Friday, July 20, 2018

Will the US House Flip in November?  Probably Not

Why Republicans in Congress Refuse to Do What Americans Want About Trump, Health Care, Stagnant Wages, and Gun Control, And Why TV Networks Pull Their Punches

 Most American voters are appalled by the gross betrayal of political values we used to take for granted: a willingness to compromise; humane, dignified treatment of the powerless; official respect for, and meaningful action on behalf of, the broad "will of the people;" a sincere search for a bipartisan foreign policy; and relatively certain and quick corrective action when these values were betrayed.  A few decades ago President Nixon, in spite of strong political support, was forced out of office, by bipartisan intervention.  He had betrayed American values by his active coverup of nasty campaign mischief he himself had engineered.  Does anyone today seriously believe these American, democratic, values, in the face of blatant official betrayal of them in Congress and the White House are still guiding our political system?  Here is how this sad state of affairs came about.

The impact of Gerrymandering on the Rule of the Majority 

 If you already understand the impact of gerrymandering, ideological polarization, and congressional dysfunction in our system, you can skip the next few paragraphs and pick up with "Why The US House is Unlikely to Flip in November."  If not, you should read on.

If you seek a single explanation of why our political system no longer functions to protect these time-honored,  basic American values, you need to understand congressional electoral districting practice, a subject deeply important, but rarely well understood.

Gerrymandering (altering district lines to favor a partisan outcome) has gotten much more sophisticated in recent decades, and both political parties collude to draw districts that are safe for the incumbent.  One result is that the extremists in each political party have become much more influential in the selection of candidates for Congress.

Imagine, for example, a district that usually votes about 54% Republican.  Imagine also that among all voters, about 60% would be considered moderate; that is, if you add moderate Democrats and Moderate Republicans together, you get about 60%.  The most democratic solution in a contest for someone to represent the views of the broad majority of this district would be for a moderate Republican to win.  But what if 56% of the Republicans are conservative extremists?  They only represent about 26% of the total electorate (.56x .46=25.8%, assuming there are no conservative extremists in the Democratic Party), but if they run an extremist candidate for Congress, they are likely to win not only in the primary but also in the general election, because the Republican Party label is likely once again produce about a 54% majority.   All the extremist has to do is appeal in the to the more moderate Republican party label during the general election, disguising the extremism, in order to be likely to win.  Thus, a person representing only about a quarter of the voters, in opposition to the other 75%, can have a successful career in Congress, leaving three quarters of the voters relatively disenfranchised.  Multiply this scenario, for members of both parties, by nearly all of the 435 Congressional seats, and you get an idea of what has been happening to our political system.  Increasingly the extremists in both parties have prevailed, since gerrymandering has made most seats in Congress safe for the incumbent.

The results of this distortion of democratic representation has polarized Congress as never before, and has played havoc with the norms of civility our political system used to have.  On major net result is that legislation has tended to be less and less representative of what most Americans want.  The influence of money in campaigns has also had the effect of privileging the wealthiest lobby groups rather than the will of the majority.  What does this have to do with flipping the House this November?  Read on, but by now you should understand why the famous Trump base, even while a minority of the electorate, is in such control of policy making in Congress and the White House, and why even moderate Republicans are too frightened to do anything but go along, often in silence.

Why the US House is Unlikely to Flip in November

If you take the logic of this argument, study each Congressional district, and put numbers to each, you can get a pretty powerful picture of what is likely to happen in November.  An organization called FairVote.org has done this, (click here) and the results are in.  This is an amazing web site and you can play with some of the parameters to create your own model of the 2018 Congressional elections, district by district, with just a few keystrokes.

Results:  If voters favor Democrats this November as strongly as they did in 2006, a very good year for Democrats--54% to the Republicans' 46% (roughly where we are in the polls today)--FairVote projects that Republicans will retain control of the House--just barely--by 3 votes.  In 2006 the 54-46 vote distribution delivered 256 seats to Democrats.This year, due to the power of incumbency and the Republican control of gerrymandering after 2010, the model predicts that 54% will get you only 216 seats out of 435  Republicans will still have 219 votes.  In order to control the House Democrats will need to get about 54.5% of the vote distribution.

Fifty four and a half percent, even with the drag on the party created by the President;s behavior, is a high bar. You can bet that Republican strategists, aided or not aided by Russian hacking, have created their own internal modeling and are busy trying to figure out what needs to be done, district by district, in the way of voter suppression, favorable legislation and funding grants for the right people in the right congressional districts, Potemkin-style promises for a wonderful future right around the corner, etc.

The bar in fact is so high, most Republicans in Congress are betting they are better off sticking with Trump on most issues in Congress while expressing hand-wringing dismay in private over some of Trumps more disastrous deeds.  And while on the subject of hand-wringing, many Democrats in Congress have been pulling their punches about Trump with little more than expressions of outrage rather than calls to action.  don't worry, though, they will all ask you for money between now and November.

And while on the subject of pulling punches, do you ever get frustrated that the talking heads on TV, especially the big cable hosts, seem to be arguing politely against a Trump monstrosity, as though hoping he will listen to their pleas, when everyone knows his political choices are not going to be altered by reason, but by sheer power?  They, too, are afraid, just as are our elected representatives in Congress.  Going out too far might just get the cable or network or talking head in trouble later on, should the 54.5% not materialize.  Normalize, play the game, cringe a little, and hedge your bets.

I am predicting, here in the doldrums of summer 2018, that the House will remain Republican.  So far I see very few signs of a sea change, in spite of in-your-face, blatant evidence of evil-doing both in Congress and in the White House.  To this day every twitter is covered breathlessly on TV; every obvious ploy in the White House to distract attention from the disasters we face in our failing democracy, is covered as though it was written from a sincere point of view and deserves our full attention.  This won't change until the polls improve for Democrats:  only then will the fear that grips our politicians and purveyors of information (I hesitate to use the word "news") act as though they believed the will of the American public should be satisfied.

But I could be wrong in my prediction.  Voter by voter, family by family, community by community, congressional district by congressional district, the democratic instincts of our forbears, which were very real, might just surface in us again, and we the people might just pull an upset.  It's worth a try.  Sign me up.

No comments: