How Democratic Is American Democracy?

July 5, 20214:45 PM ET

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ASMA KHALID, HOST:

Hey there. It's the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.

MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: I'm Mara Liasson, national political correspondent.

RON ELVING, BYLINE: And I'm Ron Elving, editor and correspondent.

KHALID: And we are taping this podcast ahead of the Fourth of July, when many of our listeners will be celebrating America's birthday and American democracy. But just how democratic, little D, is the United States? Mara, you had been doing a lot of reporting on whether the country is trending toward a system of minority rule, which I should say on its face, just that phrase - minority rule - does not sound particularly democratic.

LIASSON: No, but our government was built in a way that would protect the rights of minority parties. The founders feared a tyranny of the majority, where a majority of voters or representatives could just overrun the wants and needs of the minority. But democracy in America is something that has been constantly renewed and reformed. And there are a lot of people, mostly Democrats, who believe that now that the country has grown to about 300 million people, there are such big population disparities between states that the two-party system has developed a lot of minoritarian features that the Founding Fathers didn't foresee. So the U.S. is in a situation where a minority of voters and their representatives can pretty much block anything the majority wants.

ELVING: That's right. And, you know, this would be one thing if minority rule popped up occasionally here and there, you know, across a sweep of historical time. But what's happening is that minority rule is solidifying itself because it has the power to do so. And as it feels that it is increasingly under threat from population changes, that minority group - and we're talking here about the Republican Party and its core voters - that group is doing everything that it can to perpetuate the situation both in terms of the voting in Congress and in terms of the courts and certainly in the state legislatures.

KHALID: I mean, you mentioned courts - Congress, let's say. I mean, what are some ways specifically that we're seeing this play out?

LIASSON: Well, there are a lot of minoritarian institutions, first and foremost the Senate, where every state, regardless of population, gets two senators, which means that small states or thinly populated rural states get a lot more clout than the big states. Here's how Jesse Wegman, who's the author of a book, "Let The People Pick The President", explained it.

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JESSE WEGMAN: At the time of the founding, the biggest state was 13 times the size of the smallest state. Today, the biggest state is 70 times the size of the smallest state. So a few hundred thousand people in Wyoming - right? - or Vermont have as much power as tens of millions of people in California or New York. And I think that violation of political equality and that violation of majority rule is going to continue to haunt us through the Senate.

LIASSON: And of course, the Senate is the foundation of the Electoral College, where states get electoral votes based on their population. But every state gets at least two. Once again, smaller states have more clout. It also reverberates through the filibuster, where just 41 senators can block any piece of legislation. And we now have a situation where the Supreme Court is a minoritarian institution because a simple majority in the Senate - since they got rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, a simple majority in the Senate - and if it's Republicans, they represent a minority of the population - can put someone on the Supreme Court for life who gets to decide what laws are unconstitutional. So all of these things kind of reverberate throughout every political system.

KHALID: So, though, if I can ask, you know, both to you, Mara and Ron - you know, I feel like going back, and remembering aspects of U.S. history. The lesson you're always taught is that this was intentional. The slow, grinding process was precisely what the founders wanted to ensure that there wouldn't be sort of just, like, willy-nilly political change all the time happening. There was some sense of, like, steadiness and that the slowness was just - it was inherently built into the system.

LIASSON: They also thought that the system would force compromise, would force bipartisan compromise. But now we see that that's not what's happening. It just leads to gridlock. But the other thing is, I mean, if you play this out, the founders, as Jesse Wegman tried to explain, could never have imagined how the population sorted itself out over time. And also, if you take the population trends and just push them out on the graph to 2040, in 2040, we're going to have 70% of Americans being represented by 30 senators and 30% of Americans represented by 70 senators. And at some point, that just becomes unsustainable, and it creates a system that people don't believe is fair. And when people lose faith in the system, the system falls apart.

ELVING: Yes, that does seem to be happening. And to some degree, it's already with us because we already have a little over half the national population living in just nine states and therefore being represented by just 18 senators. That's less than a fifth of the Senate for roughly half of the country's population, while 26 states have 52 senators and less than one-fifth of the total national population. So that is, in a very real sense, the absolute essence of minority rule.

LIASSON: And unless you're going to have massive population redistribution, where all sorts of people under the age of 40 move off the coasts and into purple states, the fact is that the Republican Party has become the party of real estate, not population - acreage, not population. And they represent rural, thinly populated states. And so you get a system that gets more and more out of whack. In the past, this system has been reformed and adjusted. And, you know, we've expanded the franchise. You know, there was a time when only white property owners could vote. And there are a lot of people, mostly Democrats, who think it's time to make some adjustments to reflect the modern population.

KHALID: All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk about how these dynamics play out in the Electoral College.

And we're back. And let's talk now about what I know you all have been waiting to discuss, which is the Electoral College. Some might argue that the most democratic way of electing our president would be through a popular vote. You know, simple math - whoever gets the most votes wins. But that is not actually how the U.S. elects its presidents. So, Ron, why don't we begin by you explaining why the U.S. uses the Electoral College?

ELVING: This goes back to the convention that put together the Constitution back in the 1780s, and their suspicion of a term that some of them actually used, the mob. They didn't want a popular movement to carry some person - and, of course, they were imagining only males - carry some man on their shoulders into the office. They wanted to have a buffer. They wanted to have something in between the vote of the people and the actual choice of the president. So they devised - and Alexander Hamilton had a hand in this - they devised a system that would first elect electors, and each state would elect people who would then proceed to meet on a designated day. And they, the electors, would then decide who the president should be based on who the nominees had been. So they were imagining something more like that, a bit of an idealization that these electors, who would be fine, upstanding citizens - of course, people of some degree of education and means, would actually choose the president and take under advisement what the popular vote had been in November.

LIASSON: And over time, the Electoral College usually amplified the popular vote. It didn't contradict it. But not recently.

KHALID: I know. I'm thinking of twice in the last two decades.

LIASSON: Right. So twice in the last 20 years, Republicans lost the popular vote, but their candidate became the president. And they've actually - Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. So there are consequences for that. And now you have a situation where Democrats, because of the way the population has sorted itself out, can win the popular vote by 7, 8, 9 million votes but still lose the presidential election. The presidency is the only office that we elect in this weird state-by-state, winner-take-all manner. And what it means is that states that are battlegrounds, that could go either way, have outsize clout.

And this has tremendous implications for the big debate we're having now about ballot access - Republicans call it, you know, ballot integrity - because there are those states, those key battleground states - Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Texas - are considering laws that would not only make it harder for some people to vote - mostly Democratic constituencies - but also give more control to partisan Republican legislatures over the actual counting of the votes. But if - and if it wasn't for the Electoral College, they would not have such outsize clout.

KHALID: You know, Mara, I have heard a lot from progressive Democrats - specifically after the 2020 election, but I would say it even predates that, going back to 2016 earlier - that they want the Electoral College reformed. They feel like that system in itself is not particularly democratic. And I will say, I heard a lot in some reporting I've done over the years - when I talk to nonvoters about why they don't vote, it's this sense that my vote doesn't matter. I don't live in one of those key battleground states that you mentioned, so why bother to vote? Because, you know, I don't know. I live in Indiana. It's a red state. No one's going to care what I vote for anyhow.

LIASSON: That's a real issue - I mean, people who don't think their vote counts because they don't live in a battleground state. It shows you how just a handful of states really control the election of a president. But there are ideas for reforming the Electoral College. To get rid of it completely would take a constitutional amendment, and that's not going to happen. But there is something called the National Popular Vote Compact, and it's a law that has been passed in 15 states plus the District of Columbia. And it basically says the electors in those states have to cast their votes for the winner of the national popular vote. And the idea of people who are promoting this is if enough states passed it that equal 270 electoral votes, which is what you need to win, then the Electoral College would be, in effect, neutered. It wouldn't be abolished, but it would be neutered. I think the chances that they'll ever get to 270 are very slim. There's another idea for states to award their electors proportionally. In other words, whatever percentage of the popular vote candidate X gets in that state, that's the same percentage of electors they would get. States can do whatever they want. There are some practical problems with awarding electors proportionally because electors are actually individual human beings and they can't be cut into fractions.

ELVING: Although, human beings were cut into fractions in the original constitution when it came to race. We know about the three-fifths compromise.

LIASSON: Yes.

ELVING: And to some degree, that three-fifths compromise did empower the slaveholding states to have more clout in the Electoral College because it gave them more seats in the House, in addition to their already disproportionate share of the Senate. So in that sense, the Electoral College was part of the way the Constitution bent over backwards to accommodate slavery.

KHALID: Mara, I hear from demographers this notion that right now the Electoral College favors Republicans, right? But they project out, and they'll make these projections on what the dynamics in the country are going to look like, say, ahead to 2040. And there's this projection that once the state of Texas flips demographically, they say, and becomes more heavily of a minority population of voters, it will likely vote Democratic. And once that happens, they project it's going to be really hard for a Republican to win the presidency in the foreseeable future. And I'm curious, you know, do you feel like right now these systems do favor Republicans? And will the dynamic change if it begins to favor Democrats?

LIASSON: Well, there's no doubt that right now all of the minoritarian institutions in American life favor Republicans because they're the minority party. They represent a minority of the population. But it's very hard to make political predictions, especially about the future.

ELVING: (Laughter).

LIASSON: And a lot of Democrats were thinking that demography was destiny and demography would come to their aid and Texas would flip soon, as soon as the population got younger and browner there, and the same thing in other states. Well, it's glacial. It's not a quick sea change. You see it in Arizona and Georgia - two formerly red states that Joe Biden won. That's - you have demographic changes that are pushing those states to become purple. What happens over time? I don't know. But I can tell you that the thinking behind all of the voter restrictions and the kinds of laws that Republican legislatures are passing in battleground states - it's all a holding pattern until they can figure out how to appeal to this rising American electorate. Republicans have to become competitive over time. They have to figure out how to appeal to suburban women, people of color, young people. Otherwise they won't be a viable party. And I think a lot of Republicans see the things they're doing now, all of these voting restrictions, as a holding pattern until they can make themselves into a true majority party. And maybe they can't.

KHALID: Of course the question is, do the tactics used during the holding pattern so alienate the very voters you eventually need to win over?

LIASSON: Right. Right.

KHALID: All right, we will leave it there for today. Happy birthday, America. I'm Asma Khalid. I cover the White House.

LIASSON: I'm Mara Liasson, national political correspondent.

ELVING: And I'm Ron Elving, editor correspondent.

KHALID: And thank you all for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.

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