Did you know? (Some important facts about American democracy in the year 2020)

Everyone knows that Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 despite losing the popular vote.

Losing the popular vote, in fact, by nearly 3 million votes.

That's what the Electoral College can do. That's the way our system of government works. Whether it's a good idea for our system of government to work that way is another matter. But consider first some other facts that I suspect are less well known.

In the United States, our government has three branches. At the federal level, Republicans control the executive branch despite having received fewer votes by a healthy margin. What about the other two branches?

Currently, in the Senate, there are 53 Republican senators and 47 members of the Democratic caucus (the latter includes 45 Democrats and two independents who caucus with them). Republicans therefore control the Senate.

Did you know that the 53 Republican caucus members collectively represent states with a population smaller by about 12 million than those represented by the 47 Democratic caucus members?

(Note: this uses 2019 census estimates, and is based on splitting into halves the populations of states represented by one member of each party, and assigning the full population to the appropriate party for states represented by two members of the same party.)

In the House of Representatives, thanks to the blue wave of 2018, Democrats hold the majority. Aggregating all House races in 2018, Democrats won the popular vote over Republicans by 8.6%. This was a good thing for the Democratic Party, because prior to the election it was estimated that Republicans would be favored to retain their majority even if they lost the nationwide popular vote by up to 5%!

This is the result of gerrymandering of House districts, which very disproportionately benefits Republicans overall. Importantly, this is also true at the state level; for example, in Wisconsin in 2018, Republicans maintained their majority in the state's House of Representatives by a whopping 63 to 36 seats despite losing the overall popular vote by 8%. This is just one example. Similar situations exist in some other states.

The third branch of government is the judicial branch. At the highest level, United States Supreme Court justices are appointed by presidents and confirmed by the Senate (both of which we've just established are currently controlled by a party with minority support). These judges, who have the final say on so many important issues that affect all Americans' lives, are supposed to be unbiased, nonpartisan arbiters of justice, but let's face it, we all know that isn't really the case.

After the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which has given everything I write about here extra importance, the makeup of the court is 5 justices appointed by Republican presidents, 3 by Democratic presidents.

Did you know that? Did you also know that in the last 30 years, the national popular vote for president, which is also effectively a popular vote for Supreme Court justices, has favored Democrats six times and a Republican just once?

If you have read this far, I'd ask you to just pause for a moment and think about these facts.

Were you aware of them?

Whether or not you were aware of them, do you think that most people know these things?

What does this all mean for our country's ability to function as a healthy democracy? Is it possible for a country to continue to have a functional democracy if a party that receives fewer votes over and over is nonetheless able to retain its hold on power? And therefore a minority of the population is able to continuously exert its will, with the power of the government behind it, on the majority?

I would contend that the answer is no. I would contend that a country where one party continues to succeed in doing whatever it can to consolidate power despite lacking popular support is on a path toward authoritarianism.

In a representative democracy, as we ostensibly have in the United States, when a party's positions become unpopular with voters, what is supposed to happen is that the party modifies its positions to try to once more appeal to a plurality of voters. The modern Republican Party is instead taking advantage of structural problems with our democracy to maintain a hold on power while continuing to push deeply unpopular plans like taking away people's health care, giving massive tax cuts and subsidies to giant corporations and the ultra-wealthy, and rolling back environmental regulations.

Most people see such actions as clearly bad. But let's say that you are a supporter of such actions. Can you not still see the problem? If a party that consistently has minority support continues to hold power and continues to enact policies that most people oppose, and appoints judges to the Supreme Court and lower courts who will hand down important rulings that most people oppose, more and more people will view the government as illegitimate. And if enough people view a government as illegitimate, how legitimate can the government even be?

There are, of course, arguments as to why it is actually a Good Thing that our system of government works this way. Why it is perfectly fine that a resident of Wyoming has approximately 68 times as much of a say in what the Senate (which passes laws that, and confirms judges who, affect everyone in the country equally) does than the say a resident of California has. Why it is perfectly fine that presidential candidates only have to try to appeal to voters in a select group of swing states, and voters who live in safe Democratic or safe Republican states have essentially no say through their votes in who is elected president. To evaluate whether these arguments are valid, I think it's useful to imagine whether any of the people making those arguments would even for a moment buy the same arguments if the roles were reversed. I think it's a safe bet the answer is no. (Yes, different people might then be making those arguments, but the arguments wouldn't hold any more water.)

Anyway, what the arguments essentially boil down to is that empty land should have votes. Or, to be less polite but more accurate, that rural white voters should have a bigger say than anyone else in what the government does.

I can also imagine a potential objection: someone might say that these factors just happen to favor Republicans right now, but that's just the way the cards fell and the same factors could favor Democrats in the near future, so we shouldn't upend our system of government to fix this. To which the response is emphatically no: these issues have been getting worse and worse in the same direction for most of my lifetime, and there has been no point in remotely recent history when there was a remotely comparable imbalance in the other direction.

The more imbalanced things get, the harder it becomes to fix the imbalance. Somewhere along the line you reach a tipping point beyond which you simply don't have a democracy anymore.

I'm not going to use this post to go into detail about what could or should be done to fix these problems. I just want everyone to be aware of them. A lot of people recognize that our government is broken but don't really know the reasons why. Lazy "both sides" media reporting leads a lot of people who aren't as tuned in to politics to think the problem is just that the two parties can't work together.

If you look at what's been happening over the last few decades - with key events including the Supreme Court handing the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000 when it was later shown that a statewide Florida recount would have resulted in Al Gore being president, and then years later the stealing of a Supreme Court seat by the Republican Senate when that seat was vacated with almost a year remaining in President Obama's second term - I don't think that's it at all.

So if the information in this post is new to you, remember these graphs. If someone you know is talking about how broken Washington is but they don't seem to really know why, take the opportunity to educate them. If Republicans are saying that Democratic plans for things like the Supreme Court or the Electoral College or Washington, DC statehood are unfair, think of whether that's true in the context of the information presented here. A lot of things will be changing in this country in the coming years. I hope that we all take what is happening now as a life-long reminder to never take our democracy or our fundamental rights for granted. We have to move forward as engaged and informed and ever vigilant citizens if we want America to live up to its ideal as a land of liberty and justice for all.