If the GOP keeps the House
Winners write the rules and rewrite history
Conventional wisdom changes quickly in Washington. There was no single point when the likelihood that Democrats would take control of the House of Representatives in a “blue wave” evolved from inconceivable to nearly inevitable, but it happened fast. Too fast, it seems, and mixed with too much hoping and too much assuming for our collective expectation to process all the reasons it might not.
If Republicans keep the House on November 6th, the conventional wisdom will be shocked. But we shouldn’t be surprised. Lost in the rapid shift from an impossible Democratic majority to an almost inescapable one are some of the same structural barriers that have helped keep the House so solidly red since 2012: systematic efforts to restrict access to the ballot box and to craft congressional maps that favor Republican candidates.
GOP-led efforts to suppress the vote and draw districts in their favor have been so ruthlessly effective that no matter how tidal the blue wave turns out to be, it’s possible it was never going to be big enough.
To be clear, the odds do favor a Democratic takeover of the House. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives the party an 85 percent chance of winning control. The Economist says the likelihood is closer to three-in-four. Politico recently wrote — almost as an afterthought — that “everything would have to break their way for Republicans to eke out a victory.” These predictions have led to regular it’s-already-over headlines like “the GOP House is crumbling” (Politico), Republican “chances of victory slip” (Bloomberg), and “GOP gloom: Republicans predict House majority will be swept away” (Washington Examiner).
But neither these predictions nor the ultimate outcome should blind us to the structural barriers standing between Nancy Pelosi and the Speaker’s gavel. This isn’t a partisan assessment. It’s a simple reflection of math and power.
To have even the slimmest chance of a slim majority, Democrats have to win the national House vote by a landslide — somewhere between seven and 11 points. A July analysis by The Economist found, for instance, that while “the likelihood of a Democratic majority in the popular vote is a remarkable 99.9 percent,” the party still has a 30 percent chance of being stuck in the minority next year. The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman sees similar odds.
Part of this discrepancy can be explained by the fact that left-leaning voters tend “to live more tightly bunched together in cities,” as The Economist put it. But that explanation only carries so much water — and not nearly enough to contain a wave.
Start with gerrymandering. A March report from the Brennan Center for Justice took a state-by-state look at the impact of gerrymandering on the 2018 midterms. In Ohio and Michigan, the report found that “even if Democrats match their exceptional performance in 2006 and 2008 — the best Democratic years in two decades in both those states — they are not projected to win a single additional seat under the current maps” because of how precisely the districts are drawn to favor Republican victories. That pattern doesn’t have to hold in every state across the country to have a devastating impact. It just has to hold in enough states at the same time.
There’s more than one way for elected officials to choose their own voters, and the power to draw district lines is amplified by the power to choose who’s even allowed to vote. The GOP has done its very best to make voting as difficult as possible — if not impossible — for huge swathes of minority, low-income, and young Americans.
Since the 2010 midterms, according to a (different) report from the Brennan Center, 23 states have put in place discriminatory roadblocks to the ballot box. Among them, the Center notes, “13 states have more restrictive voter ID laws in place… 11 have laws making it harder for citizens to register, six cut back on early voting days and hours, and three made it harder to restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions.”
This wave of disenfranchisement efforts was given a mighty boost by the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down key parts of the Voting Rights Act, unleashing new waves of voter suppression in states from North Carolina to Florida to Texas. There’s little doubt, as the Brennan Center notes, that these post-Shelby County laws account for why “four million more people were purged from the rolls between the federal elections of 2014 and 2016 than between 2006 and 2008.” These efforts continue today — look no further than Georgia, North Dakota, and Arizona.
Blocking access to the ballot box and redrawing district lines to favor one party aren’t new to this election cycle — they’re depressingly American traditions. That’s because voter suppression works. So does gerrymandering. If the House stays red, it’ll be at least in part because of those two factors. And if the House does flip, it’ll be in spite of these undemocratic obstacles.
Plenty of caveats are in order, of course. Democrats have their own track record of gerrymandering, and malicious intent by the other side isn’t the only reason they face an electoral disadvantage this cycle. Countless other factors will help determine what happens in November, from individual campaign strategy and candidate selection to ads and analytics. External forces, like foreign interference and disinformation on social media, also affect the outcome. More than anything, voter turnout matters enormously.
Blaming all of the Democratic party’s woes on voter suppression and gerrymandering would thus be misleading. So why point them out at all? Why are these arguments anything but a preemptive attempt to define the narrative and find an excuse for Democrats to come up short in the midterms?
Because it would be just as misleading — and deeply harmful to our democracy — to ignore them.
If we bake into our collective consciousness the fact that Republicans will inevitably press forward with their decades-long crusade to restrict voting rights — if we simply assume that’s what the party in power gets to do — we’ll continue to see racist voter suppression laws as normal and acceptable, instead of the grave injustice they are.
If we see national turning points like the Shelby County decision and consequential disenfranchisement campaigns as a natural outcome of GOP election victories — instead of an appalling reflection of structural inequity that demands congressional action — it will remain all too easy to overlook these insidious and systematic efforts, allowing them to grow even more institutionalized.
If we conclude that the party that happens to win more state legislatures in Census years has somehow been given a mandate to control at least one chamber of Congress for the next decade, that party might just decide it’s easier to change the Census (as the Trump administration is doing) instead of its policies.
If we’ve learned anything from the Trump era, it’s that rules — both written and unwritten ones — matter to a democracy. If we normalize the rewriting of the rules to empower a clever minority to cling to power against the will of the majority, we can still have candidates and campaigns and even some voting — but we won’t have much of a democracy.
If the GOP keeps the House this fall, the party will proclaim a renewed mandate for Trumpism, doubling down on its authoritarian trajectory and tried-and-true politics of division and fear. Liberal Democrats will say the party moved too far to the middle. Moderate Democrats will say the party moved too far to the left. The Democratic party faithful will say leadership and party officials missed their opportunity. Democratic officials will say the faithful didn’t do enough to get out the vote.
The media, with its love of the short-term political horserace and obsession with identifying winners and losers, will report breathlessly on how Republican tacticians skillfully and deliberately crafted a victorious strategy that snatched a nearly impossible victory from the jaws of sure defeat. Pundits and consultants, meanwhile, will look back at the campaign with the benefit of selective hindsight and point to the explanations that fit their existing beliefs and biases (and business models).
Perhaps none of these analyses will be entirely wrong. But on their own, they surely won’t be right. Lost in all of this post-election squabbling and rush to define the historical narrative will be a glaring but mostly unmentioned part of the truth: The game was rigged from the beginning.
Who’s allowed to vote matters. How the lines are drawn matters. The way the rules are written — and who gets to write them — matters.
No matter what happens this November, if we fail to see and account for all the ways the rules are written to predetermine the outcome, we’re less likely to raise the popular awareness and collective will to fix it next time. And we’re more likely to learn the wrong lessons from this election cycle.
This isn’t an excuse for not strengthening the Democratic party. It’s not an argument against optimism, or for giving up hope, or for not doing everything humanly possible to get out the vote over the next few weeks. It’s certainly not a prediction, because anyone who claims to know what will happen in November 2018 hasn’t learned the lessons of November 2016. It’s simply an argument for calibrating our expectations based today’s facts rather than tomorrow’s headlines.
Winners write the rules to keep winning, and then they rewrite history to justify it.
No matter who the winners prove to be this fall, we should all take these lessons to heart now, before the conventional wisdom shifts and the retrospective prognosticating begins again on November 7th. Every post-election analysis that doesn’t factor in structural barriers like voter suppression and gerrymandering will be willfully overlooking part of the story.
