While James Comey’s firing and other related Trump buffoonery dominate the popular discourse, a series of onerous government actions with far-reaching repercussions has been nearly forgotten in the relentless churn of the news cycle. The most notable of these actions is the formation of a new election-fraud panel and the defunding of the U.S. Census. In previous administrations, either would have been a major scandal. In our current political climate, they barely register.
First, the Orwellian-named Election-Fraud Panel: Trump signed an executive order to form an election-fraud panel headed by a Kansas Republican who has for years led the charge of disenfranchisement of minority and poor voters. Alarm bells have been sounded by the ACLU and others. The story was in the papers for about half a day before being overshadowed by Russian intrigue.
Trump believes that he won the popular vote and that over three million votes were cast fraudulently against him. Like many things Trump, there is no evidence whatsoever for this claim. However, Trump’s ability to bend reality to his worldview is the stuff of legend, and he will do whatever it takes to bring those three million votes into line with his personal delusions. This new election-fraud panel will announce its findings next year; regardless of whether or not Trump is still the president, expect these “findings” to be the catalyst for sweeping new legislation toward the disenfranchisement of vast swaths of the electorate.
Southern Strategy 2.0
The GOP is methodically constructing a 20th-century framework for disenfranchising millions of poor and minority voters. Nixon et al. applied Southern Strategy 1.0 in the 1960s to harness racism and win support from Southern Dixiecrats. Building upon this foundation, Southern Strategy 2.0 is a data-driven approach—a sort of political moneyball toward maximizing the electoral value of white, rural (and not necessarily Southern) voting blocks while minimizing the electoral value of diverse, urban voting blocks.
The Electoral College was a compromise purposely designed to give weighted advantage to the political power of rural states over the population-dense urban centers of the country. For instance, Wyoming, which has a population of around 560,000, gets three electoral votes, which is about one per 186,000 people. The 37 million residents of California get 55 electoral votes. That works out to one per 670,000 people. As Rolling Stone writer David S. Cohen notes, “If California had the same proportion of electoral votes per person as Wyoming, it would have about 200 electoral votes.” That’s 3.6 times the voting power for a Wyomingite over a Californian. (Slate.com has a lovely map illustrating vote power in all 50 states.)
It’s no secret that this imbalance is embedded in the Constitution. What’s new is a multipronged strategy to further exacerbate this imbalance in barely noticeable increments. Over time, these tiny nudges add up to significant statistical advantages. The end result will be institutionalizing the mathematical conditions for long-term Republican minority rule.
Did the Founding Fathers actually do the math on their political handicapping? Did they consider that what they enshrined is not a fixed advantage but one that could be ever increased with clever engineering?
If a casino were to discover such a loophole that presented a likewise advantage against the house, they’d fix the rules and close the loophole. Constitutionally, the house that is America doesn’t work that way. There was never any fair dice standard to begin with or to measure off of. The dice were intentionally weighted, but there was never a legal limit to how much more a party can shave off the dice. That was poor planning.
Southern Strategy 1.0 played off of the advantage of the Founding Fathers’ political handicapping. Southern Strategy 2.0 refines the math and maximizes this statistical advantage.
Rigging the Census
Another lost story is the Trump administration’s rigging of the U.S. Census. As the Washington Post puts it, “The U.S. Census Is in Trouble.” Oh, did I just lose you by mentioning the Census? Soooo boring. Sooo much counting. No Russian spies to speak of. But bear in mind that the Census is our country’s constitutionally mandated process for dictating congressional apportionment and the drawing of district lines. Messing with the Census changes the number of Congress people per state and how many electoral delegates each state gets in the presidential election. If the Census does a half-assed job counting in California and misses a bunch of people, then California loses representatives and delegates.
When the Census budget is reduced, what happens? They cut back. That means it’s harder to count oft-forgotten people, like the homeless. That also means reduced foreign-language access, which makes the Census harder to fill out for immigrants and those for whom English is a second language. Fewer Census takers in urban areas? People in rural areas are easier to count because they are home more often and tend to answer their doors. If you reduce the number of times a Census enumerator returns to houses in certain areas, then you count less people. Crucial field tests in minority-predominant areas have already been cancelled due to lack of funding. And all these subtle details will be overseen by an as-yet-to-be-named Trump flunky appointee. Minor shifts in where and when the enumerators are sent will dramatically influence the distribution of electoral power in this country. But there will be no way to know this is happening until the actual numbers are published.
It will be impossible to challenge Trumped-up Census results because there’s no mechanism for recensusing the country (note that recensusing isn’t even a word). Furthermore, the U.S. Census does not release any personally identifiable information for 72 years. There will be no way to audit the results of the 2020 census until 2092! The Census happens once every 10 years, so if the results are, indeed, gamed, the repercussions will mean significant statistical advantages for Republicans for a least the next five elections. Every vote that happens under these conditions will multiply the effect.
Will the Dems spend their scant political capital to fight this appointment after losing on every other front? Nah. It’s all about that special prosecutor who will be the panacea to their political woes. Will Trump be impeached? How could he be impeached? Is he a peach? So on and so forth. Besides the satisfaction of picking off an ugly scab, what is gained by this? Why not let the GOP reckon with its own festering mess?
Whittling Away at the Electorate
Take away health insurance for the poor, and fewer sick people can vote. Kick the drug war back into full gear, and every felony prosecution of a POC for marijuana is a POC off the voter rolls. Every Trump policy seems to have the side effect of disenfranchisement.
Individually, these issues might not seem as headline-grabbing as treasonous collusion with the Russians, but methodically whittling away at the electoral edges year after year adds up to a government elected by an ever-shrinking minority. The pundits (and myself) thought that, logically, he couldn’t win because way more than half the people in our country despised him. But that’s not the math we should have been looking at. Trump won in 2016 by garnering only 26 percent of eligible voters. The trick is in this system is winning with as few votes as possible.
The coordinated efforts described above have and will further result in the following:
- The pool of poor/minority voters will shrink.
- The pool of poor/minority voters without easy access to voting will increase.
- The representative/electoral value of the average poor/minority/urban vote will decrease.
- The representative/electoral value of white rural votes will increase.
Small-Tent Politics
Another way of looking at all this: When the Republicans did their much ballyhooed postmortem of the 2012 election and reported that they needed to court minorities if they were going stay politically relevant in a USA where whites are on track to become a minority, the logical approach seemed to be opening up the big tent.
But there was another path: further amplify the electoral strength of the Southern Strategy voting blocks. It’s such a sad and cynical approach that both mainstream Republicans and the left brushed it off as fringe. By its very definition it is fringe. But just because it’s counterintuitive doesn’t stop the math from working out so that the necessary conditions are created for the fringe to win.
In 2016, this all added up to be just enough to tip the election to Trump. Sort of a lucky break that everything ended up so close, but sort of not a lucky break since Team Bannon put themselves in the position to win on these unprecedented margins. When so many seemingly unrelated issues break in the direction of one candidate, there’s usually a reason for that. Is it a coincidence that Bannon’s Breitbart broke onto the scene with the infamous ACORN sting, which dismantled the left’s only legit effort toward increasing their proportion of the electorate? My guess is that this guy has been thinking about playing these margins for a long time.
All this, and we haven’t even mentioned voter rights. Or gerrymandering.
Yikes.
“If Only I Had a Brain…”
Even if all the recent Russia hubbub results in Trump getting the boot, this voter disenfranchisement will continue apace. Let those righteous Dems whip themselves into a feeding frenzy. They can eviscerate the straw man, but it’s not like squeaky-clean Pence is following Trump out the door. Trump has never been a real Republican—he’s not even a proper RINO—and they will celebrate when he’s finally gone. Whoever’s arse fills the commandant’s seat, these democracy-stifling actions will be set in motion. Perhaps 2020 will result in the election of a president with under a quarter of eligible voters. It will be virtually impossible to stop a political party’s dominance if they can win with so few votes.
I’m no Nate Silver, but I don’t need to be a statistical genius to see that Dems have been and continue to be utterly outplayed at the political poker table and that all these incremental advantages will soon add up to a de facto ruling party in the United States.
