Tag Archives: rural voters

That Electoral College

There’s been no lack of political commentary as the Presidential campaign has heated up, much of it thoughtful (and lots of it not), but I was struck with a point made in the Bulwark–a point about the systemic, structural issues that so often muffle or stymie the electoral voice of We the People.

In a commentary on the competing theories of the two campaigns, Jonathan Van Last noted that

Trump is running to get to 47 percent. Harris is running to get to 52 percent.

But there’s something deeper going on here.

The reason Trump is aiming for 47 percent is because the Electoral College makes minority rule possible for the rural party. Which incentivizes the rural party to be insular and to focus on energizing—not expanding—its coalition.

By disadvantaging the urban party, the Electoral College incentivizes it to broaden its coalition. Which means that the Democratic party of this moment must be constantly seeking to expand its reach and bring in new constituencies if it is to have a chance at holding executive power.

In other words: The Electoral College distorts the character of our parties, nudging one of them to be a majority-seeking organism and the other to be a base-pleasing organism. The character of our two parties today flows from the system architecture used to allocate power.

Which explains why Trump’s campaign is focused on maneuvering to win the Electoral College, not on trying to build a national majority. Trump doesn’t think he needs to expand his base, despite the fact that it is a minority of American voters. He just needs to energize them. America’s systemic “allocation of power” protects government by the minority. That’s what allowed Donald J. Trump to “win” the Presidency while losing the popular vote by some three million votes.

The Electoral College substantially advantages white rural voters. Research suggests that every rural vote is worth one and a third of every urban vote. Small states already exert disproportionate power by virtue of the fact that every state–no matter how thinly or densely populated–has two Senators. This system adds to that undemocratic advantage.

Trump likes to claim that our elections are rigged. They are–but thanks to the Electoral College and “winner take all” state election laws–they’re rigged in ways that unfairly benefit him. As legal scholars have reminded us, no other advanced democracy in the world uses anything like the Electoral College. 

It isn’t just the existence of the College–there’s also the way states implement it.

If we fall short in the current effort to neuter the Electoral College with the Popular Vote Compact, we should mount a national effort to address a less-understood aspect of it’s unfairness: statewide winner-take-all laws. Under these laws (which states adopted to gain political advantage in the nation’s early years, even though it was never suggested by the Founders) most states award all their electors to the candidate with the most popular votes in their state.

That erases all the voters in that state who didn’t vote for the winning candidate. Even if only 50.1% of voters in a state vote for candidate A, the 49.9% of voters who opted for candidate B are unrepresented–all of that state’s Electoral College votes will be cast for candidate A.

It would be far fairer to award Electoral votes proportionally. If 60% of the votes are cast for candidate A, candidate A should get 60% of the state’s electoral votes–not 100%. People in the political minority in a state would suddenly have an incentive to vote–an incentive that doesn’t exist now. Today, absent a “wave” election, a presidential vote by a Democrat in Indiana or a Republican in California simply doesn’t count.

Think about it.

Today, 48 states use winner-take-all. That’s why most are considered comfortably safe for one party or the other.  That “safety” leads to the current disenfranchisement of voters in states like Indiana. The only states that matter to either party in a national election are the so-called “battleground” states — especially bigger ones like Pennsylvania, where a swing of a few thousand or even a few hundred votes can shift the entire pot of electors from one candidate to the other. We saw this in 2016, where Trump’s incredibly thin wins in three states (just under 80,000 votes in total over the three states) gave him the White House.

If newly hopeful Democrats can produce a “wave election” in 2024–if they can manage a trifecta at the national level–this systemic unfairness can be changed. The John Lewis Act can be passed. Gerrymandering can be outlawed. Winner-take-all laws can be addressed.

If enough of us vote Blue, we can restore small-d democratic accountability.

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Shaking Up Indiana

Among the many negative consequences of Republican gerrymandering in Indiana is one that is rarely considered: it has  isolated and largely disenfranchised Southern Indiana’s rural voters. I will readily admit that I hadn’t considered that effect; instead, I’ve been focused on the way urban districts have been carved up and wedded to surrounding suburban and rural areas in order to disenfranchise urban voters.

I’ve now been educated.

A regular reader of this blog sent me a press release about an effort called the Indiana Rural Summit, described as a “Nine-Candidate Supergroup Shaking up Southern Indiana Politics for the Better.”

These nine Democratic candidates for the Indiana House have banded together and are taking their demands for legislation  benefiting rural voters on the road.  The candidates are kicking off a six-stop “event tour” at Jasper’s Strassenfest.

As the release explains:

The Indiana Rural Summit, nine Democratic State House candidates from districts that
represent 24% of Indiana across 22 counties, are rallying around a unified message of hope for
Hoosiers: Rural communities and small towns can have better healthcare, schools, and jobs.
Turning disempowering gerrymandered districts into a secret superpower, they are uniting to
spread this hopeful message to thousands of rural voters, too often left without a choice on the
ballot for state representative due to unopposed races.

“We care about local issues, and our concerns are deeply rooted in our love of family,
community, and the beauty of our region,” says Ryan Still, Monroe County Rural Engagement
Deputy Director and organizer for the Indiana Rural Summit. “The continued policies of
extraction and exploitation from our legislature has left us behind and silenced. Our current state
representatives prioritize corporate lobbyists and outside influencers over Hoosiers. We want
legislators who understand our concerns and refuse to sell us out. We want a state that works
for all of us, not just the wealthy few. We all want to live in communities that thrive.”

The Strassenfest is an annual  parade in the town of Jasper, and the Rural Summit candidates will be joined by Gubernatorial candidate Jennifer McCormick and Attorney General candidate Destiny Wells. (The release also promises a performance by “German band Hungry5.”)

“Most of our districts are rural or artificially rural due to gerrymandering, keeping rural voters
isolated, unheard, and desperately misunderstood. Rarely are these voters asked about their
vision for Indiana by those elected to represent them,” explains Michelle Higgs, Indiana Rural
Summit member running for HD 60. (Monroe/Morgan/Johnson Counties). “Rural voters need a
seat at the table.”

The Indiana Rural Summit is using the very cause that isolates communities to unite and give
rural voters both a voice and an option. Unifying gerrymandered districts that share county
overlap, these nine candidates are turning gerrymandering into a regional coalition fighting for
regional solutions to improve rural Hoosiers’ quality of life. These solutions include better access
to comprehensive healthcare, to jobs with livable wages and benefits, to safe and
affordable housing, and to quality public education.

The effort being mounted by the candidates in the Rural Summit is significant for several reasons. It is certainly a welcome sign of life for rural Democrats, but its importance extends far beyond partisan concerns. Participants in the Rural Summit are making a profoundly important point: gerrymandering deprives all citizens–not just urban residents– of adequate representation.

I have previously noted that gerrymandering is by far the most effective form of voter suppression. In districts drawn to be “safe” for one party or another, voters who prefer the “loser” party disproportionately fail to cast their ballots, assuming their votes won’t matter. (Ironically, if all those discouraged folks actually did cast ballots, some of those districts wouldn’t be safe.)

The Rural Summit candidates are focusing on another consequence of those gerrymandered “safe” districts– the people elected from them have no incentive to actually represent their constituents. They assume they will be elected (or re-elected) in any event. Instead, their incentives are to do the bidding of the party bosses–the political figures who hand out plum committee assignments and direct the distribution of campaign dollars received from the special interests that wield enormous influence at Indiana’s statehouse.

As the press release reminds us, Indiana has the lowest voter turnout in the nation. It also has a large slate of unopposed races– currently, 26 House seats are uncontested.

These two facts are connected: The Indiana General Assembly creates voter suppression and
apathy through gerrymandering and blocking ballot initiatives, so they can pass embarrassingly
bad legislation.

The Indiana Rural Summit wants to empower disheartened voters across 22 counties and get them to the polls. Their success would benefit all Hoosiers currently disenfranchised by our legislative overlords.

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Speaking of White Privilege….

In the wake of the election, there has been a renewed call to get rid of the Electoral College–or at least modify its operation via the National Popular Vote Project to require electors to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote.

The Electoral College was originally a concession to the slave states, allowing them to “count” their slaves (albeit at a discount). Today, it has all sorts of pernicious and undemocratic effects. Not long ago, Jamin Raskin, who teaches Constitutional law at George Washington University, summed up a number of those effects in a post to the American Constitution Society’s blog. Raskin noted that,

in the absence of the Electoral College, it would no longer make strategic sense to “turn off the lights and fly over 40 states – from California to New York, Texas to Vermont, Georgia to Mississippi, Hawaii to Alaska, South Dakota to Montana, and so on.” And he disputed the argument that the rest of the electorate “should be content to be long-distance spectators because the voters of Virginia or Arizona or Florida are just like us and are effectively acting as proxies for our interests and our values.”

This was precisely the argument that was rejected in the American Revolution.

The British tried to convince the American colonists that they didn’t need their own elections and representatives in Parliament because they were “virtually represented” by members back home representing Englishmen of similar views. The colonists rebelled against this insulting doctrine of “virtual representation,” which they treated as an assault on political liberty and authentic democracy rooted in the politics of place. Roughly 140 years later, we similarly rejected claims that women didn’t need the vote because they were adequately represented by men.

Every citizen’s vote should count equally in presidential elections, as in elections for governor or mayor. But the current regime makes votes in swing states hugely valuable while rendering votes in non-competitive states virtually meaningless. This weird lottery, as we have seen, dramatically increases incentives for strategic partisan mischief and electoral corruption in states like Florida and Ohio. You can swing a whole election by suppressing, deterring, rejecting and disqualifying just a few thousand votes.

My own biggest “gripe” is, as I have previously written, the extra weight the system gives to votes from rural areas. In effect, urban votes count less and rural preferences count more–an anti-democratic result. But an analysis by Vox has confirmed that it isn’t only voters from more thinly populated areas who are privileged by the system. The Electoral College also privileges the votes of white Americans.

The probability of one person’s vote being decisive, we found, ranged from roughly one in a million for a resident of New Hampshire — a swing state with a relatively small population — to less than one in one billion in states that are reliably “red” or “blue,” such as New York, California, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

We can use a similar approach to show how the Electoral College increases not just the weight of voters in swing states but the weight of voters of certain ethnicities — based on their distribution across the states. We find that, based on the current distribution of voters of different ethnicities across states, and particularly within swing states, the Electoral College amplifies the power of white voters by a substantial amount….

After running the numbers, we estimate that, per voter, whites have 16 percent more power than blacks once the Electoral College is taken into consideration, 28 percent more power than Latinos, and 57 percent more power than those who fall into the other category.

I’m sure that analysis warms the cockles of Bill O’Reilly’s heart. (I assume he does have one. Somewhere.) It doesn’t do much for mine.

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