REAL ORIGINALISM: ONE TO ONE

“Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail…”

–Alexander Hamilton, re: the Senate

Part 5 of a multi-part series.  You can read Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 here

Like most imbalances in our own bodies, violations of the “one person, one vote” bedrock of democracy are its silent killer, maladies that make the Founders and their invention look suddenly old and frail. Or, more accurately, make us look like their elder-abusing children for not taking better care of their legacy, leaving completely fallow what, in their genuine wisdom, was designed to be open-ended so as to be able to adapt to change.

At the time of the Constitution’s signing, Senators representing as little as 29% of the population could potentially block the will of the rest.  That sounds pretty anti-democratic right out the barn door; that said, the Senate was just supposed to be a lordsian legislative speed bump for the exuberance of the all-powerful (people’s) House, and so it was, at first, a veritable pimple on the face of democracy. But this was before the filibuster–which the Founders opposed, and we allowed; before voter suppression, which they opposed (at least for the eligible population) and we allowed, in part by allowing the filibuster, which became the go-to for Southern Democrats to block civil rights legislation. It was before the Supreme Court decided to unconstitutionally seize ultimate and arbitrary authority over all governments at every level, which certainly was not in the blueprint when the Founders made the Senate (not the House, their golden child) the only guardrail against Justice-For-Life autocracy. And it was before the Industrial Revolution, which, to their undoubtable shock, spindled and mutilated our founding document before the spirit of their eyes, a rending we, as their corporeal descendents, are obligated to repair, smoothing it back out to restore it to its former majesty.

To everything we’ve proposed in Parts III and IV and are about to propose below, the authoritarian right and its supporters in the corporate media will soon respond0 by wailing like sirens about “Constitutional crisis,” but we’re already in a Constitutional crisis: we’ve been in one for more than 200 years, a crisis in which political bankruptcy threatens to mimic its economic counterpart, playing out first (very) slowly, then all at once, or as Warren Buffet often says when asked about the prevalence of class warfare, “yes, and my class is winning.”

When we combine the effects of the Industrial Revolution, the filibuster, voter suppression, and corruptions to be further discussed, we learn, as shown below, that whereas in the founders’ time, fewer than a third of the population could veto the preferences of the rest–and only on some issues–today, as little as 2% of the population can block the will of the other 98% of us at every turn, and it doesn’t even have to be the wealthiest 2%, though that clearly helps:

What to do about this state of affairs, which, when you think about it, is not a whole lot more democratic than Xi’s China, assuming he doesn’t really make most decisions entirely on his own?

Step One: The Litmus Test

The filibuster must go. Period. Perhaps we can initially–out of absolute necessity only–accept compromises like the “talking filibuster” (which would require those deploying this weapon of democracy destruction to let the American people watch them read children’s stories on the Senate floor while America burns), or better yet, put the burden of this sabotage of the democratic process fully on the minority by requiring 41 votes to maintain the filibuster instead of requiring 60 votes to break it as is now the case. The majority would be able to call votes to close debate at any time as many times as it wants to and if, at any time, there weren’t 41 Senators on the floor voting to continue talking, the filibuster would be broken, which would essentially require all filibuster supporters, or at least the vast majority, to live, eat, and sleep in the Senate 24/7/365 to block the majority’s legislation, effectively ensuring that only legislation they feel most passionately opposed to gets filibustered, encouraging them to seek compromises they can live with on the rest, which has been the American way for all but the last decade or two of our history as a nation.

But when defending democracy as envisioned by its founders against tyranny imposed by a minority that’s repeatedly and successfully defied democracy in a democratic system, only those who want to lose that fight would fail to observe and learn from the opposition’s tactics.  Just as Trump has taught us that politics is important, democracy is fragile, and  anyone can become president–a wake-up call that’s resulted in an incredible expansion in the diversity of candidates running for and winning office, and could ultimately save us from the Tragedy of the Hourglass haunting the greatest existential crisis (climate change) in human history–we need to learn from fundamental GOP strategy at every level.  For decades, Republicans have made uncategorical, implacable opposition to abortion (a position nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose) a litmus test for those who want to represent them on the ballot for federal office.  And lo and behold, Dobbs. Similarly, and QED, unequivocal opposition to the filibuster must become a litmus test for representing the Democratic/Democracy Party.

Why? Because:

  • As clever and comfortable as the reforms proposed above are, they ultimately still allow 2% of the population to indefinitely thwart the will of 98%
  • Anyone who has observed the increasing extremism of the Republican right knows that’s exactly what it will do, by any means necessary.
  • Above all, in the current and foreseeable environment, being able to react swiftly to increasingly rapid change is going to be key to maintaining the stability that requiring supermajorities in favor of any bill has been credited for providing in the past, at a minimum by preventing problems from accumulating like underbrush, just waiting for the sparks of lazy demagogues to ignite into conflagration.

In our world, change is the new stability, and the destruction of democracy–by the distraught partisans of both left and right–in favor of strongmen who will “get things done” will be the cost of failing to realize this.

Beyond the filibuster, the principle of “one person, one vote” has been so corroded over the centuries that it’s hard to know where to begin.  The Senate? Well, yes, but at least its imbalances were at least partially intended.  The gerrymandered House?  Only one founding father, Elbridge Gerry, was good with that, and “gerrymandering,” a classic example of American invention and use of political language to tar and feather a position considered inimical to our ideals, was so ridiculed and attacked by others that it quickly sputtered and, while never eliminated, for most of our history it’s been a disease whose periodic local outbreaks served mainly to remind us, like the measles, not to let our democracy’s guard down further.

It’s true that the combination of advanced mathematics and algorithms used today to flood the zone, at all levels and across state lines, have produced a Kevlar-layered, Russian doll superbug version of the tactic to which a wide spectrum of political antibiotics will need to be applied.  But at a fundamental level, like most algorithms and viruses, it still has the vulnerabilities it was born with, which can be exploited to produce the exactly the opposite of its intended effects, as we’ll discuss–to the point where it can be tempting to let the authoritarians lead with their chins trying to use it.

Back In The Day

No, beyond the filibuster, any discussion of a true return to “one person, one vote” must begin with surgically excising the ugly scar and periodically re-opened wound–on the face of our democracy, no less–that perpetually undermines our credibility as democracy’s greatest champion, slandering and corrupting the memory of the founders even as it violates one of democracy’s two fundamental promises as surely as voter suppression violates the other.

We speak, of course, of the embarrassment that is the Electoral College.

It should tell us all we need to know that there’s no institution authoritarians impute to “the wisdom of the founders” more frequently than the EC.  And that no element of the Constitution has been subject to more attempts to reform or eliminate it by we, the people’s, elected representatives, while we, the people, would like to see it eliminated in proportions (63%-37%) that exceed the greatest landslides in modern American history, including more than four in ten Republicans.

“Wisdom of the founders” is a phrase we should honor with the same reverence religious adherents ascribe to the historical leaders of their faiths, as a necessary element that binds us together. To “credit” the Electoral College as it’s been implemented to our forefathers is no less a calumny than blaming Jesus Christ for the Crusades, the Inquisition, or The Troubles.  In fact, the “wisdom” EC supporters typically believe it reflects, the desire to protect the smaller states from being overrun by the large ones (from which they were already protected, far more effectively, by the Senate), forcing presidential candidates to seek support from every state, not only has nothing to do with the originalist truth, but isn’t even in true in practice.  In the 2016 election, for example, more than half of the campaign stops by the top presidential and vice presidential candidates were in only four states, nearly nine in ten were in the twelve so-called “battleground states,” and none of the candidates paid so much as a single visit to more than half the states in the country, including nearly all of rural America.

Ironically, the modern institution the original Electoral College most resembles is a much more popular product of modern reform: the independent redistricting commission, which exists to prevent partisan gerrymandering, albeit primarily in Democratic states. Like these commissions, the EC was intended to be a compromise between two groups, two schools of thought we still have with us today, call them the populists and the elitists, or the plebeians and the patricians.

The problem Constitutional delegates were wrestling with was how to elect the president, whether by direct vote of the people or by vote of Congress. The populists wanted we, the people, to elect the president directly because they feared that Congress could be corrupted by “cabals” (i.e. political parties) and foreign interests (smart people, those populists).  The elitists wanted Congress to decide; they feared that because the country was so widespread, because candidates were going to emerge from all parts, and because communication systems were still so primitive, citizens wouldn’t be able to know the candidates well enough to make an informed choice.  A not unreasonable position then and, let’s be honest, for different reasons, not necessarily any less out of place today.  When I was growing up, for example, I won a seat as student representative to my local school board, in part because students in another high school I’d plastered with my signs mistook me for a student in their school with a similar name and voted for me in droves (namaste, Madison LaFollette–you’re the reason we’re here today).  And since we started writing this piece, George Santos, anyone (aka the perfect casus bene to crack down legislatively on lying in politics1)?

In any case, the 18th century compromise between these two worldviews was to set up a completely independent group–members of Congress were not allowed to be part of it–the Electoral College, to which each state would send electors.  The electors would put forward the most popular candidate(s) emerging from the popular vote in their states, and the College as a whole would vote.  If no candidate got a majority, the decision would be kicked to Congress to decide.  Anticipating that there would be four or five major candidates in each election, rather than the rise of political parties, most Constitutional delegates assumed it would be rare for any candidate to get a majority, that the EC would end up, in effect, as a glorified nominating convention, and Congress would end up deciding among the top candidates, but at least those candidates would have been screened by an independent body, reducing, if not eliminating, the possibility that a Manchurian candidate would end up occupying our highest office (LOL).

By the fourth presidential election, in 1800, it was clear the system wasn’t working as planned.  Thanks to the rise of parties, elections had come down to one-on-one contests that, in fact, the Electoral College was likely to decide every time.  At the same time, parties were also ensuring that voters in every state would at least know who their nominee was and his main position on the issues, obviating the need for an intermediary body to make an informed choice.  In other words, the entity commonly referred to today as “an 18th century appendix,” i.e. useless for anything but causing severe existential crises from time to time, was already obsolete by 1800, and btw, that’s a comparison grossly unfair to the appendix.

The same 1800 election had created (or compounded) the need to amend the Constitution anyway (hence the 12th amendment), which was the perfect opportunity to jettison an entity like the Electoral College that had outlived its usefulness.  But in an early proof of the right’s truism that it’s a lot harder to get rid of a government agency than to create one, the South had other ideas.  Already concerned a rising tide of abolitionism coincident with a rise in Northern population represented a threat to slavery, Southerners saw the EC as a potential electoral shield.

To a Southern state, the advantage of presidential elections decided by an Electoral College, rather than a direct vote, were obvious: the number of electoral votes each state was provided was based on its population, all of its population, including slaves, even though slaves could not vote. Whereas, because the last thing they wanted to do was give their “property” voting rights, a directly elected president would dilute their power and ability to continue–and even expand–what would soon be euphemistically known as “the peculiar institution.”  Of course, the North was well aware of this as well and, in a sick parody of the once vaunted capacity of our country to make deals and compromise, agreed slaves would count as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining each state’s electoral votes.

Thus, as Yale Sterling Professor Akhil Reed Amar states, “It is the 12th Amendment’s Electoral College system, not the Philadelphia Framers’, that remains in place today” and that system was specifically created to allow the protection of slavery by the Southern states.  This being the case, by the previously cited definition of “amendment” in the founders’ dictionary, the true originalist–and democracy fundamentalist–position should be that the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery, wiped out the Electoral College with it, and any election decided by this body rather than the so-called “popular” vote–we just call it the vote around here–is unconstitutional.  Put another way:

  • The infamous 3/5th rule is still in the Constitution, never directly amended
  • The 3/5th rule is nonetheless considered defunct, superseded by the Emancipation Amendments.
  • The 3/5th rule was created to justify the ongoing existence of the Electoral College
  • If the 3/5th rule is defunct, so is the College

But for a real originalist, there’s really no need to parse around on this. :::founding hatchetman lowering the boom (again):::

Yes, that’s Al Hamilton, arguably the most authoritarian and anti-democratic of the leading founders, champion of strong central government and the Supreme Court, and we don’t even have to hold a santeria seance to know this is pretty close to exactly what he’d say.  In writing about the Senate, an entity that, opposed though they were to each other in so many other ways, both he and James Madison despised, Hamilton couldn’t have been more direct (in a series of papers that otherwise seek, on so many occasions, to wrap up opposition in seemingly endless strands of silk), stating:

“[The Senate’s] operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common-sense.”(emphases mine)

The only reason the subject of Hamilton’s flaming ire (there’s more; much more) is not the Electoral College is because, as unlikely as most founders believed it would be for the EC to actually decide the presidency, it would have been unimaginable to them for it to make such decision in opposition to the popular will–it was precisely in cases where opinion was closely enough divided for this to be possible that the Constitutional delegates were sure Congress, specifically the House, the most democratically representative body, would end up making the call.

In 1950, a bipartisan supermajority in the Senate voted to eliminate the EC, but the effort died “a bitter death” in the House; in 1969, a bill to eliminate it passed the House by a huge bipartisan majority, 338-70, only to die, ironically/not ironically, at the hands of a filibuster in the Senate.  In 1979, yet another bill to kill it fell just short in the Senate again, 51-48.  Overall, there have been more than 700 bills introduced in the House or Senate to get rid of it over the centuries.

So, short of walking the tightrope of real revolution, maybe it can’t be killed, but if not, it needs to be fixed, neutered, so it can’t reproduce.  And a movement to do just that, the National Popular Vote Compact, under which, once states representing a majority of the current electoral votes become part of the compact, pledges every member state to pledge all its electors to the popular vote winner of the election (thus ensuring the popular vote winner will always be the Electoral College winner as well) is closer to success than the corporate media likely has you believing. States representing 195 electoral votes have made this commitment, it’s passed at least one chamber in states representing another 88, unanimously in committee by states representing 27 more, received a hearing (not an insignificant step, as followers of the US Senate know) in states representing an additional 132, and has at least been introduced in every state.

Of course, it’s widely predicted that even if/when it reaches this threshold, the radical right-wing Supreme Court will declare the NPVC unconstitutional, rather than the Electoral College, which actually is.  Given this is the same Supreme Court seeking to find a way to insert, like an ichneumon’s ovipositor, the independent state legislature doctrine into constitutional law, a doctrine that, at its most extreme, essentially says state legislatures can do whatever they want where elections are concerned, striking the NPVC down–which will have been passed by these same legislatures–will prove, if there’s even the slightest remaining penumbra of doubt, that this “Court” is nothing but a group of partisan hypocrites and hacks, hardly the finest legal minds in the country they’re alleged to be, nor citizens who should have even so much as an advisory role in a true representative democracy or constitutional republic.

In fact, as we’ll argue in Part VII (on top of Part III), Supreme Court support for this doctrine should be considered tantamount to a declaration of non-violent war (the only kind anyone can win), and in any case, yet another reason why, even more than the filibuster, neutralization of the Supreme Court by any non-violent means necessary, should be a litmus test-level priority for any candidate running for office in the Democratic/Democracy Party.

If, nevertheless, this sounds like a struggle that, like Ukraine’s against Russia, could last much longer than we have time to save democracy, let alone the planet, let us suggest a shortcut more directly within our control, one that no part of the GOP nor the Supreme Court can do anything about.

The Movement Movement

In Macbeth, Shakespeare’s classic study of the emptiness and destructiveness of power-seeking for power’s sake (a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing), the anti-hero protagonist is given a Sibylline prophecy that reads to him like a guarantee and, in turn, gives him what proves to be fatal overconfidence in his security despite the evil he knows he has committed to attain his position. The three witches who initially preyed on his weakness, insecurity, and ambition to convince him to kill the rightful king and assume the throne, reassure him that he “shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him.”

Already ensconced in a castle on seemingly impregnable Dunsinane Hill, guarded on all sides by a thicket of skilled archers, Macbeth is convinced he’s destined to rule for life since, after all, it’s just “common sense” that trees can’t walk from one place to another.  What he doesn’t realize is that his arch-enemy, Macduff, well-aware of the difficulties involved in attacking Macbeth’s stronghold, has instructed each of his men to cut off a branch from Birnam Wood en route and use it as camouflage against the archers.  In this way, Macbeth realizes, too late, that Birnam Wood has, in fact, come to his Dunsinane castle and he’s doomed.

Little did Shakespeare know that, just as the Wizard of Oz has come to be viewed as a political allegory about late 19th century monetary policy, someday Macbeth could come to be viewed as a road map for the destruction of American authoritarianism, with Texas governor Greg Abbott as Macbeth, the state of Texas as Dunsinane, and the corporate media as the witches. Or substitute any Republican governor and state of your wishes.

Why Texas?  Well, of course, there’s the principle of the thing.  Texas was considered the most difficult state to vote in 2020, then decided it wasn’t hard enough and passed a sweeping set of additional voter suppression measures last year.  In addition, as we’ve previously written, TX is:

One of six states plus DC in which Black and Latinx voters are in the majority, yet seemingly constitutionally incapable of electing a Democrat to a single statewide office, a state of affairs made all the more remarkable by the fact that our other majority-minority states are California, Hawaii, Maryland, Nevada, and New Mexico, in all of which virtually every statewide office is held by a Dem (Maryland’s governor being the exception that proves the rule).  There could not be a better casus belli for both the severity and impact of suppression than this contrast.

Democrats and the media explain this in ways that border on suggesting Black and Hispanic/Latinx Texans are a different species than in the rest of the country (“not monolithic” is the current euphemism of art)–including neighboring New Mexico?–rather than speak the extremely uncomfortable truth, that 156+ years and counting after Black Texans were the last to learn they were no longer slaves, more than a year after the end of the Civil War), Texas has become, if not remained, the world’s largest plantation, at least where the most fundamental element of American identity is concerned.

This is the state, not Virginia, is where the first slaves were brought to America, nearly a century before the English landed at Jamestown, it’s the only state that fought two wars in defense of slavery, it enshrined in its state Constitution that contra Jefferson, all men are not created equal, not to mention embedding the mother of all sundown laws, if such laws have mothers, specifying in the Constitution that free Blacks were not permitted to enter the state and that no Black slave could be freed unless he/she were immediately removed outside state lines. It was the last state to surrender in the Civil War, continuing to fight a month after Appomattox, the last place Black slaves were freed, more than a year after the end of the war, and even after that, some so-called “masters” continued to hold “their” Blacks in bondage for months, even years more, not that those who were freed has it much better, subject as they were to a series of legislative “Black Codes” designed to imitate and recreate the conditions of slavery as closely as possible, state with a statue with this written on it on the grounds of their Capitol.

Perhaps because, like the Germans in WWI, they felt they were never actually defeated in battle (indeed they won their last fight), they more violently and successfully resisted and impeded Reconstruction than any other state, and between lynchings and executions, the state has been far and away responsible for the most sanctioned killings of people of color in the country, not to mention some of our history’s most heinous and/or outrageous hate crimes (James Byrd, Sandra Bland, the El Paso Walmart mass shooting, etc. etc. etc.).  Note that we’re just very lightly brushing the surface here, and the state’s treatment of Latinx and Native people has been scarcely, if at all, any better. Ask a few Hispanic kids attending rural community colleges in south Texas (where Trump did “surprisingly well”–and, tellingly, Abbott did not) what they saw in their 2020 pre-election social media feeds, for example.

This past summer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian government, and its armed forces faced a choice.  They had fought the Russians to a standstill and had won the expectations war many times over.  With a free flow of weapons finally pouring in from the US and its allies, they could have executed the military version of football’s prevent defense, but they looked over the horizon (and who knows, maybe they knew something about American football) and knew that if they were ever going to get their country and democracy back, they had to do more.  They had to take Vladimir Putin’s most prized and heavily fortified conquest in the war to date, the southern provincial capital of Kherson.  They knew the costs would be horrific, especially if they failed, which would play into Putin’s hands on every level.  But they needed to Показати де раки зимують.2  And they did.

What we need to do is child’s play by comparison.  Liberate Texas.  That doesn’t mean turn it into a Democratic state, and it doesn’t just mean hammering the online Act Blue button to spend more money (the governor’s race this fall was the most expensive in history, the Democrat outspent the Republican, and still lost by 11 points).  It does require a Ukrainian level of commitment from the Democratic Party and the rest of us, applying, like Ukrainians, every creative and cognitive brain cell we can deploy, every minute of time–worth so much more than money in politics–we can spare.

And a Ukrainian level of persistence–they’ve been fighting to free themselves from Russia for centuries; we can’t put in the effort for one cycle and go back to business as usual if we don’t succeed, nor can we listen to the “wise men” in the party who say it can’t be done–if they weren’t themselves predicting the quick fall of Kyiv last February, they’re all close to multiple someones who did (while we publicly and repeatedly went the other way).

Ukraine is hardly the first country whose fight for self-rule and democracy we’ve aided; on the other hand, there are many more countries we haven’t, which makes it natural to ask: why Ukraine?  And the answer is that we see Ukraine as being on the front lines of a worldwide struggle of democracy against autocracy at a pivotal point in that contest.  We see failing to aid the Ukrainians in every way possible as a prelude to a direct confrontation with the Russians over the Baltic states or Poland while Russian ally China launches an invasion of Taiwan (which produces more than half of the world’s computer chips), and dictators the world over are emboldened to crack down on dissent within and without their borders, launch their own adventures, and worse. Liberals don’t want to talk about it, but the domino effect in the Cold War was real.   Is it still?  It should take only a few minutes of listening to our country’s right-wing autocrats, Putin’s fifth column, talk about Zelenskyy and Ukraine to know the answer.

Why Texas, besides the principle of the thing?  The over-the-horizon answer is similarly ominous: when authoritarians are on the march, democrats have to win every election–authoritarians only have to win one.  But the reason right in front of us is more upbeat: just as a Ukraine victory has the potential to break the back of the Russia-China axis, fully free and fair elections in Texas that make the state as competitive as it should and could be will break the back of the Electoral College, whether the National Popular Compact ever succeeds or not.  How? Because it brings with it such a haul of electoral votes–40 in 2024, up from 38 in 2020, second only to California, making TX a true swing state will make it highly unlikely that anyone will be able to win it except the “popular” vote winner, and if you’re a true blue fundy for democracy, you don’t want to just contain the threat of fascism–you want to crush it.

Besides, a little analysis we recently conducted shows it’s really not as out of reach as you might think.  We took a look at the 2020 presidential election and asked: what would’ve happened if Black and Hispanic voters turned out at the same rate as whites, even if they voted for Trump at the same rate as they did on Election Day.  The results of this little thought experiment (and the assumptions and sources behind it) are below:

Sources: US Census Bureau, The State of Texas (Comptroller), The Texas Politics Project (UTexas-Austin), The Texas Tribune, The Brennan Center, UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative, Washington Post, AP VoteCast

Of course, it’s highly unlikely, in a state as committed to suppressing minority voters as Texas has been for decades, that those additional Black and brown voters would be as inclined to vote for the GOP as those who succeeded in “overcoming” the (real) border wall Republicans placed in front of them.  Rural Hispanic voters, for example, are more conservative than Texas Hispanics in general.  Who do you think was better represented in Decision 2020, the Hispanics living in the lineless, in-n’-out counties where the Texas GOP needs to roll up huge numbers to overcome the urban vote, or the Hispanics of Houston, living in a county of 4.7 million people and 1,778 square miles, who were limited–by order of the Republican state government, upheld by Republican judges, in a pandemic that disproportionately killed Black and brown voters–to a single ballot drop-off box for the entire county.  Hence, the second set of “for real” numbers, which reflect the likelihood that any additional minority voters would likely be far more Democratic than the 2020 Election Day distributions were.

But if we can’t convince you of the opportunity, let the GOP do it.  Think about it: why does the dominant party in a state that’s already rated hardest in the nation to cast a ballot respond to a resounding win up and down the ballot in 2020 with arguably the most sweeping and comprehensive voter suppression legislation in the country?  Why are so many conservatives from all around the country (not just California) moving to the Longhorn State, to the point where the growing flood of right-wing carpetbaggers actually provided the GOP with its margin of victory in the closest they’ve come in recent years to losing a statewide race–Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 campaign to unseat Republican Senator Ted Cruz.  Exit polls showed Texas natives actually preferred O’Rourke by a 3 point margin, but transplants voted for Cruz by 15 points.  NPR reports that “more and more Trump followers are flocking to red Texas in search of the promised land,” but ideology alone can’t explain the new Great Migration–there are plenty of other states just as ideologically hospitable.

In the same NPR report, recent Texas transplant Dr. Bridget Melson aims with more precision at the truth:

“People used to come up to me and say, ‘Don’t California my Texas.’ But we’re the damn cavalry! We’re here to save you. Because we know what’s going to happen. And if we don’t run for office, get involved in school boards, and pay attention and get out and vote, then you’re gonna California Texas.”

And yet Texas seems to be doing just fine overseeing its electoral plantation. Greg Abbott even got cocky enough to promise he was going to win a majority of the Hispanic vote this fall (he didn’t). So what’s the Alamo-like level of alarm about? What do Texas Republicans and their fellow travelers around the country know that the “wise men” of the Democratic Party don’t, or just plain (willfully) fail to understand?

Likely it’s this: In February 2020, the office of the Texas State Comptroller noted that based on Census data, “one of every 10 persons under the age of 18 in the U.S. lives in Texas.”  Comptroller staff went on to observe that since 2010, Texas has seen “the highest rate of under-18 population growth among the six most populous states and the second-highest in the nation, behind North Dakota.”

And how does this population distill demographically? Nearly seventy percent (68%) are non-white, nearly half (49%) are Hispanic, and one in eight (12%) are Black. Corporate media pundits can continue to yammer about the precipitous erosion of Democratic support among Black and Hispanic voters (and likely continue to be proven wrong, as they were this fall), but there’s one age demographic where support for Dems is stronger than ever across the board, and that’s the young voters of Gen Z.

Of course, the “wise men” of the donkey party know the young never vote (except in 2018) (and 2020) (and 2022) and, QED, they know it’s as much of a fool’s errand to rely on them as it is to, well, push your chips in on Texas. Republicans know better. As we’ve previously documented, the GOP responded to the Gen Z ambush of 2018 in 2020 with a full array of youth-specific suppressing tactics, both legislative and extralegal, and did so with enough force to knock young voter participation the furthest below intent it’s been since 2008 (not coincidentally also the first year young voters were heavily targeted for suppression).

For authoritarians, brown/Black AND young is a suppression shooting gallery akin to Dealey Plaza, not only because there are a multiplicity of ways to target them, but because every trick in the GOP playbook is new to them–they’re the perfect marks for otherwise moldy old chestnuts like “you’ll lose your federal aid if you vote where you go to school.”

Yet the Repos weren’t able to prevent record youth turnout in 2020, even if it wasn’t what it could or should have been. This fall, whether intentionally or not, the youngsters apparently fooled both parties by showing up in droves on Election Day after conspicuous absence during early voting.  And every year, another 4+ million become eligible to vote, almost by definition swamping the growth of every other demographic.

That warm fuzzy reality, and the moxie that’s accompanied it to date, should be telling Democrats it’s high past time to do everything possible to fight Gen Z voter suppression in all its forms, especially in Texas, where the suppression-driven gap between turnout and eligibility is so high–over the past two+ decades, Texas ranks 49th in the country in turnout3–and so brazenly cynical (e.g., you can use a gun license as identification to vote in Texas, even though you don’t have to live in Texas or even be a citizen to get one, but can’t use a student ID).

But we want to propose something more radical as well: Take your potted trees and houseplants to Southlake, South Point, South Houston, or South Padre Island. Bring Birnam Wood to Dunsinane, whether that means setting up shop in Texas, in the red district on the other side of your state, or one on the other side of the state line. We know nearly one in five of you are working remotely, there’s a one in five chance you’ve changed jobs since the pandemic, nearly half of you are thinking of changing not just jobs but careers, more than half of you (58%) have hybrid work options, and the housing market is finally starting to return to sanity.

Which brings us to the dirty little secret about gerrymandering we mentioned earlier–it’s political Jenga, and the greedier the manderers are, the more Jenga-like it becomes. No party in our history has been greedier where gerrymanders are concerned than the post-modern GOP, as it stretches and strains to remain democratically competitive while serving only 1% of the population (quick: name a Republican policy position with majority support). When gerrymanders are extreme, they’ve often ultimately become “dummymanders” that backfire, and all the sophisticated analysis of individual voting behavior that goes into reducing the chances of this happening can’t protect a gerrymander against the political equivalent of cow-tipping, an unexpected influx of new residents of unknown origins and leanings.

Of course, cow-tipping is a better theoretical than practical (or actual) description of what can happen, so let us give you another, arguably much more important reason to consider what we’re proposing.  We wouldn’t suggest you do anything we weren’t willing to do ourselves. We’ve lived for more than a decade in a small rural community that went for Trump by 27 points, and have never had any political problems, even with the sticker at right on one of our cars (and some local public resistance-style political activity on my part4). Co-founder Baker even wears his hair long (sometimes with barrettes) and works in a local high-end steak house with a heavily Republican clientele.

Come on in, the water’s potable!

We know and like a lot of people in our town who probably voted for Trump (maybe even voted for him twice).  We know they’re good people, people who put tiki torches to the use the gods intended, people we can vouch for, fellow Americans all.  “Familiarity breeds contempt?” There’s an ample body of research, some of it anecdotal (e.g. the small towns that’ve fought to keep undocumented neighbors from being departed, Black activists who’ve converted supremacists), some of it societal (the breathtakingly rapid advances in LGBTQ rights and protections, which (only) occurred as more and more non-binary fellow citizens summoned the extraordinary courage to come out), some of it deeply scientific and biological (e.g. this), to assert, humbly but strongly, that the original Publilius, Pope Innocent III, and Chaucer were all dead wrong when they made said declaration.5  And can anyone doubt that what this country needs most right now is a little less contempt?6

In any case, as the Ukrainians realized last summer, whatever we decide to do about Texas and other suppression strongholds, we can’t just decide to tread water in place and wait “for the fever to break.” We can’t do nothing.

Given everything you know or just learned about the Electoral College, it may seem like a miracle that it’s only torched the promise of democracy four times in our history7, but in fact, it has happened only under a particular set of circumstances with two things in common: in each case, the Democrat lost (the odds of this happening randomly (e.g., by coin flip) 1 in 16, or 6%, 1 in 32, or 3%, if the election of 1824 is thrown into the mix, which would, in a typical statistical context, make it a statistically significant, non-random set of results), and in each case substantial electoral fraud–including, as we define, indeed headline it–and Republicans once did, too–sufficient voter suppression to turn the outcome.

When you think about it, it’s not actually surprising that this is the case. We’re often told how hard it is to hack and steal our elections because the system is so decentralized. And this would be true if the winner of our presidential elections was determined by the popular vote. But because it’s decided by the Electoral College, it’s not necessary to suppress the vote or otherwise commit fraud across the entire country, just in key places in the key swing states you need to harvest the electoral votes from to win the College. Which is more or less exactly what has happened in the elections in question.

Today, Texas, Florida, and Georgia are at the leading edge of massive voter suppression outpacing what Republicans call “voter fraud” by a ratio of at least 140,000:1, easily topping the level of election interference that has consistently led to divergence between the popular vote and Electoral College. With ALEC as their vector, and their majority-minority citizenry (TX) or near-so (GA, FL) as both impetus and laboratory, we can be sure they will continue to pollute and undermine the electoral process throughout the country with new anti-democratic variants every election cycle until they are stopped by the same sword they wield.

Until then, even when we win, we lose.  Thanks to grotesque, literally obscene levels of suppression–and then some, for example, Joe Biden and the American people were the ones really cheated in the 2020 election, denied the myriad benefits, foreign and domestic, that a thorough repudiation of Trump and Trumpism would have provided.  And don’t let the corporate media or establishment fool you into believing otherwise with glad tidings of “record turnouts.” When we hear this, we must always ask two questions and recall two facts:

  • The questions: Record turnouts for who, by who? All groups equally? Or more for one party’s constituencies than the other?
  • The facts: Our “record turnout” in 2020 ranked us 135th in the world. Our “record turnout” in 2022 ranked us 163rd.

As Reverend Raphael Warnock was quick to observe early in the final victory speech of the fall:

“…There are those who would look at the outcome of this race and say that there’s no voter suppression in Georgia. Let me be clear, just because people endured long lines that wrapped around buildings some blocks long, just because they endured the rain, and the cold, and all kinds of tricks in order to vote, doesn’t mean that voter suppression does not exist. It simply means that you, the people, have decided that your voices will not be silenced.”

History teaches that suppressors, like all authoritarians, play the long game.  That the people rose up, in what The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols felicitously identified as “democracy’s Dunkirk,” is nothing we can bank for another rainy election day.  Few knew that better than the first president from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson, who once said:

“You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

He was speaking of affirmative action.  What does it say about where we are as a nation that his words can just as easily be read as a call for full, ongoing, and equal access to the ballot box, especially in his home state, a battle he thought he’d already won?

Truth And/Or Consequences

As we’ve previously discussed, the Electoral College is clearly an undead political institution.  To put this in terms our sportscaster wannabe media can understand, the end result is that we’re continuously trying to determine the winner of their horse race, an extraordinarily close horse race, by watching a replay on a television with only ∼50 pixels instead of using the one with 160-250 million.

And this has, and has had, negative consequences, extremely negative consequences, frankly, for our country.  Both C-SPAN and Siena College regularly survey the nation’s top historians across the spectrum and ask them to rank our presidents from George Washington to the current occupant.  Four times in our history, we have selected a candidate who lost the so-called popular vote (what we just call the vote around here), but won the Electoral College: Rutherford B Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W Bush, and Donald Trump.15 As you can see from the chart below, they aren’t remembered fondly.

On average, the 40 popular vote winners rank 60%+ higher on average than these four losers, who are, on average, in the bottom quartile (the 24th percentile, to be specific) of history, and there are, on average 30 popular vote winners who are considered to have been better leaders than any of the four.  It turns out that we, the people, do a better job of picking presidents than the appendix of the Constitution–go figure.

And while we almost never claim to be able to predict the future with absolute certainty,  there are two predictions we’re willing to take (and make) money on, if you’re interested:

  • When Joe Biden is eligible to enter the rankings, he will rank higher than any of said four losers
  • Donald Trump will continue to drop in ranking every time a new president is added to these polls, unless we “elect” one who becomes a dictator (because autocracy is always a means with no end)

If you give us good enough odds, we’ll even bet Trump eventually falls below Buchanan, when the full extent of the havoc 44.46 has wreaked and damage he has caused become clearer, which will make Buchanan look like a patsy in comparison.  The only reason we’re not willing to make this bet straight up is that we don’t understand why the historians don’t already have him at the very bottom, if not below the bottom in advance.

In other words, as bad a bet as popular vote losers already look–with nearly 250 years worth of data to draw on, they’ll almost certainly continue to look worse and worse.

Now if you’re a typical Trump supporter, educated enough to be up on all the latest dis- and mis-information (believe it or not, research shows that the more educated and intelligent you are, the more likely you are to fall for conspiracy theories and fake news), you’re going to look at the rankings above and dismiss them because historians are part of the most liberal discipline in academia.  Never mind that any poll-taker worth their salt is aware of this and at pains to counter it by surveying a carefully balanced sample, especially a studiously neutral and non-partisan outfit like C-SPAN.

You’re certainly well within your rights to dismiss any information that contradicts your worldview, even if doing so puts you at odds with literally every animal on the planet–because every animal that does this is either dead or will soon be so. But before you do so, you might want to put on your Occam lenses and consider the possibility that historians are liberal because when they spend far more time “doing their own research” than you ever have or ever will, that’s the truth they find, over and over, about what they study: the liberals turn out to be right, the liberals win, the moral arc really does bend.  And deep down, you know you know this about the realities of history–why else would you be trying so hard to roll so much of it back?

A Thought Experiment

If this is such a great system, why don’t we use it all the way down?  Why not decide who wins Senate races by electoral votes, too, for example?  Each elector in a state either represents one of the state’s declare the candidate who wins the most congressional districts in the state the next senator.   Wisconsin 2022 race, show popular vote difference, show how distorted electoral becomes.  Show how easy it would be for Barnes to win the popular vote (take the margin he lost by, divide it by the number of congressional districts, and see what happens) and still lose the “electoral.”  It’s easy to see people would howl bloody murder if Senate, Congressional, mayoral, and other races were decided this way–so why are we doing it in the most important election.?

Those of us who come from Wisconsin know the magnitude of this distortion is the result of gerrymandering at the state and federal levels, and at the end of the day, that’s what the Electoral College is: gerrymandering at the highest level short of the permanent seats on the UN Security Council (a topic for another day).

By contrast, the originalist alternative we’ve proposed is practically gerrymander-proof.  In general, other things being equal, the more locally determined an election is, the more democratic its results will be.  Just as it’s much easier to accurately map the topography of terrain if you have more data points, you can more accurately map a democracy to its citizens with more representatives, each serving the needs of a smaller geographical area, than you can with fewer representatives serving larger areas, and not just because the representatives are more likely to be able to listen and provide constituent service to a smaller number of people. If there are 5,000 members of Congress rather than 500, each is more likely to represent a group of citizens in which the opinions of large majorities are aligned across the issues, with far fewer citizens feeling like they have no representation at all because they are not only a minority in their state, but in their Congressional district as well.

Vidvaga

Results In Favor of democracy would be even stronger if not for the EC.  Making it easier to vote doesn’t mean more people vote, and EC is the reason why…



It’s presumably intuitively obvious that increasing the number of representatives by dividing the state into smaller geographical areas will make it much harder to gerrymander, but since the increasingly sophisticated gerrymandering we see today is based largely on mathematical modeling, here’s a simple mathematical proof of this intuition using limits, a basic concept taught in first semester calculus.

We use limits to make mathematically accurate observations and predictions based on the value a function approaches as the input into the function approaches some value.  In this case, we’re interested in knowing what happens to the ability to gerrymander as the number of constituents per representative decreases, and it’s clear that the ability to gerrymander declines because at the end point, where every constituent has his or her own representative, the ability to gerrymander is non-existent; it disappears entirely.

We should note, in fairness, that the same thing happens as you increase the number of people each legislator represents, because at that endpoint, everyone is represented by the same legislator, again rendering gerrymandering impossible.  What this means, given the ease with which gerrymandering takes place today, is that we are either at or near a local maximum potential for this activity, and likely could make it more difficult by either increasing or decreasing the number of representatives.  But our goal is to make the system as democratic as possible in every way, not just reduce the potential for gerrymandering, and in every other respect, increasing the number of representatives does this, while reducing the number only exacerbates the anti-democratic friction, corrosion, and inertia that’s set in because the system–stuck at 435 representatives since 1929 (even as our population has nearly tripled since then)–has failed to keep up with the times.

In the next part of this series, in the name of going for multiple loaves to get at least one, we explore some even more originalist–and therefore much more radical–ways to get back to the one person, one vote principle.

Creative Politics is the world’s first community-based political incubator, always under construction, as we synthesize the best of liberal and conservative ideals with technology and history to generate policies, strategies, applications, and actions for the post-modern era that are well outside the beltway, and well beyond just talk.  All Creative Politics blog posts are collaborative, living documents, the way Madison and Hamilton would create them if they were writing The Federalist today.  Let us prove it (with credit) by leaving us a comment below.

0 Assuming that, with your help and our decades of successful experience coalition and community-building, they become fully aware of and alarmed by what we’re calling “democracy fundamentalism”/”real originalism” Back

1 Which is probably why the politicians and corporate media are all desperately trying to find means under existing statutes–wire fraud, for example (for collecting campaign contributions under false pretenses)–and scapegoats (the political parties and corporate media, for not vetting the man) who can be publicly flogged enough to satisfy the public there will be no next time. Anything to prevent we, the people, from concluding that there is such a thing as objective truth politicians should be as required to adhere to, just like the rest of us, that there either is or isn’t a fire in that constitutional crowded theater.  Still we have to give Santos some props: after the 3rd day of waiting to be sworn in because the new GOP House majority couldn’t agree on a Speaker to elect, he was seen walking with a colleague, shaking his head, and overhead saying “you can’t make this $#$% up.” Back

2 Translation: “show [someone] where the crayfish winter,” a Ukrainian expression that means to “teach someone a lesson” (that they won’t forget), in this case the Russians, the Allies, and any Ukrainians who were losing hope. Back

3 The link we provided contains the data from 1996-2000 we used to make this calculation.  Here’s the data from the 2022 election we used.  In all cases, we recorded turnout by rank relative to the other states (rather than percentage), then averaged the state’s position in the rankings.  We plan to calculate it by percentage as well, and will update it as necessary–suffice it to say, with an average ranking of 49th, we’re not expecting to modify–at all–our claim that Texas is one of the national leaders in voter suppression, and therefore provides one of the biggest opportunities if its grip can be broken. Back

4 For example, in the first year of Trump’s reign, I found myself quite offended by the free political advertising on his behalf that the National Enquirer was providing every week, and by the reality that customers where the Enquirer was sold were compelled to be exposed to it every time they stood in a checkout line at a grocery store or pharmacy. So I started going into stores and flipping the top copy of the Enquirer in every checkout line. Soon–and well before the Enquirer blew up in scandal–a number of the establishments where I did this stopped carrying it or put it in with the adult magazines where it belonged. A friend took up the campaign in Florida and within three weeks, Publix announced it wasn’t going to carry it anymore. All of which leads me to believe that we must have inspired others to do what we were doing and/or goaded into getting up the courage to start complaining to store employees about the Enquirer’s behavior–it’s hard to imagine that just the two of us could have had such an effect. One of the employees at one of the pharmacies, a Republican who at first dutifully flipped the Enquirers in their store back over as soon as I left, later became a friend as she became increasingly embarrassed by and ashamed of Trump. Back

5 Imnsho, the false presumption of familiarity can have this effect–most of the January 6th insurrectionists, for example, hailed from locales where the white population is declining relative to other races–but such presumptions don’t age well in small towns, where you usually actually have to interact with “the other,” not just look askance at them as they pass. Back

6 As someone of German descent, I will always wonder if/how history might have been different if the “good Germans” of the 1930s had engaged with the Brownshirts rather than simply avoiding and disdaining them as the “deplorables” of their era.  Those who yammer about both “the backfire effect” and “big lie tactics” need to explain how both can be written in stone.  Or admit that the best way to get beyond the “backfire” is to keep telling the “Big Truth” over and over again as well (e.g. long before the midterms stamped Trump as a loser, the polls, which, in the aftermath of 1/6, had shockingly shown Republicans more loyal to Trump than their party, had completely flipped, while the proportion who believed the 2020 election was stolen had declined significantly as well, not that you’d know it from reading or listening to the corporate media Back

7 We don’t count the election of 1824, even though it followed the usual pattern in some ways–e.g., the Democrats were cheated of the victory they earned at the ballot box–because it was a four-way race in which neither the popular nor electoral vote leader (Jackson in both cases) was declared president. Instead, because no candidate received the required majority of electoral votes, for the only time in its history, the Electoral College actually did what the Founders thought it would always do, namely throw the election to the House to decide, which chose John Quincy Adams, son of the president who committed the original sin against the democracy–putting John Marshall in charge of the Supreme Court and conniving with him, after we, the people, turned their party out of office, to turn the judiciary into the undemocratic, unaccountable seat of power it has become today! SAD! Back

8 Thanks to the poor design of the ballot, thousands of Jewish voters in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County accidentally voted for far-right Nazi-adjacent candidate Pat Buchanan, who anomalously received more than 3,000 votes in the county, a sixth of his total statewide. How hard would it have been to allow these voters to correct this obvious error in the 36 days between Election Day and the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the recount, during which time Palm Beach’s votes were recounted multiple times? States all over the country now allow voters to cure errors in their absentee ballot submissions, and provisional ballot casters are regularly given up to a week to prove their eligibility. Back

9 Diabolically, the Court used the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, which was intended to protect the thousands of minority voters who Florida’s Republican state government disenfranchised, to justify stopping the recount and hand the election to Bush. Meanwhile Republican military voters overseas were allowed to cast new ballots after Election Day–how does this jibe with the “equal protection” “logic” the Supreme Court used? In what way were these two groups of voters treated or protected equally? Back

10 In fairness, against this only partial and outrageous litany, Republicans, in a precocious bit of “whataboutism,” say their voters were disenfranchised, too.  How?  Because the FAKE NEWS media called the race for Gore at 7:48PM, a whole twelve minutes before polls closed in Florida’s traditionally Republican panhandle, causing “thousands” of Bush supporters not to vote.  A Republican poll of Panhandle voters supposedly proved this theory when 13% said they hadn’t voted because they heard the call for Gore, and another 13% said they knew someone who didn’t vote for this reason.

Let’s be clear–there’s a fundamental difference between this “proof” and one we’re about to cite in the piece itself, i.e. research showing that more than enough Democratic Wisconsin voters were unable to get IDs in 2016 (and were therefore unable to vote) to flip the state to Trump–and you don’t even have to impugn the character and honesty of one party’s partisans to see it. 

Acceptable ID for voting is fairly cut and dried—you either have it or you don’t, and if you claim not to have it and you do, it’s pretty easy to prove, via public records, that you’re lying.  So there’s no upside in being wishful or untruthful.  On the flip side, whether you would’ve voted if you hadn’t heard a race called is not verifiable one way or another–it’s your word against nobody’s (especially given that in 2000, few of us had GPS-enabled phones or cars, and those who did, didn’t know yet that the government was using the technology to track them) and, at the same time, you definitely have an incentive to make such a claim if the other side is claiming your team’s bad behavior cost their candidate the election. 

Moreover, Republicans and their Panhandle voters are really asking us to enter the santa zone to buy what they’re selling.  First of all, assuming the friends some respondents said they “know didn’t vote because the race was called” aren’t the same people as the ones who told the pollsters directly that they didn’t vote for this reason (it seems highly unlikely this was checked, for multiple reasons, and doesn’t reflect well on the professionalism of the pollster involved not to make clear whether they did or not), what these Panhandle poll respondents are asking us to believe is that nearly a quarter of Republican (-only?) Panhandle voters either hadn’t decided whether they were going to vote or not 10 minutes before the polls closed or were still en route when they heard the news, or were standing in line when they heard it and left.  Here are a few of the problems with this claim:

  • Much of the Panhandle is rural, and most folks in rural areas are likely more than 10 minutes away from a polling place–certainly you aren’t going to be on the fence about it 10 minutes before closing and you probably aren’t still en route; I live in a rural area, and 2022 was the first time I voted at the last minute.  Guess how many voters I found at my polling place in this year of “record turnout” when I arrived?  Two. 
  • The parts of the Panhandle where a lot of people might have a polling place less than 10 minutes from their doorstep were/are also markedly less Republican.  In its largest city, Tallahassee, for example, both candidates for mayor in this fall’s election were Democrats, and in the 2000 election, Tallahassee’s county, Leon, went for Gore over Bush 60-38.
  • The idea that so many Republican voters, in particular, were still making up their minds about whether to vote 10 minutes before closing and/or struggling to get to the polls just doesn’t pass the laugh test.  Republicans typically vote at first light and throughout the day; they pride themselves on being on-time or early and taking their civic duties seriously.  Note that explanations for the disconnect between 2004’s exit poll and official results also depended on the mythical “late Republican voter” and his cousin, the “shy Republican.”  Know any Republicans who are either routinely late or shy? 
    • If we were talking about the 2016 election when white working class voters flocked to Trump. maybe we’d have to smother that laugh down to a snicker, because the working class, unlike traditional Republicans, usually has a hard time getting time off on Election Day, and so often ends up showing up only at the end.  But in 2000, while that shift was definitely underway, much of it hadn’t happened yet. And btw, not everyone in the working class is white, non-Hispanic–far from it.
    • In general, it’s Democrats who show up late, not because they’re lazy or less responsible, but because largely Republican officials at the state level have done everything possible to make it as much of a pain in the derriere for core Democratic groups–the young, minorities, and the poor–to vote, so they have to be cajoled and cajoled to do so.  
  • What about all the Republicans waiting in line?  What Republicans waiting in line?  LOL.  Holding elections typically requires more resources than localities can conjure up on their own, and in Republican-run states, it’s de rigeur to allocate the necessary subsidies states provide as part of their constitutional charge (including those passed on from the feds) to insure Democratic voters, especially Black/brown voters and students, are the ones standing in long lines (because they know these lines depress turnout) while their voters breeze in and out all day long (like we do in my rural, Trump-supporting precinct every election, no matter when I vote, even though my state is one of the few that doesn’t have early voting).  Certainly this was the playbook in Florida in 2000. 
  • Seriously, long lines are an election coverage trope that’s been around forever–and/yet when was the last time you saw a long voting line that was primarily Republican, rather than people of colors and/or students?  When’s the last time you saw a long line of Republicans waiting in the dark at night to vote?  
  • Because there were only twelve minutes between the call for Gore and closing, unless they were already in said non-existent lines, anyone at home or en route would pretty much have needed to hear that call the moment it was first aired, not be in the john, in the kitchen, gabbing with someone, at the dinner table, having sex, playing a game, etc. for it to impact their behavior in any way that translates into votes or their suppression. So… these 25% of Panhandle residents are soooo into politics that they’re all glued to their screens, and yet they also haven’t voted ten minutes before the polls close? LMAO. What would Nancy Grace have to say about a tale like this? 
  • Bottom line: The Panhandle may have voted 2:1 for Bush, but if anyone was still wondering if they should vote, was en route, or waiting in line at 7:48 that night, it was the 1, not the 2. The early call for Gore more likely took more votes away from him in the Panhandle than from Republicans. Back

11 We’ll probably add to this list–for the sake of our collective fight, it’s important never to forget any of what happened in this turning point (after ALEC’s shadow state-level confederacy started to bite in 1996) in our history as a democracy, and we welcome your help and support in this little American archeological dig (anything more than a decade old is archaeology in our country) in comments below. . Jeffrey Toobin’s Too Close To Call is generally considered to be the definitive account, but we’re going to be looking for damn the torpedoes tell it like it is raw material, so we’ll be checking out collections of more partisan perspectives and recollections like Arthur Jacobson & Michael Rosenfeld’s The Longest Night, and Jack Rakove’s The Unfinished Election of 2000 as well. Back

12 Tellingly, the Court included in its opinion, and injunction that its reasoning was not to be used as precedent for any other case (because, of course, they knew how questionable it was), though naturally Republicans have done so, including, embarrassingly for the Court, Trump’s Kraken legal team. Back

13 Neither Indiana nor any other state requiring voter ID has made said IDs nor the documentation (eg one’s birth certificate) required to get them costless to obtain, nor have they implemented automatic registration and automatically provided associated IDs as other economic juggernauts like Estonia have done. The 14th amendment, which the Republican Court happily used to install Republican George W Bush as president, makes clear that the Court should not be making such decisions on the basis of whether these requirements place an “undue burden” on the voter–it clearly states that the right to vote is not to be “abridged in any way,” which means the “due burden” is NONE. Back

14 Twitter says they “took down” such tweets. Meaning what, exactly? When were they “taken down?” Were they all taken down? Were all those that were passed along (not just retweeted) “taken down,” too? What about Facebook? Were they taken down there as well? What about versions posted in Facebook Groups (e.g. the fake BLM the Russians created) or elsewhere online (Reddit, for example)? Take it from someone who’s been in the new media industry for more than three decades–Twitter has been so shoddily run for so long that they likely have no idea how many times disinformation like this was posted on their platform in 2016; for them, it’s a classic unknown unknown Back

15 We’ve left John Quincy Adams out of this analysis. Yes, it’s true he lost the popular vote, but he didn’t win the Electoral College either. Instead he was chosen by Congress. Interestingly, the verdict of history on Quincy Adams, is considerably more favorable than on any of the four electoral winners/”popular” losers, though he still ranks no higher than 17th in either poll (17th in both, in fact). Back

The Creative Politics mascot showing migrants one of several ways to get around voter suppression…

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