![]() But what we have now is the tyranny of the minority. Certainly, we need checks on the tyranny of the majority. But if this was true at the founding, it’s probably not how most Americans understand their country today, when “undemocratic” is considered a political epithet.īefore Trump, there was enough overlap between popular will and electoral outcome to make the issue largely semantic. ![]() Could that fringe movement become mainstream? Brown said it was “not beyond the realm of possibility” that the country could eventually break apart, even if he doesn’t think it’s likely.Ĭonservatives are often unmoved by complaints that our system is undemocratic, arguing that America was intended not as a democracy but a republic. Polls already show a third of Californians favor secession. Jerry Brown of California what might happen if we have more elections like 2016, where a majority of voters and a supermajority of Californians are thwarted. But it could just as easily be taken as a warning about the stability of our democracy. In July, Senator Sherrod Brown told The Washington Post, “It’s not out of the question that in 2020, if nothing changes, Democrats could win the popular vote by five million and lose the Electoral College because of the Great Lakes states.” He meant that as a warning to Democrats to pay attention to the Midwest. Twice in the last 17 years, Republicans have lost the popular vote but won the presidency, and it could happen again. The other is white, provincial and culturally revanchist. One is urban, diverse and outward-looking. But America is now two countries, eyeing each other across a chasm of distrust and contempt. This would matter less if the United States weren’t so geographically polarized. The distortion carries over to the Electoral College, where each state’s number of electors is determined by the size of its congressional delegation. “Roughly half the country gets 80 percent of the votes in the Senate, and the other half of the country gets 20 percent.” “Given contemporary demography, a little bit less than 50 percent of the country lives in 40 of the 50 states,” Sanford Levinson, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Texas, told me. Our Constitution has always had a small-state bias, but the effects have become more pronounced as the population discrepancy between the smallest states and the largest states has grown. ![]() Some analysts have even suggested that Republicans could emerge from 2018 with a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority. (According to a Brookings Institution analysis, in 2016, Republicans won 55.2 percent of seats with just under 50 percent of votes cast for Congress.)Īnd because of the quirks of the 2018 Senate map, Democrats are extremely unlikely to reclaim that chamber, even if most voters would prefer Democratic control. Worse, the majority of voters who disapprove of Trump have little power to force Congress to curb him.Ī combination of gerrymandering and the tight clustering of Democrats in urban areas means that even if Democrats get significantly more overall votes than Republicans in the midterms - which polls show is probable - they may not take back the House of Representatives. I don’t just mean the fact that Trump became president despite his decisive loss in the popular vote, though that shouldn’t be forgotten. Here, in my debut as a New York Times columnist, I want to discuss a structural problem that both underlies and transcends our current political nightmare: We have entered a period of minority rule. We’ve grown used to naked profiteering off the presidency, an administration that calls for the firing of private citizens for political dissent and nuclear diplomacy conducted via Twitter taunts. Since Donald Trump’s cataclysmic election, the unthinkable has become ordinary. This is Michelle Goldberg’s debut column.
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