With six weeks to go until Election Day, the midterms aren’t unfolding as we all expected earlier this year, when Republicans were better than even money to retake the Senate and a lead-pipe cinch to flip the House by a substantial margin. There are, of course, plenty of reasons you can cite for this change in the political climate, from the backlash to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to somewhat better economic news to Donald Trump’s continued presence on the campaign trail to bad GOP-candidate selection. It’s nerve-racking, of course, because with Democrats holding the slightest of majorities in both congressional chambers, very small micro-trends in just a few states or districts could have enormous consequences for the parties and for the country (the consequences extend, of course, to state-level positions, not just governors but election-supervising secretaries of State).
But as political observers anxiously parse polls and hold up weather vanes to test partisan winds, Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter offers another way of looking at this election cycle:
“In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post, political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck write that American politics has become more polarized and calcified. Events and the responses to them from politicians no longer have the ability to deeply and fundamentally reshape our politics or political coalitions. ‘Voters and leaders in the two major parties are not only more ideologically distant from each other but also more likely to describe each other in harsh terms,’ they write. ‘In the fall of 2020, 90 percent of Americans said there were important differences in what the parties stood for — the highest number recorded in almost 70 years of American National Election Study surveys.’
“Moreover, they write, voters are ‘less likely to change their basic political evaluations or vote for the other party’s candidate.’ This calcification of our partisanship ‘produces rigidity in our politics — even when dramatic events suggest the potential for big changes.’
“In other words, if every election is an existential fight, then every election will be close. Or, as the Democratic strategist told me, ‘notably competitive.’”
If true, this would mean not only fewer “persuadable” swing voters to produce big shifts in the results from election to election, but likely a reduction in the sorts of “enthusiasm gaps” thought to affect partisan turnout patterns in the past. Elections would be more like a series of huge pre-mobilized armies meeting in a series of huge clashes with no prisoners taken (and little cooperation across party lines between elections). Even if that’s an exaggeration of the degree of gridlock from which our government and our electorate is suffering, we might truly be entering a period in which swings in party voting are limited. And as Sides, Tausanovitch, and Vavreck note, the “calcification” of party and ideological divisions can become self-perpetuating:
“Calcified politics and partisan parity combine to produce a self-reinforcing cycle. When control of government is always within reach, there is less need for the losing party to adapt and recalibrate. And if it stays on the same path, voters have little reason to revise their political loyalties.”
To be clear, very close elections can have variable outcomes. And in our winner-take-all system, the stakes will remain high. It will obviously make a great deal of difference which party wins the White House in 2024. Control of the Senate, moreover, depends as much on near-accidents of landscape than on the overall voting strength of the two parties, since only one-third of senators face voters each cycle. Democrats are benefiting from a modestly positive Senate landscape this year. Republicans should have a big Senate advantage in 2024. There is no guarantee either party can muster a governing “trifecta” in the future. As Republicans learned in 2017–18 and Democrats have learned in 2021–22, a trifecta isn’t all that if you can’t rigidly discipline all your troops all the time.
When white-knuckle time arrives just before Election Day this year, the odds are pretty good there will remain a lot of uncertainty about exactly what will happen when the votes are all counted (assuming we can get bipartisan buy-in on the results as officially certified, which is hardly a safe assumption at present). If Democrats managed to hold onto both congressional chambers, they may well feel vindicated by voters and go on to undertake an ambitious agenda in the next two years. More likely we will have a return to divided government and even more uncertainty and gridlock as we enter still another momentous election cycle.
Gerrymandering is a problem no matter whose ox is being gored. The way states handle redistricting is broken beyond repair.
There is one very easy solution: The states should combine their districts into big, three-member districts, open their general elections to the top three vote-getters from each party’s primary, and apportion seats to the top three vote-getters in the general election. This would make it much more difficult to gerrymander (because the states would essentially have fewer, bigger districts) and would be much more fair (because in most cases the districts would thereby elect two members from the most dominant party and one member from the lesser party, ensuring that the minority party still gets some say). There would have to be a few rules for the occasional one- or two-member district that would still come up in states whose congressional delegation was not a multiple of three, of course.
Of course, because this (a) makes sense, (b) provides the most meaningful way to elect centrists of both parties, and (c) threatens incumbents, Congress — which otherwise lets states handle redistricting however they want — has outlawed multi-member districts.
For many years the Southern Money Elite held the South in the grip of Fraud, Intimidation, and a wide variety of legality games and criminal enterprises.
The 1968 election overthrew that lock on the Democratic party, so the Southern Gang Of Pirates became Republican, but never lost their old ways. Rather they spread them across the country.
Now they need all the games to retain control, the loss of one could lose all. But Gerrymandering might be the biggest, and certainly the least understood.
By packing a few districts as 100% frequently voting Democrats (who are mostly black) into their own districts, they bleach the surrounding districts such that an area can vote 55% Democrat and still have that elect 4 Republicans and one Democrat to Congress. The Democrat wins by 95% without even trying and the Republicans win by 55%.
Until there are rules against Gerrymandering, or such voting districts are outlawed entirely, there will be little need to apply the other methods to House seats.
One of the reasons we will continue to have problems in South is that so many African-American males have been disenfranchised, in part because of crack vs. cocaine sentencing disparities and sentencing enhancements that were part of the Clinton 1994 Omnibus Crime bill.