Ruy Teixeria's webpage pointed me to an interesting article in Mother Jones this past week, on this very subject. The author, Steven Hill, writes:
...Yet practically no one is talking about it. Even though this bias undercuts any attempts by liberals and Democrats to gain control over the government, and will continue to do so for years to come, no matter how many volunteers Democrats mobilize or how much money they raise, these sorts of structural barriers are being ignored.
The most tragic example of how dangerous the anti-democratic spirit of the current electoral structure is, of course, the 2000 presidential election, which propelled George Bush into the White House, even though he lost by 500,000 votes. If your reading this blog, I doubt I need to refresh you of what a fiasco that has been.
The House of Representatives, is almost as bad, right now.
It turns out that there is a fundamental anti-urban (and thus anti-Democratic) bias with single-seat districts. The urban vote is more concentrated, and so it's easier to pack Democratic voters into fewer districts. As Democratic redistricting strategist Sam Hirsch has noted, nice square districts are in effect a Republican gerrymander because they "combine a decade-old (but previously unnoticed) Republican bias" that along with a newly heightened degree of incumbent protection "has brought us one step closer to government under a United States House of Unrepresentatives."
And the Senate has always been absurdly, undemocratic.
Yet the Democrats consistently win more votes for Senate than Republicans. The current 100 senators have been elected over the past three election cycles, dating back to the year 2000. According to Professor Matthew Shugart from University of California-San Diego, in those elections, over 200 million votes were cast in races choosing each of the fifty states' two senators. The Republicans won 46.8% of the votes in these elections -- not even close to a majority. The Democrats won 48.4% of the votes, more than the Republicans -- yet the GOP currently holds a lopsided 55 to 44 majority. In 2004, over 51% of votes cast were for Democratic senatorial candidates, yet Republicans elected 19 of the 34 contested seats.
...The GOP has been over-represented in the Senate in nearly every election since 1958, primarily due to Republican success in low-population, conservative states in the West and South. Not surprisingly, the Senate is perhaps the most unrepresentative body in the world outside Britain's House of Lords, with not only Democrats under-represented but only five of 100 seats held by racial minorities and only fourteen held by women.
As to the 2004 elections, Hill writes,
But has this stark reality of our political landscape made a dent in liberal or Democratic understanding of "what to do?" Hardly. Instead, moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party have been cannibalizing each other over the no-win debate about the base versus swing voters. Or else they have been fiddling to the latest fad about Lakoffian reframing.
How convenient, to think you don't have to engage in the hard work of enacting fundamental electoral reform, city by city and state-by-state, all you have to do is find better speechwriters and produce slicker TV ads and then the left can go back to its poetry nights.
It's hard to hold out much hope for the Democratic Party as long as it remains railroaded by structural biases built-in to our basic electoral institutions of which they appear to be blissfully unaware.
While I appreciate Hill's analysis, I think his tone in this article is somewhat more hopeless than is called for, and he certainly seems to gloss over the fact that Bush did clearly win the 2004 election (with all due respect to those that still believe in it was stolen in Ohio). Nevertheless, his analysis is fundementally accruate. There currently exists a strong bias in the system that favours somewhat the Republicans.
How should Democrats respond to this? Well, in a certain sense, Hill is right. We can't just shift our rhetorical positions somewhat and expect the chickens will suddenly come home to roost. It will require something much more fundemental, meaning either a realignment in our favour or a virtually new system of election (Dare I say it? The Constitutional Option?) :) One thing is almost certain, however, and that is that in both cases, it will require our siezing power and effecting capitalizing on that power in such ways as to elimate the structural bias of the opposition.
Which is the better choice? That, I suppose, depends on your perspective. The realignment option would by far be the easier option--relative to amending the constitution, that is. If you've never really taken a look at the cuurent coalitional structures of the parties, you might think there is not much the Democratic Party can do in this department. Actually, with a strong leader in power, it might not be as difficult as someone like Hill would imagine.
But from the stand point of civic responsibility, are we really doing the right thing for the generations after us? As a father of two small children, I worry sometimes about what kind of a country I'll be leaving behind for them. And I personally have a deep skepticism of any entrenched power--be it Liberal or Conservative (though I'd take Liberal as the lesser of two evils, of course). Eventually, a structural power bias will always lead to dysfunctional governance. "Absolute Power corrupts..."
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