On the heels of some controversial or downright terrible decisions from the majority conservative court, courtesy of a stolen Supreme Court seat in 2016, it is now crystal clear that every branch of our government is being run by the minority. While progressive ideas remain wildly popular, conservatives have pulled off a complete coup, overrunning the majority of voters. This conservative agenda, this conservative court, are NOT what the American people voted for—and here are the numbers to prove it.
Let’s start with Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. That vote total means that Democrats have won six of the last seven popular vote totals, something no party has done in the United States since 1828. And yet, we ended up with George W. Bush in 2001 and Donald Trump in 2016. Let’s repeat: Democrat ideas and values have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. That’s a blistering statistic, unprecedented. And yet … here we are.
Now let’s examine the vote totals for the United States Senate. In 2016, Senate Democratic candidates received 23 million more votes than their Republican competitors. Let that number sink in: it is a staggering majority. In fact, Senate Democrats have won the majority of voters in six of the last nine elections. Shortly after the election, Daily Kos political director David Nir broke down exactly how unjust our current system really is:
In other words, Senate Democrats have gotten more than 23.5 million more votes than Republicans. In a head-to-head election, that would amount to a crushing 59-41 margin in percentage terms. But due to a grave injustice designed to perpetuate the power of slave-holders that’s been perpetrated down the generations, the party that’s earned a massive majority of support from the American public is in the minority in the Senate.
Yes, the Constitution was designed this way, but it’s a bad design—one that leaves the country hostage to the views of a tyrannical minority. Combined with the similarly unrepresentative Electoral College and a House that’s been gerrymandered beyond recognition by Republicans, the GOP has an undemocratic hammerlock on America.
Nir wrote that in January 2017 and as we can see now in June 2018, the tyrannical minority warnings were spot on. We remain committed to a system of governance that has its basis in white supremacy. As noted in Buzzfeed in 2016, the Electoral College continues to dilute minority votes.
According to FiveThirtyEight, “The ‘Voter Power Index’ is the relative likelihood that an individual voter in a state will determine the Electoral College winner.” Swing states that could potentially tip the election (such as New Hampshire, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina, and Michigan) have high “Voter Power Index” scores, whereas states with large Democratic or Republican majorities (such as Wyoming, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Maryland and Massachusetts), are at the other end of the scale.
Our analysis found that every registered white non-Hispanic voter in 2012 has the influence of about 1.05 registered voters. For registered Asian voters it was just 0.58, and for Hispanics it was 0.87.
The proof is in the pudding. This is how you end up with a nearly all-white, all-male minority party in control of the government, despite an increasingly diverse electorate overall. The current system gives wildly disproportionate power to rural, mostly white states across the middle of the country at the expense of all states with major populations of people of color. This is the broken system that allowed Mitch McConnell to remain in power. It allowed Mitch McConnell and his coup conspirators to steal a Supreme Court seat, securing a conservative wing of the court that will damage this country for generations. And on the day they handed down some of the most misguided and discriminatory policies, how does Mitch McConnell reach out to all Americans? With a juvenile troll on Twitter.
If there is one bright light, a new analysis by the New York Times shows that the Democratic turnout in primaries this year has sharply increased, a promising sign that Democrats may be able to beat back the ruling minority in the fall. Click play to see just how much enthusiasm Democratic voters have shown at the polls thus far in 2018.
The rest is going to be up to you, dear readers. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. It is up to each of us to get involved in ways large and small. Find a candidate and donate your time and your money. Phone back, donate, fundraise, register voters, knock on doors, put out those yard signs. Take it all back and then let’s fix this broken system, starting with throwing the Electoral College in the trash where it belongs.