For years, liberal Democrats have haughtily explained to Republicans that the GOP is on the cusp of becoming a permanent minority. Even speaker of the House John Boehner can find himself on the receiving end of lectures by preening leftists. President Barack Obama warned Boehner of the GOP’s impending presidential collapse just two days after the Republican party’s midterm triumph!
For all the talk about Republican weakness on the presidential level, there has been virtually no discussion of Democratic weakness in Congress, especially the House of Representatives.
Liberals often point out that Republicans have lost five of the last six popular votes for president. This is true, but not very meaningful. After all, if Al Gore and not George W. Bush had been elected in 2000, subsequent political history would have been entirely different. It is equally true, and much less specious, to point out that the Republican party has won control of the House of Representatives in 9 of the last 11 elections and the Senate in 6 of the last 11.
That is an impressive run in the House. As for the Senate, Republican campaigns have been hampered by bad luck or bad choice of candidates. In the 2010 and 2012 cycles combined, Republican mistakes ceded as many as seven seats to the Democrats. If the GOP had performed better in these races, the party might have won control of the Senate outright in 2012 and gained a filibuster-proof majority this year.
What accounts for the GOP’s success in the House and its potential in the Senate? The answers parallel the explanations for Democratic strength in the race for the presidency: It gets down to structure.
Democrats point out that, in presidential races starting in 1992, their party has consistently carried states totaling 242 electoral votes. That puts them well within striking distance of the 270 votes required to win. Moreover, states totaling 206 electoral votes are typically uncontested by Republicans. The last time a Republican presidential candidate campaigned in California, for instance, was 2000, when George W. Bush toured the Golden State late in the cycle. Analysts have largely deemed this a mistake, and no subsequent Republican nominee has repeated it. This cedes 55 electoral votes to the Democrats, an enormous number.
But something similar helps Republicans in the battle for Congress. In the House of Representatives, the GOP now unites white voters in the suburbs and rural areas; combined, these blocs are usually enough to yield a Republican House even when Democrats win the presidency, as happened in both 1996 and 2012. The problem for Democrats in the House is that their coalition, increasingly nonwhite and urban, is concentrated in deep blue districts. That gives the GOP a variety of paths to a House majority.
The problem for the Democrats is a combination of law and geography. The 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act require the creation of majority-minority districts whenever they can be drawn with reasonable lines. In effect, state legislatures are required to concentrate Democrats in a handful of districts, while dispersing GOP voters across the remainder. Meanwhile, the geographical distribution of the Democratic coalition reinforces the effect of the law. Outside the Deep South, Democratic voters tend to be densely packed into urban areas, making it harder to distribute them across many districts, even in cases where the law does not require a majority-minority district.
To see how this plays out, take Pennsylvania. It regularly votes Democratic for president, but not overwhelmingly so. More and more these days, the deciding votes come from Philadelphia County, whose Democratic margin is so great it overwhelms the increasingly GOP tilt of the rest of the state. And yet Keystone State Republicans still won 13 of 18 House seats in 2012 and 2014. The reason? The Democratic vote in the Philadelphia area is concentrated in just three congressional districts, which went at least 2-to-1 for Obama. Democrats also win the Scranton district and the Pittsburgh district, while Republicans get everything else. Statewide, it amounts to a Democratic presidential victory combined with a strongly Republican House delegation. If state Democrats were to take control of the gerrymandering process, they could mitigate the problem, but they would still be constrained by the Voting Rights Act and geography. It is just too hard for them to spread their votes around.
In the Senate, the story is different. Since the boundaries for Senate elections are the boundaries of the states themselves, neither the Voting Rights Act nor urban/rural political geography applies. Still, Republicans have an edge because they now dominate rural voters, who hold immense power in the upper chamber.
If “safe Democratic” states yield 204 electoral votes, they are only good for 32 senators. Meanwhile, “safe Republican” states are only good for 182 electoral votes, but provide 44 senators. That leaves 24 senators from 12 states that either side may win in presidential years. If both parties won all their safe seats, and they split the seats in contested states, we would see a GOP majority in the Senate of 56-44.
The advantage the GOP enjoys in the Senate is not as decisive as its edge in the House, as Democratic senators in red states have done a better job of holding on than their House counterparts. Still, liberal policy breakthroughs inevitably depend on Democratic senators’ going against their own constituents and running the risk of defeat. Obamacare would not have been passed by the Senate without the support of Democrats from states that have voted Republican for president since 1964; many Democratic senators who voted for it have since been tossed from office. And even now, after a decisive Republican victory that has snatched the majority from Harry Reid, he will still have to convince five Democrats from strongly Republican states to stick with him rather than defect to the GOP on issues like Obamacare and the Keystone pipeline.
Surely this must be bad for our government, some say. The Framers could never have intended our elections to produce such a muddle. Gridlock—as the Beltway pundit class assures us—is dangerous and un-American.
But this is not true! In fact, the Framers might celebrate these mixed electoral messages if they were with us today.
Before the American Revolution, many political philosophers held up Britain as a nearly ideal system of government. The British system balanced power among the monarch, the nobility, and the people. The idea was to prevent any one faction from upending another for its own gain. The Americans did away with this idea in 1776, when they declared it self-evidently true that all men are equal and that all power derives from the people alone.
The problem was that the American governing experience in the decade after the Declaration of Independence was disastrous. State governments were exquisitely democratic and utterly atrocious: Fractious majorities often controlled them, punishing political minorities, squabbling with other states, violating the treaty rights of loyalists, failing to support the federal government, and making a wreck of public finances.
After the failure of the Articles of Confederation, the Framers sought to retain the egalitarianism of the Declaration, but to inject the notion of balance. They did not empower a landed gentry to check the masses; all power would continue to flow from the people as a whole. Yet by dividing power among the branches of government—and within the legislative branch, between an upper and a lower chamber—and designing a different selection system for each, they created artificial distinctions within society. Power would still flow from the people, but it would travel to different branches of government, by different routes, at different intervals. Thus, the government would be balanced—like the British system—yet at the same time radically egalitarian. The people would rule, but no fleeting majority could get its hands on all the mechanisms of government at once.
That is not so far from what we have now. The rules of the game favor the Republican coalition for the House and Senate; they favor the Democratic coalition for the White House. Far from being a distortion of the constitutional vision, this is a realization of it.
And, indeed, we have seen this play out many times. The 30 years after the Civil War are often remembered as an era of Republican dominance, but Democrats almost always held one chamber of Congress. Republicans may have had an edge in pursuit of the White House, winning six of eight contests between 1868 and 1896, but Democrats had a corresponding edge in Congress. Even the New Deal era, from 1932 to 1952, has wrongly been remembered as a triumph for liberal Democrats. A conservative coalition in Congress decisively checked the liberals from 1938 onwards and sometimes had such an outsized majority that it passed bills over presidential vetoes.
To put it simply, our country is not a radical democracy run on a straightforward popular vote. The people experimented with something like that in the 1780s, and the Framers thought it an unmitigated disaster. So they built a republic in which, to acquire all the levers of governmental power, a party must build a big, broad, and durable majority, one vast enough to sweep up control of all the federal institutions, each with its own peculiar rhythms.
Right now, it appears no party is able to do that.
Jay Cost is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
