The Republican Strategy to Rule as a Minority Party — Permanently

Of the nation’s 200 million registered voters, only roughly 37% of them consider themselves Republicans — seven percentage points lower than the number of Democrats. A majority of independents leans Democratic, too. And in the 2016 election, the Democratic candidate received over 3 million more votes than the Republican one.

Yet, Republicans control the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, along with 33 state legislatures and 33 governorships. The Republican Party currently rules America — as a minority party.

Majority rule from a minority party isn’t an accident. It has been carefully orchestrated for decades — with the intention of ensuring permanent rule for the GOP.

The strategy of choice: a combination of controlling who votes and how their vote matters, enough advertising and marketing to make anyone’s head spin, all the money in the world (even from elsewhere in the world), and an all-out assault on democratic institutions and principles that have created voter apathy to unprecedented levels.

Republicans are rigging the game, and they’re playing for keeps — not just for midterms, or for the next presidential election, but for all time.

Controlling the Vote: Gerrymandering, Voter Suppression, and Blocking Access to the Ballot

Republicans know they need to keep Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters from making it to the polls. Every year, there are fewer Republicans and more Democrats. Roughly 50% of registered voters are Democrats or lean Democrat, compared to 42% who are Republicans or lean Republican — and that trend is growing. Protecting their majorities depends on protecting the ballot box, and to do that, Republicans are using anti-democratic methods like gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering — the practice of drawing voting district maps to carve out an advantage for the majority party in a state — is as old as the country is itself. For centuries, it has been a time-honored practice of the majority party, Republicans or Democrats, using their superiority at the state level to influence the number of seats a party has at the state or federal level.

Both parties use gerrymandering — Illinois and Maryland are Democratic strongholds in part due to gerrymandering — but the GOP takes it to a new level. The audacity of some of the maps the party has drawn is breathtaking. Drawn often along racial lines, the GOP has used gerrymandering to rig the system so that the voting power of a Democratic voter is far less than the voting power of a Republican one.

And a complicit Supreme Court doesn’t appear to be doing anything to fight back against the widespread and brazen gerrymandering going on in quasi or full battleground states like Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas, among others.

Republicans can take gerrymandering to the next level, ultimately, because a conservative-dominated Court won’t stop them, at least until they mess up and do something truly drastic, and even then the prospect is questionable. Another key reason is because Republicans captured a majority of state legislatures in the wave election of 2010 — the same year they captured the House of Representatives and controlled the Census.

The level that Republicans will stoop to when it comes to gerrymandering is revealed in an enlightening passage from The Atlantic, talking about the GOP in Texas:

“These statistical realities left the Republican-controlled state legislature and Governor Rick Perry with three choices when it came to redistricting. They could bow to the demographics, draw three or four new “minority-opportunity districts” — ­in which Latino and/or African American voters would have the opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice — and then set themselves to the task, as Governor George W. Bush once did, of appealing to the state’s fastest-growing population. Or they could opt for the middle ground and create one or two such districts. Or, says Gerry Hebert, a lawyer who has handled numerous election and redistricting cases for Democrats, ‘they could use the redistricting process to cling to what power they have and hang on for as long as they can.’”

Gerrymandering is key because it allows the GOP to consolidate power and hold on, to maintain the crucial numbers advantage they have. But gerrymandering is only one part of controlling the vote. Gerrymandering rigs the election at the party level. There are more sinister things going on to rig the election at the individual level.

The Battle Over Voting Rights

There’s nothing more fundamental to American democracy than the right to vote. But that right to vote isn’t equal for everyone. Depending on who you are and where you live, voting can be much harder and much less effective than it is for others.

As mentioned, Republicans have a numerical disadvantage. Their saving grace is that people who are very numerous — the young, minorities, and the poor, groups that traditionally skew overwhelmingly Democratic — don’t vote very often. But that could change if voting access improves. The GOP knows this, which is why they have created an audacious series of voting ID and voting access laws across the nation to keep those three crucial groups from turning out.

Voting ID laws disproportionately impact low-income voters, minority, elderly voters (the poor ones, at least), and voters with disabilities. They’re almost surgical in their precision, and it’s no coincidence that the people these laws affect tend to vote for Democrats.

Republicans know they work, too. Voter ID laws were instrumental in securing Republican majorities and electoral votes in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In 2012, a Pennsylvania Republican representative named Mike Turzai, in a moment of honesty, admitted as much: “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: done.” Romney didn’t win the state, but Trump did — thanks in no small part to voter ID.

As distasteful as these laws are, there are more nefarious plays the GOP is making across the country. One tactic is to limit the number of places where people can vote, which, at best, decreases turnout overall — which favors Republicans — and at worst reduces turnout in select areas usually full of minorities and college students. At the national level, the Voting Rights Act being gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013 resulted in 868 fewer polling places. In Alabama, the Republican-controlled government tried to close DMV locations in minority-dominated counties in 2015, a move that was reversed only in response to a federal probe and a public outcry. Republican states have also limited voting hours, which makes it harder for working low-income voters to make it to the polls and vote.

You can’t vote unless you’re registered, but in Republican-controlled states, you may get to the polls and find out you’re not registered at all. Purging the rolls of registered voters is an entirely too common yet undemocratic and heavy-handed technique to limit votes — and is, in reality, one of the more openly dirty ways the Republicans are trying to rig the vote. The Supreme Court, characteristically, isn’t of much help; the Court just ruled that Ohio’s voter purges of inactive voters are good to go — nevermind the fact that your right to vote is enshrined in the Constitution and isn’t dependent on how often you do it.

One new tactic is being tried in North Carolina. It’s downright Machiavellian. The state legislature voted to mandate that polling places stay open 12 hours a day, every day of the week, in addition to weekend hours. This, on the surface, sounds like it’ll expand access, but the GOP-dominated legislature passed the bill right before most counties in the nation solidified their election budgets. Since this measure will be more expensive for counties, some counties won’t be able to afford it, which means they’ll have to close some of their polling places to save money.

Naturally, the counties with limited budgets that will have to close polling places are dominated by minorities.

The first defense against encroaching Democratic voters is at the ballot box, and Republicans are doing whatever they can legislatively to keep Democratic voters in check. But that’s not the only part of their strategy to stay in power indefinitely.

Controlling the Message: Unlimited Money, Propaganda, and Foreign Interference

Voters are human. They’re susceptible to messaging, marketing, advertising, and propaganda, as all humans are. Even voters who think they’re solely responsible for who they choose — that their choice is theirs alone and isn’t influenced by anything else — are wrong. The idea of the rational voter is a myth. Instead, voters have limited time, are susceptible to emotional appeals and manipulation, and fall victim to any number of means of persuasion that skilled campaigners and propagandists can leverage to get voters to do what they want.

Both parties use messaging and advertising to get their points across, to influence voters. That’s perfectly reasonable. But Republicans have a unique edge: money.

Money matters. It is the fuel of any election. Generally speaking, the more money you have, the more reach you can get with your messages. The more influence you can purchase. In marketing, there’s a direct correlation between campaign budget and outcomes. The better-funded business — or candidate — usually wins.

Since the 2000 election, money has steadily poured into politics. From 2008 to 2016, each election cycle has been the most expensive ever up until that point — and that’s just counting the money that was officially spent and tracked by each campaign. Hillary Clinton’s campaign outspent Donald Trump’s campaign, but there is an advantage that Republicans have, and that comes with soft and dark money that can be spent in unlimited amounts and is virtually untraceable if the donors really want it to be.

And when it comes to soft and dark money, Republicans are so far ahead of Democrats that it’s laughable.

Republicans have legions of wealthy donors who can fund not just presidential campaigning, but campaigning at virtually every level of politics. In Colorado, an election with four seats for the local Board of Education up for grabs saw in excess of $2 million spent trying to win a battle over school choice and vouchers — much of it coming from outside donors. In Los Angeles, over four times as much money was spent on one school board race — also over school choice and vouchers. Big money is impacting every election from school boards to mayors, state representatives and senators, governors, lieutenant governors, public commissions, and, naturally, federal offices.

And much of it is coming from the unprecedented and notoriously wealthy network of Republican billionaire donors built by the Koch brothers, the Mercers, and the like, as detailed in the disturbing book Dark Money by Jane Mayer.

This tidal wave in spending comes from Republican efforts to dismantle campaign finance reform in every conceivable form. Republicans want as much money in politics as they can possibly get, because they can raise more than Democrats can. That’s why a conservative-dominated court decided Citizens United in 2013. That’s why conservatives fight tooth and nail in any effort to limit spending.

Why do Republicans donate more? To Republicans, political donations are investments. They expect to get returns from what they contribute. The tax reform bill passed in December is a prime example. Republican donors ponied up tens of millions of dollars because they knew they were set to make hundreds of millions of dollars if tax reform passed. To these wealthy elites, tax reform was the key issue of the 2016 cycle (and 2012, and 2008, etc.). They knew that if they succeeded, every dollar they spent would return multiple.

For Democrats, though, their causes just don’t have the same effect. Wealthy Democratic donors won’t make more money by pushing Medicare for all. Their profits don’t dramatically increase if gay marriage is enshrined into law, or if assault weapons are banned. Supporting workers’ rights arguably cost them money, when viewed in raw terms. To these donors, donations are expenditures, not investments.

Of course, Democrats know that ensuring a better quality of life for lower and middle-class Americans means the upper class benefits as well, but that doesn’t always translate to the masses because Republicans are determined to convince Americans otherwise — that policies that benefit the wealth benefit everyone, instead of the other way around.

In this country, doing the right thing doesn’t always pay.

Building the Propaganda Machine

To use money to put out your propaganda, though, you need a vehicle for that propaganda, for your messages. You need some way to distribute the lies to the masses.

That means you need control of the media in the form of TV, radio, print, and the Internet. To Republicans, that means media consolidation.

For the past two decades, conservatives have been steadily working to make it easier for themselves to consolidate media in the hands of the conservative elite. They started by using their money to start making purchases: a radio station here, a newspaper or TV station there. Over time, wealthy elites have gradually bought more and more media outlets until today, when we have corporations like the Sinclair Broadcast Group — the ultra-conservative outfit that is the largest owner of local television stations in the country with 173 stations across the nation.

This is the same Sinclair Broadcast Group that recently forced its broadcasters to repeat an Orwellian anti-media, pro-Trump mantra during every broadcast.

There have been laws on the books since 1975 that limit the number of newspapers and TV stations that one company can own in a given market. The FCC, under Trump appointee Ajit Pai, wants to abolish those rules. The biggest beneficiary? Sinclair Broadcast Group.

The federal government also has to approve Sinclair’s $4 billion bid to acquire Tribune Media, which was announced in May, 2017. The FCC is the entity that has to approve it. If it goes through, Sinclair will own stations that reach a staggering 72% of Americans. Absent congressional intervention, it’s likely that the Pai-led and Republican-controlled FCC will give the deal the green light, although they may wait until after the 2018 midterms to do so.

Various conservative billionaires are also attempting to purchase newspapers across the country, like when Sheldon Adelson purchased the Las Vegas Review-Journal in a move that promptly led to the resignation of several staffers who investigated and criticized the purchase. Liberal and Democratic-leaning billionaires also own media properties — Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and Michael Bloomberg owns his own massive media company — but conservatives are the ones driving media consolidation, and want to, in their eyes, reverse decades of liberal dominance in the media.

Of course, the main source of news today is the Internet, and it has become the newest battleground. Pai — remember him? — led the FCC’s initiative to finally overturn Net Neutrality regulations put into place during the Obama administration in what is widely viewed as a blow to open communication, online entrepreneurship, and free speech. With Net Neutrality gone (only a Republican-controlled Congress can save it now), there’s virtually nothing stopping ISPs from filtering or outright blocking access to any online property. If an ISP wanted to throttle or block traffic to, say, CNN.com or MSNBC.com, they could. Of course, their customers are free to go elsewhere — but Internet service is largely a monopoly and many consumers don’t have a choice.

And wealthy conservatives are attempting inroads into the ISP business, as well.

It doesn’t take much to imagine a world in which Republicans, fueled by dark money from conservative billionaires and unencumbered by legislation, protected by the Supreme Court, start to take control of the means by which information is distributed to the masses. You could argue we’re already moving into that world — especially given how Russian operatives managed to help swing the election in 2016 by using a massive, coordinated propaganda assault through Facebook.

Plenty has been written about how Russia used Facebook (and other online platforms like Reddit) to flood targeted users with misleading propaganda. Republican voters dismiss the impact of the propaganda campaign because they, like virtually all humans not in the advertising and marketing industry, think themselves immune from propaganda. But humans are very vulnerable, and propaganda works all too well. Republicans may or may not have colluded with Russian propagandists, but they certainly benefited from the way voters were manipulated by messaging — particularly in a close election in which the presidency was decided by roughly 70,000 votes across three battleground states.

Republicans are more or less fine with Russian interference in elections as long as they’re the party to benefit. They haven’t pressed Trump on his refusal to enforce sanctions passed by Congress — which shows how the effort was for PR purposes more than anything. Many benefited from millions in campaign contributions given to them by the NRA, which has been linked to heavy doses of foreign cash from Putin-linked oligarchs in Russia — which, thanks to the GOP’s dismantling of campaign finance disclosure laws, can’t definitively be proved or disproved without the NRA’s assistance.

In fact, Russian involvement has helped many Republican members of Congress get elected or re-elected, given how successful propaganda and campaign contributions were in the 2016 election. With foreign help, the GOP can stay in power, therefore they have zero vested interest in stopping it, no matter what sound bites they may offer the national media.

When everything is put together, Republicans have built a propaganda machine backed by unlimited money, the help of foreign governments, laws and regulations passed or dismissed by a GOP-controlled government, a conservative-dominated Supreme Court, media consolidation in the hands of conservative billionaires with a Republican FCC allowing it to happen, and a willingness to use every unethical and manipulative persuasion tactic in the book to spread lies and misinformation.

They’re depending on this propaganda machine to get their voters to the polls while discouraging or misleading other voters so they either stay at home or split the Democratic vote by supporting third parties. It is an essential component of the long-term strategy of ruling the nation.

Controlling the Mind: Attacking Faith in Democracy

The third prong of the Republican plan to capture permanent rule is perhaps the most insidious: attacking the very institution of government itself.

Since the time when Ronald Reagan declared government to be the problem, conservatives have been relentlessly promoting one key message: government doesn’t work, so vote for the party that will do the least amount of damage by keeping government small.

There are real practical reasons why conservatives want limited government. Government is the only force that can check corporations and the conservative billionaires who want them. Government is the only force that can reduce the amount of money in elections, a natural Republican advantage over the past decade. Government in the wrong hands costs business owners money due to environmental regulations, protection for workers, higher taxes and fewer loopholes, and a host of other things.

For conservatives, government is the enemy if it’s under Democratic control. The GOP can use this to their advantage by convincing voters in the middle that government will hurt more than it’ll help. That government rewards laziness and punishes hard-working Americans. That government can’t be trusted with power.

And that if you want to protect yourself from government interference and overreach, you need to elect the party that understands just how dangerous government can be.

The all-out assault on government as a valid part of democracy has paid dividends for Republicans. It’s hypocritical, of course; Republicans use government to carve out monopolies for entrenched businesses, punish potential competitors, give favors to their voters, and defend Big Business from workers by crushing unions, passing anti-worker laws, and fighting any attempt to limit corporate power.

But voters in the middle are steadily being convinced that the size of government is a key issue. They’re being convinced that government isn’t the answer, although many low-income, rural, blue-collar voters who vote GOP depend on the government.

Of course, this militaristic crusade against government as an institution of democracy is doing something very dangerous: it’s creating voter apathy.

Voter apathy is profound in the United States, which has a painfully low participation rate among eligible voters at all levels. Voters give a variety of reasons for not voting, but most of them boil down to one common refrain: “My vote doesn’t matter and won’t do any good.”

They believe this because they see the grip Big Money has on government — that politicians are getting away with corruption and greed without consequence. They feel, either consciously or subconsiously, that their participation doesn’t matter because they have no control and no voice. They believe this because Republicans have done a very good job of convincing them of this mindset and simultaneously destroying the institution of government once they gain power.

If government can’t work, the mindset goes, then there’s no point in voting for it.

Additionally, voters don’t vote because they become disgusted by the political process. Salon did a great piece on how the GOP has intentionally poisoned politics and discourse in America to their advantage. If people have negative opinions of politics, and of government — thinking it’s hopelessly corrupt — then they are less likely to vote.

The people who believe this the most tend to be the people who really don’t have a voice and for whom participating in democracy is a lot more difficult due to a shortage of time, resources, education/knowledge, and mobility. By now, these groups should be familiar: low-income voters, elderly voters (except for affluent ones), the young, and minorities.

In short, voter apathy suppresses votes that help diminish the numerical advantage Democrats have over Republicans — and voter apathy is something Republicans actively try to promote every chance they can get.

How Close Are Republicans to Permanent Minority Rule?

The short answer: they’re not quite there yet — but they’re closer than you think.

Already, for the 2018 midterms, Republicans don’t have to get a majority of votes to retain control of the House of Representatives — even though most of the vulnerable seats for the GOP are in blue districts that should easily flip just based on historical midterm election trends.

What’s really up for grabs in the 2018 midterms, however, isn’t short-term control of the House (or, in a long shot, the Senate); it’s belief. It’s belief that democratic principles work, and that the rule of law can be obeyed. It’s the belief that American democracy is sacrosanct, and no foreign power should ever be allowed to interfere with it, regardless of whose side they’re on. It’s the belief that voter suppression, election rigging, and unlimited money in politics are wrong and should be fought whenever possible.

It’s the belief that country is more important than party — an ideal that seems to be on life support with a grim prognosis.

It’s likely that the conservative Supreme Court will validate gerrymandering even more than it has already. It’s likely that the Court will also turn a blind eye toward voter suppression that has ticked up in intensity since the Court dealt a mortal blow to the Voting Rights Act. More judges are being appointed at the federal level. More money is pouring into politics. More media consolidation is occurring.

But perhaps the biggest battleground isn’t the 2018 midterms. The real battle will take place two years later, in the 2020 election cycle. The House will once again be up for grabs, along with a third of the Senate — this time with an electoral map much more favorable to Democrats than the 2018 map — and, of course, the presidency. If ever there was a time for America to rise up and refute the schemes and machinations of the Republican Party — the party’s efforts to rig the system and dominate the majority as a minority party — it will be in November, 2020.

Voters then can send a clear message: we don’t want a president like Donald Trump and we don’t want a party that aids and abets him willingly like the GOP.

But that’s two years away. Midterms are up first, and there’s no guarantee that even despite the looming prospect of a “Blue Wave,” Democrats will regain the House and make inroads at the state level. There’s no guarantee that the will of the people — as of the latest polls, against Trump, the GOP, and what they stand for — will be manifested in electoral results.

The damage, as they say, may already have been done.