The U.S. is in a state of perpetual minority rule- WaPo op-ed
Daniel Markovits and Ian Ayres teach about law, economics and politics at Yale Law School. Ayres is an author of “Voting With Dollars.”
Many see the midterm results as a split decision. Democrats herald their victory in the House as a repudiation of President Trump’s agenda. Republicans, meanwhile, regard picking up three seats in the Senate as a vindication of that very agenda, and the president tweeted that the election was a “very Big Win.”
Both appraisals accord Trumpism a democratic legitimacy it has not earned and does not deserve. Look behind the midterm elections’ outcomes — and the distortions produced by small states in the Senate and by gerrymandering in the House — to focus directly on the votes that constitute democratic bedrock, and a very different picture comes in to focus. The partisan balance of power — even the new balance, including a Democratic House — subjects the United States to undemocratic minority rule.
As of this writing, Democratic candidates for the House overall have won 4.2 million more votes than Republican candidates did. And partisan gerrymanders and geographic sorting meant that the Democrats needed every vote they got.Similarly, although the 2018 tallies are not complete, we estimate that the Democratic senators in the new Congress — taken all together over the three cycles that elected them — will have won 4.5 million more votes than Republican senators. The members of the Democratic minority, on average, each received about 30 percent more votes than their Republican counterparts.
Both results represent trends rather than historical anomalies or accidents. Research by the political analyst David Wasserman (of the Cook Political Report) shows that the current Republican biases in both the House and Senate elections are at all-time highs — greater than the partisan biases in favor of either party at any prior time for which data exist.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-is-in-a-state-of-perpetual-minority-rule/2018/11/08/9f9f38a0-e2b1-11e8-8f5f-a55347f48762_story.html?utm_term=.ab6fffe6ee9f
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