 60 votes in the Senate, so any progressive legislation is essentially held hostage unless we get a supermajority of 60 seats. By definition it’s anti-democratic when a majority of Americans are subject to the will of a much whiter, much more rural minority.
The House
And then there’s the House. In theory, it should be fairer, as House seats are allocated by population, but in 2010 we saw a concentrated effort from Republicans across the country to redraw congressional maps at the federal and state level to benefit Republicans after the 2010 census. By ‘cracking and packing’ electorates, they were able to craft maps that ensured the Republicans secured more seats with fewer votes necessary. For example, take our adopted home state of Wisconsin and its state Assembly, the lower house of our state government. According to the Milwakuee Journal Sentinel in 2018:
“GOP Gov. Scott Walker lost his bid for re-election by roughly 1 percentage point Nov. 6 to Democrat Tony Evers. Yet Walker carried 63 of the state’s 99 state Assembly districts.
In fact, the data show that 64 of the 99 districts are more Republican than the state as a whole, based on their vote for governor.
In other words, Republicans enjoy a built-in 64-35 advantage in the partisan makeup of the 99 Assembly districts. In a hypothetical 50-50 election, in which there are equal numbers of Democratic and Republican voters in Wisconsin, no one crosses party lines and independents split down the middle, that translates into a massive 29-seat GOP advantage in the Assembly. That’s very close to the 27-seat margin (63-36) that Republicans won last month.”
But gerrymandering isn’t restricted to state legislatures. An analysis of gerrymandering in US House races from 2012 to 2016 found that 59 seats per race shifted due to partisan gerrymandering. Yes, both parties are guilty of this, but Republicans got a net gain of 19 seats per election due to this practice. As we prepare to draw new maps following the 2020 census, Democrats have been far more vocal in calling for nonpartisan commissions to redraw state maps, taking the power out of the hands of the politicians. As the common refrain goes: “Voters should pick their politicians. Politicians shouldn’t pick their voters.”
The Supreme Court
In 2016, Mitch McConnell executed a brazen, calculated strategy to refuse a hearing to replace the recently deceased Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. At that moment in February 2016, with President Obama having already nominated Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to the bench, the balance of the court sat at four justices nominated by Democratic Presidents and four nominated by Republicans. This vacancy would shift the balance of the court to the Democratic side if Obama could confirm Garland. So McConnell made a huge bet — that he could convince America that we shouldn’t nominate a new Supreme Court justice during an election year, and that Donald Trump would upset Hillary Clinton to win the Presidency. We all know what happened next. Four years later, Trump stole that seat and nominated Neil Gorsuch to the bench, and when the swing vote Anthony Kennedy retired a few years later, Trump nominated the aggressive Brett Kavanaugh to replace him, cementing a 5-4 conservative-leaning court. And then, as if 2020 couldn’t get worse, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a progressive icon, passed away two months before the election. So what did Mitch McConnell do? Did he accept the rule he so fiercely clung to in 2016 and waited until after the election to replace her? Of course not. Instead, we now have flagrant hypocrisy from Senate Republicans like Lindsay Graham (R-SC):
“I want you to use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination,’ ” he said in 2016 shortly after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. “And you could use my words against me and you’d be absolutely right.”
NPR
He didn’t care. So here we are, with a deeply unpopular President who lost the popular vote working with Senate Republicans who represent a minority of Americans to cement a 6-3 conservative leaning court. And because Supreme Court justices serve for life, Trump’s nominees are all in their 40s and 50s, likely to serve for 30-40 more years.
All three branches of government have antidemocratic systems in place that overvalue the voice of white, conservative Americans, which in turn overrepresents Republicans in national politics.
Americans often say that we love democracy, that our Founding Fathers were geniuses who shouldn’t be second-guessed, but the way our democracy is functioning proves that something needs to change, as a person’s vote matters more or less based on where they live within this country. It’s not unpatriotic to admit we have a problem – patriotism is loving your country so much that you can point out where we need to get better.
And this isn’t even getting into the issues related to the lack of accountable democracy for American territories and protectorates like Puerto Rico and American Samoa, nor the taxation without representation happening in Washington DC. Or the fact that Republicans openly tried to manipulate the 2020 census by including a citizenship question to discourage immigrants from filling it out in order to decrease overall numbers of residents in primarily blue states to then decrease funding for those cities and states.
The ‘Red Mirage’ in the Making
We’re slowly walking into a major national crisis in the coming weeks. Republicans have spent decades trying to convince America that voter fraud is a rampant problem that swings election, like when Trump casually claims that ‘millions voted illegally’ in 2016 or when Republicans fabricated lies that illegal voters were bussed from Mississippi to Alabama to swing the Alabama special Senate election in favor of the Democrat Doug Jones. These are frankly untrue, but in the face of a pandemic where Democrats are more likely to vote by mail than Republicans due to the (stupidly) partisan divide on how dangerous the pandemic is, we have seen Republicans across the country seek to discredit the legitimacy of absentee voting.
These efforts to discredit mail-in voting dovetail sickeningly well with the Republicans’ decades long voter suppression efforts in Democratic-leaning districts and/or bases by enacting voter ID laws, restricting when and how you can register to vote, purging voter rolls, closing polling locations to leave only a few sites in some of America’s most Black neighborhoods, and preventing formerly incarcerated citizens from voting. And now, the 2020 election offers a serious chance for Republicans to cash in their chips. Because record numbers of voters are voting by mail, we likely will not know the result of the election on the night of November 3rd. In fact, it may take weeks to determine the winner as mail in ballots will take time to count and as states differ on when they will start processing ballots and by when a ballot must be received and postmarked in order to count. Some analysts are talking about a ‘Red Mirage’ on November 3rd where Trump looks like he’s winning in key swing states because the election day in-person vote is more likely to lean Republican vs the mail-in vote which will lean Democratic. So if Trump claims victory on November 3rd only for more votes to come in and flip a state’s electoral votes to Biden, there’s a strong chance Trump will seek to discredit those ballots with cries of voter fraud. And with a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court in charge of sorting out any election questions, we could be staring down the barrel of a constitutional crisis. Trump already refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and he never promised to avoid claiming victory on election night. We are in this situation due to calculated antidemocratic systems that pervade every level of government.
And, of course, in the background of all of this lives a shady system of business interests masquerading as SuperPACs to fund politicians and secure favorable policy to help secure higher shareholder profits. The Citizen’s United court case (which allowed companies to essentially spend as much as they want on political races) was decided by a conservative court and exemplifies what McConnell and other Republicans are counting on: even if they lose majorities in Congress and the Presidency, the Supreme Court can step in and enshrine conservative policy while striking down any progressive policy passed by Democrats.
So what can we do?
Number one: Admit we have a problem. Number two: Tackle the corruption and symbiotic relationship between profit-obsessed business and politicians. I supported Warren in the primary, and this was her number one issue because without fixing this, we really can’t make meaningful change on climate change, health care, education, or any other policy we want to pass. Joe Biden understands what the Republicans will do if he wins — he saw it as Vice President, and by strengthening his relationship with Warren, I’m optimistic he will take on corruption in a similar manner.
But everything should be on the table. We should consider structural reform for the Supreme Court, ranked choice voting across the country, multi-member districts, statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington DC, and an abolishment of the Electoral College. Because if we don’t make these reforms, a smaller and smaller percentage of Americans will hold the rest of the country hostage with no incentive to change plans or policy.
But none of this happens if we don’t elect Joe Biden. And realistically, Joe needs to win the national popular vote by seven or eight points to make it clear on election night that Trump isn’t going to win. We need to prepare for a result where we truly don’t know the winner for days after election night, as ballots get counted. Otherwise, the ‘Red Mirage’ may lead to a ‘Red Minority’ entrenched for four more years.
Purple State Progressive 