The Democratic Popular Vote v. Minority Rule

The Founding Fathers perhaps unwittingly created a system now being used by Republicans to impose minority rule over the majority of Americans.  Between the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate that gives small rural states a disproportionate amount of power over states with many multiples of their populations.  Odds are that come November, Democrats will win the popular vote for the seventh time in the past eight presidential elections.  If somehow Trump scores another Electoral College win, the question then becomes how much longer the majority of Americans will stand for rule by a minority party that makes no attempt to woe them and whose base openly hates them. The past suggests that at some point this situation will boil over and violence against the tyrannical minority can't be ruled out.  A safety valve would be a Democrat trifecta in November that allows some structural changes - two more states and voting right protections - that could blunt the rule of a self-centered minority.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the growing problem of minority rule in America.  Here are excerpts:

If Joe Biden maintains his steady lead in national polls over President Donald Trump through Election Day, Democrats will win the popular vote for the seventh time in the past eight presidential elections – something no party has achieved since the formation of the modern American political system in 1828….

Since…1828, no party has won the popular vote more than six times over any eight-election sequence. Democrats did that from the 1820s to the 1850s, Republicans did it from the 1890s to the 1920s and Democrats managed the feat again from the 1930s to the 1960s.

Republicans, of course, have won the presidency twice in this century while losing the popular vote. That only happened three times in the previous 211 years.

Since Trump’s strategy assumes another Electoral College win combined with a popular vote loss, a record- a record-breaking Democratic streak is, well, nearly a lock. And unless the Republican Party gets serious about expanding its narrow coalition to include nonwhite voters and urban areas, its presidential candidates will likely to continue to rely on an Electoral College advantage to win the presidency – until they lose and are forced to change.

But unfortunately, they have another, sinister option: hanging onto power by strengthening the institutions – not just the electoral college, but the U.S. Senate, the states, the federal courts – that allow for minority rule.

Republican heretic Geoffrey Kabaservice on this point: The Republican appetite for vote suppression ultimately springs from the lack of confidence in the popular appeal of its ideas. Otherwise you wouldn’t need to do that. … I think the party has not just given up on ever winning majority status, it has given up on trying to persuade people who are not already in the camp.

[M]ost observers consider it more likely that a unified Democratic government would pursue the election agenda the House passed in 2019 – and that former President Barack Obama recently endorsed in his eulogy for Rep. John Lewis. That would include approving a new Voting Rights Act, measures to ease registration and access to voting, limits on gerrymandering of congressional districts, constraints on unregulated political spending and potentially making the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico new states. (The House has already voted for DC statehood but has not addressed Puerto Rico.)

A trifecta Democratic government would also at least seriously consider abolition of the legislative filibuster, a goal Obama endorsed in those same remarks at Lewis’s funeral.

At some point the Democratic popular majority is going to reject being regularly consigned to the tender mercies of a GOP minority that’s mostly interested in fighting to protect its illicit power. And then you’ll see some Democratic radicalism for real.