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What the pundits aren't taking into account - there was a wave and it was blue [1]

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Date: 2022-11-11

Just a reminder — the playing field is NOT level when it comes to elections. The historic result in the midterms for Democrats this time around is even more impressive if the structural bias against Democrats is taken into account.

Thanks to Supreme Court rulings that have gutted the Voting Rights Act and extreme gerrymandering in Red States via Project REDMAP, what were called close races were races where Democrats were outperforming Republicans enough to overcome the difference. That’s because too many states have drawn up state legislative districts and congressional districts that systematically suppress the Blue vote. To get the results we did took huge turnout to close the gap. (And yes, it looks like Dobbs was one of the big factors in that.)

States that have gone to non-partisan redistricting, like Michigan and Minnesota, have seen a swing blue in their legislatures. Governor races also saw Democrats do well, at least in states that haven’t effectively suppressed Blue votes across the state. We’re looking at you, Florida, with your election ‘police’ and other shenanigans.

And shall we talk about Wisconsin? Charles P. Pierce has the lowdown, and is it low!

..On Tuesday, the Democratic Party got 51 percent of the vote statewide. This got the Democrats…30 percent of the seats in the state legislature. Any reasonable definition of “a Republican Form of Government” cannot possibly include this kind of result. It is completely and utterly a product of grotesque partisan gerrymandering sanctioned by the Supreme Court in its disgraceful decision Rucho v. Common Cause three years ago. The die was cast on this atrocity last April, when the state supreme court ruled that this year’s elections would be contested on the ludicrous maps produced by the state legislature, itself the product of past gerrymanders. The U.S. Supreme Court was a critical accessory after the fact. From Wisconsin Public Radio: It was a reversal for Hagedorn, who joined the court's liberals in early March to choose a legislative map drawn by Gov. Tony Evers. But after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Hagedorn's ruling based on the way it applied the federal Voting Rights Act to draw Black-majority districts in Milwaukee, it sent the case back to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to consider all over again.

It’s not just the state level where this is a factor. House races have been skewed by gerrymandering to give Republicans safe districts at the expense of Democratic voters. It’s one big reason the party has gone so hard-right extreme. In closed primaries, the candidates who draw the hard-right primary voting base beat out the more moderate candidates, and the survivors can pretty much cruise to election at that point — but maybe not so much lately? We can hope.

As for the Senate, it has never been representative of democracy, and it’s only gotten worse since the founding of the country. Every state gets two Senators, regardless of population, so North Dakota has as many Senate votes as California despite the huge disparity in how many people those Senators respectively represent.

And let’s not even talk about how anti-democratic the Electoral College has become (and always was.) Ross Douthat was arguing the other day that Republicans have a true populist ‘majority’ that could ‘win’ the Electoral College.

That theory, basically, is that there’s a decisive right-of-center majority there for the taking in American politics, an opportunity magnified by the Biden administration’s unpopularity. It’s a majority that Donald Trump pushed the party toward, by picking up working-class white voters in 2016 and then Hispanic voters in 2020 — proving that the G.O.P. coalition could be more blue collar and multiracial than its Romney-Ryan iteration and better optimized for Electoral College success.

emphasis added

There you go again Ross — that “America is Center-Right” myth. Whether or not it’s true, the Republican Party is so far from the center these days they couldn’t see it with a telescope.

So, if the media was expecting a red wave, they had some reason to — even if they never seem to consciously take into account or mention the factors that tilt the playing field Red. Republican control of Congress is de facto minority rule as matters stand, and we’ve had two recent Republican presidents who lost the popular vote but squeaked in through the Electoral College.

If there is one thing the Lame Duck Congress should make a high priority, it’s passing real voting reform to put the kibosh on the extreme gerrymandering and other voting atrocities the GOP is counting on to establish permanent Republican Rule. They will continue to lie and cheat to ‘win’ because winning is their only purpose.

The Electoral College should be scrapped as well. Given the GOP Presidents it saddled us with, Bush the lesser and the Former Guy, it’s a dangerous anachronism. The GOP effort to create fake electors last time around should be a wake up call, because they’re not going to give up their attempts to game the E.C.

Approving as many Democratic judicial nominees as possible should also be a priority. They’ll be needed to defend voting reforms against the well-funded assaults that will be inevitable. Demonstrating to women voters that they made the right choice would also be a smart move going forward.

Will it happen? With control of Congress still unsettled it remains to be seen how Democrats will respond to the window of opportunity they have left — especially while Republicans are in disarray.

But wait — there’s more

Speaking of structural problems with how the Federal government is set up, there’s one trend that is only going to get worse and is already an issue.

Consider this.

The population of Los Angeles County alone is greater than the population of 40 out of the 50 states. There have been suggestions Democrats should pursue statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Perhaps it is time to give cities above some population threshold their own Senator as well, leaving the rest of their states to their current two senators. Realigning House districts to accommodate the change might also make sense if this happens.

There would be fights over city boundaries and what the threshold should be, but modern cities are far beyond anything envisioned in the Constitution. By 2050, it is projected 89% of the U.S. population will be living in urban areas. It makes no sense for a decreasing fraction of the population in rural areas to wield so much structural power at the expense of the vast majority.

For the people out in the hinterlands, they’d have the benefit of Senators whose attention wouldn’t be monopolized by large urban centers in their states. It would be tricky where cities spread over state boundaries, and also contentious for states that wouldn’t have cities large enough to qualify — but it would be far more equitable if it could be worked out. It could potentially simplify how cities get their share of Federal dollars.

Republicans have effectively declared war on cities, claiming they are violence-filled dens of crime, drugs, and any other evil they can toss into the mix. Worst of all — they’re filled with Democrats! There is no place in MAGA mythology for healthy, vibrant urban life, its diversity, its urgency. They have no money for urban health needs, housing, transit, or any of the many things that cities need to function — heck they don’t even have it for the rural suckers who are their base.

This is the direction America is headed regardless. We just might want to take that into account as we try to move forward — those of us who actually want to move forward. How it would be accomplished would be… complicated…. but it would certainly be useful to throw into the mix if right wing desires to call an new constitutional convention start to go forward.

It’s something that Climate Change is going to impact as well. Superstorm Sandy demonstrated that dealing with climate events and long term resiliency efforts are going to be critical for urban areas. It’s time to think about how to make government more responsive to those needs.

Thoughts?

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