Blog
Bobos Busted
Twelve days to go….
On a flight back to the US from Europe several weeks ago, the man sitting beside me struck up a conversation when he noticed I was reading an article on conservativism in the US. He made it clear he considered himself a conservative, and traditionally a Republican, but right now, he said, “I don’t have a party.” This Republican dilemma is acute right now, yet this is a dilemma Democrats find hard to understand: Why would you feel you faced a dilemma when Donald Trump is on the ballot?
But let’s look at this. The margin between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris has hardly shifted in recent weeks. In a race where one candidate is a convicted felon with a record of sexual molestation and a refusal to respect the results of a fair presidential election, the close margin suggests that the United States is a country dramatically separated by other concerns. Indeed, two unshifting mindsets define us. They supply people with a strong sense of social identity and command loyalty at the level of a family or church. The decline of religion has definitely contributed to this state of affairs. So has the emergence of a liberal university-educated elite that has shifted the Left’s emphasis away from its trade union and working-class roots to focus on cultural inclusion and a morality of “choice.” While the substance of the Left’s positions does not sit well with the American right, the bigger problem, according to several commentators on the right, is that the Left is condescending and insular.
In yesterday’s New York Times, columnist Bret Stevens posed the question [H]ow can we fashion a liberalism that doesn’t turn so many ordinary people off?
Back in 2001, another New York Times columnist who tilts to the right, David Brooks, coined the term Bobo - Bohemian-Bourgeois - to describe the meritocracy that has become the elite of our time. Brooks’s book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, examines the influencers of the baby-boom generation, a group who started out as university-based rebels in the 1960s, then linked elements of bohemian behavior with capitalism to create an impression that they stand outside any typical social stratification. This group was smart at school, gained college degrees, and became thought leaders through professional jobs such as college professors, journalists, physicians, civil servants, and politicians. Richard Florida’s 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, describes this elite class similarly, underlining how engineers, mangers, researchers, as well as artists, have used their creativity to redesign the workplace. Now they are the arbiters of which enterprises succeed or fail, and, as a result, which cities thrive or decline.
Unlike the previous dominant class, says Brooks, this group does not assume that the traditional mores of elitism are necessary to secure their position. Many do not come from families with money. They wear funky clothing, are attracted to rough materials rather than smooth, gravitate to open-plan homes and an open lifestyle. They rely on their success in the university framework to get ahead. Brooks calls them out for shunning long-standing indulgences of the wealthy, but at the same time spending their cash (of which some have a good deal thanks to the rise of tech) on their own status symbols. Says Brooks: A $7,000 crystal chandelier in the living room was vulgar, but a $10,000, 59-inch AGA stove in the kitchen was acceptable, a sign of your foodie expertise. They drink lattes purchased at coffee shops, drive Volvos and Lexus’s, and go to considerable lengths to get their children into elite schools and universities.
Bobos embrace principles of fairness and diversity in education and employment and support higher taxes to help the disadvantaged. In other ways they have not shown themselves to be attuned to genuine egalitarianism because they lack the traditional left’s emotional connection to the disadvantaged. They do not recognize that their preoccupations have pushed the blue-collar, trade union left out of the Democratic Party, privileging, as they do, college education and an intellectual egalitarianism where code words like Latinx and intersectionality have become cultural markers.
In the minds of their critics, Bobos’ compassion for immigrants constellated in the 1980s if not before when the US government was supporting right-wing, intolerant regimes in Central America, and US Sanctuary Movements welcomed and protected refugees whose lives were threatened. Even if the politics and economics of Central and South America have now evolved, compassionate Bobos have perpetuated a response to potential immigrants that assumes we in the US owe them something and therefore should allow them in with no discerning criteria.
American conservatives hold Bobos responsible for the challenge to traditional morality and the relevance of religion that have spread since the 1960s. Bobos have promoted the notion that sexual mores should be a matter of choice as long there is consent, that women have been marginalized in a multi-millennial power-system, and that, therefore, traditional family life must give way to a system where women’s primary focus is outside the home.
Conservatives look for consistent standards that undergird a moral order. What they see coming from Bobos is a mishmash of ideas about inclusion and identity that fail to hold people accountable in ways that they should. They see a feminization of culture where feeling has become the arbiter of experience.
When it comes to civil rights, Bobos have shown more interest in power imposed through culture (a view of things that emerged from the New Left in the 1960s which leads naturally to a focus on inclusion at the table of power) than to promoting a culture-neutral policy of resource sharing that allows all to draw on their interior resources to get ahead.
Bobos assume that they are conducting a righteous crusade against racism and other forms of oppression, particularly oppression of women. The right to decide for oneself about the appropriateness of abortion is central to the Bobo mindset. They discount the importance of religion if it opposes abortion. They lump all those on the right together as people who stand in the way of these values. Their intellectual self-confidence creates an unwillingness to consider the validity of other ways of viewing the world.
According to Brooks, the first book to highlight the Bobo phenomenon came out in 1983. Literary critic Paul Fussell, in Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, describes, in parallel to other American social groups, a group he calls “X people.” Says Brooks, paraphrasing Fussell, these people were “highly educated, curious, ironic, wittily countercultural. X people tend to underdress for social occasions, Fussell wrote. They know the best wine stores and delis. They have risen above the muck of mainstream culture to a higher, hipper sensibility.” By giving these people the X designation, Fussell suggests such people operate outside of class designation, and have created a way of life free of class assumptions. But forty years after Fussell’s book was published, we recognize he was describing the elite of our time, and captured the naivete of that elite for believing they had come up with some universal stance towards life that could only be designated by “X.”
The arrogance of this assumption is what stares us in the face right now, in October 2024. Bobo self-satisfaction has considerable responsibility for the anti-Left stance of the American Right. Bobos lost a grasp of the concerns of the blue-collar people who would never expect to go to university, who relied on trade unions to assure their future. That group has found solider ground in the rejection of the Bobo elite. Bobos do not know how to honor the values of those who find abortion an affront to their faith. Bobos speak of social justice, know how to be polite and pleasantly interactive with supermarket cashiers, and treat domestic workers with respect when they enter their homes. But they have no expectation of being genuine friends with such people, and do not reflect on the way they have alienated them.
Now Bobos have become something close to an identity group. David Brooks commented on this state of affairs in 2021 by pointing out how he himself had been misled by the Bobo phenomenon two decades earlier:
The educated class, in spite of its homage to openness, turns out to be more closed than elite classes of the past, because it hides behind the idea that anyone can get in if they have what it takes. In fact, it is rigged to advantage people who have learned their hidden cultural cues from elite schools and pretend these cues do not exist. Shamus Rahman Khan, whose book Privilege is a sociological study of St. Paul School in New Hampshire, emphasizes that these cues, signifying accepted codes of behavior, can only be absorbed through long association with elite institutions.
The right has its own elite. Traditional Reagan Republicans, who value their hard-earned individual wealth unapologetically and maintain their right to enjoy it, ally with a property-owning right-leaning gentry who hang onto family property over generations. But in our current alignment of mindsets, the elite of the right finds no common ground with the elite of the left, indeed they feel belittled by them. As a result, they tilt to Trump who at least delivers scorn to the group that derides them.
When Republicans look at Kamala Harris, they see someone whose trajectory has been assisted, indeed infected, by Bobo values. Their dislike of this set of assumptions is a huge obstacle to voting for her that operates separately from her objective merits. We see Kamala Harris attempting to shift this view of her by her choice of Tim Walz as running mate, and by playing down identity politics - not harping on the fact she is a woman and a person of color. Most importantly, she expresses her position on abortion as “your religious or ethical values might cause you to decide not to have an abortion, but the government should not be making this decision for you.” Last night on CNN, when asked by one questioner what faults she has, she spoke of herself as a “nerd.” She underlines that she wants to be a bridgebuilder.
But Kamala needs help. How can Bobos move beyond their insularity to create a cultural space where more people are honored and respected? As a highly intelligent segment of the population, surely they have the capacity to re-examine assumptions and propose a realignment of language and values. A key piece of this, according to Brooks, will be to shift the system away from over-valuing university education so that it confers dignity on vocational schools and service professions.
Whoever wins on November 5, we will have to grapple with this issue.
Every vote counts in this election
Twenty-eight days to go…
The upcoming presidential election in the US is likely to be one of the closest, if not the closest, in our history. This means challenges, recounts, and accusations of voter fraud are likely to be part of the picture. How will the system handle this? In 2020Joe Biden won the Georgia popular vote by 11,779 votes. This gave him all the Electoral College votes from Georgia. As we all know, Donald Trump tried to persuade the Georgia Secretary of State to “find” 11,780 votes. But the Secretary of State and the mechanisms of the state’s election system pushed back and delivered the state to Biden.
In 2000, George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes. In this case the Supreme Court stepped in to decide the outcome of the election.
A flurry of challenges to voting practices
According to the watchdog organization Protect Democracy, in the three years between the 2020 election and the end of 2023, state legislatures introduced over 600 pieces of legislation many of which seemed designed to upend non-partisan election practices by encouraging misinformation, disruption, confusion, and manipulation. Sixty-two of these became laws in 28 states.
In March 2024, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel resigned, largely due to her unwillingness to take action on supposed ballot fraud in response to former President Trump’s bidding. Her successor, Trump protégé Michael Whatley, with co-chair Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump, took over with a declared intention to increase “election integrity” lawsuits and monitoring.
Since then, we have seen lawsuits in nearly half the states challenging various aspects of election practice.
Forcing election officials to remove voters from the rolls
An oft-declared area of Republican concern is that election officials are poorly performing the maintenance of voter rolls and allowing ineligible people to remain registered. This tallies with one of Donald Trump’s most common claims: that millions of non-citizen voters are voting in U.S. elections.
In Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Alabama, efforts have been underway to cull voter rolls in ways that have the potential to take the vote away from legal voters. According to the Washington Post, these lawsuits do not offer evidence of large-scale illegal voting. The one in Nevada has already been thrown out.
In Texas in late August 2024, Governor Greg Abbott announced that since 2021 over a million names had been eliminated from Texas’s voter rolls, including 6,500 “non-citizens.” This number included people who had moved, were deceased, or had felony records, as well as the 6,500 “non-citizens.” Of the “non-citizens,” less than a third had actually voted in the past.
Watchdog groups pointed out that both federal and state law require voter roll maintenance, so that this purging is a matter of routine, whereas the governor’s framing of this process as a protection against illegal voting could undermine trust in elections.
A key source of confusion, when it comes to “non-citizens,” is that non-citizens are able to get drivers’ licenses, and so their names appear as “non-citizen” in Department of Motor Vehicles records. So flagging legal voters as “non-citizens” can happen if information is outdated or someone checks the wrong box in error at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Texas is known to have made errors of this kind before. In 2019, the state cited 95,000 voters as “non-citizens” whereas after review many of the people identified on the rolls were found to be naturalized citizens. The scandal resulted in the resignation of the Texas Secretary of State.
“Releasing these numbers without context is a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate voters of color and naturalized citizens from exercising their rights to vote, which is particularly concerning given the upcoming election,” comments Savannah Kumar, a voting rights attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Kumar claims that the state invented the issue of widespread illegal voting as a tactic to intimidate people of color from voting, and “we’re seeing now that the state has to resort to spinning otherwise ordinary data to make it look like it’s addressing this invented problem.”
In Tennessee in June 2024, state officials warned over 14,000 suspected non-citizens that they could face penalties for voting illegally, based on data from the Department of Motor Vehicles. In this case at least 3,200 people – around 22% – responded saying they were citizens. Election officials ultimately agreed not to remove the others from the rolls, even if they didn’t respond.
In Alabama on August 16, 2024, the state’s Republican secretary of state, Wes Allen, identified 3,251 people on the voter rolls who had received a non-citizen identification number at one point from the Department of Homeland Security. Acknowledging that some of those people might have subsequently become naturalized citizens, he nevertheless designated all of them inactive voters unless they prove their citizenship, referring all 3,251 to the Alabama Attorney General’s office for further investigation.
A coalition of civil rights groups sent a letter to Allen on 19 August warning him that his actions violated the National Voter Registration Act, the 1993 federal law that sets guardrails on how states can remove people from the voter rolls. The letter says that any systematic efforts to remove people must be “uniform” and “non-discriminatory” and that the state can’t complete any mass removal program within 90 days of an election.
On September 27, 2024, the US Department of Justice sued the State of Alabama and its top election official for allegedly removing voters from its election rolls too close to the November election.
Mailed ballots, drop boxes, and drive-through voting
Meantime, on September 24, 2024, a panel of federal judges heard arguments in a case that could alter the rules for counting mail ballots in Mississippi. The implications for the election tally in Mississippi would be small. But the ramifications for all other states could make this a big issue.
Mississippi law currently allows mail ballots to be counted if they are postmarked on the date of the election or earlier and arrive up to five days after Election Day. Eighteen other states have similar laws. The Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party, and two individuals are suing in a federal court of appeals to change the law, arguing that votes must be in by Election Day in order to be counted.
Democrats and voting rights advocates say Republicans are looking for ways to throw out valid votes because Democrats have disproportionately embraced voting by mail. Republicans respond that they simply want to abide by the letter of the law and limit possibilities for fraud.
In Pennsylvania, a swing state that could decide the November 5 election, the Republican National Committee recently filed a lawsuit that seeks to disqualify mail ballots when their outer envelopes are not dated or are misdated, even if they arrive by Election Day.
Lawsuits in Michigan and Arizona to limit ballot drop boxes and drive through voting grow out of a common Republican complaint that in 2020 election rules were changed to accommodate needs during the pandemic. The lawsuits argue that such practices do not conform with state election manuals setting out rules for administering elections. The Arizona suit has already been thrown out. The Michigan case is still making its way through the courts.
Gates McGavick, senior adviser to Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, dismisses criticism of this and other suits. “The idea that widely-supported election integrity safeguards somehow constitute ‘voter-suppression’ is a far-left conspiracy theory,” McGavick said in a statement.
Absentee voting
Other suits pertain to rules around absentee voting.
In Michigan, the Republican National Committee has claimed a victory in a case over the rules governing the verification of signatures on ballot envelopes.
Although Michigan’s Secretary of State Benson has said the suit will not appreciatively change the way clerks validate signatures, the election watchdog group Protect Democracy suggests that the ruling could have an effect on election workers, who may now reject more ballots unfairly. Protect Democracy bases this possibility on a comparison it ran of the Georgia general election in 2020 and the two U.S. Senate runoff races the following January that showed a rise in rejected signatures that researchers attributed a spike of misinformation, largely coming from Trump, about how much cheating occurs among voters using mail-in ballots.
The special case of Nebraska
A related, but also unique, case of attempting to alter election practices has arisen in the state of Nebraska, which is one of only two states (the other is Maine), where the Electors for the Electoral College are allocated proportionally to the popular vote in the state, rather than according to the winner-take-all practice embraced by all other states.
Nebraska, which has five electoral votes, generally goes to the Republican Party in the popular vote. But Nebraska’s constitution stipulates that if there is a single Congressional district that goes to the Democratic Party, then one Electoral vote must be allocated to a Democratic Elector. Traditionally, Nebraska’s Second Congressional District has gone to the Democrats, and is likely to do so again this year.
Donald Trump and his supporters recently tried to persuade Nebraska Republican Gov. Pillen to call a special legislative session to change this allocation of Electoral votes. Pillen agreed to do it if he had the votes. But Republican State Senator Mike McDonnell refused to go along with a change before the 2024 election, killing the plan. McDonnell asserts that if Nebraska’s Electoral system is to be changed, this should happen through a state-wide process and a constitutional amendment.
Changing the way Nebraska participates in the Electoral College could have decisive impact on the November 5 election. If Vice President Harris were to win the so-called “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, she would need only one more Electoral vote to reach the required 270 Electoral votes she needs to win. Without that one vote, the election would be tied. In that case, the House of Representatives elects the president, with each state’s delegation getting one vote. Because Republicans generally control more state delegations, a vote in the House of Representatives would very likely go to Donald Trump.
What is going on with the Voting Rights Act?
Thirty-five days to go…
In my last blog, I got into the weeds of why the American voting system can favor a minority and currently favors Republicans. (In other words, how the Republicans won the presidential election in 2000 and 2016 even though they lost the popular vote.) Reader beware… this week we are delving into another complex matter relating to our electoral system.
Currently, we are seeing a concerted effort to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act or declare it unconstitutional. This endeavor ideologically connects with Republicans’ stated view that the role of the Federal government should be limited and should not be the source of favorable treatment towards particular groups. But in fact, a central tenet of Republican politics for decades has been to win elections by making it difficult for their opponents to vote. So this endeavor should not be passed over without further investigation.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a federal law created to assure that the right to vote cannot be denied on account of race. It enforces the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which stipulates “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Though the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, Blacks’ voting rights continued to be curtailed by state constitutions, poll taxes, literacy requirements, and intimidation. The Voting Rights Act addressed the continuing barriers to voting.
In 2013, the Supreme Court, in its Shelby County v. Holder decision, struck down the core stipulation of the Voting Rights Act. Section Five of the Act requires preclearance from the Federal government for any change of voting law or redrawing of district boundaries in districts that have had a history of voter suppression or racial discrimination. Section Four (b) lays out the formula for determining which jurisdictions are covered under Section Five. Shelby County v. Holder invalidated Section Four (b), with the result that Section Five no longer has any power. This was a signal to the legal system nation-wide that the Federal courts would no longer be the protector of voting rights, and that states therefore would be able to pass restrictive voting legislation. Since the Shelby decision, at least 29 states have passed 94 laws restricting voting. Some of these have been blocked by the courts, but every one of the 29 states now has at least one more restrictive law on its books.
The crippling of Section Five has made Section Two of the Voting Rights Act all the more important. Section Two outlaws “denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Section Two provides a mechanism for challenging maps and laws that have been enacted with a discriminatory purpose or impact.
Lawsuits relating to Section Two attempt to limit the Voting Rights Act in three ways: trying to remove the possibility for minority coalitions under Section Two, to restrict who can bring lawsuits under Section Two, and to make Section Two unconstitutional.
A Supreme Court ruling on Allen v. Milligan in June 2023 affirmed the power of Section Two. Leading up to this decision, in November 2021, citizens’ groups had sued the state of Alabama with regard to its new district map created in the wake of the 2020 census. In the new map, new district lines created only one district with a majority black population. The suit claimed that this diluted black Alabamans’ voting power. A District Court in Alabama found in favor of the suit, but it was appealed to the Supreme Court, which initially put a hold on the Alabama court order, leaving the new district lines in place for the 2022 election. The Supreme Court later considered the case in full and in June 2023 found 5-4 in favor of the plaintiffs, requiring a redrawing of Alabama’s district boundaries to make two black majority districts. In doing this, the Court affirmed Section Two of the Voting Rights act.
But at the time of the Supreme Court’s ruling on June 8, 2023, there were thirty-two active Section Two lawsuits proceeding in ten states.
In Arkansas last November a decision by the Federal Appeals Court of the Eighth Circuit held that voters and civil rights groups cannot bring claims under Section Two. Now only the U.S. attorney general can bring claims based on Section Two in the Eighth Circuit. This decision affects not only Black and minority voters in Arkansas, but also minority voters in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, given that the Federal Appeals Court of the Eighth Circuit court has jurisdiction in those states.
Republican officials are now trying to extend this decision beyond the Eighth Circuit. In Louisiana, their efforts have been denied by the Fifth Circuit court, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
Republican activists are also trying to remove the Section Two right of more than one minority group to club together in a district in order to create a majority of minorities. In Galveston County, south of Houston, Texas, neither the black nor Hispanic population on its own is enough to earn majority status in a district, even though these two groups together make up 40% of voters in the county. If minority-coalitions are deemed impermissible, then 40% of the population in the county will have no way to elect a representative who looks like them. New districting created districts that split the minority vote among several districts. The Texas court ruled this unconstitutional, and a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court confirmed this ruling, but in addition it asked the Fifth Circuit court to reconsider the case. Therefore, we don’t know right now what the ultimate outcome will be.
In Georgia, Republican officials are raising questions about the constitutionality of Section Two, arguing that the Voting Rights Act requires “inherently race-based remedies,” which, they argue, are not justified under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. This argument has been rejected in the Georgia court, on the basis of the “the Supreme Court’s Allen v. Milligan ruling mentioned above.
In Florida, Kansas, Missouri and Texas, Republicans have beefed up criminal penalties and fines for those who “assist voters.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last May introduced a $50,000 fine on third-party voter registration organizations if paid or volunteer staff who collect the forms have been convicted of a felony or are not U.S. citizens. As a result, some voter outreach groups have had to change their ways of doing business or cease altogether.
In Missouri an election law passed in 2022 bans compensation for people who register voters and stipulates that a person who helps more than 10 people register must be registered with the secretary of state’s office and must be a voter themselves. Failure to adhere to these requirements could lead to criminal penalties.
At the beginning of 2024, the Republican National Committee and the Georgia Republican Party intervened in a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s absentee ballot application deadline. The basis of their argument: the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional. This initiative did not succeed but is being appealed in Georgia’s Eleventh Circuit court.
According to the Brennan Center for justice, there is ample evidence that these laws affect communities of color at a high rate. Courts have indeed struck down some as racially discriminatory. Since the Shelby County ruling of 2013, gaps between turnout rates for white voters and voters of color have widened. The Brennan Center’s research also indicates there was a racially discriminatory purpose in passing these laws, giving the lie to the presumption in the Shelby County ruling that protections for minority voting are no longer needed.
As is noted in the Shelby County ruling, the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act can be reversed by Congress by passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore the Voting Rights Act to its full strength, and the Freedom to Vote Act, which would set nondiscriminatory baseline national standards for voting and elections.
Why does the American voting system favor Republicans?
Forty-nine days to go…
Last Tuesday, September 10, Vice President Harris and Former President Trump debated. Sixty-seven million Americans watched. In a flash poll taken right after the event, 63% of voters said Harris had the upper hand. Commented Peter Wehner of The Atlantic “I’ve never seen a candidate execute a debate strategy as well as Harris did.” Even Trump supporter Senator Lindsay Graham said the debate was a “disaster” for Trump, who took Harris’s bait every time, and towards the end lost the focus he had had at the outset.
Doing well in the debate was a necessary hurdle for Vice President Harris, but she cannot be complacent and is wise to continue to call herself the underdog. The election is now in a statistical dead heat.
A curious aspect to American voting is that even if Vice President Harris were to win the popular vote on November 5, this does not guarantee her an election victory. Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Al Gore in 2000, who both won the popular vote, demonstrated this. To be assured of victory, a Democratic candidate needs to have a 3-4% popular vote lead over their opponent.
Why does the American voting system favor Republicans?
A simple answer to this question is that Democrats tend to win by wide majorities in fewer districts, and Republicans tend to win by narrow majorities in a greater number of districts. In part this is because more Democrats live in densely populated cities on the two coasts, while more Republicans live in the more sparsely populated areas in the center of the country.
But there is more that can be said on this subject. It all goes back to the Electoral College, a body created by the US constitution in the late 18th century. Why do we have an Electoral College? The founding fathers were wary of giving a direct vote for the presidency to all voters, therefore they considered having Congress vote for the president (they had already decided that state legislatures would elect Senators, a practice that continued until the 17th Amendment was passed in 1912). The problem with having members of Congress elect the President, the founding fathers realized, was that the President would be beholden to the members of Congress who had voted for him. Therefore, it seemed better to select a special group of Electors who would vote for the President and then disband. The constitution stipulated that state legislatures would figure out how to select these Electors. If the Electors ultimately failed to choose a candidate, the House of Representatives would vote, giving a single vote to each state. A key point to notice in all of this is that the states were considered the most important unit in this process of decision-making.
Each state was assigned a number of Electors that equaled the sum of House members plus Senators they had. House members were elected in proportion to population. The Senate was composed of two members from each state. Thus, the two additional Electoral votes that came from the two Senators had a greater proportional impact on small population states over large population states. The upshot was that small population states – which were often Republican leaning – gained greater representation in the Electoral college.
Moreover, there are seven states whose population size allows them only one Member of the House of Representatives. Those seven states could have a population significantly lower than the standard number of people represented by a Member of the House. Since every state must have at least one representative, Members of the House of Representatives from these states represent fewer people than the members from other states.
In both these ways, states with a small population are over-represented in Congress, and they are over-represented in the Electoral College. And because such states cluster in the center of the country where Republicans predominate, Republicans are over-represented in Congress and in the Electoral college.
The Electoral College system evolved fairly quickly from its original form where state legislators chose the Electors, to an election by all voters where the electoral votes are distributed as a block to the winner of the popular vote in that state. (Only two states – Maine and Nebraska – have not opted to distribute their electors on a winner-takes-all basis.) For candidates, this system places great importance on winning a majority in strategic (i.e., large) states, where they will earn the allegiance of more Electors. Thus, the majority vote of individual states is a more important determinant of the race than the separate votes of all members of the population.
Moreover, the system reduces the focus of the election to a few key “swing” states that have large populations where the outcome for the electoral college could tilt either way. These states are generally agreed to be Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
Two recent Supreme Court rulings have also changed the character of American elections in the twenty-first century, tilting the balance towards wealthy donors and Corporations and away from marginalized groups who have more difficulty in voting.
Citizens United v Federal Elections Commission ruled in 2010 that Corporations can spend unlimited money on elections, overturning 100 years of precedent that the government has a role in creating restrictions to prevent corruption. The rationale for this decision was that limiting “independent political spending” from Corporations and other groups violates the First Amendment right to free speech. The 2010 ruling concluded that Corporations’ “independent” political spending, i.e., not tied to a particular candidate’s campaign, did not threaten corruption. The assumptions that such donations would be corruption free and transparent have both proven to be false. The result has been massive political spending and disproportionate influence of wealthy donors, Corporations, and other special interest groups, adding to an impression that the political system belongs to the wealthy. This situation has, moreover, a racist bias, and reinforces a racially-based wealth gap.
Secondly, On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court ruled with regard to one aspect of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The 1965 Voting Rights Act used a “coverage formula” to single out jurisdictions that should be required to get preclearance for changes in their system of voting. The preclearance process was a way to ensure that changes to a system of voting was not discriminatory. The 1965 requirement was to be temporary, to expire in five years, and to be applicable only to certain states. The requirement was then repeatedly extended by Congress, and in 1975 was extended to address voting discrimination against members of "language minority groups." The 2013 ruling said it was no longer constitutional to use the “coverage formula” to decide which jurisdictions needed preclearance.
As a result of the 2013 Supreme Court ruling, jurisdictions with a past history of discriminatory voting practices are no longer subject to special supervision when they make changes to voting practices. This has recently opened the way to many changes in voting rules that make it more difficult for those who have been traditionally marginalized to vote.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s claim that voter fraud prevented him from winning the 2020 election, we have seen a number of states tightening requirements to vote. Previously, signature matching was enough to assure the right to vote. Now a large number of states are requiring some ID, and twenty-one states are requiring photo IDs.
In Georgia, voters without driver’s licenses or state ID cards now must provide in their absentee ballot application a photocopy of another government-issued ID. This may be difficult to produce. And Texas now rejects a request for a mail-in ballot if the applicant produces a different ID than the one they provided when registering to vote.
These tighter controls, Democrats argue, have more impact on Democrats than on Republicans, because Democrats are more likely to lack driver’s licenses, and have more difficulties in getting to the polls.
Next week we will explore other actions state legislatures have taken recently to increase their power in deciding the outcome of an election.