Month: November 2020

Jamelle Bouie lays out the case for reforming the electoral college.

Last year I wrote that the Electoral College, an archaic and outmoded system that runs contrary to our democratic principles and intuitions, was the “greatest threat to our democracy.”

Somehow, this was an understatement.

As recently as Wednesday, according to a report by my colleague Maggie Haberman, President Trump was pressing his aides on whether Republican legislatures in key states could overturn the results of the presidential election and pick pro-Trump electors, potentially giving him a second term. It’s not likely, but the fact that it is even theoretically possible is one of the most starkly undemocratic elements of the Electoral College. If it actually happened, in 2020 or the future, it would mark the end of American democracy as we know it.

If Americans chose their president by a national popular vote, the outcome would have been apparent from the time polls closed on the West Coast on Election Day. Late that night, Joe Biden held a strong lead in ballots cast, and since then it has only grown. As of Friday morning, the president-elect led the national tally with 77.8 million votes to 72.5 million for Trump, for a spread of 5.3 million votes. With plenty of outstanding ballots left to count in Democratic strongholds like New York and California, the gap will continue to grow.

Of course, Americans don’t choose their president by national popular vote. They choose him (still him, for now) in 51 individual elections, nearly all of them winner-take-all, with special attention paid to those states competitive enough to make a difference in the fight for 270 electoral votes. No one designed this system — it bears little resemblance to the deliberative, temporary legislature empowered to pick a president described in the Constitution — but it’s what we have.

It is because the outcome depends on results in individual states — and because those results are much narrower than the national tally — that Trump can claim there is path to reversing the outcome of the election, however ridiculous that claim is. Allege enough fraud in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia and you might convince Republican state legislators to take matters into their own hands, embracing the view, first articulated by Chief Justice William Rehnquist in Bush v. Gore and then echoed in a recent opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, that state legislatures have sole and exclusive power to decide election law and procedures.

What could those lawmakers do? Under the Constitution, states can allocate electors — meaning electoral votes — in “such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Beginning after the Civil War, every state in the union has used direct popular election to choose electors. The modern process is straightforward. After the vote, election officials certify results and prepare “certificates of ascertainment” that establish credentials for each elector. There are multiple copies, and the governor signs each one. The electors meet, record their votes, and those votes, along with the certificates of ascertainment, are sent to state and federal officials, including the vice president, who will preside when Congress counts electoral votes early next year. If a state submits conflicting electoral votes, the House and Senate may choose which ones to accept or reject.

Bouie goes into the current speculation around the idea that Trum-friendly legislatures might go around the voters and the governors to name Trump electors to the electoral college. They could legally do it and if the Supreme Court stepped in a stopped it (not a given) it would create a tremendous upheaval among the people. He points out that this is highly, highly unlikely although you never know. Strange things are happening in our country and even if this is just “performance art” to keep the base on board things could still get away from them.

And who knows what will happen next time?

We are living through a period in which, for reasons of geographic polarization in particular, the Republican Party holds a powerful advantage in the Senate and the Electoral College, and a smaller one in the House of Representatives. Twice in 20 years they’ve won the White House without a majority of votes. A few shifts here and there, and Trump might have won a second term while losing by a popular vote margin nearly twice as large as the one he lost by in 2016.

The Republican Party, in other words, can win unified control of Washington without winning a majority of the vote or appealing to most Americans. Aware of this advantage, Republicans have embraced it. They’ve pinned their political hopes on our counter-majoritarian institutions, elevated minority government into a positive good (rather than a regrettable flaw of our system) and attacked the very idea that we should aspire to equality in representation.

“Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are,” Senator Mike Lee of Utah tweeted last month. “We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

“Rank democracy.” Perhaps Lee, one of the leading intellectual lights of the Republican Party, is alone in his contempt for political equality between citizens. But I doubt it. And a Republican Party that holds that view is one that will do anything to win power, even if it breaks democracy. It’s a Republican Party that will suppress voters rather than persuade them, degrade an office rather than allow the opposition to wield it and create districts so slanted as to make it almost impossible for voters to remove them from office.

For that Republican Party, the Electoral College is a loaded gun, waiting to be fired. We’ll disarm and disassemble it as soon as possible, if we value this democracy of ours.

We have a bill of rights to protect the rights of the minority in this country. We do not have to allow the minority to rule over the majority out of some misplaced idea that it will hurt their feelings and attack their “culture” if we don’t. It’s nonsense and by allowing this continue, we are slowly making our democracy more and more dysfunctional.

Personally, I think we either need to split some states, add new states or get rid of the Senate altogether as well. It’s an undemocratic holdover from the House of Lords and we really don’t need it. If we must keep it, the breakdown needs to change so that we can have an institution that accurately represents human beings instead of giving equal representation to rocks, trees and cows.

If you’re looking for a short piece debunking the prevailing myths about the electoral college’s necessity, this is a good primer. It is not a necessity. Republicans would still win plenty of elections and it would at least guarantee that they had to eschew the radicalization the electoral college is currently incentivizing them to adopt.

Oh heck. Charles Koch believes he made a mistake by being so partisan. Imagine that:

Four days before this year’s presidential election, Charles Koch—the voluble Kansas billionaire who has spent a fortune injecting his particular brand of prairie libertarianism into the American political debate—pauses at the other end of the line when asked if he will vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

“That’s a very divisive question, because however I answer, that’s going to upset a bunch of people,” he says. “That’s why there’s a secret ballot.”

Mr. Koch, whom Forbes calls the 15th-wealthiest man in the U.S., says he isn’t interested in more division. At age 85, he says, he is turning his attention to building bridges across partisan divides to find answers to sprawling social problems such as poverty, addiction, recidivism, gang violence and homelessness. His critics are skeptical, noting that his fierce Republican partisanship over the years blew up a lot of bridges.

Mr. Koch has written (with Brian Hooks) a new book, “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,” which will be published on Nov. 17. It is part mea culpa, part self-help guide and part road map toward a libertarian America. Along the way, the book traces Mr. Koch’s life from hardheaded adolescent to student, engineer, industrialist, tycoon and political mastermind. The book suggests that he wants to add one final act: philosopher and, he hopes, unifier.

The key to successful, long-term movements? “Unite a diversity of people behind a common goal,” Mr. Koch says. “That’s our approach today.”

Mr. Koch is still overseeing Koch Industries, a multibillion-dollar conglomerate, and its 130,000 employees. He worked from home for a while when the pandemic began; he still avoids crowds and most public spaces, and wears a mask when he is around people.

His new book is the latest step in a yearslong process of rebranding (a word he doesn’t appreciate). Mr. Koch, it seems, doesn’t want to be forever known as a hard-driving partisan.

“You’ve probably seen all the names I’ve been called,” Mr. Koch says. He tells me to call him Chuckie.

[…]

Boo hoo. He’s trying to kill life on this planet.

In Mr. Koch’s telling, the reason for social progress and increased prosperity is simple: Billions of people have had the freedom to try to fail, invent and succeed. They have solved the problems in front of them and lifted society from the bottom up.

Mr. Koch applied that philosophy to Koch Industries, which he took over from his father when he was 31 and the company employed just 300 people. Its annual revenues today are around $120 billion.

The problem, Mr. Koch says, is that such freedom is under constant attack by people who want to take control away from individuals and create top-down systems that stifle innovation. He rails against what he calls unnecessary licensing and government lobbying. (Koch Industries has spent more than $100 million in lobbying over the past decade, according to federal records kept by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group tracking money in U.S. politics.)

Mr. Koch and his late brother David seeded the political landscape with conservative and libertarian ideas, then built an infrastructure to nurture them. Koch-aligned ventures fund more than 1,000 faculty members at more than 200 universities, helped bankroll think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, and supported the American Legislative Exchange Council (a nonpartisan organization of similarly minded state legislators) to write bills that were introduced and championed by Republican state lawmakers across the country.

Mr. Koch’s influence increased in 2010 after the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations were exempt from restrictions on political spending. That controversial ruling brought a flood of new money into politics from wealthy individuals, including the Koch brothers, George Soros and Sheldon Adelson. The ruling also allowed nonprofits to more easily keep the sources of their funding secret, allowing so-called “dark money” to influence elections.

The Koch brothers’ organization raised and spent billions of dollars, untethered to the limits of the campaign-finance system. The wave of money influenced policy areas from health care to environmental regulation, foreign policy and unionization. Critics warned that the Kochs were rigging the public debate to enrich their own bottom line by casting corporate self-interest as a new form of populism.

Mr. Koch disagrees and bristles at the notion that he wields too much influence. “When you look at countries that don’t let everyone participate, those in power stay in power unchallenged,” he says. “Instead of limiting certain people’s ability to engage, we should do all we can to empower more people to get engaged.”

Uh huh. Even billionaires have a right to “participate” …. with massive amounts of spending. Because every one of their dollars has the same right to free speech as you do. Ain’t that sweet.

After President Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and the tea party (which pushed to slash federal spending) emerged, Mr. Koch threw his weight behind the new movement and its candidates. “We did not create the tea party. We shared their concern about unsustainable government spending, and we supported some tea-party groups on that issue,” Mr. Koch wrote in an email. “But it seems to me the tea party was largely unsuccessful long-term, given that we’re coming off a Republican administration with the largest government spending in history.”

Mr. Koch said he has since come to regret his partisanship, which he says badly deepened divisions. “Boy, did we screw up!” he writes in his new book. “What a mess!”

Mr. Koch is now trying to work together with Democrats and liberals on issues such as immigration, criminal-justice reform and limiting U.S. intervention abroad, where he thinks common ground can be found. He has partnered with organizations including the LeBron James Family Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and even a handful of Democratic state legislative campaigns. In 2019, he renamed the Koch network of about 700 donors as Stand Together.

Still, his political spending remains almost entirely partisan. Koch Industries’ PAC and employees donated $2.8 million in the 2020 campaign cycle to Republican candidates and $221,000 to Democratic candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Koch insiders say that it will take time to build trust with Democrats, some of whom would be happy to spurn a Koch donation and then raise funds around that rejection. Mr. Koch says he will continue to look for potential partners.

“I congratulate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on their victory,” he wrote in an email. “I look forward to finding ways to work with them to break down the barriers holding people back, whether in the economy, criminal justice, immigration, the Covid-19 pandemic, or anywhere else. At the same time, I hope we all use this post-election period to find a better way forward. Because of partisanship, we’ve come to expect too much of politics and too little of ourselves and one another.”

Whatever. I remember that Richard Mellon Scaife had a similar awakening in his dotage and even ended up trying to mend fences with Bill Clinton after having spent millions trying to destroy him. As these wealthy political thugs face their mortality they suddenly realize that their legacy is going to be something toxic and ugly.

Too late. All of Koch’s attempts to smooth over his image cannot make up for the fact that he and his money are working overtime to obstruct all efforts to stop climate change before it turns the world upside down. He and all the libertarians combined with the rest of the fossil fuel industry are enemy number one for humanity. No quarter.

He’s talking about the hail mary:

At a meeting on Wednesday at the White House, President Trump had something he wanted to discuss with his advisers, many of whom have told him his chances of succeeding at changing the results of the 2020 election are thin as a reed.

He then proceeded to press them on whether Republican legislatures could pick pro-Trump electors in a handful of key states and deliver him the electoral votes he needs to change the math and give him a second term, according to people briefed on the discussion.

It was not a detailed conversation, or really a serious one, the people briefed on it said. Nor was it reflective of any obsessive desire of Mr. Trump’s to remain in the White House.

“He knows it’s over,” one adviser said. But instead of conceding, they said, he is floating one improbable scenario after another for staying in office while he contemplates his uncertain post-presidency future.

He knows it’s over so he floats the idea of having pro-Trump Republican legislators usurp the will of the people and deliver enough electoral votes to stay in office? Sure, the president is musing about what amounts to a coup attempt but it’s no big deal.

Hookay…

The president has insisted to aides that he really defeated Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Nov. 3, but it is unclear whether he actually believes it. And instead of conducting discreet requests for recounts, Mr. Trump has made a series of spurious claims, seizing on conspiracies fanned on the internet.

The latest was on Thursday, when he falsely claimed on Twitter that Dominion voting machines switched hundreds of thousands of his votes to Mr. Biden, citing a report he had seen on the fringe network OANN, something even his supporters called ridiculous and a federal agency overseeing cybersecurity disavowed in a statement.

Advisers said his efforts were in keeping with one of his favorite pastimes: creating a controversy and watching to see how it plays out.

Has anyone mentioned to him that he still has duties?

Never mind. He never paid much attention to those anyway. And if he did, it would undoubtedly make everything worse. And anyway, not having to see him or hear him these past few days has been blissful. I don’t think I fully understood how awful it was until it stopped.

But the work of government has been reduced to something of a sideshow for the president. He has not made any public appearances except for a visit to Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day since an angry statement a week ago.

And he has not spoken about the coronavirus pandemic or mentioned it on Twitter despite the staggering growth in positive cases and the number of West Wing aides and outside advisers who have been diagnosed with the virus in the past week.

The country is in a full blown health crisis that is getting worse by the day. It it is approved, the vaccine will not be available to most of us for months. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands more preventable deaths will have happened by then. And the government is completely AWOL, led by a man-baby who won’t accept that he lost so he’s obsessively watching TV and scheming about how he can persuade people that he actually won.

I suppose it was inevitable that Donald Trump would end up killing massive numbers of people. You can’t put an imbecile like him in charge of the most powerful country on earth and have it end up otherwise. And so his legacy will be the near destruction of our democracy and a massive pile of dead bodies. Sitting atop them will be the institution of the Republican Party which helped him do this every step of the way.

One of the many overlooked stories during the run-up to this election was the New York Times series based upon Trump’s tax documents. Sure, we heard about it, but I don’t think the full scope of it sunk in. Trump didn’t pay federal income taxes for years, he got a multi-million dollar lifeline from “The Apprentice,” he owes vast sums to banks — which he has personally guaranteed — and he played fast and loose with tax write-offs for his alleged philanthropy, which don’t always add up. It was an unprecedented indictment of a sitting president.

That series was a sequel to the Times’ earlier award-winning series on Fred Trump’s tax fraud scheme which set Trump and his siblings up for life and cheated the taxpayers of millions of dollars. It showed how Donald went on to waste his inheritance on failed business ventures and kept coming back to the trough for more each time he got into trouble. He even cheated members of his own family out of their rightful inheritances — his niece Mary Trump, the psychologist and author of a bestselling family memoir, recently filed a lawsuit based on some of the information revealed in those reports.

Although we’ve known for many years that Donald Trump was a failed businessman and con artist, these two series provided a fuller picture of his finances and business practices than we’d seen before. What becomes obvious when you review the whole story from the beginning is that Trump has been dancing as fast as he can for many years, always on the verge of total collapse and somehow surviving by getting through life one day at a time.

The most recent Times report disappeared almost immediately because it came in the last two weeks before the election and there just wasn’t any bandwidth availabl for it. It was the story of Trump Tower Chicago and how Trump mismanaged the entire development, as usual. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, he found himself on the hook to Deutsche Bank and a hedge fund for hundreds of millions of dollars. The creditors tried to work with him but finally hit their limit, at which point Trump went into his usual “fight back” mode and sued the bank for allegedly causing the financial crisis, which he claimed was force majeure, meaning he didn’t have to pay back the loans. He became such a pain in the ass, with bad-faith negotiations and lawsuits, that the institutions ended up writing down the loans just to get him off their backs. That’s how he works, whether with a small vendor who sold him some carpeting or a major multinational bank.

He’s lied to banks for years about how wealthy he is, while telling the government in virtually the same breath that he was nearly broke. Banks kept lending to him and kept losing money, until he was finally left with only Deutsche Bank. According to a Reuters report last week, that relationship may finally have reached the end of the line as well:

Deutsche Bank AG is looking for ways to end its relationship with President Donald Trump after the U.S. elections, as it tires of the negative publicity stemming from the ties, according to three senior bank officials with direct knowledge of the matter. Deutsche Bank has about $340 million in loans outstanding to the Trump Organization.

These loans are coming due within two years and are personally guaranteed by Trump. The bank would apparently like to sell the loans on the secondary market — but it’s likely no one will want to buy them. And that the $340 million is just a portion of the enormous debt he reportedly owes to entities we still can’t identify.

The fact that Trump was a terrible businessman and worse dealmaker was something once kept on the QT among the financial elite (probably to cover their own ineptitude in repeatedly lending him money) but everyone knows what he is now. They know what his family is. His “brand” is no longer something anyone can sell as luxury. (Remember, he was dropped by a whole bunch of his sponsors during the first campaign.) Everything Trump has done as president has only made his name more toxic.

Meanwhile, his political game has been run in similar fashion. Trump paid off his porn-star mistress and evaded the lawsuits brought by various players both professional and personal, not the least of which are the women who have sued him for defamation and assault. His henchmen in the Republican Party have covered for his corruption and incompetence every step of the way.

But now the American people have finally held him accountable and his presidential immunity from prosecution is about to come to an end. That is why we’re all watching this unprecedented spectacle of a president who lost re-election wildly flailing about in hopes of fending off the reckoning he’s avoided his whole life. He’s still dancing.

Back in 2018 just before the midterm election, Trump was at one of his rallies musing about the fact that Republicans might lose. He told his adoring crowd, “And you know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.'”

But there is no way out of this defeat. He has been repudiated by a clear majority of the electorate and there’s nothing he can do about it. He can’t sue his way out of it or renege on his promises. But he can certainly lie about it, say he was cheated and reinvent himself as a martyr to the MAGA movement. He’s got about 70 million people ready to believe him.

This is yet another reason why I believe Trump will announce he’s running for president again in 2024, and will find ways to monetize that possibly-fictional campaign and keep GOP donors and others spending money to remain in his favor. Maybe he’ll get some sucker to pay for him to start a media company of some sort. 

Trump may not be able to sell condos anymore, or a perfume called “Success.” But he’s got a new brand anyway, and millions of deluded customers. I suspect he’ll be out there selling that for quite some time.  

My Salon column.

Donald Trump scams like he lies, like he breathes.

In case you missed his “legal defense fund” grift, Reuters did not:

(Reuters) – As President Donald Trump seeks to discredit last week’s election with baseless claims of voter fraud, his team has bombarded his supporters with requests for money to help pay for legal challenges to the results: “The Left will try to STEAL this election!” reads one text.

But any small-dollar donations from Trump’s grassroots donors won’t be going to legal expenses at all, according to a Reuters review of the legal language in the solicitations.

A donor would have to give more than $8,000 before any money goes to the “recount account” established to finance election challenges, including recounts and lawsuits over alleged improprieties, the fundraising disclosures show.

It’s all in the fine print. Sixty percent of small donations will go to a Trump leadership PAC (set up Monday). Forty percent goes to the Republican National Committee (RNC). The recount defense fund is an afterthought unless donors give more than $8,000.

Even the leadership PAC could be a slush fund, Reuters suggests.

Leadership PACs such as Save America are often set up by prominent political figures to spend money on other candidates, while also paying for personal expenses, such as travel and hotel stays.

Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, suggests he has no real plans for running for president again.

Basically, Trump is broke. He is in debt to his bushy eyebrows and has no source of income sufficient to keep debt collectors at bay. Post-presidency books and speaking fees may not be enough to spare him. He faces a flurry of lawsuits including one from his niece Mary and perhaps criminal charges in New York state. His tax returns will see the sunlight in due course and confirm this.

Grifting is all he knows … and all he has left.

Seth Meyers took “A Closer Look” Thursday night:

(h/t Spocko)

To no one’s surprise, the soon-to-be-former Acting President has already checked out of the job he never really did anyway. In the private sector, employers let you clear out your desk and escort you to the door after you’ve been RIFed or fired. Not so in Washington, D.C. We let you hang around to sabotage the national security apparatus and “misplace” key files. This is euphemistically called “transition.”

Six Americans die in a helicopter accident in Egypt? Tropical Storm Eta causes flooding in Florida? Another record-setting day of coronavirus infections after a string of record-setting days? Donald Trump, if he is busy at all, is somewhere in the White House picking at his grievances until they bleed, spreading misinformation via Twitter and, naturally, scamming people.

All of which bodes ill for the federal response to the latest spike in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations between now and January.

Washington Post:

“It seems clear Trump has checked out,” said Norman Ornstein, a political scientist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has criticized Trump. “It’s not like this guy has shown a great interest in governing for four years, so to expect he will now accelerate the pace is a little fanciful. It’s pretty clear he feels wounded. Under those circumstances, the idea he’s going to pay more attention to the details of governance is ridiculous.”

White House aides disputed the notion that Trump was reneging on his responsibilities as president, releasing a list of executive actions he has taken since the election. The list included an order Thursday banning U.S. investment in Chinese military companies, an emergency declaration for Florida over the storm damage and several presidential proclamations, including celebrating the 245th anniversary of the U.S. Marine Corps.

“Any suggestion that the President has given up on governing is false,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said in a statement. “Just as he promised, President Trump is fighting hard for a free and fair election while at the same time carrying out all of his duties to put America First.”

Pretty much what you’d expect a White House aide named Judd Deere to say in an Ivan Reitman film as the president is humping his secretary.

White House aides know better than to mention President-elect Joe Biden’s name, the Daily Beast reports:

“If you even mention Biden’s name… that’s a no-go, you’d be fired,” one national security official said. “Everyone is scared of even talking about the chance of working with the [Biden] transition.”

Everyone is afraid to tell Trump the race is over and he lost.

“It’s like dealing with a lunatic on the subway. Everyone just kind of sits and stares ahead, pretends they can’t hear him, and waits for him to eventually get off,” said a “GOP source close to the administration.”

The result is chaos in the national security apparatus, a surging pandemic left to run wild, with rampant spread across the the top half of the country and a “catastrophic” lack of ICU beds in the Twin Cities.

Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy told the Washington Post on Tuesday, “This is like one huge coronavirus forest fire, and I don’t think it’s going to spare much human wood out there unless we change our behavior.”

Just don’t expect the soon-to-be-former Acting President to change his.

Sixty-seven thousand hospitalized and 1,100 dead per day, you say? This isn’t a transition, it’s a death march to January 20th.

He’s still hanging in there…

He’s firing people which makes him happy:

Top U.S. cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs has told associates he expects to be fired by the White House, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Krebs, who heads the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), did not return messages seeking comment. CISA and the White House declined comment.

Separately, Bryan Ware, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, confirmed to Reuters that he had handed in his resignation on Thursday.

Krebs has drawn widespread bipartisan praise for his handling of the Nov. 3 U.S. election, which generally ran smoothly despite persistent fears that foreign hackers might try to undermine the vote.

But he drew the ire of the Trump White House over a website run by CISA dubbed “Rumor Control” which debunks misinformation about the election, according to the three people familiar with the matter.

White House officials have asked for content to be edited or removed from the website, which has pushed back against false claims that Democrats are behind a mass election fraud operation. CISA officials have refused to delete accurate information.

Ware is one of several officials who have left national security-related posts since President Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden. Trump has yet to concede.

Ware did not provide details, but a U.S. official familiar with his matter said the White House asked for Ware’s resignation earlier this week.

The churn is being closely watched amid concern for the integrity of the transition from Trump to Biden.

So, it’s going very well I guess. Good times.

Ezra Klein has written a smart analysis of why are system is so broken. It’s depressing but important to understand.

Imagine that, four years ago, Donald Trump lost the presidential election by 2.9 million votes, but there was no Electoral College to weight the results in his favor. In January 2017, Hillary Clinton was inaugurated as president, and the Trumpist faction of the GOP was blamed for blowing an election Republicans could have won.

The GOP would have been locked out of presidential power for three straight terms, after winning the crucial popular vote only once since 1988. It might have lost the Supreme Court, too.

And so Republicans would likely have done what Democrats did in 1992, after they lost three straight presidential elections: reform their agenda and their messaging, and try to build a broader coalition, one capable of winning power by winning votes. This is the way democracy disciplines political parties: Parties want to win, and to do so, they need to listen to the public. But that’s only true for one of our political parties.

Take the most recent election. Joe Biden is on track to beat Donald Trump by around 5 million votes. But as my colleague Andrew Prokop notes, a roughly 50,000-vote swing in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin would have created a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, tossing the election to the state delegations in the House, where Trump would’ve won because Republicans control more states, though not more seats. Trump didn’t almost win reelection because of polarization. He almost won reelection because of the Electoral College.

The Senate tells a similar story. It is likely, when the votes are counted, that Democrats will have won more Senate votes in each of the last three Senate cycles, but never controlled the Senate in that time. Vox’s Ian Millhiser calculates that if Senate Democrats lose the two Georgia runoffs, they will still, in the minority, represent 20 million more people than the Republican Senate majority.

[…]

America’s problem right now isn’t a surfeit of political polarization. It’s a dearth of democracy. The fundamental feedback loop of politics — parties compete for public support, and if they fail the public, they are electorally punished, and so they change — is broken. But it’s only broken for the Republican Party.

The simplest way to understand American politics right now is that we have a two-party system set up to create a center-left political coalition and a far-right political coalition.

Two reinforcing features of our political system have converged to create that result. First, the system weights the votes of small states and rural areas more heavily. Second, elections are administered, and House districts drawn, by partisan politicians.

Over the past few decades, our politics has become sharply divided by density, with Democrats dominating cities and Republicans dominating rural areas. That’s given Republicans an electoral advantage, which they’ve in turn used to stack electoral rules in their favor through aggressive gerrymandering, favorable Supreme Court decisions, and more. As a result, Democrats and Republicans are operating in what are, functionally, different electoral systems, with very different incentives.

To reliably win the Electoral College, Democrats need to win the popular vote by 3 or 4 percentage points. To reliably win the Senate, they need to run 6 to 7 points ahead of Republicans. To reliably win the House, they need to win the vote by 3 or 4 points. As such, Democrats need to consciously strategize to appeal to voters who do not naturally agree with them. That’s how they ended up with Joe Biden as their nominee. Biden was not the choice of the party’s more ideological base. He was not the choice of those who wanted to see Democrats reflect the young, multiethnic, majority-female voters driving their electoral victories.

Biden was the choice of Democrats who favored electability above all. Electability is a weird idea: It asks not that you vote for who you find most electable, but for who you think a voter who is not like you would find most electable.

Biden promised that he could lure back some of the white, working-class voters who’d powered Trump’s 2016 victory, and he could do it explicitly because he was an old, moderate, white guy who could talk to the parts of the electorate that feared the ideological and demographic changes sweeping the nation. Democrats bought that pitch, and Biden, to his credit, delivered on it. The Democratic Party is led by a center-left leader because that’s what it believed it needed in order to win. And winning mattered above all else.

For Republicans, the incentives are exactly the reverse. They can win the presidency despite getting fewer votes. They can win the Senate despite getting fewer votes. They can win the House despite getting fewer votes. They can control the balance of state legislatures despite getting fewer votes.

And so they do. Their base, like the Democratic base, would prefer to run more uncompromising candidates, and their donors would prefer a more uncompromising agenda. A party that needed to win a majority of the popular vote couldn’t indulge itself by nominating Trump and backing his erratic, outrageous, and incompetent style of governance to the hilt. A party that needed a majority of the popular vote to win the Senate and the House couldn’t keep trying to rip health care away from tens of millions of people while cutting taxes on the richest Americans.

Republicans are not irrational for spending down their electoral advantage on more temperamentally extreme candidates and ideologically pure policies. The process of disappointing your own base is brutally hard — just look at the endless fights between moderates and leftists on the Democratic side. What motivates parties to change, compromise, and adapt is the pain of loss, and the fear of future losses. If a party is protected from that pain, the incentive to listen to the public and moderate its candidates or alter its agenda wanes.

An argument I make at some length in my book is that polarization is not, in and of itself, a good or a bad thing. What matters is the way it interacts with the broader political system: how elections are won, how legislation is passed, how disagreement is resolved. At the simplest level, higher levels of polarization will make parties more desperate to win, which in turn will push them to adapt the strategies needed to win in the system they inhabit.

But our electoral system is imbalanced, and it’s led to imbalanced parties: It forces Democrats to lean into the messy, pluralistic work of winning elections in a democracy, and allows Republicans to avoid that work, and instead worry about pleasing the most fervent members of their base. It forces Democrats to win voters ranging from the far left to the center right, but Republicans can win with only right-of-center votes.

And that is how we come to the situation we face today: A party that adapts to anti-democratic rules will quickly become a party that fears democracy. A party that knows it can’t win a majority of the vote will try to make it difficult for majorities to vote, and have those votes count. A party that isn’t punished for betraying the public trust will keep betraying it.

If Republicans were more worried about winning back some of Biden’s voters rather than placating Trump’s base, they wouldn’t be indulging his post-election tantrum. It would be offensive to the voters they’re losing, and whom they’ll need in the future. But they’re not, and so they have aligned themselves with Trump’s claims of theft — with profoundly dangerous consequences for America.

Trump is not in the White House, refusing to accept the results of the election, because America is polarized. He is there because of the Electoral College. Mitch McConnell is not favored to remain Senate majority leader because America is polarized. He is favored to remain Senate majority leader because the Senate is the most undemocratic legislative chamber in the Western world, and the only way Republicans seem to lose control is to lose successive landslide elections, as happened in 2006 and 2008.

In politics, as in any competition, the teams adopt the strategies the rules demand. America’s political parties are adopting the strategies that their very different electoral positions demand. That has made the Democratic Party a big-tent, center-left coalition that puts an emphasis on pluralistic outreach. And it has let the Republican Party adopt more extreme candidates, dangerous strategies, and unpopular agendas, because it can win most elections even while it’s losing most voters.

At this point I’m not particularly moved by the various critiques of Democratic factions from either side. I have my feelings about all of it, but I will confess that this election has made me stop and grapple with some of my priors. Some things I thought were obvious were not obvious. I don’t think the Democrats’ reaction to all of this, as well as the difficulty of maintaining control of the House when it is so ruthlessly gerrymandered by the right or the media ecosystem that is polluting half the country with disinformation is as strenuous as it needs to be. Look at where the courts are now.

But as I said, I need to think a bit about all of this, digest the results and see where we land. This piece is helpful in crystalizing some of the fundamentals. I am convinced that the problem is bigger than tactics, organizing and turnout. The barriers are institutional.

Yes, we already knew that the GOP has increasingly embraced authoritarianism and abandoned democracy, but it’s nice to have the data:

…according to data released by an international team of political scientists just before the Nov. 3 election, it’s possible to quantify the extent to which the Republican Party no longer adheres to such principles as the commitment to free and fair elections with multiple parties, the respectful treatment of political opponents and the avoidance of violent rhetoric.

“The Republican Party in the U.S. has retreated from upholding democratic norms in recent years,” said Anna Lührmann, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and a former member of the German parliament. “Its rhetoric is closer to authoritarian parties, such as AKP in Turkey and Fidesz in Hungary.”

No kidding.

The Democratic Party, by contrast, hasn’t changed much. This is a prime example of what political scientists call asymmetric polarization — a growing partisan gap driven almost entirely by the actions of the Republican Party.

While V-Dem’s data only runs through 2018, that asymmetry has only become more apparent in the aftermath of this election, Lührmann said: “It is disturbing that most leading Republicans are still not objecting to President Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud and attempts to declare himself the winner.” 

As a result, she says, GOP scores are likely to sink further when 2020 data is released.

It can’t be said enough: if you have a system with only two major political parties and one of them is openly authoritarian — which is undoubtedly the case with the GOP — your country is one heap of trouble.

I had never heard of this before, but it certainly does seem relevant for our times:

DARVO is an acronym for “deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender”, which summarizes a common strategy of abusers. The abuser denies the abuse ever took place, then attacks the victim for attempting to hold the abuser accountable, and then claims that they, the abuser, are actually the victim in the situation, thus reversing the reality of the victim and offender. This usually involves not just “playing the victim” but also victim blaming. The acronym and the analysis it is based on are the work of the psychologist Jennifer Freyd, whose webpage links to an article explaining that the first stage of DARVO, denial, involves gaslighting.

Jennifer Freyd writes:

…I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of law suits, overt and covert attacks on the whistle-blower’s credibility, and so on. The attack will often take the form of focusing on ridiculing the person who attempts to hold the offender accountable. […] [T]he offender rapidly creates the impression that the abuser is the wronged one, while the victim or concerned observer is the offender. Figure and ground are completely reversed. […] The offender is on the offense and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense.

Democrats have to get past this somehow and I would suggest that the first step is holding abusers legally accountable for their actions.