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Democrats won the popular vote again in this year’s presidential election, marking seven of the eight consecutive presidential elections in which the party has reached that milestone.
And, for some Democrats, that is concerning.
President-elect Joe Biden has won 50.8% of the vote so far compared to the 47.4% who voted for President Donald Trump, a 5 million-vote lead that is likely to grow as Democratic strongholds like California and New York continue to count the ballots. Biden’s 77.5 million votes to date is the most for any winning candidate, and Trump’s 72.3 million also set a high mark for a losing candidate.
Experts predict that Biden’s margin of victory will exceed the 4 percentage point advantage in the popular vote of former President Barack Obama in 2012. Only Obama’s landslide victory in 2008, with a 7 percentage point margin in the popular vote, was higher in recent elections.
But what alarms many Democrats is a widening gap between the popular vote count and their political power. Democrats may be winning more supporters, but as long as those votes are pooled on the shores or in cities and suburbs, they won’t deliver the victories in Congress the party needs to enact its policies.
That power gap is especially clear this year. As Biden racked up those historic margins, Democrats lost at least eight seats in the House of Representatives and failed to win a single state chamber; in fact, they lost control of the New Hampshire legislature. They also failed to regain control of the US Senate, and their hopes now rest on winning two runoff elections in Georgia that are seen as an uphill climb for the party.
“There is a massive structural challenge for most Americans who have political power in the short term,” said Rebecca Katz, a liberal Democratic strategist. “It’s a problem.”
Whether it is a problem, or a necessary control of power, is a matter of debate. The founders created an American system of government based partially on geography. Wyoming, with a population of 500,000, has as many senators as California, home to 39 million people. House seats are awarded based on population, but districts can be drawn to dilute the impact of voter types. The presidency is won by accumulating a majority of electors assigned to the states.
“Power is not assigned by popular vote,” said Simon Rosenberg, a veteran Democratic strategist. “What we have to improve on is not just winning more votes, but winning in more parts of every state and in more states.”
The disparity has only grown as the country becomes more polarized. When George W. Bush won the White House in 2000 through an Electoral College victory despite losing the popular vote, it was seen as a fluke.
Bush won reelection in 2004 with 50.7% of the national vote. But Democrats have won every presidential election since, including in 2016, when Democrat Hillary Clinton won an additional 2.9 million votes, but lost the White House to Trump because she narrowly missed critical critical states and did not win a majority. of voters.
The polarization of the Trump era has accelerated the divide. Trump has done well with white voters, specifically white voters who have not graduated from a four-year college, a group that is fairly evenly distributed across all 50 states. Meanwhile, Democrats have gained ground with college graduates, who are more likely to cluster in cities and in states like Massachusetts and Colorado.
Another stronghold of the Democratic coalition, black, Latino and other racial minority voters are also clustered in cities and certain states, and are less represented in a wide swath of rural states that help give Republicans their geographic advantage.
The 2018 midterm results were especially clear: Democrats lost ground in the Senate even as they won 41 seats to gain control of the House of Representatives.
It’s easy to see how the dynamics unfold in your campaigns. Trump repeatedly criticized Democratic states like California and New York and Democratic-controlled cities during his presidency and re-election campaign. Biden, who could not win simply by appealing to places where his party was strong, argued that the country needed to unify and stop fighting.
The growing gap between the majority and those actually in power worries even those who benefit from it.
“Republicans can be simplistic about this because it’s working for them, but I don’t think it’s a good long-term solution,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist based in Washington, DC. “For the long-term health of the party and the country, one has to hope that it is not just being won with a waning rump.”
Still, the strong performance of Republicans in state legislatures makes it likely that they can secure profits during the next gerrymandering that will take place once a decade, by drawing boundaries for congressional and state legislature districts that group the voters in districts that favor the Republican Party. The party’s landslide victory in 2010 during Obama’s first half term helped them do just that over the past decade.
“They will be able to cement this for a new decade,” Donovan said. “They are discovering new ways to consolidate power with the minority of the electorate.”
