When you’re a Republican, they let you do it. You can do anything.
Republicans ignore voters’ wishes. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Democracy is not exactly their jam. They’ve made that clear again and again. But now there’s a little-noticed study analyzing that affliction in our beleaguered constitutional republic.
Timothy Noah gives the study by Mary Ellen Klas and Carolyn Silverman published last month in Bloomberg Opinion some extra press at The New Republic.
The way elections are sold, candidates tell us what they promise to do for us (or in MAGA’s case, to us) “and then voters decide which set of policies they prefer.” If only.
See, Democrats are more likely to respond to the majority of voters’ wishes than their GOP counterparts:
The Klas-Silverman piece didn’t attract much notice when it was published because it was packaged, in rather boring fashion, as a story purporting to show that in the 40 “trifecta” states where a single party controls both halves of the state legislature and the governorship, voter preferences get ignored. A plague on both your houses! But what the story really shows is that Republican officeholders in the 23 Republican trifecta states routinely ignore voter preferences, even as Democratic officeholders in the 17 Democratic trifecta states work much harder to do what voters want. Indeed, Democratic trifecta state government policies match up with voter preferences more frequently than in states in which power is shared between Democrats and Republicans.
[…]
“For the past quarter century,” Klas and Silverman write, “the public has become more progressive on many social issues,” including “abortion, gender identity, climate change, guns, immigration and voting rights.” Blue trifecta states have kept pace with these changes, they write, and red trifecta states have not. Instead, they’ve become known more for “rejecting Medicaid expansion, relaxing gun laws and cutting unemployment insurance.” The authors go on to explain that “Blue monopolies channel the goals of their voters, while red monopolies channel the goals of their legislators (often at the expense of voters).”
It’s not that Republican trifectas never give the majority what it wants. They just do it far less than Democratic trifectas.
What’s a voter to do? Vote out the malefactors of great wealth? Maybe in Teddy Roosevelt’s day, but not in ours. Republican gerrymandering, particularly after REDMAP-powered 2010 redistricting, has ensconced politicians in state legislative seats where, Klas and Silverman, explain:
Nearly half of all state legislators running for reelection in recent decades faced challengers only in the general election, and 35% of all legislators were elected with no opposition at all, according to Steven Rogers, professor of political science at Saint Louis University.
It’s not that Democrats don’t gerrymander, Noah writes, but data suggests “gerrymandering is almost entirely a Republican problem.” And what gerrymandering doesn’t accomplish, GOP vote-suppressing measures supplement.
Klas and Silverman:
A Bloomberg analysis of data compiled by the non-partisan Voting Rights Lab found that more than 120 election law changes in Republican-led states over the last four years have had at least one component intended to restrict voter access or election administration — such as tightening voter ID requirements, restricting mail-in voting, limiting ballot drop-off locations and shortening the early voting period. By contrast, the analysis showed, Democrats’ legislation has focused on improving voter access by standardizing voter registration, ensuring a sufficient number of polling sites and expanding the early voting period.
“They want everyone to vote,” complained Paul Weyrich, co-founder of The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, in 1980 to a conference of religious conservatives. “I don’t want everybody to vote.” In GOP circles, that’s chiseled on stone tablets.
Citing the collapse of local newspapers and “news deserts,” Klas and Silverman suggest perhaps voters’ lack of information contributes to politicians stealing their candy. Noah adds that
… this problem is especially acute in conservative areas. Steve Waldman and Lori Henson, crunching data from the 2023 Medill State of Local News report, note that fully 83 percent of those counties Medill judged either news deserts or in danger of becoming news deserts voted Republican in the 2020 election. The 13 states with the most news deserts—Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, etc.—were all red states except Georgia. In the absence of information, people vote based on cultural affinity. When people self-identify as conservative, as they do in many regions of this country, they vote Republican.
Noah devotes a lot of pixels to these news deserts. Granted, as he explains, “Democrats’ primary obstacle is that 80 to 85 percent of Americans pay little attention to any news source, readily available or not, according to the political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, both of the University of Michigan.”
But I’m not so sure news deserts account for people voting based on cultural affinity more than on policies. They just do. “I wouldn’t trust anyone my dog doesn’t like” is how most people really vote. On their guts. Voters in 2000 thought they’d rather have a beer with Gov. George W. Bush, recovering alcoholic, for heaven’s sake. They’re not looking for more information (see disingenuous complaints about Kamala Harris) as much as authenticity. That’s as true for national candidates as it is for state officials.
Many of our conservative neighbors simply find the orange con man more authentic than Democrats. Perhaps because they are accustomed from childhood to being sold prayer cloths, prosperity plans, and afterlife insurance by loudmouth hucksters in church pulpits. It’s what they know. It’s comfortably familiar.
Send your prayers to God and send your money to me has a parallel in politics.