Minoritarianism and the Landslide that Wasn't, or, The Dictatorship of Mr. 49.9
For quite some time, I have been highlighting the Republican Party's eagerness to rule the United States as a one-party, minoritarian autocracy. (For one relatively recent example, see here.) With Donald Trump winning the popular vote this time, does that change the story? No. Not for the presidency, and certainly not for the rest of the government. That matters for many reasons, but before I get there, I will first update some of the key numbers that I summarized in a Dorf on Law column ten days ago.
In 2020, everyone was told in advance that, because of the order in which some key states count votes, the early results would favor Trump but the later voting would favor Biden. That is in fact what happened, and Trump then spent four years whining about "massive dumps" of votes at 3am that proved in his mind that something fishy was happening. This time, the later-counted votes will not change the overall result, but because California is the last state to tabulate all of its votes, we are seeing the same pattern in the popular vote totals.
As of this writing, the results show that Donald Trump received 49.9 percent of the popular vote, a plurality but not a majority. The man who claims a mandate is leading Kamala Harris by 1.6 percent (2.5 million votes), and the numbers will tighten up a bit more before the counting is complete. I will change the exact number as needed, but for now Trump's new name is Mr. 49.9. That is not to say that his underwhelming Electoral College win will be reversed by any of this, but it is significant that the supposed blowout is not even turning out to be the 3.2 million edge in the popular vote or the 2.2 percent split that I reported on November 12.
Will any of that matter? Of course not. Republicans always claim to have mandates and govern as if they won landslides, such as when Ron DeSantis won Florida's 2018 gubernatorial election by 0.4 percent (33,000 votes out of more than 8.2 million total) and then acted as if he was the king of the world. With his state legislature already safely gerrymandered, he could get away with it. Even though the Republicans' margin in the incoming Congress appears to be 3 seats in the 435-seat House, they will similarly do everything that they want to do and then claim that "the American people voted for this," when in fact less than half of the people who voted voted for Trump, and they supposedly did so because they were angry about grocery prices and immigration.
More to the point, the chattering classes will largely go along with that narrative. Indeed, they already have. On November 11, Jon Stewart's first show after the election began with a rant about the Democrats having suffered "a thumpening," which upset the host because the pollsters had promised him a coin-toss. In fact, the results (even the results that were reported at the time, before the later votes were counted) were easily within the margins of error, and the results skewed toward Republicans just enough to ruin everything.
Again, this is not to say that the Republicans will hold back from doing what I have long predicted, which is to make future elections impossible for Democrats to win. It is American democracy that is about to be thumpened, but not because the election was anything but a razor-thin Republican win. Do I expect Stewart to correct himself? No, I do not.
Indeed, the supposed "lessons for Democrats" discussion -- which, again, is almost adorable in its failure to notice that the entire political rule book is about to be tossed out, making all of the conventional wisdom even more useless than ever -- continues to be nothing less than sickening. It started with the usual suspects like Joe Scarborough saying the morning after the election that the Democrats "need to look at themselves in the mirror," thus laying the blame not on the Republicans -- including George W. Bush and nearly all of his family, who again sat on their hands -- but on the party that had in fact run an amazingly disciplined and even joyful campaign.
A few days later, Scarborough and his panel eagerly discussed an op-ed by the tiresome Maureen Dowd, who piled on with more "the Democrats were too woke" snark. We still see people saying that Democrats lost Latino votes because some of them used the term Latinx. The idea that any of that explains the outcome is absurd.
Of course, the bigger surprise-that-shouldn't-have-been-a-surprise moment arrived last week, when Scarborough and his wife Mika Brzezinski decided to visit Trump and make nice, fending off criticism with the most painful nonsense. (Brzezinski acknowledged, for example, that people would ask why she and Scarborough would do that. Her answer: "Why wouldn't we?" She acted as if "engaging" with Trump was somehow akin to her late father's diplomatic career. I am not kidding.)
And the hits just keep coming. On this week's Stewart-anchored episode of "The Daily Show," he said this: "The election that we just had was a repudiation of the status quo, an
overly-regulated system that is no longer responsive or delivering for
the needs of the people." That is, to choose my words carefully, fucking bullshit. It was not a repudiation of anything, and if something under 240,000 votes had flipped in three swing states, Stewart would now be talking about how President-Elect Harris needs to honor her pledge not to rock the boat.
As an aside, I did have a moment of surprise in that same segment when Stewart made a point that I have been making for years, which is that Barack Obama could have said that Mitch McConnell's refusal to hold hearings for Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination in 2016 amounted to a failure to "advise and consent" and thus was not an actual defeat, allowing Obama to play hardball and have Garland sworn in. The problem is that Stewart included that point in a larger melange of complaints about Democrats being useless and weak.
That is a complaint that I have made many times as well, but Stewart was claiming that any time the Democrats follow rules, standards, and norms, they are being ridiculous rather than possibly realistic. Even I admitted at the time that Obama would have been taking a big risk of blowback in the 2016 election by following my advice. For Stewart, however, the Democrats' failure to do something is proof that they are failing to see and pursue obvious avenues for success. That is simply false.
But there is no reason to focus only on Stewart, who has always been hit-or-miss and has only a fairly good batting average (dragged down by far too many notable swinging strikeouts). There are so, so many other non-Trumpists who are sure they know how the Democrats can win next time. (Again, "next time"? Adorbs.) For example, on his show earlier this week, Seth Meyers interviewed Brian Williams, the former TV news talking head who was forced out his job for lying nine years ago yet who somehow still books network interviews. (As always, White men's failures are forgiven.). What was Williams's brilliant take?
I think it's insulting when members of the working class -- which the Democratic Party has lost entirely in our lifetimes -- to insist the economy is doing great. A 12-pack of Bounty is forty dollars. Rich folks don't feel that, poor folks already switched to Sparkle during the Covid, uh, during the lockdown. and I think telling them that the NASDAQ is gangbusters is further insulting. It's insulting -- I think the biggest unforced error of the Biden Administration by far -- was the border. To tell people it's not a problem is further insulting for the working class to see incoming migrants getting welcome bags, debit cards, and motel rooms is probably insulting as well. ... [The Democratic] party has gone quinoa, and the rest of America is eating at Cracker Barrel.
Listen up, America. The man of the people has spoken. Could there be a more perfect example of a supposedly neutral or, given that he had a show on MSNBC for a few years after he was kicked out of NBC News, even liberal commentator buying into every condescending narrative about the working class and passing it off as an attack on other people's supposed elitist condescensions? (For more, see esp. my Dorf on Law column last Tuesday.) To his credit, Meyers politely pushed back, but Williams was smugly certain that he has the key to winning back White male voters.
The most obvious problem with Williams's claims is that the Biden Administration -- and certainly the Harris campaign -- never said that people should not worry because "the economy is doing great" or because the stock market has been setting records (even though that does help middle class people who have retirement accounts). If anything, the Democrats undersold the economy for the very reason that Williams presents as a brilliant insight: polls showed that people were angry about prices, and Democrats were being advised not to tell people that their feelings were wrong. Harris proposed actual policies to address prices. Trump did not -- instead promising to raise prices with huge, across-the-board tariffs.
Moreover, what exactly were Democrats supposed to do? Refuse to point to the very good economy, including data showing that wage increases -- especially at the low end -- were more than outpacing inflation? That would be political malpractice, as would failing to tell as favorable a story as possible about progress at the border. Biden's people never said that the border is "not a problem." But this is where the conventional wisdom now sits: spitting out lies about what the Democrats did and did not do, and then pretending that people like Williams would not be just as critical if the Democrats had done the opposite.
I am happy to say that not all talking heads have gotten this wrong. I noted in an earlier column that Meyers had done a particularly good job of lampooning the insta-analysis that was coming from the comfortable navel-gazers soon after the election was called. Meyers, thankfully, is not alone. Even though Michael Steele was the Republican Party chairman during the second Bush presidency, he has not fallen for the inanity. In a podcast segment the other day, he and Elie Mistal had a discussion in which Mistal recalled the oft-repeated claim (most notably from Biden in his 2020 campaign) that "America is better than this." Mistal's retort: "America Wasn't Better Than Trump After All.”
Notably, Steele and Mistal are both Black, and they commented pointedly that the claims that Trump was going to make big inroads among Black men turned out to be a non-story. As I have also argued, both of those commentators were willing to say bluntly the sad-but-simple truth that enough Americans to turn the election were willing to vote against a Black and Indian woman because she is not a White man. Steele and Mistal did not mention the 6.5 million Biden voters who disappeared for Harris by not voting at all (only some of which can be explained by the relative ease of voting in 2020), but it is essential to continue to point out that those abstentions were more than enough votes for Harris to win easily. It is not about quinoa, for chrissakes.
Where does that leave us? Returning to the issue that I flagged at the top of this column, many commentators (including me) have argued that Trump and the Republicans have long been committed to minority rule. Now that Trump won the popular vote (again, by 1.6 percentage points or less, which is half a point less than Jimmy Carter's win over Gerald Ford in 1976), does that need to be amended? Does the Republican Party still need and want to engage in minoritarianism?
Obviously yes. Their House majority exists entirely because of gerrymandering. Their re-gerrymandering of North Carolina alone gave them the three extra seats that constitute the whole of their majority. Their Supreme Court blesses all of that, all while watching how its 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act continues to allow Republicans to prevent Black and other disfavored citizens from voting.
The US Senate is an entirely minoritarian artifact, and even if future elections were no less fair then recent elections, the small-state (pro-slavery) bias in the Constitution has made the Republicans' new majority permanent. No one, after all, should ever expect that Ohio or Montana will elect a Democrat again, not when both states' very effective and popular incumbents could not stave off rather decisive defeats. And the Electoral College is what gave us W and Trump in the first place.
Of course, Republicans will be sure to make future elections much less fair than recent elections. Doing so will allow the Republicans to claim that they have won majorities, just as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban claim to be the People's Choice. Trump and the Republicans were clear all along that they would have refused to accept a Harris win in any case, and Mr. 49.9 is now going to be like DeSantis on steroids in using his narrow win to shut down democracy.
In the end, maybe all of those vapid commentators who are carping about the Democrats being too far left, too woke, too whatever do not matter at all. The Republicans were going to do their thing no matter what. Even so, if there is to be any sustained resistance to Trump's nascent dictatorship, a resistance that could eventually lead the country back to some form of democracy, it does not help that those commentators are assuring each other that the Democrats would have been just fine were it not for pronouns. What nonsense.