Four features of our anti-democratic democracyīroadly speaking, there are four features of our system of government that make our democracy less democratic, many of them working in interlocking ways. This is how United States now finds itself barreling toward a legitimacy crisis. Republicans, meanwhile, take their unfair advantage and build on it by gerrymandering the states they control, using their Senate “majority” to fill the courts with Republican judges, and then using their control of the judiciary to bolster their own party’s chances in elections. (And, to be clear, the system would be just as anti-democratic if it put Republicans at a disadvantage instead.)
That means that a political coalition that is largely powered by voters in dense, urban areas - like, say, modern-day Democrats - are at a terrible disadvantage under this constitutional arrangement. But the framers did create a system that favors small states over large states. The country’s framers obviously could not have known that they were creating a system that would give Donald Trump’s party an unfair advantage over Hillary Clinton’s party more than two centuries later - and that would allow Trump to become president despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots in 2016. Under current political coalitions, that’s become an enormous advantage for Republicans.
It was rigged from the outset, quite intentionally, to favor small states. The phantom fears of a stolen election - fears that drove nearly 150 Republican lawmakers to try to invalidate Biden’s victory and that encouraged sitting United States senators to rile up a violent mob - would have been even more transparently ridiculous in a nation without the Electoral College.
Raphael warnock legacy tyranny free#
If the United States chose its presidents in free and fair elections - awarding the office to the candidate preferred by the voters - Donald Trump would have never become president and he wouldn’t have spent the last four years with the bully pulpit that comes with that office.Īnd Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from him would have been even more implausible if he was demanding that enough ballots be tossed out to overcome Biden’s 7 million vote lead in the national popular vote. This anti-democratic system deserves at least some of the blame for the violent siege of the US Capitol by a Trump-supporting mob last week. And yet Republicans nearly walked away with control of all three. Solid majorities of the nation, in other words, voted for a Democratic White House, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate. If a few thousand more voters had turned out for Perdue, Republicans would control the Senate. David Perdue, under the threshold that forced Perdue into a runoff election that he lost.
In November, moreover, Ossoff barely held his Republican opponent, former Sen. But the Democratic half will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half. When Senators-elect Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA) are sworn in, each party will control 50 seats in the Senate. Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesĪnd then there’s the Senate. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi speaks to the media after winning the House Democratic leadership election in Washington, DC, on November 30, 2016. If Republicans had picked up half a dozen more seats, they would have captured the House. Yet Democrats lost a dozen seats, and barely held on in a few others, with one race still uncalled. In the House of Representatives, Democratic candidates also received a clear majority of all ballots cast - 50.8 percent - and Democratic House candidates defeated their Republican counterparts by 3.1 percentage points in the national popular vote. If a total of 43,000 Biden voters in those states had not voted in the election, Trump would have won a second term under the rules laid out in our Constitution. Yet Biden’s margin of victory in three crucial states - Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin - was harrowingly close. Nearly 160 million Americans voted in the 2020 presidential election, and President-elect Joe Biden won over 81 million of these votes - winning a clear majority and defeating outgoing President Donald Trump by 4.5 percentage points in the national popular vote. The United States came within inches of an anti-democratic disaster in 2020.
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