The trend in the American electorate is more accurately demonstrated by the results of the elections for the House of Representatives. There, the Democrats, needing to pick up 23 seats to be the majority party, are projected as of the time of the writing of this to win as many as 35 seats.
The Founding Fathers, fearing mob rule, built safe-guards into the Constitution, insulating the Government from the popular vote. Thus, the President is not directly elected by the people. Instead, the people vote for Electors, who make up the Electoral College and who in turn choose the next President. The number of Electors each state has is the sum of the number of the state’s representatives in the House and the number of the State’s senators. This results in disproportionate power being given to the voters in states with smaller populations, such as Montana and Utah, than to those in states with large populations, such as California and New York.
Likewise, each state has two senators, regardless of whether the state has a population of 700,000 or 7 million.
Even if a policy or presidential candidate lacks the support of the most voters nationwide, the structure of the US Constitution means that that policy or candidate can still win the day.
Indeed, in the history of the United States, there have been five times when the candidate winning the popular vote nonetheless lost the presidency. The two most recent times occurred in 2000 and 2016 when the Republican candidate lost the popular vote but won a majority in the Electoral College.
It should come as no coincidence that these two most recent examples involve Republican presidents. The fact is that the Republicans have seen their core supporters diminish for quite some time now. In fact, Republican Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by almost 3 million. The reason Democrat Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College vote was due to the fact that her voters were concentrated in highly populated states where the individual vote has less power.
Take the 2012 federal elections as an example. That year, the only group that gave Republican Mitt Romney a majority was white males. This caused a lot of soul-searching within the Republican Party, with many Republican leaders seeing a dire need to expand the appeal of the party to other demographic groups. As one effort to attract new voters, Republicans even initially supported a liberal version of immigration reform, which passed the Senate but died when Tea Party members in the House branded the bill as amnesty. Fearful of the new-found power of the Tea Party, House Republican leaders backed away their support of immigration reform.
The rise of the Tea Party itself serves as an example of how a group took advantage of political structures meant to counter the popular vote to gain power. When Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 1994, after over forty years of Democratic majorities in that body, the party concentrated on protecting its power. Republicans, led by Tom DeLay, focused on state legislature races, the state legislatures being the bodies that created congressional district maps. In a process known as gerrymandering, state legislatures controlled by Republicans drew maps that purposefully created a large number of districts where the population favored the Republicans. That is, the legislatures created safe Republican districts. While gerrymandering has been a part of American politics since the republic was formed, it had never been accomplished on so grand a scale before. The unintended consequences of this round of gerrymandering was that Republican House members now found stronger competition from more conservative candidates in the primaries than from challengers in the general election. Thus, the conservative Tea Party found themselves with power disproportionate to their actual size in the general population. Tea Party members strongly influenced the direction of the Republican Party.
While Republicans count on white makes for their support, the trend in the United States has been for white males to make up less and less of the general population. In order for Republicans to maintain popular support, Republicans needed to appeal to other demographic groups.
However, Republicans have chosen not to broaden its appeal, but instead to attempt to counter the trend of the growing number of non-white voters. This can most easily be seen in the party’s immigration policy. While Republicans have opposed the ability of undocumented aliens to enter the country, they have also pursued policies to stem legal immigration. The Trump Administration, for example, has imposed harsher requirements on immigrants with at least a college education to qualify for a visa through the H-1B program. The Administration also seeks to impose restrictions on asylum-seekers, and wants to change the law to limit family-based immigration. If successful, the result of such policy positions will be to reduce the growth in non-whites within the US population.
Applying these trends to the 2018 elections, Republicans picked up Senate seats in states such as North Dakota, Missouri, Florida and Indiana. These were all states that voted for Trump in 2016. Republican wins should therefore not be surprising. Indeed, of the 35 seats up for election in 2018, 26 were Democratically held. That meant going into the election, the Democrats not only had to defend all of their seats, but also pick up three of the remaining nine seats. The task of making gains in the Senate was much more difficult for Democrats.
Gains in the House, however, are much more reflective of trends in the US population. Despite Trump’s claim to economic success, issues such as health care, the protection of women from sexual assault, harsh immigration enforcement, Russian interference in the 2016 election and the rise of racial bigotry all played a role in the Democratic victories. Indeed, the Democrats made these gains despite the aforementioned disadvantage of Republican gerrymandering. Clinging to gains in the Senate, which themselves will have no effect of the balance of power in Congress due to the fact that the Republicans already had a majority in the Senate, will do little, if anything, to enhance the long-term prospects of the Republicans.
By contrast, a Democratically controlled House will not only thwart Trump’s agenda, but will give support to the continued investigation into Russian electoral interference headed by Robert Mueller. In sum, the results of the 2017 mid-term elections were a clear disaster for Trump and the Republican Party, and far more reflective of the hurdles Republicans face in future elections.
By: William J. Kovatch, Jr.
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