Electoral Current

One benefit of modern life is the proliferation of outlets that irritate, provoke, mislead, goad, trigger, inflame and generally annoy the populace. A blessed number of those channels remain freely accessible. Without them to stoke grudges and outrage, people might devote more of their energies to improving their lives and communities, and where’s the fun in that? Constructive and noble as that may be, it doesn’t exactly feed the furnace. 

All of which gets to a recent outing in which I spun the car radio AM dial and landed on a right-wing talk show. The larynx in question trafficked in predictable talking points: Trump as national savior and antidote to Biden Administration incompetence and malfeasance, with a side of heroism for surviving an assassination attempt; Kamala Harris as unfit and possibly dangerous and emblematic of the Democrat Party’s threat to America. Between the ‘hyper’ and ‘bole’, however, the voice floated the notion that Electoral map arithmetic is and is likely to be incredibly tight, almost no matter what occurs between now and Election Day. 

After scraping around a bit, some numbers appear to bear that out. I’ll try to go light on the dipshit civics, since y’all come to this space for political yammering the way people go to concerts for the $15 beers. You could, and should, access a dozen other sites for more knowledgeable and nuanced political discussion, though it’s unlikely to be wedged among Muppets and music. 

The idea that a good deal of presidential election math is essentially predetermined doesn’t get nearly enough run in the political discussion, probably because it doesn’t conform to the national image we’ve constructed and of which we’ve convinced ourselves. It’s tough to hold yourself up as a model of democracy and representative government when you admit that a sizeable segment of results is aligned and racked before the first ballot is cast. That doesn’t even get to the number of state legislatures in the tank for one side or the other because of lockstep voters, district gerrymandering or both. Bless our tribal hearts and that delightful relic and Founding Fathers’ chew toy, the Electoral College. 

Consider the last presidential election. Biden won the popular vote by seven million and held a 306-232 edge in the Electoral College, which if not a mandate appears to be a comfortable margin. However, he won Georgia and its 16 electoral votes by fewer than 12,000 votes out of 4.9 million cast. He won Arizona (11) by fewer than 11,000 votes out of 3.3 million, and he won Wisconsin (10) by 20,000 votes from more than three million total. Flip just 42,000 votes out of more than 11 million in three states, and suddenly the Electoral count is tied at 269 (the magic number is 270). The tiebreaker would have been a vote by the incoming House of Representatives. With a slim Republican majority, the nation would be winding down the Orange Oaf’s second term, despite him twice losing the popular vote. 

As for presidential voting being predetermined, 2020 also offers a guide. Not to go all Steve Kornacki, but forty-two states and the District of Columbia had margins of at least five percentage points in favor of one of the two candidates. Thirty-eight states and D.C., had margins of 10 percent or greater. Odds are, you’re either a member of the solid majority or despairing minority. An especially attractive or poor candidate, or ghastly mis-step, might nibble away at the margins, but are unlikely to erase the dominant bloc in most states. 

Some back-of-the-envelope noodling suggests that Democrats can pretty much pencil in 223 electoral votes and Republicans 216 votes before ballot counting even gets underway. This leaves us with indicators that the race for the keys to the Lincoln Bedroom will likely be decided by seven states: Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. In the last go ‘round, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada – in addition to Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin – also went to Biden by just a few percentage points or less, while North Carolina went to Trump by 75,000 votes out of 5.4 million total. For what it’s worth, Florida went to Trump by fewer than four percentage points, but given the population, that still amounted to 371,000 votes. Flipping DeSantistan blue is likely too tough an ask. 

This is the way

Elsewhere, Michigan appears to be more a blue lean, having given Biden a 155,000-vote margin out of 5.4 million. Pennsylvania is tighter, having gone for Biden by just 81,000 votes (1.2 percent) of 6.8 million total in 2020, and for Trump by 46,000 votes out of 5.9 million in 2016. Should seven states that are home to 15.3 percent of the population have the responsibility to choose the nation’s path for the next four years and beyond? Seems less than democratic. 

Now, one might argue that our one-person, one-vote experiment led to an unintended consequence, that the freedom to live and vote where we choose created the boundaries and expected results nationwide that give a small minority outsized influence. One might also argue that it’s time to turf the Electoral College as burdensome artifact and go straight popular vote. Good luck with that, given that Constitutional tinkering requires both a super-majority in a split Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states, many of whom still embrace it as a potential path to power. Who would have thought that the Constitution and sites devoted to history and with “dot-gov” in their address could be as discouraging and annoying as anything else in the agitate-o-sphere? Progress.

TarHeelymander

The next installment of the Most Important Election of Our Lifetime is 18 months away, but the maneuvering and back-channel fuckery is well underway, if it ever ceased. 

I’ll try to keep this brief, because y’all come to this space for political yammering the way guys go to strip clubs for the cheeseburgers. Here in North Carolina, late last week the state Supreme Court overturned a previous ruling against partisan gerrymandered districts. That decision is expected to green-light the Republican-heavy legislature to re-draw districts that will give the GOP more seats in the House of Representatives in the 2024 elections. 

North Carolina is one of a handful of states building conservative legislative majorities disproportionate to actual voter trends, along with Wisconsin and Ohio, and to a lesser degree Georgia, Texas and Florida. The current redistricting kerfuffle began following the 2020 census, when NC’s population increased to the point where the state merited one more seat in the House, a 14th rep. The Republican-led legislature drew up maps that would have all but cemented 10 or 11 GOP seats. Dems and voting rights groups challenged. 

The very same state Supreme Court ruled in Feb. 2022 that state courts may reject district maps that give an unfair advantage to one party in a narrowly divided state and re-affirmed that decision late last year. 

A quick clarification – not the very same state Supreme Court. The previous court was split 4-3 with Democrats in the majority. Elections last November flipped the breakdown to a 5-2 Republican majority, and that was the margin last week. The chief justice wrote that the previous court overstepped its authority to find that the state constitution prohibited partisan gerrymandering, and that voting districts should come under the purview of the legislature. 

“There is no judicially manageable standard by which to adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims,” wrote chief justice Paul Newby, which is some judicial jiu-jitsu that all but eliminates oversight and redress by anyone outside the gerrymandered legislature. 

North Carolina ought to be a purple state. It’s not. Some numbers: in the 2020 Congressional elections, 2.66 million people voted for Democrat candidates for the House of Representatives, and 2.63 million people voted for Republican candidates. Results seated eight Republican reps and five Democrat reps because of the way district maps were drawn (the results were 10 Rs and 3 Ds in 2018, when vote totals were 50.4 percent Republican and 48.3 percent Democrat). 

When the courts rejected the Republicans’ proposed maps after the 2020 census and used maps drawn up by judges and a more impartial election panel in the 2022 mid-terms, 1.94 million people voted for GOP candidates, 1.76 million voted for Democrats, and the state delegation to Washington D.C., was split 7-7. 

That ain’t happening again, largely because of the Supreme Court ruling and makeup of the state legislature. As of April 2023, Republicans control the NC House 72-48 and the state Senate 30-20, veto-proof margins against a Democrat governor or a rubber stamp for a GOP governor, again because of the state voting district map. The state GOP will get its 10 or 11 House seats. 

If you’re still reading and your eyes haven’t glazed over, you might point out that this is nothing new and that both parties are guilty of gerrymandering. Maryland, New York, Illinois and Oregon are current examples of Democrat district tinkering. Politics and all that. But on the Republican side of the ledger, I’d argue that the current setup is less about convincing voters that their positions are attractive and more about preserving power and limiting access to the “wrong” sort of voter, through legislative monkeying backed by a judiciary increasingly stacked with Dollar Tree Scalias. 

North Carolina is at the forefront of these efforts. Judges tossed a state voter ID measure in 2016 because they found that it “would target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” A Republican strategist named Thomas Hofeller, a California native who eventually settled in Raleigh, was one of the modern gurus of gerrymandering, working in North Carolina and multiple states to create bulletproof conservative districts. His estranged daughter obtained many of his files following his death in 2018 and released them to various media outlets. In a case that originated in NC, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last term on so-called “independent state legislature theory,” a movement that would prohibit state judges and other officials from changing the rules on Federal elections. It’s unclear whether the court will rule on the case, now that the state Supreme Court has reversed its previous ruling. And in a tandem decision late last week, the state court also threw out a prior ruling that restored voting rights to convicted felons no longer in prison but who have not completed their parole or probation, a move that observers say likely will remove tens of thousands from voter rolls. 

The old saying goes that people get the government they deserve. My concern is that the slow march toward artificially constructed majorities will lessen the impact of overall vote counts, and we’ll end up with government we don’t.