We’ve spent a lot of time this week talking about cheaters, most notably Lance Armstrong, but we haven’t talked nearly enough about the biggest cheaters of 2012: the Republican party.
You probably read that title and thought to yourself, “But MonkeyBiz, we reelected a Democratic President and a Democratic Senate; how could the GOP steal an election they mostly lost?”. To answer that question, I’d like to turn to my good friend Morpheus:
Yup, that’s right. Over a million more votes were cast for Democratic House candidates than Republican House candidates in 2012, and yet the GOP has a 33-seat House majority. More importantly, they’re already preparing to do the same thing in 2016, only this time they’re going to steal the Presidency.
We’re all well acquainted with the GOP’s big gains in the 2010 election, in which they took over the House of Representatives and multiple statehouses around the country. 2010 also happened to be a Census year, which means that the new Republican-controlled state legislatures in states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina now had control of the redistricting process. The GOP leveraged their newfound power to maximum advantage, carving new Republican-friendly districts out of previously Democratic ones. Consequently, states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan now have GOP-majority Congressional delegations, while their states broke strongly for President Obama overall.
The GOP was so successful in subverting the will of the American people, they even wrote a report about it, “How a strategy of targeting state legislative races in 2010 led to a Republican U.S. House majority in 2013”.
On November 6, 2012, Barack Obama was reelected President of the United States by nearly a three-point margin, winning 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206 while garnering nearly 3.5 million more votes. Democrats also celebrated victories in 69 percent of U.S. Senate elections, winning 23 of 33 contests. Farther down-ballot, aggregated numbers show voters pulled the lever for Republicans only 49 percent of the time in congressional races, suggesting that 2012 could have been a repeat of 2008, when voters gave control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to Democrats.
But, as we see today, that was not the case. Instead, Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans.
They called the program REDMAP, short for Redistricting Majority Project, and it was brutally effective.
REDMAP’s effect on the 2012 election is plain when analyzing the results: Pennsylvanians cast 83,000 more votes for Democratic U.S. House candidates than their Republican opponents, but elected a 13-5 Republican majority to represent them in Washington; Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress. Nationwide, Republicans won 54 percent of the U.S. House seats, along with 58 of 99 state legislative chambers, while winning only 8 of 33 U.S. Senate races and carrying only 47.8 percent of the national presidential vote.
The roots of this issue can be traced to the fact that the majority of US states allow for a wholly partisan redistricting process. Whoever controls the statehouse draws the map, and there isn’t much that the minority party can do about it. Long story short, the 2010 wave elections couldn’t have happened at a worse time for Democrats.
I’ve discussed the GOP’s long term demographic problems at length in the past; the country is becoming younger, more diverse, and more liberal, all of which are obviously not conducive to continued GOP electoral success. So, rather than come up with policy positions that might appeal to the next generation of voters, the GOP has decided it’s better off disenfranchising them instead.
It’s worth noting that the GOP has had decidedly less success in taking over the Presidency and the Senate, due to the fact that both of those offices are voted on at a national and state level, respectively, and consequently are not vulnerable to the kind of redistricting shenanigans the GOP used to take the House. But what if there were some way they could leverage their statehouse and Congressional districting advantage to do just that? As it turns out, there is.
On Monday, Pennsylvanian Republicans introduced a bill to apportion electoral votes based on results in Congressional districts to each candidate. The statewide winner gets two EVs, and the rest are apportioned based on the outcome in each district. So, how might this have affected the 2012 elections? President Obama won the state by more than 5 points last year, but only carried 5 of the state’s 18 Congressional districts. Despite winning the vote of the majority of the state, President Obama would only have received 7 electoral votes, while Mitt Romney would have received 13. Similar results would have come out of states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and other Democratic-leaning states with Republican legislatures. Long story short: if the GOP had their way, we’d be talking about how President Romney won the election with 47% of the popular vote.
Before you think that this is just a Pennsylvania thing, RNC Chair Reince Priebus hasn’t just endorsed it, he’s pushing for all Republican legislatures in Democratic states to do the same thing.
Republicans are in a unique position to make headway with such a plan nationally because Wisconsin and other key states that have gone to the Democratic presidential candidate in recent elections are currently controlled by Republicans at the state level. The change would give Republicans a chance to claim some of those states’ electoral votes.
“I think it’s something that a lot of states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red ought to be looking at,” Priebus said of the plan to change how electoral votes are granted.
Such a system “gives more local control” to the states, he argued.
Bullshit. It doesn’t give more local control to the states; what it does is disenfranchise millions of voters because the GOP is out of touch with the majority of Americans. Of course, this isn’t the first time the GOP has tried to disenfranchise millions of voters, or do we need to talk about Voter ID laws again?
The Republican party has given up any pretense of winning legitimately; now they just want to cheat their way to victory.
