The last posting points out that voting
statistics reflect how the electorate has been polarized for some time. For example, it cited that in 1992, 63% of
all registered white voters did not have college degrees, and that that
percentage fell to 45% by the time of the 2016 election. So, while the overall percentage of male vs.
female voters voting for one party or the other stayed the same over the years
(at least since the 1980s), the more substantial factors affecting why those
voters vote as they do have changed.
And
those changes have fed the polarization that is characterizing the current
national political landscape. Have the
political parties been unaffected bystanders to these shifts? Hardly.
And here a very important structural attribute of the system comes into
play. While the US claims to be a
democracy, its lack of democracy has become a contributing factor to the
advantage that one side of the grand divide enjoys and consequently adds to the
underlying animosities.
An
expert on American political processes, particularly voting, Jonathan Rodden, a
Stanford political scientist, reports on the unique or nearly unique
characterizations of the American system.[1] He points out that in most democracies one
wins office by garnering the most votes.
Even in America, social clubs, corporation elections for board members,
union hall elections, collegiate Greek house elections, and so on, the party or
person who receives the most votes, wins.
But not so for offices of the American government, at least in terms of
the political parties involved and, in the case of the presidency, the person
seeking the office.
Of
course, the last presidential election demonstrated the case in the election of
Trump. Hillary Clinton did receive a
majority of the popular vote, but the Electoral College decided otherwise. Yes, in the individual other elections, the
candidate with the most votes, wins, but if one reviews the results over
geographic areas, one sees the group seeking one approach to policy being stymied
systematically even though it has received more votes in those areas.
And
this is the case both at the national level and at the state level as well. It seems to reflect an inherent problem with
America’s version of its federal structure.
There, in case after case, the party receiving the fewer number of votes
win time after time, at least in terms of the candidates of one party as
opposed to the other.
For
example, Democrats in the various House of Representatives’ elections in 2012
received 1.4 million more votes nationwide than their opponents, the
Republicans. Yet, Democrats were awarded
only 45% of the seats of that body. This
happens repeatedly. It happened all the
way back to ’02. As a matter of fact,
the Dems, to win control of the House in 1996, had to receive an overwhelming
electoral victory as in 2006 and 2018 – so overwhelmingly, these elections are
called “wave elections.”
How
about at the state level? It turns out that
the undemocratic quality seems more pronounced at that level, particularly when
one considers state legislatures. One
state often cited in this regard is Michigan.
Usually, the Democratic Party wins the overall vote. In 2012, for example, its candidates
convinced 54% of the electorate to vote for them in the elections for both
houses of that legislature. That equated
to winning only 46% of the seats in the lower house and 42% in the upper house.
Similarly,
the states of Virginia, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania
are cited by Rodden as other examples of this undemocratic result. Of particular note is the Pennsylvania Senate. Republicans there have held control for forty
straight years even though they have lost the popular vote in about half the
elections in those years. Almost as
noteworthy is the case of the Ohio Senate.
But
back to the federal level: In terms of
the US Senate, since 1990, the Democratic Party outperformed the Republican
Party in receiving votes in eleven of the fifteen races but held the majority only
six times. And here one falls upon one
of the most undemocratic structural attributes of the national constitutional arrangement,
i.e., the equal representation provision in the US Senate – each state, no
matter how populated it is, has equal representation with two seats.
Now
consider that. While this provision
guarantees that the big states can’t run roughshod over the smaller states and
forces policy considerations to include the lesser populated areas of the
country, it often prohibits that same government from addressing the more
populated, usually more urban, areas of the country. Stated another way, California with nearly 40
million people has the same voice as Wyoming with fewer than 600,000 people in
2020.
Given,
as mentioned earlier in this blog, how the urban-rural divide contributes to
polarization, one can see how this underrepresentation of urban areas (a
demographic feature of the more populated states) adds to the divisions since
meeting the needs of the urban, more populated areas tends to be ignored by the
national government.
While
at the same time, the US House of Representatives’ districts and the districts determining
representation in both the lower and upper house districts of state legislatures
are drawn to have more or less equal populations, one wonders why Democrats can’t
do better in securing their majority votes in those chambers. Not only do they receive more votes, the
party has more registered voters and that is substantiated by polls indicating
the numbers of those claiming affiliation with that party.
Yes,
it does claim victories in state elections where the pure majority wins – such
as in gubernatorial elections – but still cannot secure legislative seats comparable
with its number of votes in those elections.
Why? A simple and telling answer
is gerrymandering. That is the drawing
of district borders to advantage one party over the other and those drawings
occur every ten years, based on the preceding census count (which, in turn, happens
in years ending in zero, e.g., 2020).
The
strategy by which favorable election occur consists of those drawing the lines,
that being the party controlling the various state legislatures, bunching up as
many opposing registered voters into as few districts as possible. And this usually assists Republicans by the
fact that a high proportion of Democrats live in cities and are therefore
already bunched up geographically. But
even with that assistance, gerrymandered districts turn out to have bizarre
shapes to be able to accomplish the aims of this strategy.
This
practice has been around so long, the name was a journalistic creation based on
the name of James Madison’s vice president, Eldridge Gerry, that it has more or
less become a science. There is even
special software to facilitate the process.
That process calls on sophisticated map drawings and manipulations and
of the two parties, the Republicans enjoy far more experience in the practice.
As a
matter of fact, the effects of these undemocratic features have had profound
effects and this blog will continue this overview in the next posting. For most civics teachers, this posting does
not instruct them about anything new, but it is offered as way of reviewing
contextual information for what will follow as this blog aims to share more of Rodden’s
findings.
[1] Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political
Divide (New York, NY: Basic Books,
2019).
