The Right Kind of Hope (parts 2&3 of probably 4)

Hello again! In case you missed it, this is the follow-up to

ONE: We Are Losing

I said there that nobody knew what would happen in the midterms but that the broader picture was clear. A week later, there's still a lot we don't know about the midterms, and it definitely doesn't change that broader picture. So ...

TWO: We Are Losing Because of Structural Bias in Our Election System

We’re losing because there’s a powerful right-wing bias built into the constitutional structure of our election system for all federal elected offices. It gives Republicans an undemocratic advantage in winning the presidency and both houses of Congress. It also impels both parties to field candidates further to the right than they otherwise would, pushes the federal judiciary to the right, and right-shifts the politics on every significant national controversy.

Major mainstream publications have recently started publishing about this. For one good rundown this fall, see David Leonhardt’s NYT piece ‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy, in particular his second “twin threat.” (Note, though, that his first “twin threat” is really better seen as a consequence of the second than as an independent threat.)

The core problem is that every member of Congress is elected in a single election, with a single winner, from a single state or district, and that the electors who choose the president are chosen in the same way. How many people vote for one party or the other doesn’t matter, only how many places voted mostly for one party or the other. Because left-leaning voters are heavily concentrated in cities, this system creates what is in effect nationwide gerrymandering that favors the political right. Continuing urbanization only exacerbates the problem.

Additional anti-democratic flaws, specific to each office, rest on this anti-democratic foundation of voting exclusively by place. The Senate gives equal power to every state, regardless of population. The House allows gerrymandering. And the Electoral College incorporates part of the Senate’s small-state advantage and an even worse set of rules for when no candidate wins a majority in the College. The Electoral College also manufactures the phenomenon of the presidential swing state, which among its other pernicious effects, enables a few well-placed bad actors to change the result of the election.

The bias in the system also shifts both major parties rightward, so that the outcome of our elections—the simple number of seats each party receives in each house of Congress and how often one party or the other takes the presidency—doesn’t capture the fullness of the disaster. Fully 61% of states (31 of 50) and 52% of districts (226 of 425) (fivethirtyeight) are more Republican-leaning than the US as a whole. As a result, the Democrats can’t win without winning in red-leaning places, while the Republicans can win by appealing to their base.

That's why this sort of thing pops up all the time:

THREE: To Start Winning We Need to Remove the Bias

This right-wing bias is baked into the constitutional structure of our election system, and there’s no way to overcome it without changing the constitutional structure to remove it. But without removing the bias, there’s no way to make sustained progress on the pressing issues of our time.

Red Herrings

It follows that any step we might take that isn’t calculated to remove the bias isn’t good enough. Here’s a non-exclusive list of steps like that, with a few reasons why they can’t solve the problem. They range from the mundane to the radical, from the already-doing-thats to the never-gonna-happens, from familiar campaign tactics to respangling our banner with more than fifty stars. Some of them deserve more discussion, which I plan for later emails. What they have in common is that they won’t remove the bias from our election system, and so they can’t halt our downward spiral.

Step	Why It Can’t Solve the Problem
	doesn’t address the key structural bias	aims to address the structural bias but only partially	blocked by the structural bias itself
Voter registration drives	x
Better candidates/messaging	x
Get out the vote	x
End voter suppression	x		x
More focus on state legislative races	x
Develop better future judges	x
Independent redistricting committees		x	x
Money out of campaigns	x		x
National election administration	x		x
Ranked Choice or Approval Voting	x
End the filibuster	x		x (so far)
National popular vote compact		x	x
Fair Representation Act		x	x
Third (or multiple) parties	x
Create new states	x		x
Add justices to SCOTUS	x		x
Strip judicial jurisdiction		x	x
Term-limit justices	x		x

Proportional Representation & Popular Election

To remove the bias, we need to change the Constitution in two rather simple ways: We need proportional representation in both houses of Congress, and we need popular election of the president. Proportional representation means that the percentage of the vote that a party or its candidates receives in legislative elections determines the percentage of seats that that party will hold in the legislature. It comes in many well-established varieties.

Proportional representation is the norm for modern democracies. It prevails, for example, in all seven of the nations that scored a 9 out of 10 or better in the Economist’s most recent Democracy Index, and most of the rest of their so-called “full” democracies, too.

Popular election is likewise the norm for presidents in modern presidential democracies. The Electoral College is, in fact, uniquely awful among ostensibly self-governing nations.

Our system is obsolete, and it’s hard to change. But we have to change it anyway.

Therefore, coming to you soon:

FOUR: There’s a Way to Remove the Bias

Thanks for reading. Keep up the good fight. Peace & Love.

Best,

David