The Left and the Left Out: The Grand Old Minority reigns
Since Bill Clinton unseated George H. W. Bush in the 1992 presidential election, the GOP has only won the presidency with a majority of the popular vote once. This was in 2004, when, in the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush (50.7%) had a decisive victory over John Kerry (48.3%).
However, Republicans have won the White House in three elections since 1992. Besides 2004, they won in 2000 — George W. Bush (47.9%) over Al Gore (48.4%) — and 2016 — Donald Trump (46%) over Hillary Clinton (48.1%).
These two wins were only possible because of the Electoral College, which puts more weight on votes from less populous states relative to the weight it puts on votes from more populous ones. For instance, in 2016 the Washington Post calculated the weight of a Wyoming vote to be 3.6 times that of a California vote.
The Electoral College is an anti-democratic oddity of American presidential elections, resulting from a compromise between the Constitution’s framers. Some of them believed the president ought to be chosen by Congress, while others believed this power should reside in the people. No other democracy existed for the United States to model its own after at the time, so the debate is understandable.
However, it is telling, as Harvard Kennedy School Professor Alex Keyssar points out, the process “does not conform to democratic principles the nation has publicly championed … [and has] never [been] imitated by another country or by any state of the U.S.” David Weigel of the Washington Post perhaps best captures its irony: “There’s only one office in this country you can win without the popular support of most voters, and it happens to be the most powerful one in the world.”
The Electoral College was not the only anti-democratic compromise arrived by the Founding Fathers. There was also, of course, the notorious Three-fifths Compromise. And there was the “Great Compromise,” which, like the Electoral College, still affects American politics today.
The “Great Compromise” between small and large states agreed upon two systems of congressional representation: the House of Representatives, where seats were assigned according to a state’s population, and the Senate, where “equal representation” of two senators was assigned to each state. In 2013, this meant that six senate votes from California, Texas and New York represented the same amount of people as 62 Senate votes from the smallest 31 states.
The last time Republican Senators represented a popular majority of the vote was in 1996 when they represented 50.3% of the population to the Democrat’s 49.7%. Nonetheless, Republicans controlled the Senate from 1995 to 2001, 2003 to 2007 and 2015 to 2021.
The Senate holds certain powers that the House does not, including approving treaties and Supreme Court Justice nominations. This has allowed Senate majorities that do not represent the majority of the American population’s desires to block Supreme Court nominees such as Merrick Garland or appoint Justices to an increasingly conservative Supreme Court (all W. Bush and Trump appointees).
One would have to be very naïve to believe Republicans’ aggressive agenda in the last two decades comes from a convenient ignorance of the desires of the majority of the American public. In reality, the GOP is all too aware that it is a disproportionately represented minority. Thus, their aggressiveness in policy is not only matched but surpassed in another area: their aggressiveness in holding on to power.
One of the most cited examples of political manipulation is gerrymandering: redrawing the boundaries of electoral districts so that one party is unfairly advantaged. While both parties are complicit in gerrymandering districts, one party’s reliance on the method is clearly more substantial.
According to Business Insider, in 2016, there were “four times” more states gerrymandered so that their House or Assembly districts unfairly favored Republicans. Additionally, gerrymandering allowed Republicans to win up to 22 more U.S. House seats than they should have been able to based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country.
District lines are redrawn every 10 years with each new Census. The next redistricting will come in 2022, meaning that state legislators elected in the 2020 cycle will draw the new district boundaries.
This is great news for Republicans. Even after they lost the presidency and both houses of Congress, Republicans “won big” in state elections. After all, 2020 came ten years after “Project Redmap,” the unprecedented Republican effort to gain control of U.S. state legislatures and redraw districts to their advantage. Perhaps this is why Senate Republicans are now threatening to use the filibuster to derail a law that would end partisan gerrymandering for good.
The subtle manipulation of gerrymandering is one thing, but after months of Trump’s incendiary lies about election fraud, Republicans feel more emboldened than ever. According to the Washington Post, since the election, more than 250 new voting laws have been proposed by Republicans in 43 states to create voting hurdles for “tens of millions of voters.”
In the words of Alice O’Lenick, the Republican chair of the Gwinnett County elections board in Georgia, “they’ve got to change the major parts of them [voting laws] so that we at least have a shot at winning.” Yes, Alice, that would be a good idea. Or maybe you can actually get a pulse on the needs of the American electorate.
Whether a democracy that ignores the many to cater to the few can long be sustained remains to be seen. Republicans are waiting to find out.
Javier Calleja Erdmann is a junior writing about politics. His column, “The Left and the Left Out,” usually runs every other Wednesday.