Fixing Elections:  The Failure of

America�s Winner-Take-All Politics

by Steven Hill

Note:  This article will appear in the Summer 2002 edition of the National Civic Review and is an excerpt from the book published by Routledge Press.  It can be downloaded as a Microsoft Word document.

You can also listen to a presentation by Steven Hill at the New America Foundation that was filmed by CSPAN.  These are MP3 files that can be played by Real Audio or Windows Player.  The running time is around 1 hour:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

 The Landscape of Post-Democracy

�It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government -- except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.� 

Winston Churchill

The numbers would be comical if they weren�t so alarming: only five percent voter turnout in a recent Dallas mayoral election. Six percent in Charlotte, 7.5 percent in San Antonio. Seven percent in Austin.[1] Seven percent in Tennessee�s congressional primaries, 6 percent for a statewide gubernatorial primary in Kentucky,[2] 3 percent for a U.S. Senate primary in Texas, and 3 percent for a statewide runoff in North Carolina.[3] Several cities and towns in southeastern Massachusetts reported single-digit turnouts, with Rochester at 7 percent;[4] their 2000 state primary election drew less than 10 percent, a modern record low according to the Massachusetts Secretary of State.[5] In Virginia, the 1997 primary for attorney general, the state�s top law enforcement official overseeing criminal as well as civil matters for the entire state, topped out at a whopping 5 percent of registered voters, the lowest figure since 1949.[6] For the first time, we have been seeing an increase in single-digit voter turnout levels all across the nation. 

In numerous other cities and states, turnout for local, state and even congressional elections has fallen into the teens and twenties.  In seven cities in Los Angeles County, California, elections for city council were canceled when no challengers emerged to contest against the safe-seat incumbents.[7]  The 1996 presidential election produced the lowest voter turnout in America�s premier election in the last 70 years, less than half of eligible voters; the 2000 election was barely an improvement.[8] For all the pyrotechnics surrounding the 2000 presidential un-election, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that nearly half of eligible voters once again sat it out. More people watched the Super Bowl or TV fad Survivor than cast ballots for either Gore or Bush.[9]

The 1998 midterm congressional elections dipped even further, to just under a third of eligible voters, despite the first midterm use of motor voter laws which greatly boosted voter registration rolls. The 2000 congressional elections clawed to a marginally higher level.[10] A week of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or O.J.�s freeway ride in his white Bronco drew a comparable audience.[11] Voter turnout in the world�s lone remaining super-power has lurched to 138th in the world -- sandwiched between Botswana and Chad.^[12] Perhaps most disturbing, only 12 percent of 18 to 24 year olds and 8.5 percent of 18-19 year olds voted in the 1998 congressional elections.[13] The future adults of America have tuned out and dropped out, electorally speaking, even more than their 60s hippie counterparts.[14]

Rational choice theorists should instantly recognize the sanity of their reasons:  for most people, voting doesn�t matter anymore. The act of voting on the first Tuesday in November seems increasingly pointless and -- particularly in the middle of a busy workday -- a waste of precious time.[15] The �voting incentive� in recent years has seriously eroded, producing what Anthony Downs once called a �rationality crisis.�[16]  Washington D.C. has emerged as a kind of House of Horrors theme park, with much of what passes for politics today having degenerated into an obnoxiously partisan brew of bickering, spin, hype, petty scandal, name-calling, blaming, money-chasing and pandering.  Politics today certainly puts to the test that famous Churchill witticism, that democracy is the worst form of government -- except for all the rest.

Americans, now the least exuberant participants in the established democratic world, have become used to diminished expectations.  But in addition to our severe under-participation -- which amounts to nothing less than a political depression -- recent national episodes have pulled back the curtain to reveal that, besides being a politically depressed nation, we are a raucously divided nation as well.  The impeachment debacle, the resignation of two House Speakers, piled on top of Elian, O.J., Monica and various other deracinations now too numerous to list -- and all of THAT capped by the astonishing UnElection 2000 -- have each in their national moment exposed critical fault lines and fissures simmering beneath the surface.

How deep these divisions go have been the subject of conflicting opinion and keen debate in venues ranging from the New York Times to the conservative National Journal, from Internet chat rooms to the liberal Atlantic Monthly. Immediately following the November 2000 election, USA Today published a much-discussed red-and-blue map showing the counties all across the nation won by either George W. Bush or Al Gore.  At the very least, what the map revealed in its huge swaths of fiery red (Bush counties) and royal blue (Gore counties), was that the national divide has a certain shape to it:  it is partisan, of course; but that partisanship has a strong regional element, as well as a cultural and racial component.  It was this potent combination of national division -- partisan, cultural, racial and regional -- that raised the hairs on more than a few necks.  For whenever that combination has emerged in our history it has been explosive. Think of the Civil War in 1865; the aftermath of Reconstruction that produced Jim Crow and the �solid South;� the disenfranchisement and terrorizing of the freed slaves and their descendants; the violent struggles for civil rights 100 years later; and numerous conflicts in between and since.

Moreover, Census 2000 has revealed the galloping pace of our nation�s rapidly shifting diversity.  Are our political institutions and practices ready for this? The 1990s began with the Rodney King riots that combusted South Central and other parts of Los Angeles; the decade ended and the new century began with a series of police shootings of unarmed black men in New York City, Washington D.C., Seattle, and elsewhere. In Cincinnati, a police shooting resulted in four days of the worst street fighting since the death of Martin Luther King. The 2000 presidential election displayed eye-opening levels of racially polarized voting, as did a statewide referendum in Mississippi in April 2001 that retained the use of Confederate symbols on their state flag.[17] There are ongoing and disturbing signs of national frisson on various horizons, and they seem loaded and capable of erupting if we don�t deal with some of the precipitating factors. 

But what are these precipitating factors?  Obviously there are many complex interwoven social, political, historical and economic elements.  I will tackle one element that I believe is fundamental to the rest, yet it has been overlooked in the past and will be overlooked again unless we pull it to center stage and fully, carefully, examine it. 

The central thesis of my examination is what is known as the Winner Take All voting system -- Winner Take All for short.  No, I�m not talking about voting machines, like the antiquated punch card voting machines known as Votomatics that burst upon the national scene during the UnElection 2000.  I�m not talking about chads, paper ballots or Internet voting, nor am I talking about the byzantine hodgepodge of voter registration or ballot access laws or even campaign finance laws enacted in the fifty states. While those are all undeniably important, and part of the many components of our �democracy technology� that allow our republic to express and renew itself via periodic elections, I am talking about a type of �democracy technology� that is even more basic than those.

Rather, I�m talking about the rules and practices that determine how the votes of millions of American voters get translated into who wins and who loses elections, resulting in who gets to sit at the legislative table and make policy. I am talking about the voting system itself, the engine of a democracy. Voting systems are to a democracy what the �operating system� is to a computer -- voting systems are the software that make everything else possible. Like a computer�s operating system, a voting system functions silently and largely invisibly in the background, and yet it has enormous impacts related to the five defining dimensions of a democratic republic:  representation, participation, political discourse and campaigns, legislative policy and national unity.

There�s an old saying -- �We don�t know who discovered water, but we can be certain it wasn�t a fish.� That is to say, we don�t always understand the nature of the sea in which we swim, since we are understandably steeped in the mythology and momentum of the time and place in which we live.  In the current context, it is not always easy to perceive our Winner Take All ways.  Understandably, we look at the world through our �Winner Take All eyes,� and we tend to think that the way we do it must be the best, the simplest, the rightest, the only way. But our way certainly isn�t the only way; it�s not even the only Winner Take All way. 

The ancient Romans, for example, while they had a limited proto-democracy dominated by wealthy families, used a form of Winner Take All that in at least one way was more democratic than our own methods. The early Roman Republic had four primary political gatherings, and in one called the Centuriate Assembly all male citizens of military age, even the poorest, were enrolled into one of five voting groups based on economic class.  Each property class voted as a unit on important issues, the poorest classes, like other citizens, having their say.[18]  In the middle Roman Republic the poorer classes exclusively elected ten high-level leaders, called the tribunes of the plebeians, who could use their office to take up populist causes in opposition to the nobility. Although the Roman Republic overall was a very primitive Winner Take All democracy, one dominated by its wealthiest male citizens, still it is interesting that the Roman Republic explicitly granted a �representation quota� to its poorest citizens. Even the lowest of classes had a political voice.  Class was distinctly recognized, and formally incorporated, into their Winner Take All voting practices and institutions.[19]

Today, of course, the idea of such affirmative action along class lines would be ridiculed by the gatekeepers and defenders of Winner Take All. Instead, poor people pretty much have opted-out of our democracy, since there are no class quotas, no tribunes like the Gracchi to speak for their causes, and no hope that a viable political party might arise that can represent their interests. With the benefit of two thousand years of hindsight, we can see ways that the early Romans were pioneers of representative democracy -- for instance, they initiated the secret ballot -- and other ways that they were lacking in modern standards.[20]  But can we see how our own practices are lacking? 

Winner Take All�s Dubious Democracy

The fact is, our current 18th-century Winner Take All practices and institutions have outlived their usefulness in the 21st century.  In numerous ways, our nation is being impaired by our continued use of a geographic-based and two-choice political system, particularly when shaped by modern campaign techniques like polling, focus groups, and 30 second TV sound bites, amid dramatically shifting racial, regional and partisan demographics.  In particular, Winner Take All profoundly affects the five major standards, the five sturdy tent poles, that hold erect the great tent of representative democracy -- representation, voter participation, political discourse/campaigns, legislative policy and national unity.

Representation. The fact that a random lottery would make our legislatures far more representative of �the people� is a disturbing sign that something is woefully amiss with our current institutions and practices. Winner Take All, by design, tends to over-represent majority constituencies and under-represent minority constituencies. We usually think �minority� means racial minority, but in the context of Winner Take All it really means �geographic minority,� and more �orphaned� white Democratic and Republican voters who happen to live in the wrong districts lose out on representation than anyone else, due to the vagaries of Winner Take All.  These voters, just like most racial and political minorities, are geographic minorities where they live and must be satisfied with what may be called �phantom representation� -- virtual representation in name only. 

Besides white orphaned Democrats and Republicans, racial minorities are vastly under-represented in legislatures at every level of government, as are women, the working class, political minorities, independents, and third parties. The only constituency with sufficient representation is the 32 percent minority of white men who are grossly over-represented and still, over 200 years later, dominate all legislatures. Such �mirror representation� -- the extent to which our legislatures mirror the diversity of our population � is much maligned by various pundits and political scientists as a form of political correctness for representation.  Nevertheless, it is a legitimate indicator among several indicators of the health of our democracy, and on that score the U.S. rates very low, both in absolute terms and when compared to nearly all other established democracies.

Rather than evolving our Winner Take All system to accommodate such diversity, instead we have wall-papered the gap with two peculiar versions of Winner Take All propaganda: 1) �phantom representation,� a rather odd notion that defies second grader logic that says that an elected official somehow �represents� you even if they are opposed to your point of view, and even if you in fact voted for someone else, and 2) it does not matter the color of your representative�s skin, or his or her gendered plumbing, or his or her class background, or even, oddly enough, their political opinions.  All that apparently matters is -- that you elect either a Democrat or Republican, and the rest supposedly will take care of itself.  But as we become a multiracial society, with national diversity exploding at unprecedented levels -- the Latino population increasing by 58 percent over the past decade, Asian Pacific Americans increasing by 41 percent -- the zero-sum �if I win, you lose� game of Winner Take All politics eventually will blow these archaic notions out of the water.  Authentic representation does matter.  In fact, in a fundamental yet flawed way, the Founders and Framers founded our nation on this principle.

Moreover, representation has become balkanized by geography -- cities becoming Democratic Party strongholds, and Republicans dominating rural areas and some suburbs.  Entire regions of the country have become virtual sub-nations, with the West and the South solidly conservative and usually Republican constituting a virtual sub-nation that we shall call, for convenience of identification, Bushlandia; and the West Coast and the Northeast, particularly the thin thread of coastal regions, tilting toward the Democrats in what we shall call the sub-nation of New Goreia.  In these areas political monocultures have been created by over-representation -- in some cases quite dramatic -- of the majority party.

While U.S. democracy does not bestow an affirmative action �representation quota� based on economic class like the Romans did, and threatens to retreat from its three decade opening to representation that is conscious of race, we do grant a huge representation subsidy, a form of affirmative action to late next character, if you will, to low-population and predominantly rural states in the U.S. Senate and Electoral College.  At the current time, this representation subsidy disproportionately favors conservative representation, policy, and issues. According to political scientists Francis E. Lee and Bruce I. Oppenheimer in their excellent book Sizing up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation, that representation quota has over-represented the Republican Party in the Senate in every election since 1958, primarily due to Republican success in low-population, conservative states in the West and South -- i.e. in the sub-nation of Bushlandia. The U.S. Senate is perhaps the most unrepresentative body in the world outside Britain�s House of Lords, with no elected blacks or Latinos and only thirteen percent women.  Naturally, this overly conservative White Guy�s Club has a dramatic impact on our five pillars of democracy.

For the presidency, our unique -- increasingly, many say bizarre -- way of electing our President was revealed to be an archaic 18th-century construct by the 2000 election.  Without a majority requirement for the national popular vote, or even for the winners of each state�s electoral votes, we ended with a winner who failed to earn the highest number of popular votes. Lacking a majority requirement, either nationally or state-by-state, the center-left vote split itself between Al Gore and Ralph Nader and their popular majority fractured ((Nader and Gore had 52 percent of the popular vote for president in 2000, the highest center-left vote total since Lyndon Johnson won in a landslide in 1964). Moreover, due to the �representation subsidy� or affirmative action quota granted to low-population, conservative states in the Electoral College, Republican presidential candidates have a built-in bias that favors their election.  In Election 2000, the small-state padding explained the difference between the Electoral College vote, which went to Bush by a lean 271-267 margin, and the national popular vote, which Gore won by over a half million votes.

Those who oppose affirmative action based on race because of its alleged unfairness also should oppose it based on low-population.  Any other position is hypocritical, just another special interest group protecting its turf.

Participation.  Despite the pyrotechnics of the photo-finish 2000 presidential contest, most elections have been turned into pale farces of competition, and by extension of participation. We have seen an alarming increase in single-digit voter turnout levels all across the nation for various elections. Voter turnout for our national legislature regularly drops well-below a majority, often barely a third, of the adult population. Nine out of ten U.S. House races regularly are won by noncompetitive margins of at least 10 percentage points, and three-quarters by landslide margins of at least 20 percentage points. In fact, the 2002 redistricting plans in most states amounted to little better than incumbent protection plans, producing even fewer competitive districts than previous redistrictings. State legislative elections are even worse, where in recent years two out of five state legislative races have been uncontested by one of the two major parties -- these races are so noncompetitive because of the lopsided partisan demographics in each district -- not campaign finance inequities -- that the party considers it a waste of resources to run a candidate. With numbers like these, most voters are bunkered down into safe-seat districts where they have little choice but to ratify the candidate (usually the incumbent) of the party that dominates their district.  In other words, the frame of reference for most voters in our Winner Take All system is not of a two-party system at all, but of a one-party system.  Instead of voters choosing the politicians, the politicians are choosing the voters via the redistricting process, which is increasingly dominated by technocrats armed with the precision of sophisticated computers and demographic data.

Needless to say, this leads to wholly uninspiring elections, and not surprisingly research has demonstrated a strong correlation between voter turnout and competitiveness.  For instance, two studies of U.S. House elections showed that voter turnout dropped dramatically by as much as 19 percentage points as House races became less competitive.  Another study found that voter turnout among California�s Latino and black communities was far higher in those congressional districts redistricted to give candidates of color a fair chance at electing someone.  Numerous other studies have found similar results, which makes perfect sense: if a voter feels that the act of voting is a waste of time, election after election, sooner or later they quit showing up.  Moreover, the effect is passed down generationally: if one�s parents did not vote, chances are greater that you won�t vote, and neither will your children.

While it is true that these legislative districts are gerrymandered into their politically comatose state during the redistricting/�incumbent protection� process, it is also true that redistricting is the twin sibling of Winner Take All -- you don�t get one without the other.  Even if the gaming incentives and ability of incumbents or party leaders to carve out their own personalized districts were curtailed by a more �public interest� redistricting process, many of the same effects still would occur due to the regional balkanization of partisan sympathies i.e. liberals/Democrats dominating in cities and the sub-nation of New Goreia, and conservatives/Republicans dominating rural areas and Bushlandia.  With demographics like that, there are only so many ways to slice up the districts, and most of these will have limited impact on the lack of competition and low voter turnout. Even campaign finance reform will provide little relief, given the political terrain of Winner Take All that produces such lopsided partisan demographics and regional polarization, capped by gerrymandered districts.

National and state elections for our highest offices -- president, governors, and the like -- also are marked by declining participation as voters fail to turn out for the Two Choice Tango offered as standard fare.  Targeted campaigns of poll-tested sound bites aimed at swing voters, swing districts, and swing states leave all other voters on the political sidelines, their issues and concerns unaddressed, wondering if the candidates are speaking to them.  Not surprisingly, certain demographics of voters, such as the poor, low-income working class, youth, and racial minorities are disproportionately non-participants in our dumbed-down elections -- the candidates have nothing to say to them.

People are awash in a sea of too many elections -- over a half million elections, from local sheriff to president -- and a declining pool of civic-minded voters continues to trudge off to the polls to do their dreary duty. What else is a good citizen to do?  But the dirty little secret is that, today, for tens of millions of these citizens living in the vast numbers of noncompetitive districts and states, including �orphan� Democrats and Republicans who are a minority perspective in their districts as well as the supporters of third parties, independents, and racial minority candidates nearly everywhere, there are not a lot of viable choices when they step into the voting booth. Instead, there are lots of opportunities for wasting your vote on losers and third party spoilers, or holding your nose and voting for the �lesser of two evils.�  Not surprisingly, voters have quit responding to the uninspiring electoral choices regularly manufactured by the Winner Take All system.

Political discourse and campaigns.  One of the most marked changes to our Winner Take All politics in recent decades has been caused by new campaign technologies. The technologies and tactics used in commercial marketing, i.e. polling, focus groups, dial meter focus groups, 30 second TV spots, and more, are sinisterly suited to Winner Take All�s two-choice/two-candidate milieu. Without any third candidate intervening with conflicting messages, neither political party has to watch its back much; likely partisan supporters don�t have any other electoral place to go and can be taken for granted, freeing candidates to concentrate on extreme targeting of undecided swing voters.

Highly-sophisticated techniques conducted by winning-obsessed political consultants allow candidates to figure out which group of swing voters are crucial to winning a close race, and what campaign spin, TV images, �crafted talk� and �simulated responsiveness� will move these swing voters.  Ironically, the swing voters, by definition, usually are those who are least interested, least informed and least tuned in to politics, or alternatively the most zealous voters for a particular issue, like NRA supporters or Florida Cubans.  These two categories of voters have disproportionate influence in our elections today.  In a two-choice field, mudslinging and hack-attack sound bites become particularly effective means to drive swing voters away from your opponent and to mobilize your activist political base, and not surprisingly such negative campaigning dominates elections today.  With the ideological space relatively wide open and undefined in a two-choice field, candidates and their consultants are free to game the system by reducing complex policy proposals into campaign slogans and sound bites, carving out positions vis-a-vis their lone opponent. 

Consequently, in an era of declining participation, not only in the voting booth but in the numbers of people paying attention between elections, Winner Take All�s two-choice elections are devolving into an uncomfortable specter of the �canned campaign� -- a cookie-cutter formula endlessly replicated every four years for national electoral consumption.  Because of the impact of the new campaign technologies in a Winner Take All milieu, and given the regional balkanization and nationally dead-even status of the Democrats and Republicans, we can expect that political consultants and candidates will intensify their use of the modern campaign technologies to produce McCampaigns of centrist rhetoric and images in an attempt to hoodwink the crucial blocs of undecided voters about their policies, putting a gloss of �centrism� around their candidates, regardless of actual voting records or policies pursued.  Indeed, in our two-choice, Winner Take All system, these campaign techniques have become the steroids of politics -- they are so successful, that once one side is using them the other side does not dare not use them.

Moreover, because of the way candidates and parties now conduct campaigns, any semblance of real political exchange and discourse is being buried under the McCampaign jingle and sound bite.  Indeed, we are losing political ideas. Under the mind-numbing influence of the new campaign technologies and the Winner Take All media, electoral politics in the United States has become like cotton candy for the political faculties.  We are witnessing a wholesale and widespread underdevelopment of the American voter, contributing to the atrophy of the national political consciousness. Voters are not challenged or stimulated to think about the great issues of our times, because these issues mostly are left on the political sidelines.  And the harsh terrain of Winner Take All�s two-party bias does not allow the flowering of new parties or independent candidacies that can act as the laboratory for new ideas or give voters other viable choices. Tragically, at a time of rapid technological, ecological, foreign policy, and global change, when fresh, creative ideas for dealing with looming challenges and crises are at a premium, our nation is in the throes of an alarming loss of political ideas.

Legislative policy.  Because Winner Take All is a geographic-based and two-choice system, it instigates certain dynamics that dramatically affect policy.  The most obvious of these, the one that has been most analyzed and exposed in the media, is pork barrel legislation, whereby legislators try to �bring home the bacon� for their districts in the form of federal subsidies.  Tales of $600 toilet seats for the military and billions in military and transportation appropriations for favorite states and districts are legendary.

But the fact is that other aspects of our Winner Take All system affect policy, producing a host of mischievous policy goblins.  These include safe-seat politicians who act as the pit bulls for their party, pursuing unpopular initiatives like the impeachment of a president without fear of career repercussions. In the late 1990s, that dynamic worked in tandem with end-of-the-decade tussling over redistricting, when the two major parties pursued specific policies based on how they might affect the last two election cycles of the decade in 1998 and 2000, since the battle for control of state legislatures determined who would win the divine right to redistrict in 2001.

The gaming incentives of Winner Take All also drive the two parties to engage in bumper-sticker politics and �simulated responsiveness� for political positioning, as the two parties play off each other to craft policy initiatives on issues like Social Security, crime, gun control, tax cuts, military appropriations, education and more, targeted at winning votes from crucial blocs of swing voters.  These sorts of pseudo-responsive policy initiatives can be particularly visible leading up to and during election years.  The regional polarization resulting from a geographic-based system also is affecting policy more and more as the region�s fragment along partisan, racial and cultural lines.  For instance, policy for education and transportation between cities and suburbs has become a political football as Democrats and Republicans tilt for control of the Legislature, knowing with a high degree of certainty which areas they will win and which they will lose.  Instead of coherent regional policy that works for the urban-suburban corridor, we end up with zero-sum policy pitting cities, i.e. Democrats against suburbs and rural areas, i.e. Republicans.

Using modern mapping software and redistricting techniques like packing and cracking, a political party in control of redistricting can end up with an undeserved artificial majority or an exaggerated, over-represented majority that allows them to pursue policies lacking support from the majority of voters. The �representation ripoffs� created by artificial or exaggerated legislative majorities have prevailed in various state legislatures and in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, due to the distortions of our Winner Take All system. This effect has been particularly pronounced in the sub-nations of Bushlandia and New Goreia as one political party is drastically over-represented than the other. This in turn creates a Political Power Ripoff, in some cases producing exaggerated, veto-proof majorities that can ram through radical policies without a popular mandate.  The climate becomes one of a political monoculture, lacking the most basic levels of political discourse or pluralism, and the bitter partisan divide gets exacerbated by the political power and representation ripoffs as one side effectively wins more representation and political power than it deserves. Under Winner Take All, as we have seen and as various researchers have demonstrated, the majority does not necessarily rule.

In the U.S. House, one party or the other frequently has been ripped off by the vagaries of Winner Take All districts; between 1945 and 1980, congressional elections produced artificial majorities 17 percent of the time, where one party or the other received less than 50 percent of the national vote yet ended up with more than 50 percent of the U.S. House seats. In today�s 107th Congress sits a Republican majority in the House that won only 48 percent of the national popular vote, about the same as the Democrats, and only a quarter of the adult population.  But the Republican Party historically has been cheated out of seats due to such votes-to-seats distortions, losing as many as 43 House seats in 1976, and an average of twenty-seven seats per congressional cycle from 1976 through 1988. More recently, it is the Democratic Party that has been on the short end of the stick. In the 2000 elections for the U.S. House, there were 371 U.S. House seats where both Democrats and Republicans fielded a candidate, and the Democrats won slightly more votes nationwide in those races, yet the Republicans won more of those seats, 191-179 (plus one independent), due to the vagaries of how the district lines were drawn.

In the U.S. Senate, the �representation subsidy� given to low-population states has had dramatic influences on policy, particularly on federal subsidies to states and on Senate leadership that is able to influence policy. As Lee and Oppenheimer have pointed out in Sizing up the Senate, the over-representation of the least populous states means they receive more federal funds per capita than the citizens of the most populous states, and that the Senate will design policies in ways that distribute federal dollars disproportionately to the less populous states.  One unanticipated consequence of the Great Compromise, then, is that citizens now are treated differently based on where they happen to reside.  Moreover, due to the demands of campaign fund-raising and constituency-serving for Senators from high-population states like California, Michigan, Florida, and New York, which tend to see the most competitive Senate elections, Senators from the largest states no longer have the flexibility or time necessary to lead the Senate. Thus, the most influential positions in the Senate, those of the party and floor leaders and powerful committee chairs, which once were dominated by Senators from high-population states, have in recent years been occupied by Senators from low-population states like West Virginia, Kansas, Maine, South Dakota, Oklahoma and Mississippi (similarly, many of the most powerful House leaders and committee chairs have been entrenched incumbents from safe districts -- meaning that the most powerful members often face the least electoral testing).

Given the fact that this �representation quota� in the U.S. Senate mostly has benefited conservative, rural, white states, this adds additional dimensions to the impacts on policy.  Because of the Senate�s unique constitutional role in approving presidential appointees and treaties, this thoroughly unrepresentative body has a powerful influence on all three branches of government, as well as on foreign policy. Over the years, conservative senators from low-population states representing a small fragment of the nation�s population have flexed their representation quota to influence judicial appointments and foreign policy, as well as to slow down or thwart numerous policy initiatives, including desegregation, campaign finance reform, health care reform, affirmative action, New Deal programs, gun control, and more.  Large, corporate agribusinesses have been some the biggest beneficiaries of the geographic basis for Senate malapportionment, pocketing billions in federal subsidies even as urban areas have faced cutbacks and political marginalization. The Political Power Ripoff of Winner Take All is tremendously exacerbated by this affirmative action quota for low-population states, which is hard-wired into both the U.S. Senate and our peculiar Electoral College method of electing the president.

National division.  The two-choice, geographic-based nature of Winner Take All is contributing to chronic partisan, regional, racial and cultural division.  As we have seen, representation as well as political power have become balkanized by geography -- cities becoming Democratic Party strongholds, and Republicans dominating rural areas and to a lesser degree suburbs.  As the USA Today red-and-blue map showed, entire regions of the country have become sub-nations, with an area larger than the European continent in the Western and Southern United States and Alaska solidly conservative and/or Republican (Bushlandia), and the Northeast and the West Coast, particularly the urban and narrow coastal areas, favoring the Democrats (New Goreia).  In these regions, the zero-sum game of single-seat districts has created lopsided political monocultures where all but the winning side is reduced to political spectator status.

The bitter partisan divide gets exacerbated as one side effectively wins more representation and political power than they deserve, while the other side is frustrated and unfairly marginalized.  When these Winner Take All dynamics cause citizens living in cities to lose some of their education or transportation funding at the hands of GOP legislatures, or frustrate the majority in South Carolina who wish to remove the Confederate flag from the capital grounds, or produce votes-to-seats distortions that cause the Congress to be more liberal or conservative than it should be, with consequences on policies passed, existing tensions are exacerbated. Moreover, while it is understood that in Winner Take All�s two-choice field nasty, negative campaigning always will be a highly effective way to drive swing voters away from your opponent and mobilize your political base, this serves to further bruise relations, polarize voters, and fan the flames of internecine tension.

In presidential elections, the regional balkanization has become so severe and hardwired into our state-by-state demographics that an astonishing 436 out of 538 Electoral College votes now are considered safe or mostly leaning toward one party or the other in a competitive presidential race. That leaves only 102 electoral votes -- less than 20 percent -- in nine states as toss-ups in a nationally competitive race, and we can predict that those areas will be campaign battlegrounds in 2004, with the most of the rest of the nation once again as bystanders.  Based on these kinds of demographics, there are strong indications of another razor-thin race in the 2004 presidential election.  We may have ringside seats to an ongoing and ugly political drama that once again rips apart the nation, courtesy of our defective Winner Take All method of electing the president.

Outside the brief display of �rally �round the flag� domestic unity following the September 11 attacks, numerous pundits and commentators have observed that the general level of national division and partisan warfare has reached unsettling proportions not seen by our nation for many years.  And even with the unifying stimulus of foreign aggression, by December 28, 2001 USA Today was running headlines like �Lawmakers Back at Each Other�s Throats.�  But this hardly should be surprising, given how the �winner takes all� nature of our electoral contests exacerbates the stakes, and hence the division and conflict.

Moreover, the regional balkanization creates some real zero-sum dilemmas for the Democratic and Republican Parties that will make it difficult for either of them to be act as a vehicle that can articulate, much less resolve, genuine conflicts of interest in society.  For instance, to a substantial degree national politics still reflect the decades-old subtext of partisan competition being centered around appeals to culturally and racially-conservative white voters, who still comprise the bulk of American voters.  If anything, since Nixon�s �southern strategy� these trends have sorted themselves and deepened, Democrats now providing near-exclusive representation for the densely-populated cities, the GOP for the vast territory of sparse rural areas; the Democrats are now the party preferred by the burgeoning population of racial minorities, while the GOP is the party of most whites, especially most white men.  

Under these demographic pressures funneled through the pinhole of the clunky, antiquated Winner Take All system, and with regional, cultural and racial balkanization exacerbated by representation ripoffs and political power ripoffs, and given the incentives of how you run and win elections with modern campaign technologies under Winner Take All, both political parties are tiptoeing as carefully as they can around the color line, strategizing as they go.  Each side will continue to bunker down in their foxholes of Bushlandia and New Goreia, calculating ways to triangulate into pockets of white swing voters; and cross-partisanship and cross-fertilization of ideas will remain near-impossible, except in campaign rhetoric around election time, or when rallying around the flag following national tragedies like the September 11 attacks.  With the two parties effectively acting as proxies on region, culture and race, representing one side or the other of the divide, the conservative white vote and the multi-racial burgeoning of our population are on a collision course. 

The fork in the road

Despite the potential offered by the evolution of our 18th-century Winner Take All practices, the American gatekeepers in the punditocracy, the media, the academy and among reformers steadfastly overlook this course.  In fact, their degree of misinformation, misunderstanding and outright disinterest in the area of voting systems is baffling as well as dismaying. Even as our Winner Take All democracy gasps for breath, some old Winner Take All war horses have faithfully circled the wagons and rallied the troops.  These gatekeepers have clung to the hope that traditional methods will be useful still, and approach the subject in an uninformed and oddly dismissive manner.  Even following the meltdown of UnElection 2000, they would countenance few new ideas or allow discussion that fell too far outside the orthodoxy.

Despite their myopia and sophistry, this analysis finds that the impacts of Winner Take All are considerable; that the impacts are sweeping and decidedly troubling.  Winner Take All is robbing voters of viable choices in the voting booth, and is contributing to an entrenched decline in voter participation and engagement.  Most voters have become bunkered down into �safe� one-party districts gerrymandered during a secretive redistricting process that guarantees reelection of incumbents. Winner Take All also is distorting representation of the majority as well as the minority, including millions of �orphaned� Democratic and Republican voters living in opposition legislative districts, as well as racial minorities, women, independents and third party supporters.

Moreover, Winner Take All�s geographic-based paradigm is exacerbating national tensions that are turning entire geographic regions of the country into virtual wastelands for one political party or the other.  It is producing �phantom representation� and �artificial majorities� where a minority of voters sometimes wins a majority of legislative seats and a disproportionate, exaggerated amount of political power. In short, Winner Take All has produced a national legislature that does not look like �the people� they purport to represent, nor think like us, nor act as we wish they would.  No, under the distortions of Winner Take All, the majority in the United States does not necessarily rule.

Winner Take All also underlies an alarming debasement of campaigns and political discourse, which have grown increasingly harsh, negative and uninformative; it affects how political campaigns are conducted, as candidates and political consultants chase the infamous �swing voters,� that small slice of fuzzy-headed and disengaged voters who determine the outcome of elections in a Winner Take All system. New campaigning technologies like polling and focus groups, it turns out, are malignantly suited to the Winner Take All system and its typical two-choice/two-party field, allowing the precise targeting of political spin and hack-attack sound bites to ever smaller slices of swing voters, while everybody else and the issues they care about are relegated to the political sidelines. The dynamics unleashed by Winner Take All also are affecting how much money is needed to run a viable campaign, how the media covers those campaigns, and how political ideas are debated and decided.

Finally, Winner Take All is draining the vitality out of well-meaning political reforms like campaign finance reform, the Voting Rights Act, term limits, and redistricting reforms.  Indeed, the impact of Winner Take All is pandemic and indiscriminate, reaching into our communities and neighborhoods, into our psyches and attitudes towards government and elections, indeed into our very self-identity as a nation. Generally speaking, the pervasive impact of Winner Take All on participation, representation, campaigns and discourse, policy and national unity is hurling us toward chronic national division and political depression. 

In short, Winner Take All is making losers of us all.  Even the apparent winners lose when our representative democracy is so sickly.  This escalating combination of nagging national division combined with dispirited political depression is particularly perilous, because each are mutually reinforcing of the other.  As most players (i.e. voters), abandon the field in frustration, the game is left to be played by increasingly partisan careerists and professionals, and by the most zealous activists who seize center stage, further polarizing politics and policy.  And as politics become more polarized, negative and downright nasty, more and more people turn off and tune out. 

One cannot help but wonder:  what will be the political destiny of a nation that, on the one hand has fewer and fewer voters and diminishing electoral engagement, but on the other hand is so rife with the heated passions of political division and acrimony, cleaved along the volatile lines of partisanship, regionalism, and racial and cultural polarization?  It�s a confounding and alarming paradox. Much like stagflation has bedeviled economists with the twin scourges of inflation and recession -- theoretically impossible, the textbooks once informed us -- our national politics are being squeezed between the Scylla and Charybdis of a passionless political depression intertwined with the torrid fervor of partisan obsession and divide.  And our 18^th century Winner Take All system is at the root of the problem.

The gravity of the moment requires a new term to describe what is happening to the national consciousness:  post-democracy. That is, a polarized, splintered nation, nominally democratic, but with fewer and fewer voters. A nation where many of our civil institutions are still vital and our individual rights reasonably well-protected, but where elections fail to inspire or mobilize, or to bind us as a nation. A nation where an emerging trend of regional balkanization -- exacerbated by our Winner Take All practices -- is alarmingly suggestive of the geographic-based polarization faced by other large Winner Take All democracies like India and Canada. What are we to make of this fractured, voterless, post-democracy?  Its onset is an alarming development in our nation�s political history.

It is important to note that post-democracy will not be merely the latest stage of an old, familiar specimen; post-democracy is not the same as pre-democracy or the Romans� proto-democracy. In fact, it will have transmogrified into a new and unexpected phyla of political life, a new evolutionary form without precedent in human history.  Post-democracy is a type where huge numbers of citizens simply have given up.  And they have given up because they don�t think politics or elections matter in their lives, they have made a decision, conscious or unconscious, that political/electoral participation is a waste of time, and that withdrawing makes more rational sense, despite its obvious perils.  They have chosen to toss their political fate to the winds, keeping their fingers crossed that whatever emerges, or whatever faction is in control, won�t screw them over.  The specter of post-democracy unearths from the historical crypt Gaetano Mosca�s disquieting theory of an elite ruling class, which asserted that �the history of all societies has been, is, and will be, the history of dominant minorities,� contrary to any theories of majority rule.

Post-democracy is a political iceberg of staggering proportions, and we are heading straight for it. Yet it is rarely talked about around American dinner tables, there is no presidential-sponsored national dialogue, there are no gavels pounding in Senate committee hearings or in august courtrooms. There are few opinion page rants or �60 Minutes� documentaries, attempting to galvanize public attention and mobilize the national brain trust, seeking a solution. Instead, all there is, is silence. A silence that is occasionally broken by a few well-meaning but misguided missives about the impact of private money in elections, or TV talking heads debating the passions of presidential ejaculatory stains on a dress -- and now the vagaries of chad, Votomatics and butterfly ballots.  All the while the iceberg drifts, relentlessly closer, and practically nobody is talking about it. It�s downright spooky.  

Government of, by and for the people -- not by emperors, not by a Politburo, not by preachers or mullahs, not by corporate CEOs or multinational media magnates and their proxies, nor by neo-aristocracy or kakistocracy, but �by the people.� Two hundred years after our national birth-quake, that is still a revolutionary concept, even a fragile one.  During this time of national anxiety, with minds that rarely seem to meet except in the most tragic of circumstances, and partisan, cultural and racial lines that hardly cross, the potential offered by evolving our Winner Take All ways is a tantalizing prospect that demands our consideration. If we fail, around a future bend in the road awaits post-democracy.

Steven Hill is the western regional director of the Center for Voting and Democracy (www.fairvote.org).  His latest book is �Fixing Elections: The Failure of America�s Winner Take All Politics� (Routledge Press, June 2002), and this article is an excerpt from that book.  He also is the co-author of �Whose Vote Counts� (Beacon Press, 2001).

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