As Donald Trump forms a right-wing government with its sights trained on health care and workers’ rights, Americans are about to experience important policy changes they didn’t vote for and don’t want. On the morning after Election Day, Michael Moore pointed out:
You live in a country where a majority of citizens have said they believe there’s climate change, they believe women should be paid the same as men, they want a debt-free college education, they don’t want us invading countries, they want a raise in the minimum wage and they want a single-payer true universal health care system. None of that has changed. We live in a country where the majority agree with the “liberal” position.
This year, 48% of voters belong to or lean toward the Democratic Party and 44% belong to or lean toward the Republicans. The Democratic candidate has won the popular vote for President in six of the last seven elections, but for the second time, has been denied the office. 42.5 millions Americans voted for a Democrat for the Senate in 2016, while 39.3 milllion voted for a Republican. In the House of Representatives, Republicans collected 49.7% of the votes to the Democrats’ 47.5%. Yet the Republicans will have a 52-48 advantage in the Senate and a 241-194 majority in the House. At all levels of government, Republicans typically wind up winning a percentage of elective offices that is greater than their percentage of the votes.
There are a variety of political and ideological reasons why the Republicans, the minority party for decades, do better than expected in elections, but this post will focus only on the structural reasons for minority rule. Our political system favors rural over urban areas, small states over larger ones, and conservatives over liberals, and this is by design. These structural biases have greater consequences now that rural and urban America have become more polarized.
The Senate
Of the branches of government, the Senate is the most structurally unequal. Every state gets two Senators regardless of its population. California has over 39 million residents, while Wyoming has just over 586,000, which means that a Wyoming resident’s Senate vote counts almost 67 times as much as a Californian’s. Today, states containing just 17% of the American population can theoretically elect a Senate majority. To make matters worse, even when the majority party controls the Senate, the filibuster rule requires a 60-vote majority to pass most legislation. Senators representing a very small percentage of the population can produce gridlock in the Senate.
The House of Representatives
In theory, House districts are approximately equal in population and are therefore “representative.” But there’s an exception, since every state gets at least one representative, and seven states have a smaller population than an average Congressional district—another small state advantage. There is also a built-in time lag, since redistricting occurs at the end of each decade’s census. Redistricting assumes the census is accurate, which of course it’s not. It is estimated that the census misses 2.1% of Black Americans and 1.5% of Hispanics. (Whites, not surprisingly, are overcounted.)
Two additional factors which account for most of the Republican advantage in the House.
Demography. Republican partisans are more evenly spread over the territories of most states, while Democratic partisans are concentrated in a smaller number of predominantly urban areas. This results in Democrats winning by large majorities in the districts they control, while Republicans win by smaller margins in a greater number of districts. This can be seen as unintentional gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering. Republicans control a greater number of state legislatures, especially after their victories in the 2010 (off-year, low turnout) election, and they have used this advantage to gerrymander Congressional districts. Gerrymandering refers to the manipulation of district boundaries for political advantage. With the aid of computer programs, it can produce legislative districts that resemble salamanders crawling across the state map. (I live in Pennsylvania’s notorious 12th district.)
Gerrymandering is most effective when the minority party engages in “packing”—that is, concentrating the majority party members in a small number of districts. This results in many “wasted votes.” Wasted votes are either votes for the losing candidate, or votes for the winning candidate that exceed the number need to win, as when a House candidate in an urban area receives 85% of the votes.
This chart shows how gerrymandering works. In the example, 60% of the voters favor blue. But if the red party controls redistricting, by packing two of the five districts, they can produce an outcome such as the one on the right where they control 60% of the seats. In Pennsylvania, Republicans controlled the 2010 redistricting. In 2012, Democrats received 51% of House votes, but won only 5 of 18 seats (28%).
Stephanopoulos and McGhee have proposed a mathematical formula for the efficiency gap, defined as the difference between the two parties’ wasted votes divided by the total votes cast. Ideally, it should be close to zero. When it’s not, it gives you a measure of a party’s undeserved vote share. This raises the possibility that the courts could rule that if the efficiency gap exceeds a certain percentage, the redistricting is unfair. A Wisconsin federal court recently struck down the Republicans’ 2010 redistricting, citing expert testimony about the state’s large efficiency gap.
The Electoral College
In the Electoral College, each state has a number of electors equal to its number of Senators plus Representatives—that is, a minimum of three. This produces a level of structural inequality that is intermediate between the more biased Senate and the (theoretically) less biased House. However, since the presidency is a winner-take-all event, it seems more unfair when Clinton, with 48.2% of the vote (as of this morning), loses to Trump, with 46.4%. Clinton’s large majorities in California and New York mean nothing in the Electoral College.
And it gets worse. In Wyoming there is an electoral vote for every 195,000 residents while in California there is one for every 711,000 residents. Merling and Baker point out that the states that are overrepresented are less diverse than the country as a whole. (Wyoming, for example, is 84% white; California, 38%.) Thus, the Electoral College amplifies the votes of White people. The chart below shows the underrepresentation of minorities in the Electoral College.
The States
These inequalities at the national level tend to be replicated in the states. As of January, Republicans will control both chambers of the state legislatures in 32 states, and the governor’s office as well as the legislature in either 24 or 25 states (depending on the outcome in North Carolina). Many states have geographically small urban areas that are traditionally outvoted by rural residents. (Lots of money for highways in rural areas, but little for mass transit.) When cities enact progressive changes, such as a minimum wage, they are sometimes preempted by more conservative state legislatures.
Why it is and won’t change
While some of our first political leaders, such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, favored proportional representation, the small-state, rural bias was an intentional policy choice deliberately built into the Constitution. The Senate and the Electoral College were a result of the Connecticut Compromise of 1787 designed to allay the fears of the smaller states that, if decisions were made by popular vote, their interests would be ignored by the larger states. Later, the small-state bias served to maintain slavery at a time when it probably would have been abolished by popular vote. (The analogy to our present situation is obvious.)
Equal state representation in the Senate is the only part of the Constitution that cannot be amended. The Electoral College, however, could be abolished by Constitutional amendment. Amending the Constitution, as specified in Article Five, is a two-step process. First, the proposed amendment must pass with a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate. Then it must be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths, or 38, of the 50 states. It is hard to imagine the smaller states agreeing to surrender so much power.
Conclusion
This post only begins to cover the many reasons for minority rule in this country. Here are some additional political and ideological reasons. To their credit, the Republicans have a higher turnout, especially in seemingly less important off-year elections, probably because Republicans are older than the average voter, and are more likely to see voting as a normative obligation. They have used their control of state legislatures to enact voter suppression laws that reduce turnout among traditional Democratic constituencies such as poor people and college students. 2016 was the first election in over 50 years without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, and 14 states celebrated by enacting new voter restrictions such as requiring voter I.D., and reducing the time people could vote and the number of polling places.
Because they represent the interests of corporations and rich individuals, Republicans are able to raise more money to influence political campaigns and to lobby Congress. In recent decades, they have carefully developed a strategy of using religion and racial prejudice to persuade working class Americans to vote contrary to their economic self-interest. And so on.
But the structural advantages that favor the rural minority require Democrats to win by a landslide in order to have any real influence on social policy.
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