The Democrats won 50.6% of the votes for president, to 47.8% for the
Republicans; 53.6% of the votes for the Senate, to 42.9% for the
Republicans; and…49% of the votes for the House, to 48.2% for the
Republicans (some ballots are still being counted). That’s not a vote
for divided government. It’s a clean sweep.
The House of
Representatives is supposed to be the arm of government that most
closely reflects the popular will. Its members are allocated by
population, serve brief two-year terms and represent small districts,
giving every citizen a local representative who will advocate directly
for their interests. In the (probably apocryphal) formulation of George Washington,
the House is supposed to channel the people’s passions like hot tea,
which is subsequently served up to the contemplative Senate for cooling.
For
most of modern political history, the chamber has fulfilled this duty
admirably. When one party won a big lead in the popular vote—as the
Democrats did often from 1954-92—it exaggerated their advantage, helping
the voters’ preferred party enact its agenda. Following the Watergate
scandal, Democrats won 59% of House votes in 1974 and 57% in 1976; they
were rewarded with 67% of the chamber in both years. In contrast, when
the vote has been closely split, the House has generally reflected a
divided electorate: from 1998 to 2004, the Republicans’ share of
representatives (51%, 51%, 53% and 53%) closely matched their percentage
of the vote (51%, 50%, 52% and 51%).
However, in the first vote following the decennial redistricting process in 2010—when Republicans took advantage of their strong performances in state legislative elections to set a new standard for gerrymandering—the
House has completely abandoned the popular will. Not only is the wrong
party in control, but it reigns with a sizable majority: despite
receiving just 49.6% of the two-party vote, the Republicans have 54% of
the seats. The GOP will have a bigger share of the House in the next
Congress than it did following Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With
America”-fueled Republican Revolution of 1994, when it won 53.5% of the two-party vote and 53% of the seats.
It
is not the first time that a party has won a majority of seats in the
House despite receiving fewer votes than its rival. Mr Gingrich’s team
won re-election and a 26-seat majority in 1996, on 47.8% of the vote to
48.1% for the Democrats. In 1942 Sam Rayburn managed to attain a 13-seat
majority for the Democrats in the mid-terms, even though his party won
46% of the vote to the Republicans' 51% (small wonder that Rayburn holds
the record as the longest-serving speaker). But rarely does it produce
such a skewed result as we've seen in the House this year.
It’s
also not fair to attribute the current democratic (with both a lower-
and upper-case “D”) deficit entirely to gerrymandering. As Glenn
Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact-checker, notes,
the fact that Democrats tend to live in cities causes them to be
concentrated in fewer Congressional districts. This means they would
probably be under-represented even in the absence of a partisan effort
to weaken them. He cites a report
showing that the GOP secured 11 seats during the 2010
redistricting—meaning that the Democrats would still be a minority in
the House even if the pre-2010 map were still in effect.
But it is
a problem for the country that the House has ceased to reflect the
immediate popular will. The current crop of Congressional Republicans
have proved themselves willing to go to unprecedented
lengths—principally putting the Treasury at risk of default—in order to
implement their policy agenda, despite holding only one of the three
elected arms of the federal government. With the fiscal cliff looming,
perhaps the biggest changes in decades to the role of government in the
economy will be negotiated by a party that was rejected at the polls.
For
at least the next two years, America will remain stuck with a gravely
unrepresentative House of Representatives. Since Mr Obama will need the
Republicans’ assent to prevent the economy from tipping back into
recession, he probably cannot afford to antagonise them by publicly
questioning the legitimacy of their majority in the lower chamber. The
simplest way to restore the House’s democratic credibility would be a
constitutional amendment adopting proportional representation.
But that is both unrealistic and undesirable, since it would sever the
link between individual members of Congress and their constituents that
gives the House its vitality.
Barring such a drastic measure, it
is up to the states to change their districting procedures one by one.
Fixing the system would require solving an enormous collective-action
problem. If states controlled by Democrats decide to appoint independent
committees to draw boundaries but those run by Republicans do not, the
GOP’s structural advantage in the House would only grow. (This is the
same obstacle that supporters of a national popular vote for the
presidency are trying to surmount.)
The only viable method for
Democrats to reinstate the House’s democratic integrity is to win a
healthy majority of state governments in 2020, threaten to gerrymander
to their own advantage, and then use that leverage to extract a deal
from state Republican parties for a non-partisan districting process.
The Democrats have shown they have the support of a majority of voters
across the country. But all politics is local, and they will have to do as well in the states as they do nationwide in order to get their just deserts in Congress.
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