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TThe good news is that Donald Trump appears to be on the verge of being ousted from the White House. The bad news is that Trump was not a unique and aberrant threat to American democracy; It has already been broken so deeply and in so many ways that no single choice can repair the damage.
Even with a Biden administration, worsening structural inequalities rooted in the nation for centuries, and cynically exploited by Republicans to rule with limited minority support, will continue to be with us. They are embodied in institutions like the electoral college, which elected Trump in 2016 despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.
In fact, including Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. But partly because of the electoral college’s rural bias (a vote cast for president in Wyoming counts nearly four times as much as a vote cast in California), and partly because the college increases the importance of a handful of largely battlefields. Midwest whites. states, Republicans have won the White House with fewer votes twice since 2000.
Equity of representation is even more dire in the US Senate, which gives disproportionate power to older, whiter, more rural, and more conservative interests. Right now, states that make up just 17% of the nation’s population could elect a majority of senators. By 2040, the 15 most populous states will be home to 67% of Americans, but represented by only 30% of the Senate. Add up the actual votes received in the winning election from all sitting US senators, and Republicans have not won a majority in the Senate since the mid-1990s. Yet they have controlled the Senate for 10 of the last 20 years. and they used that advantage to shape the ideological balance in the federal courts.
Taking advantage of the design flaws of American democracy, the Republicans gained an advantage. State legislatures and courts helped keep it up. After Barack Obama and the Democrats swept the election in 2008, Republicans identified another tactic that could be exploited as a path back to power: redistricting.
Each state legislature and congressional district is redrawn every 10 years after the census to account for population changes. In almost every state, state legislatures draw these lines. As part of a $ 30 million Republican strategy called Redmap, Republicans identified 107 key state legislative seats in 16 states that would give them complete control of the process in the largest swing states: Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. They won, and then sophisticated maps were drawn on which they haven’t lost since: More than 50 million Americans live in a state where one or both houses of its state legislature are controlled by Republicans even though Democrats got more. votes in 2018. And in the 2012 election, the first on these tilted maps, Republicans held onto the House of Representatives despite losing the overall vote to Democrats by 1.4 million.
In 2013, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision struck down the “prior authorization” protections of the Voting Rights Act, designed to verify localities with a history of racial bias in election laws. Chief Justice John Roberts argued that those voting protections were in response to “stalemate practices.” “Today the nation is no longer divided in that sense,” he argued, “however, the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.”
This magically changed and racially harmonious nation then embarked on an orgy of voter suppression, largely aimed at disenfranchising Black and Latino voters.
German-controlled legislatures led the way. State Republicans tampered with the rules and took power. Twenty-five states enacted restrictive voter identification (ID) bills or more stringent measures that are already in effect. Texas required ID that the state knew was missing 600,000 registered Latino voters. The North Carolina legislature studied the exact forms of identification that black voters were least likely to have, and then required them. Alabama began enforcing a strict identification law; Then, in 2015, it closed almost every office in majority black counties where people could get those IDs. And Wisconsin’s new law may have prevented 300,000 people from voting, according to a federal court, in a state that Trump won by a margin of less than 25,000 in 2016.
Between 2014 and 2018, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 32 million Americans were removed from state voter rolls, disproportionately minority voters, for the flimsiest of reasons. Thousands of electoral districts were also closed, mainly in the south. Again, this disproportionately affected black voters.
In some cases, citizens have organized heroic efforts to undo racist voter repression and gerrymandering, only to see their own courts and legislatures overturn them. In Florida, a referendum to restore the voting rights of 1.4 million previously incarcerated citizens, people who lost the franchise permanently with a conviction, a cruel holdover from Jim Crow South that is still with us 150 years after the Civil War, won in 2018 with almost 65% of the votes. In response, Florida’s rigged legislature passed a law requiring that all fines and fees associated with the conviction be paid first. It was essentially a modern poll tax, and the courts accepted it.
During this election, a record number of Americans voted early, by mail, or braved hour-long lines in the midst of a pandemic to vote. Here, too, they had to fight their own government and courts, which worked together to slow down mailings and enforce rigid deadlines for when ballots must arrive to be counted.
Trump is responsible for only a small part of this. American democracy will survive only if your party decides to move away from these repressive tactics and compete for every vote in a multiracial America. Perhaps this defeat will encourage him. Or maybe Republicans will learn the same lesson they learned from their 2008 beating and bow, knowing they will be backed by courts full of true ideological believers.
Trump may have lost, but the governor of Texas, who limited the polls to one per county, is going nowhere. Neither are his colleagues in Congress, who refused to fully fund the postal service amid the expansion of pandemic mail-in voting. And what about the Wisconsin state legislators who forced voters to go to the polls in person this spring during the coronavirus? Or the Republican officials who refused to start processing millions of mail ballots early, allowing Trump to try to paint mail ballots as fraudulent?
These last few months have exposed the fragility of a system that is based on rules and the responsible behavior of its leaders. These railings are richer than we imagine.
Democracy reform must be job one for the Biden administration and its allies in Congress, if it is to win the presidency. There is a strong bill, the For The People Act, ready and waiting. However, it would be naive to imagine that many of those reforms would be allowed by this supreme court, which means that court reform must go hand in hand with our efforts to fix democracy.
The rot is deep. A country that claims to be the largest democracy in the world has a lot of work to do.
