“Line-Drawers’ Art”: The GOP’s Gerrymandered Advantages
When Republicans claim that this was a status quo election, they point to their continued hold on the House. The 2012 congressional vote, some have said, didn’t undo the party’s 2010 successes.
True enough, but that’s not because Americans didn’t vote to undo them. It’s because Republicans have so gerrymandered congressional districts in states where they controlled redistricting the past two years that they were able to elude a popular vote that went the Democrats’ way last week.
As The Post’s Aaron Blake reported, Democrats narrowly outpolled Republicans in the total number of votes cast for congressional candidates. The margin varies depending on whether you count the races in which candidates ran unopposed and those in which members of the same party faced off (as happened in several California districts). But any way you count it, the Democrats came out ahead — in everything but the number of House seats they won.
Consider Pennsylvania, where President Obama won 52 percent of the votes cast, and Democratic Sen. Bob Casey defeated his Republican rival, 53 percent to 45 percent. Yet Democrats won just five of that state’s 18 U.S. House seats. They carried both districts in the Philadelphia area — by 85 percent and 89 percent, respectively — and three other districts, by 77, 69 and 61 percent. Of the 13 districts where Republicans prevailed, GOP candidates won seven with less than 60 percent of the vote; in only one district did the Republican candidate’s total exceed 65 percent of the votes cast.
Why such lopsided numbers? Because Republican-controlled redistricting after the 2010 Census packed Democratic voters into a handful of imaginatively shaped districts around Pennsylvania’s urban centers and created a slew of GOP districts in the rest of the state. The overwhelming Democratic margins in the two heavily African American Philadelphia districts didn’t require constructing oddly shaped districts, but carving up the rest of the state to minimize districts that Democrats might win required politically driven line-drawing of the highest order.
So it went in several other swing states. Obama won Ohio by two points, and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown won by five, but Democrats emerged with just four of Ohio’s 16 House seats.
In Wisconsin, Obama prevailed by seven points, and Democratic Senate candidate Tammy Baldwin by five, but their party finished with just three of the state’s eight House seats.
In Virginia, Obama and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tim Kaine were clear victors, but Democrats won just three of the commonwealth’s 11 House seats. In Florida, Obama eked out a victory and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson won by 13 points, but Democrats will hold only 10 of the Sunshine State’s 27 House seats.
In these five states, where both Obama and Democratic Senate candidates won, Democrats will hold 25 House seats in the next Congress to the Republicans’ 55. If the control of these House seats reflected the Democrats’ statewide margins in presidential and Senate contests, the Democrats would likely be at parity or in the majority in the new House.
Now, this isn’t to say Democrats don’t play similar games. On Election Day, they picked up five House seats in Illinois after a Democratic-controlled redistricting in 2011, so they will hold 12 of the 18 Illinois House seats come January. But Obama carried his home state by a 16-point margin, and the Democratic pick-ups help create a delegation that fairly reflects the state’s partisan balance.
A model for a fairer war to carve congressional districts — so that they more closely reflect actual voter sentiment — exists in California. Years ago Golden State voters entrusted redistricting to a nonpartisan commission. Last week’s election was the first conducted using the new boundaries. Some longtime incumbents (among them Democrat Howard Berman and Republican David Dreier) were displaced, and some rising constituencies were empowered; California’s new congressional delegation will include five Asian Americans, nine Latinos and 18 women — all Democrats. But no one is arguing that the new members don’t reflect the state’s balance of power. Obama carried California by 21 points; Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein won by 23; and Democrats are likely to hold 38 of the state’s 53 seats when the counting concludes (two races are still out).
Republicans love to proclaim their affinity for the marketplace and the genius of competition. But it’s precisely by suppressing competition, and crafting uncompetitive districts, that they maintained their hold on the House last week. Any notion that House Republicans have a mandate of their own that they can bring to a fight with the president is spurious. Their grasp on the House derives not from voter sentiment but almost entirely from the line-drawers’ art.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 13, 2012
“The Fizzling Of A Divine Plan”: Is The Religious Right In Trouble?
If we’re going to count the losers of the 2012 election, the religious right has to be high on the list. Its members said they would turn out in extraordinary numbers to fight that infidel in the White House, but Ralph Reed’s turnout push fizzled. Gay marriage is now legal in three more states than it was on November 5, with more sure to come. In response, some on the religious right are wondering whether this politics thing just isn’t working out for them. It isn’t that they failed to get their message out, said influential religious-right quote machine Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, “it’s that the entire moral landscape has changed. … An increasingly secularized America understands our positions and has rejected them.”
We’ve heard this kind of thing before, and Ed Kilgore warns that the religious right’s stranglehold on the Republican Party hasn’t lessened at all:
Lest we forget, every single Republican candidate for president in 2012 toed the Christian Right line in every major detail. The second-place finisher in the nomination fight, Rick Santorum, was himself a Christian Right Culture Warrior of the most impeccable purity, willing to openly smite not just Secularists but Liberal Protestants and Catholics as infidels and instruments of Satan. The old chestnut of a “struggle for the soul” of the GOP between economic and cultural conservatives turned out to be as empty as ever, as the former embraced an aggressive campaign against legalized abortion and for “religious liberty” even as the latter continued to baptize laissez-faire capitalism as part of the Divine Plan.
Ed also notes that the potential 2016 GOP contenders all have impeccable religious-right credentials as well. All of that’s true, but as a faction they still have an uncertain future. Ed’s last point about the deal between economic and cultural conservatives—the former pretend they care deeply about abortion and oppose gay rights, while the latter proclaim that if Jesus came back tomorrow his highest priority would be cutting the capital gains tax—is right, in that it isn’t so much a “struggle” as a negotiated arrangement. But in the last few years, culture has been pushed further and further into the background. If you added up all the time Mitt Romney spent talking about the business and the wonder of markets and compared it to the time he spent talking about abortion and same-sex marriage, the ratio would probably be ten to one or more. The Tea Party may have been made up in large part of cultural conservatives, but they swore up and down that all they cared about was their economic agenda. Republicans are as engaged as ever in a culture war, but the primary enemy in that war isn’t godless secularists, it’s government-loving socialists.
There’s no question that the GOP can’t abandon the religious right. But what it may do is confine its pandering to as brief a period during the primaries as possible. Let’s remember that though Rick Santorum may have finished second to Romney, he scared the living daylights out of the Republican establishment, precisely because his message was so retrograde and filled with hostility.
The problem will only get worse for the religious right. There’s an inexorable demographic evolution going on, one in which older, more culturally conservative people are dying off as younger, more culturally liberal people become adults and play a larger political role. How will they handle the shrinking of their appeal? One answer is for the religious right to undergo its own evolution. They’ve done it in the past, and there’s no reason they can’t do it in the future. The Southern Baptist Convention, which in the past had supported slavery and then segregation, recently elected its first black president. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if 20 or 30 years from now, nearly all the institutions we now consider part of the religious right will have changed their position on gay people. They won’t have to change on abortion—the country looks like it will remain split on that issue for the foreseeable future—but they may change on any number of other issues.
On the other hand, they may just hunker down; as Ed says, these folks love being able to consider themselves martyrs, surrounded by hostile forces and bravely standing up for God. But what happens when, a few elections from now, some incredibly charismatic Republican comes along and says he supports gay marriage and somehow manages to win, proving that maybe Republicans don’t need them? Then they’ll be in real trouble.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 14, 2012
“That’s Just How Those People Are”: Land Of The “Free Stuff,” Home Of The Brave
If you want to explain why your party lost a presidential election, there are a number of places to look. You can blame your candidate and his campaign (which usually means, “If only they had listened to me!”). You can blame your party and ask if it should examine its ideology or its rhetoric. You can blame the media. Or you can blame the voters. As the old political saw says, “The people have spoken—the bastards.” And that is what one conservative after another has been saying over the last week.
They aren’t saying that the voters are uninformed, or that they allowed themselves to be duped. Instead, Barack Obama’s re-election is said to be a moral failing on the part of the American public. They got what they wanted, conservatives are saying. And what was it they wanted? Universal health coverage, higher taxes on the wealthy, strong environmental regulations, legal abortion? Nope. They wanted free stuff. Because that’s just how those people are.
This was perhaps articulated most vividly by Bill O’Reilly, who on election night lamented the fact that “the white establishment is no longer the majority” and said, “It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.”
It didn’t start on election day; this is a tune that Republicans have been playing for a couple of years now, and nearly everyone, from media figures to members of Congress to their presidential nominee himself, joined in with increasing frequency over the last few months. “You either get free stuff or you get freedom. You cannot have both,” said Sarah Palin back in September. “Offering Americans a check is a more fruitful political strategy than offering them the opportunity to take control of and responsibility for their own lives,” wrote National Review‘s Kevin Williamson after the election. “You have two generations now who believe that the government owes them something,” said conservative columnist Cal Thomas. “If you’re looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for, vote for the other guy,” said Mitt Romney during the campaign. And of course, his infamous 47 percent video was all about those people who think they are “entitled” to government benefits.
The truth, of course, is that every single person in America gets benefits from the U.S. government. We get defended from invasion, we get roads to drive on, we get reasonably clean air to breathe, we get parks and schools and so much else. But that’s not the “free stuff” conservatives are talking about. They’re talking about the government giving you something directly as an individual, like money. But there’s a problem here too: Lots and lots of Americans, including most of those whom Republicans deem morally worthy, get plenty of stuff from the government. I’m not even talking about bank bailouts, or corporations like General Electric rewriting the tax code so they pay nothing. I’m talking about individual people, the kind of people Republicans like, getting direct government aid.
There is nothing–nothing–that makes, say, Medicare superior to unemployment benefits, even though as far as conservatives are concerned, only receiving the latter makes you a “taker.” If you’re unemployed, you paid taxes, and now the government is helping you in your time of need. There is nothing that makes the mortgage interest deduction morally superior to food stamps, even though conservatives like one but not the other. The government has decided, wisely or not, that it wants to promote home ownership, so it pays for part of millions of homeowners’ mortgage interest. The government has also decided that it’s bad for our society if people starve, so if your income falls below the level where it will be difficult to afford food and also pay for the other necessities of life, it give you some help in buying food.
So what is it that, in conservatives’ minds, distinguishes the “makers” from the “takers,” particularly when, as political scientists Suzanne Mettler and John Sides report, “97 percent of Republicans and 98 percent of Democrats report that they have used at least one government social policy”? Think hard, and it’ll come to you.
Even if Mitt Romney had not chosen Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan to be his running mate, this election would still have seen the triumph of a Randian attitude on the right, in which every policy and everyone they don’t like is attacked as a despicable parasite sucking off the labors of their economic betters. We had Romney’s absurdly mendacious welfare ad (“You wouldn’t have to work … they just send you your welfare check”). We had Newt Gingrich proclaiming that he’d love to explain to the NAACP “why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” We had the attack on Sandra Fluke for allegedly wanting “free contraception,” or even asking for taxpayers to pay for it (“Ms. Fluke wants us to pick up her lifestyle expenses!” said Bill O’Reilly), when what she advocated was that the insurance coverage that women themselves pay for should cover contraception. We had conservatives fascinated by the idea that poor voters were being given free “Obama phones” (don’t ask). To the right, if you were voting for Obama it could only be because you wanted to get something from the government you didn’t deserve.
But if you want to find a real sense of entitlement, the place to look is among the country’s wealthy, the people who turned over hundreds of millions of dollars to Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie in their failed attempt to drive Barack Obama from office. They may not have been able to propel one of their own to the White House, but despite all their resentment and complaining things have never been better for the country’s economic Übermenschen. Not only do they hold more of the nation’s wealth than at any time since the Gilded Age, the privileges of that wealth have never been greater. Their taxes have never been lower. The entire world offers special concierge services to shield them from the indignities and inconveniences of everyday life. And now, they have new freedoms in the political realm as well; where they might have had to hold their tongues in the past, thanks to Citizens United they are now free to strong-arm their employees to vote in the right way, complete with threats of layoffs should the voters be so vulgar as to elect a Democratic president.
Perhaps by the time 2016 arrives, the Republican party will find a message that resonates with voters more effectively than “You people make me sick.” For now, though, that’s what they’re sticking with.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 12, 2012
“An Apocalyptic Cult”: The GOP’s Biggest Problem Is Itself
“How ya like me now?” — Barack Obama
OK, so Obama didn’t really say that, but surely he must have thought it behind a private smile at some point Tuesday night.
There are no smiles among the Republicans, however, only a pressing question: Can the GOP fix itself? Can a party whose appeal is wholly white and mainly male learn to appeal to a rainbow electorate which is neither? Especially after it has spent so many years denigrating that rainbow, drawing lines in the sand, placing chips on its shoulder.
There are hopeful signs that our long national hissy fit may at last be over. House Speaker John Boehner was making conciliatory noises about resolving the economic impasse the day after the election. Some of the party’s most prominent voices, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, have been speaking of the need for the GOP to broaden its appeal. So maybe the adults are finally returning home.
But the place is a wreck, because the kids (looking at you, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain) have been having quite the party. And repairing it is going to be a long and difficult process.
In the first place, any sudden GOP outreach to those it spurned while courting angry older white men must unavoidably appear conniving, self-conscious and self-serving. And once you get past the problem of appearances, there is the simple question of what it will take to undo the damage the party has inflicted upon itself with those groups.
How long will it be before gay men and lesbians are willing to forgive and forget that the party has routinely demeaned their relationships and impugned their moral fitness?
How long will it take before Hispanics are willing to let bygones be bygones with a party that spoke of “self-deportation” and cheered the notion of a border fence to electrocute undocumented Mexican workers?
And how much time must go by before African-Americans are willing to look past the GOP’s unrelenting and deeply personal disrespect toward the nation’s first African-American president, its insistence on treating him as some foreign Other who, in John Sununu’s memorably tawdry phrase, must “learn how to be an American”?
All that said, the biggest question here is not whether the GOP can transform itself, but whether it can even try. At this point, the Republicans are less a traditional political party than what disenchanted former GOP staffer Mike Lofgren has called an “apocalyptic cult.”
And cults are remarkably fact-resistant. Cultists live in a reality of their own construction and, far from being chastened by it, they thrive on rejection. So while the grownups in the party may be reading the writing on the demographic wall and believe it calls on them to abandon extremism, there is every reason to believe the rest of the party will think that writing requires them to double down on it instead.
Indeed, even as Rubio and Boehner were talking sense, party icons were talking the same old craziness. Donald Trump called for revolution in the wake of Obama’s re-election. Ted Nugent called Obama supporters “pimps, whores … welfare brats” and “soulless fools.” Bill O’Reilly said people voted for Obama because he will “give them things.”
And so on.
This, then, is the dilemma Republicans have created for themselves by their own short-sightedness. It was all well and fine to embrace angry white male extremism so long as white male extremism was able to deliver elections. That day is passing and the party awakens in a new America, desperately needing to change but quite possibly prevented from doing so by the very craziness it has so long cultivated.
Ain’t that a kick in the head? For years, the party has won elections by inventing enemies for angry white men to fear. But at this point, the GOP has no bigger enemy than itself.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, November 12, 2012
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