Alternet
The Challenges to Creating a
New Democratic Majority
By
Steven Hill
September 25, 2003 In their recently acclaimed book,
The Emerging Democratic Majority, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira make
the case that long-term demographic trends favor the Democratic
Party. Given the electoral letdown suffered by the Democratic Party
in the 2002 and 2000 elections, and also throughout the 1990s as the
Democrats lost control of the Congress and the presidency, Judis and
Teixeira's themes have offered a ray of hope in a dismal political
landscape. But a stable Democratic majority in the Congress or the
Presidency is not likely to emerge anytime soon, and here's why:
Because even if Judis and Teixeira are correct that the demographics
are shifting toward the Democratic side, structurally our 18th
century winner-take-all political system will continue to favor
conservatives and the Republican Party. Unless confronted by
reformers, that structural bias trumps the shifting demographics.
Electoral battles for the House, the Senate and the presidency are
fought out district by district and state by state in
winner-take-all contests not on a national basis. So the national
polls on which Judis and Teixeira rely for their analysis are less
and less meaningful. The problem is where Democrats and Republicans
live. Democrats tend to live heavily concentrated in the Blue
America urban areas, with Republicans more evenly dispersed in the
Red America rural areas as well as suburban areas. The fact is, when
the national vote is tied, Republicans still win a healthy majority
of Congressional seats. Indeed in 2000, even as Al Gore beat George
Bush by a half-million votes, and the combined center-left
Gore-Nader vote had an even bigger lead, Bush beat Gore in 227 out
of 435 U.S. House districts and in 30 out of 50 states. New U.S.
House districts are even more lopsided, with Bush's advantage now
rising to 237 to 198. It's no coincidence that Republicans currently
hold 229 U.S. House seats. An issue like gun control is a great
example. National polls have shown for some time that, nationally,
the public wants gun control. But that doesn't make a bit of
difference, because most of those people who want gun control live
in states and congressional districts that already are locked up for
the Democratic Party, particularly in the urban areas of Blue
America. What matters are the battleground states (for the
presidency and Senate) and battleground congressional districts (for
the Congress), and those electorates either don't care as much about
gun control or actively oppose it. In the aftermath of Election
2000, many Democrats now believe that Gore's pre-campaign support
for gun control may have cost him such rural states as West
Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, Arkansas and his own state,
Tennessee. Even if there are more Democratic voters, to make a
difference they need to be moving into areas now held by
Republicans, not into current Democratic strongholds. If the
"Democratic majority" emerges mostly in states and districts where
Democrats already are strong, it just increases their winning
majorities in those areas without changing the outcome of
presidential winners or congressional majorities. If it occurs in
states and districts where it's not enough to overcome safe
Republican majorities, again no electoral results will change.
Ultimately it will take a supermajority of Democratic voters to win
a bare majority of Democratic seats particularly progressive
Democratic seats. Also, the distortions resulting from the
redrawing of legislative district lines can turn a statewide
partisan majority into a minority of legislative seats, and
Republicans seem more conniving and successful at this backroom
dealing. For instance, Virginia Democrats in 2001 won their first
gubernatorial race since 1989, but Republicans went from barely
controlling the statehouse to a two-thirds majority. How?
Republicans drew the district lines. In Florida, Democrats were
strong enough to hold both U.S. Senate seats and gain a virtual tie
in the presidential race, but with full control over redistricting
Republicans went from a 15-8 edge in U.S. House seats to an
overwhelming 18 to 7 advantage. Republicans also have won lopsided
shares of seats in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania due to control
over redistricting, and now the Tom DeLay-led GOP in Texas is
seeking to re-redistrict their House districts to pick up another 5
to 7 seats. Moreover, the Democrats did not leave themselves very
many opportunities for retaking House seats. In states like
California, where the Democrats controlled redistricting, they opted
to protect their incumbents rather than try to gobble up more seats
as the GOP has done in other states. Teixeira and Judis try to
account for these factors to some degree on pages 69-72 of their
book, but their analysis of this is brief, overly optimistic, and
unconvincing. Also, they and others point to the increasing
migration of Latinos to the heartland, as well as states like
California, Florida, and Texas, as a trend that will overturn the
Republican applecart. Certainly, the Latinization of the U.S. is one
of the "hopeful" scenarios, but the horizon for that is more like 20
years, not ten. Similar arguments also can be made for the
presidential election, which is won or lost in a handful of
battleground states, and the U.S. Senate. Both of these have a
structural bias that awards more per capita representation to
low-population states, which in turn favors the Republican Party and
its candidates, and will tend to frustrate any emerging Democratic
majority. Thus, due to the distortions, peculiarities, and the lack
of proportionality built into our 18th-century winner take all,
geographic-based, political system, winning a majority of votes does
NOT necessarily mean you end up with a majority of seats.
Winner-take-all means "if I win, you lose," and in that zero sum
game the Democrats will continue to come out on the short end of the
stick. The Republican Party and its think tanks seem to understand
this much better than the Democrats. Relying on our analysis, one
can make a strong case that the hope for the Democratic Party lies
in enacting full representation electoral systems. With full
representation (also known as proportional representation), the
Democrats as well as the Republicans will win their fair share of
legislative seats that matches their proportion of the popular vote.
Redistricting and demographic trends will not distort outcomes and
produce such exaggerated results. Only with full representation
systems will the types of demographic shifts identified by Judis and
Teixeira, that perhaps over time should favor an emerging Democratic
majority, ever have a chance to win at the ballot box. Steven Hill is a senior
analysist with the Center for Voting and Democracy. He is the author
of "Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All
Politics" (Routledge Press, www.FixingElections.com), and, with the
Center's executive director Rob Richie, author of Whose Vote Counts
(Beacon Press, 2001). For more information about CVD's upcoming
national conference, "Claim Democracy," November 22-23 in
Washington, D.C., backed by a broad range of pro-democracy groups,
visit www.democracyusa.org/events/conference.html
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