Losers Win
How a Republican Minority Succeeded in Ruling the United States and Subverting Democracy
On all of the important political issues of the day, a majority of Americans agree with the position of the Democratic Party over the position of the Republican Party: gun control (61 percent of Americans want stricter gun laws; only 8 percent want them less strict), abortion rights (71 percent support Roe v. Wade, and only 23 percent want it overturned), gay rights (67 percent of Americans favor same sex marriage, and 23 percent think homosexual relations should be illegal), climate change (59 percent are concerned or alarmed about it, only 18 percent dismissive or doubtful), taxes (62 percent think the rich pay too little, and only 39 percent approve of the Republican 2017 tax cuts), the environment (57 percent believe the environment should be given priority over the economy, even at the risk of curbing economic growth; 35 percent believe the opposite), healthcare (57 percent think the government should ensure that all Americans have coverage), labor unions (62 percent approve), and so on for every core issue facing Americans today. If you line up the political opinions of the majority of Americans, you see the Democratic platform.
Yet Republicans enjoy political power far in excess of the popularity of their positions. Republicans hold 52 percent of the governorships, 61 percent of state senates, 57 percent of state houses, 53 percent of the seats in the U.S. Senate, and the presidency. Republicans appointed 55 percent of the circuit court judges and 56 percent of the Supreme Court. Democrats hold the House of Representatives, which they just gained in the “blue wave” of 2018, but on every other national political measure, Republicans beat Democrats.
How did the United States, the world’s largest democracy, become a country in which a minority of the population exerts more political power than the majority? Why do Democrats keep losing elections and policy battles, if their policies reflect the opinions of most Americans?
The standard response to those questions is that Republicans simply do better at winning elections. Democrats can’t get their messaging right. Democrats nominate unelectable candidates. Democrats ignore the Midwest and the white working class. Democrats are too focused on identity politics. Democrats are elitist. Democrats over-reach when they’re in office. Democrats are too far to the left. Democrats are too far to the right. But those explanations do not withstand scrutiny. One could say comparable things about Republican politicians, yet Republicans continue to win elections, despite that their policy positions represent the values of a relatively small conservative minority.
The reason Democrats have less power than their policy positions would warrant has little to do with the reasons we normally hear. The belief that Democrats somehow blow it at election time does not match the facts, especially when one considers how many Republicans seem to blow their elections (with poor candidates, scandals, falsehoods, political miscalculations, gaffes, extremist views, and shocking statements) yet still manage to eke out victory. The tendency for Republicans to succeed politically results, rather, from several structural advantages that favor Republican politicians in elections and governing. Consequently, Democrats must win elections overwhelmingly, just to gain power proportional to their numbers in the country.
The following pages analyze eight structural advantages that enable Republican politicians to win elections and policy battles that the core principles of democracy say they should lose. Some advantages are consequences of our Constitutional design and of recent trends in population density that favor the Republican party, and others result from actions by Republican politicians and Republican-appointed judges that subvert democracy. All of them distort the proportional division of political power in our country, which, according to a democratic design, should apportion power in a way that represents the distribution of the population and the interests of the country as a whole. Some of these advantages are regularly discussed in our political discourse, some rarely mentioned, yet all of them unfairly favor the Republican Party and put Americans who are Democrats, or who believe in the values promoted by Democrats, at a strategic political disadvantage. Together they subvert majority rule.
1. Republicans tend to live in states with smaller populations, while Democrats concentrate in more populated states, exaggerating Republican political representation in the Senate.
The Constitution affords each state two senators, meaning that the Senate represents the states, not the American people. This structure comes by design, but, because Republicans now dominate most of the least populous states, one half of Congress will necessarily lean more Republican than the country as a whole.
The 25 most populous states (home to 81 percent of the U.S. population) are represented in the Senate by 28 Democrats and 22 Republicans. The 25 least populous states (17 percent of the population) are represented by 29 Republicans, 19 Democrats, and 2 Independents. The least populous state (Wyoming) has a population lower than that of Washington DC, a reliably Democratic district, yet Wyoming has two senators (both Republican) and D.C. has none. In the current Senate, Democrats received 15 million more votes than Republicans, yet Republicans hold 53 percent of Senate seats.
Another factor favors Republicans in the Senate: Densely populated states that vote Democratic are more overwhelmingly Democratic, whereas densely populated states that vote Republican favor the Republican party more slightly. The country’s two most populous states are California and Texas, the first predominately Democratic and the second predominately Republican. In California, however, Democrats enjoy a 21-point advantage over Republicans in party affiliation, whereas Republican Texans have only a 3-point advantage over Democrats. Hillary Clinton won California by over 3.4 million votes; Trump won Texas by only 800,000. In 2018, Texas Senator Ted Cruz beat challenger Beto O’Rourke by only 214,921 votes. While Texas may be more likely to flip to the other party in the future, until then Texas Republicans enjoy greater representation in the Senate, relative to their numbers in their own state, than California Democrats. To put this another way, if a million voting Democrats moved from California to Texas, it would have no effect on California’s senatorial races, but Texas would suddenly turn blue.
2. Democrats are packed into fewer districts, diluting their power in the House of Representatives.
But what about the House? Aren’t House seats doled out according to population density? Not exactly. Two factors cause the House to represent Republicans in greater proportion than is warranted by the number of votes received by House Republicans.
First, the Constitution affords each state, no matter the size, at least one representative in the House, magnifying the political power of voters in the very smallest states. Seven states (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming) have only one representative, five Republican and two Democrat, because their populations do not warrant more representation. Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney represents only 563,767 people (according to the last census), whereas each representative from California represents, on average, 702,885 people. Hence, a citizen of Wyoming has 25 percent more voting power in the House than a citizen of California (which has 66 times the population).
But the more significant Republican advantage comes from the fact that Democrats tend to live in densely populated urban areas. Because Democrats concentrate in fewer districts, Democratic Congressional candidates tend to win with large majorities, whereas Republicans running for Congress tend to win by narrower margins. To maximize political power in the House as whole, it’s better to have a slight advantage in many districts (the Republican norm) than an overwhelming advantage in fewer districts (the Democratic norm).
Consider Arizona, where an independent commission determines district boundaries (i.e. the state does not allow gerrymandering). In the 2018 race for Arizona’s nine congressional districts, Democrats won five seats and Republicans won four. But the Democrats won by an average of 27 percent in each district, while Republicans won by an average of 19 percent. Whereas urban density ensures Democratic House victories in large cities like Phoenix (where the Democrat won by 72 points), it dilutes the party’s power in the House as a whole. Republican slight victories and Democratic overwhelming victories mean that the House of Representatives tilts more Republican than the overall population.
This lopsided situation is exaggerated by Republican gerrymandering, which is naturally more easy and effective than Democratic gerrymandering. Gerrymandering involves packing the opposing party’s voters into as few districts as possible in order to concentrate their numbers and give one’s own party slight advantages in all other districts. The practice dilutes the political power of the opposing party, giving one party the broadest possible representation, far in excess of the party’s representation in a state as a whole. But today’s population distribution naturally gerrymanders on behalf of the Republican party because of urban concentration. Consequently, even in states (like Arizona) that have not gerrymandered their districts, Republicans enjoy some of the same advantages of gerrymandering that they do in states (like North Carolina) that they have successfully gerrymandered to their benefit. A 2018 article in The Economist shortly before the November 2018 election calculated that “Democrats need to win 53.5 percent of all votes cast for the two major parties just to have a 50/50 chance of winning a majority in the House,” a consequence of both gerrymandering and natural urban concentration.
Hence, in both the Senate and the House, Republicans enjoy a strategic political advantage that affords Republican-leaning Americans more political power in Congress than their number of votes warrant.
3. The Electoral College has favored Republicans in recent presidential elections.
In their first electoral victories, the two most recent Republican presidents received fewer votes than their Democratic rivals. Over half a million more Americans voted for Al Gore than for George W. Bush in 2000, and almost 3 million more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump in 2016. Bush and Trump succeeded in winning the electoral college without winning the popular vote in part because some states are afforded more electoral votes per person than others. Since each state receives a minimum of three electoral votes, the eight smallest states enjoy exaggerated political power in the electoral college. In the 2016 election, five of those eight states gave their electoral votes to Trump. Hence, residents of Alaska and Wyoming (both of which supported Trump) enjoyed three times the voting power of the average American citizen. With an electoral college, moreover, votes count more in states where the race is close because the winner in each state takes all of that state’s electoral votes, even if the race in the state is almost a dead heat (as was the case in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida in 2016). The electoral college penalizes voters in states in which the presidential candidate wins by large margins, and most of those voters are Democrats. If the US instead elected the president by popular vote, then every vote would carry the same weight.
The electoral college does not necessarily pose a permanent advantage for Republicans — even Texas could flip someday — but, as yet, no Democratic president has ever benefitted from our country’s use of an electoral college rather than a popular vote in presidential elections, whereas the two most recent Republican presidents have.
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So far we have looked at three reasons that elections favor Republicans disproportionate to the number of votes for Republican politicians. One cannot blame these biases in our political system on Republicans, who did not spread out in the country strategically in order to gain political advantages. Those advantages result rather from our Constitutional design, combined with changing political affiliations after the New Deal of the 1930s and the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, when liberal Americans increasingly identified Democratic, and conservatives increasingly identified Republican.
But Republicans have also enjoyed several advantages that result not by accident but rather from their behavior, which enables them to win elections and enact their policy agendas more effectively than Democrats. Again, the reasons for the disparity have little to do with the reasons normally offered by political commentators (Republicans are more disciplined, Democrats more fractured and diverse, most people vote their pocketbooks, Americans trust Republicans on the economy, etc.) but rather from advantages afforded by the Republican brand and their attitude toward elections and government. Consequently, when Republicans are in power, they pull the government far to the right, but, when Democrats are in power, although Democrats try to pull government back to the political center of the country, Republican politicians often prevent Democrats from doing much of anything at all. Several factors explain Republicans’ greater success at realizing their political agenda, success that has less to do with the country’s political leanings than with the differences between the behaviors, funding, and political philosophies of the two parties.
4. Republican policies on taxes, corporate regulation, the environment, worker’s rights, and unions favor corporations and the wealthy, who have disproportionate influence on political platforms and election outcomes.
The economic positions of Republican politicians are geared to address the desires of the wealthiest Americans, at the same time that Republicans and conservative news media work to convince working-class Americans that they and the rich share the same real interests. Hence, Republicans refer to the rich not as “the rich” but as “job creators,” who require lower corporate and personal income taxes to make jobs more plentiful. The strategy encourages poor Americans to mistake their interests for those of the wealthy, so that some poor Americans, who might pay no income tax at all, believe their lives will improve if government lowers taxes on the rich. One can easily understand why the rich think of themselves as deserving of wealth (it serves their interests to believe that), but to have convinced the poor of the same thing is a stunning accomplishment, achieved in part because wealthy Americans fund the Republican propaganda apparatus. So thoroughly has the Republican party’s message permeated the country’s working class that many mistake the ideological propaganda of right wing pundits for expressions of unvarnished truth. If the privileged Donald Trump has become the spokesperson for the white working class, then we can say that Republican messaging has succeeded.
The Republican position on taxes, regulation, worker rights, and the environment means that, when corporations and wealthy Americans support the most right-wing candidates and causes, they are donating in their own economic interests. By contrast, when corporations and wealthy Americans support the most liberal candidates and causes, they are normally donating against their own economic interests: They are supporting more regulation, worker’s rights, environmental protections, union power, and higher taxes. A wealthy liberal donor and a wealthy Republican donor may both donate based on sincere political beliefs, but only one of them is donating against her own economic self-interest. There’s nothing wrong with voting one’s self interest; the American political system has been designed that way. But whereas all eligible Americans have the power of the vote, wealthy Americans have an additional political power — their greater wealth. That wealth biases election outcomes toward Republicans and compels a fiscal policy in both parties more friendly to corporations and the wealthy.
In the 2010 Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court held that political spending constitutes “free speech.” This controversial decision — supported by five Republican-appointed justices and no Democrat-appointed justices — enabled people and corporations to spend literally unlimited amounts of money in favor of any political campaign, provided they do not coordinate their spending with the campaign itself. Studies have shown that the decision has significantly favored Republicans, increasing Republican representation in state legislatures, for instance, by up to 10 or more percentage points in several states, mostly due to corporate spending.
Although corporate and wealthy donors tend to support Republicans in order to elect candidates that favor their financial interests, some also support Democrats, pulling the Democratic platform to the right. Consider the Democratic politicians that wealthy Democrats tend to support, such as Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Patrick Leahy, and Hillary Clinton. Those Democrats often hold policy positions that favor the wealthy on taxes, the environment, and corporate regulation — positions more like those of Republicans than those of more progressive Democrats, such as Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Democratic Socialists, such as Bernie Sanders. Indeed, Democratic party leaders tend to favor positions fairly close to the Republican platform on issues such as taxes and financial regulation. They have to, if they want support from wealthy donors.
Consider tax policy. For the past 30 years, income taxes have been historically low under both Republican and Democratic rule. Between 1988 and 2020, the highest marginal income tax rate has fluctuated between 28 percent and 39.6 percent, averaging at 36 percent. Compare that number to the highest marginal tax rate in the 1960s and 1970s, when it never dropped below 70 percent. Between 1951 and 1963, it never dropped below 91 percent. Before 1988, you would have to go back to 1931, when the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, to find a maximum marginal tax rate lower than 36 percent. So was Hillary Clinton advocating a return to the marginal tax rates of the 1950s? No, her plan would have kept taxes the same for households making under $5 million per year, and it would raise the rate to 43.9 percent only for income above $5 million. That’s a modest maximum tax rate, compared to historical averages, and it would have affected only the wealthiest 5 percent of the country. Compare Clinton’s proposal to Bernie Sanders’s proposal for a 52 percent marginal tax rate and a 77 percent estate tax, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal for a 70 percent marginal tax rate, and Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a “wealth tax” on Americans with more than $50 million in assets. Clinton’s proposal was closer to the Republican position than to that of the Democrat’s left wing.
Hence, when Republicans want to win elections, they move to the right (to appeal to their base), whereas, when Democrats want to win elections, they move to the right (to appeal to corporate and wealthy donors). True leftist Democrats, with positions to the left of the country as a whole, constitute a small minority of Democrats in power. Consequently, the mainstream Democratic caucus supports comparatively conservative positions on most financial matters.
5. Democrats build government programs, whereas Republicans destroy them, and it’s easier and quicker to destroy things than to build them.
The Republican agenda of “smaller government” is easier to enact compared to the incremental constructions of Democratic presidents like Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, and Obama, who created the Peace Corps, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, the War on Poverty, Head Start, the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965, Medicare, Medicaid, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Department of Education, the cleanup of Superfund sites, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Brady Bill, AmeriCorps, the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Paris Agreement to curb climate change, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Democrats made incremental improvements to the EPA, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other environmental regulations. They bolstered banking laws, ethics laws, campaign finance laws, and gun laws.
The Republican smaller-government agenda is by nature destructive. If government is the problem, not the solution, as President Reagan contended, then the duty of the Republican politician is to weaken or destroy it. Libertarian lobbyist Grover Norquist said famously, “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Republican politicians who share Norquist’s attitude toward government, and most all of them would express support for it, enjoy several distinct advantages over Democrats seeking to enact their agendas. Let’s look at them one at a time.
First, Republicans can quickly destroy legislation, regulation, agreements, and institutions that took Democrats years, sometimes generations of lawmakers, to enact. Each of the Democratic accomplishments listed above required arm twisting, bi-partisan efforts, compromise, diplomacy, research, planning, new institutions, administration and enforcement, and a campaign to educate the public. Then Republican politicians come to power and sink those efforts, either through quick, devastating legislation (such as weakening the Dodd-Frank Act that established financial regulations after the Great Recession), through executive action (such as pulling out of the Iran Nuclear Deal), or through their nominees to the Supreme Court, who gutted the Civil Rights Act (a landmark legislation, arduously complicated to pass, that protected African Americans against voter suppression), established the Citizens United precedent (which immediately devastated campaign finance laws that took decades of bi-partisan work to create), and damaged the Affordable Care Act (which compelled the states to expand Medicaid). It took Trump about a year to destroy most of the accomplishments of the eight-year Obama era, including the Iran Nuclear Deal, North Korean Sanctions, transgender military service, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Net Neutrality, the Paris Climate Treaty, DACA, an effective EPA, and many other Obama-era accomplishments. Trump almost succeeded in destroying the Affordable Care Act entirely but so far has had to settle for merely hobbling it. Whether one agrees with Trump’s actions against Obama-era accomplishments, one must agree that it was quicker and easier to destroy the accomplishments than to make them. Destruction can happen fast.
Second, partly because of the design of our government, Republicans can readily obstruct Democratic efforts to build things. Just to rebuild the laws and institutions that Republicans destroy would take years and a fortuitous set of circumstances — a Democratic President, a Democratic House of Representatives, and a Democratic super-majority in the Senate (enough votes to overcome a Republican filibuster). And Democrats must accomplish all of it quickly because, as soon as they lose control over one of those bodies, they cannot accomplish anything because of Republican obstruction. The country could elect a Democratic president, a Democratic House, and a 59 percent Democratic Senate, yet Republicans could still stop Democrats from creating new legislation because of Senate filibuster rules, as they did routinely under the Obama presidency. Hence, Democrats, to enact their agenda, must win elections overwhelmingly (and build incrementally during periods of overwhelming Democratic rule), whereas Republicans, to enact their agenda, need only obstruct and destroy, a comparatively easy task, even when one is in the minority.
Finally, Republicans can enact their agenda of smaller government in two ways: They can kill a program directly or they can cut off funding through underfunding and “tax reform,” a practice known to Republicans as “starving the beast.” President Reagan compared the strategy to cutting off the allowance of an extravagant child. George W. Bush called it a “fiscal straightjacket for Congress.” Democratic accomplishments require money, whereas smaller government requires no money. The Trump administration, for instance, reduced funding to promote ACA enrollment from $100 million to $10 million, and subsequently sign-ups on the federal health insurance marketplace dropped 11.7 percent from previous years, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Hence, when Republicans cannot stop legislation through legislative means, they can try to stop it through financial starvation, an option unavailable to Democrats because of their constructive agenda costs money.
6. Republicans can win elections by appealing to their extremist base and the wealthiest Americans, pulling the Republican party to the right and the government along with it. Democrats have no comparable effective strategy available to them.
Republicans have adopted a polarizing strategy for winning elections: excite the base. Belligerent and extremist views get Republicans to the polls; negative emotions are very motivating. Republican political rhetoric often speaks to people invested in conspiracy theories (global warming is a conspiracy of left-wing scientists; Barak Obama, a Muslim communist, is planning to invade Texas and confiscate guns; the FBI is run by a “deep state”; Donald Trump is secretly saving children from sex slavery). It engages in racist propaganda, nativism, and white nationalism (Mexican immigrants are criminals, American Muslims will implement Sharia Law, and Christian whites are the real oppressed cultural group in this country). And it targets hot-button cultural issues for the far right (transgender bathroom bills, prayer in school, gay marriage, religious freedom, abortion, gun rights). Republicans, recall, do not need a majority of the American vote to obtain a majority in Congress or the presidency. If only the wealthy and their extreme base support them, they can still succeed at election time because they need fewer votes than Democrats in order to win office. This extremist strategy does not work for Democrats, who must in general appeal instead to a significant majority of the voting population (well over 50 percent), not an extreme left that has almost no representation in federal government.
The difference between the strategies of the two parties accounts for the fact that the Democratic platform almost mirrors the mainstream beliefs of the country as a whole, whereas the Republican platform is designed to satisfy the richest Americans and an uneducated working-class white base. As a result of the two parties’ differing strategies, Democratic victories pull the country toward the political center of mainstream American beliefs, whereas Republican victories pull the country to the far right.
7. Republicans favor simple solutions to problems, making their policies easier to understand. By contrast, Democratic Party solutions require Americans to address complex, hard-to-face facts.
Compare the following two messages in terms of their complexity:
“Universal healthcare requires higher taxes, mostly on the wealthy, but it will untie your healthcare from your work, enabling you to change jobs without fear of losing coverage, and it will reduce your overall healthcare costs because you will obtain medical care with only a nominal copayment.”
“My opponent wants to raise your taxes.”
Which message is more easily understood? Which requires more mental effort to grasp and trust? Which messenger do you think would more likely win over voters in a political debate?
On just about every issue, the Republican position is simpler, more consistent, and more accessible than the Democratic position. Unlike Republicans, Democrats seek balance between the competing pressures of the economy and the environment, border security and a compassionate immigration policy, individual liberty and gun regulation, the free market and financial regulation, job growth and climate change, economic growth and income inequality, a sensible tax rate and government services, fighting crime and addressing the over-incarceration of people of color, aggressively combating terrorism and maintaining our country’s moral values. Even Democrats know the Republican position on all of those issues (probably better than they know their own party’s position) because it is simple, consistent, and accessible.
By contrast, Democratic solutions to these and other problems are nuanced, evidence based, scientific, difficult to face, difficult to implement, tailored to each problem individually, and not always intuitive (e.g. raising taxes to fund government healthcare will paradoxically raise Americans’ overall income). Democratic solutions, moreover, require collective action, whereas Republican solutions more likely rely on individual action. There’s nothing wrong with promoting individual responsibility. However, some problems — including healthcare, climate change, crime, under-performing schools, income inequality, and gun violence — require collective action to address properly. But it’s easier to think that we each govern our own lives than to think that we must rely on institutions like government for change. Republicans, therefore, have an easier job selling their positions, even in the face of empirical contradiction.
8. Republican politicians today have demonstrated an unprecedented willingness to sacrifice their own principles and principles of American democracy — principles that stabilize our political system, ensure continuity and comity, and enact the will of the American people — for the sake of political gain. Democratic politicians, by contrast, cannot engage in unprincipled behavior without risking the support of Democrats.
Republicans play by different rules than Democrats. In some ways, they don’t play by rules at all. Time and again, Republicans have demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice their own policy positions for the sake of political gain. Rather than obeying norms that govern political behavior, they develop principles tailored to the moment that offer them immediate political advantage.
We could examine numerous examples in which the Republican Party abandoned principle for immediate political gain. We could, for instance, examine the party’s inconsistencies when it comes to the deficit, presidential executive orders, healthcare, presidential oversight, presidential overreach, Russia, the security of classified material, judicial activism, state’s rights, impeachment, or President Trump himself. But we already have many essays illustrating Republican political opportunism, so I’ll focus on just two issues: “voter integrity” and Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination. The first issue best illustrates the Republican approach to elections and the second their approach to governing. Together they indicate a disrespect for democracy and the will of voters that affords undeserved advantage to the GOP in elections and governing.
An honest effort to safeguard the integrity of elections would ensure that the election system does not disenfranchise eligible voters. Republicans instead focus on voter ID and voter purges. Let’s examine why.
Voter ID laws disproportionately affect African-Americans, who overwhelmingly support Democrats in elections. Up to 25 percent of African Americans lack government issued photo IDs, compared to only 8 percent of whites. A 2014 GAO study found that photo ID requirements disproportionately affect turnout among racial minorities. A North Carolina appeals court found that Republicans intentionally designed the state’s Voter ID law to discriminate against black people. Republican legislators, the court learned, had requested data on voting patterns by race and drafted a law that would, the court said, “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.” The Republican legislature had in fact discovered evidence of fraud in absentee voting, a method used disproportionately by white voters, and had intentionally excluded absentee voting from the law’s ID requirements. The courts furthermore found that the law “retained only those types of photo ID disproportionately held by whites and excluded those disproportionately held by African-Americans.” (Texas currently allows state-issued concealed weapons permits for voting but not state-issued student IDs.) North Carolina Republicans contend that Voter ID laws are necessary to prevent rampant election fraud, but the only type of election fraud that voter ID can prevent is voter impersonation, and there have been only 31 reported cases, out of 1 billion votes cast, of voter impersonation in the US since 2000 and not one case in North Carolina.
Bad actors trying to subvert election integrity use more productive means than voter impersonation. Indeed, North Carolina investigators found an “unlawful,” “coordinated,” and well-funded plot to tamper with scores of absentee ballots in the 2018 election for the ninth district US House seat, a fraud designed to benefit the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, and paid for by his campaign. Yet the NC GOP made no effort to prevent absentee ballot tampering either before or after the case. On the contrary, they demanded that election officials stop “stalling” and seat Harris, despite the tainted ballots. Eventually, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the operative hired by Harris had committed pervasive voter fraud and that Harris had been warned of the operative’s history of ballot tampering, he withdrew from the race, contrary to the GOP’s ongoing effort to have him seated.
Republicans have also disenfranchised Democratic voters through “voter purges,” which drop voters from the rolls in order to control who can vote on election day. The Georgia Secretary of State, Republican Brian Kemp, cancelled 1.4 million registrations, many for minor disparities, and ultimately won his 2018 race for governor by under 55,000 votes. Although African Americans constitute only 32 percent of Georgia’s population, Kemp’s voter purge was nearly 70 percent black. If Republicans wanted to ensure the integrity of elections, they would take just as much care to ensure that eligible voters are able to vote as they do to enact voter ID laws and voter purges.
The facts of these and other cases (the lack of evidence of voter impersonation, the intentional disregard of absentee ballot tampering, the targeting of African American voters in drafting laws and purging voters, the absence of any efforts to ensure that all eligible Americans can vote) indicate that Republican politicians are not seeking to safeguard elections, despite their stated goals. Rather they are attempting to keep as many Democrats from the polls as possible without harming the access of Republican voters or preventing fraud committed by Republicans. The true goal, in other words, is to subvert democracy by undermining the will of the American people.
The same unprincipled attitude toward the will of voters characterizes Republican behavior in government and further reveals the differences between the two parties with regard to their attitude toward principle, politics, and governing. The Merrick Garland example illustrates that attitude and can stand for many similar examples.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called blocking Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court “one of my proudest moments.” Let’s examine exactly what McConnell was so proud of.
With eleven months remaining in his presidency, Obama nominated Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, but McConnell and the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to consider any Obama nominee. To justify his obstruction, McConnell said that “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.” McConnell’s stated principle, however, does not withstand scrutiny. Indeed, one could make McConnell’s case in reverse: The American people elected Barak Obama, so don’t those Americans have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice? Obama was, after all, re-elected President three years before Scalia’s death, and the vacancy occurred under his tenure. But a feigned concern for the will of the American people, like the concern for voter integrity, obscures Republican’s real effort to subvert the will of voters in order to benefit Republicans.
Indeed, McConnell, when asked about the principle by which he blocked a vote on Garland’s nomination, declined to support a rule that a president should not be allowed a Supreme Court Justice confirmation in election years; he called the question “absurd.” Indeed McConnell’s principle was not a principle at all: It was a rationalization designed to suit the circumstances and provide McConnell a specious justification for a power move. It was the most successful obstruction of his career, and he was proud of it. McConnell, in other words, was proud not of standing on principle but of having foiled a Democratic president who had a Constitutional right to have his nominee considered by the Senate. He was proud that he had beat Democrats in a key fight that American tradition and the rules of the Senate said he was supposed to lose, a cunning triumph he managed to pull off without any justifiable principle to back it up.
Republican political principles vary, depending on whether the principle benefits the party politically at the moment, but the true principle is victory and its attendant qualities (aggressiveness, militancy, force, winning). The Republican brand is victory. So we can view Donald Trump (whom some Republicans have said is not a real Republican) as the most militant Republican of all time — aggressive, disrespectful of norms, adapting his principles to suit whatever victory he is seeking at the moment, unconcerned about contradiction, morality, norms, principles, or facts.
McConnell ultimately admitted that he behaved not out of principle but rather for political gain in the Garland case when he said, for instance, that “Everybody knew that neither side, had the shoe been on the other foot, would have filled” the Supreme Court seat. In justifying his behavior, McConnell has made similar assertions about what Democrats would have done in his position. In other words, McConnell assumes that, because he’s unscrupulous, the other side is unscrupulous too. This Democrats are no better attitude permeates Republican rhetoric and is a common retort to accusations of Machiavellian behavior by the Republican Party. But the assumption is false. Democrats cannot behave like Republicans and still maintain their political authority. Democrats are not, for instance, rewriting voting laws and purging Republican voters, because seeking to keep eligible voters from voting, for the sake of political gain, would violate the Democratic brand.
Had Democrats done what McConnell did, they would have sacrificed some of the moral high ground that they stand on to attract the support of voters. Democrats follow principles because their brand is not victory but rather principle itself, including all of the qualities that attend it (fairness, compassion, morality, democracy, decency, respect for norms, institutions and people). Democrats support the Democratic Party because of its emphasis on principle (“When they go low, we go high”). To behave unscrupulously and unpatriotically would violate some of the key reasons Democrats are Democrats.
But the Democratic Party’s emphasis on morality and patriotic behavior creates political weakness. When Democrats forced Senator Al Franken to resign, for instance, after several women accused Franken of groping and kissing them, the Democrats strengthened their brand but lost a reliable liberal vote and a powerful, persuasive, intelligent, winning senator. Allowing Franken to remain would violate moral principle. I’m not romanticizing the Democratic Party: Democrats did not demand Franken’s resignation on principle alone, without political calculation. I am arguing rather that for Democrats the political calculation includes moral principle, because moral principle attracts Democrats to the party. We can find a handful of instances in which Democrats sacrificed some principle for political gain, but, each time they do, they chip away at their brand.
For Republicans, each political victory, including voter suppression and the Garland obstruction, only enhances the Republican brand. Since victory, even unprincipled victory, only strengthens the Republican brand in the mind of the Republican base, principle need not factor as much into Republican political calculations; any specious justification will do (“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice”). That difference accounts for why the many sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump (or the evidence of lying, corrupt business practices, charity fraud, misogyny, and tax evasion) have not led any Republican politicians to call for Trump’s resignation. Whereas calling for Franken’s resignation signals the Democratic Party’s strength to Democrats, calling for Trump’s resignation would signal that Party’s weakness to Republicans.
The differences between the two parties have obvious implications for both elections and policy battles. So while Democrats focus on raising the level of discourse, maintaining a principled approach to governing and elections, and ensuring widespread access to the polls, Republicans focus on winning. Winning by preventing Democrats from voting is still winning. Winning by cunningly preventing a Democratic president from having his nominee considered by the Senate is still winning. The two parties are, in fact, engaged in two different activities: Democrats are engaged in a grand debate, a serious debate to determine the future of the country, and Republicans are at war. And in a contest between debaters and soldiers, one side has an advantage.
Conclusions
Most news commentators see the battle between Democrats and Republicans in symmetrical terms: Left vs. right offers a tidy, intellectually pleasing frame that accords with the news media’s efforts toward balanced coverage. Left vs. right makes politics seem fair. But the metaphor of a fair fight does not pertain because the opposing sides do not mirror one another. The extreme right (those with beliefs far to the right of the country as a whole) is the right, the right that is in power, whereas the extreme left is a mostly disenfranchised group with no real prospect of financial support and almost no voice in government.
Electoral victories enable Republicans to maintain the illusion that we live in a center-right country and that they represent the majority of Americans. But polls show that we live in a country whose citizens by and large believe in the Democratic platform. Republican victory results not from their popularity or superior ability to field electable candidates and persuade voters but rather from the eight structural advantages enumerated above. Any one of those advantages would tilt elections, but the combination — a result of the accidents of political demographics and unprincipled behavior by Republican politicians and judges — has led our democratic system of government to warp in favor of a conservative minority with extremist political views, far beyond the views of the majority of Americans.
The design of our political system contained the seeds of our current political dysfunction. Our Constitution is flawed: The framers did not envision a scenario in which the supporters of one party would concentrate in fewer states and denser cities, and another party, financed by the richest Americans, would fuel an extremist minority. They also mistakenly gave legislators the right to draw their own districts, unable to foresee that technological advances would enable those legislators to pick with precision the voters who would re-elect them, thus further exaggerating, through gerrymandering, the power of the politically powerful. Our American political system has reached a stage of dysfunctional democracy, the source of which was built into our Constitution.
We should regard American politics not as a battle between two equal forces, one pulling left and one pulling right, fighting over the heart of the country, but rather as a battle between a party committed to democratic rule and an extremist minority that exploits flaws in our Constitution in order to win power and subvert democracy.
