Michele Bachmann (R-MN).
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
April 11, 2013 |
With an assist from some long-term demographic trends, House Republicans have redistricted, propagandized and
policedthemselves into another country.
As
a result, they have become unmoored from the political incentives that
typically drive lawmakers' decision-making process. Public opinion no
longer sways them, and that is creating a potentially insurmountable
problem for the party establishment's efforts to broaden the GOP's
appeal beyond angry old white people.
House Republicans may care
about the GOP's national fortunes in the abstract, but too many are
impervious to what the public at large wants because of the nature of
the districts they represent. At the same time, a steady stream of spin
from the conservative media provides insulation from the realities of
American politics, and deep-pocketed outside groups punish Republicans
for any deviation from right-wing orthodoxy.
This isn't just a
serious problem for establishment Republicans. It has ground our
government to a halt, as Congress is virtually incapable of action, even
on issues where there is something approaching a consensus among the
public at large -- like universal background checks for firearm
purchases, for example. They're supported by 80-90 percent of voters,
but face a steep uphill climb in the House.
How did this happen?
The Great Gerrymander of 2010
In
2012, Democratic House candidates got 1.4 million more votes than
Republicans, but came away 33 seats short of the majority – only the
second time since World War II that such a reversal has taken place.
That was the fruit of a
well-funded, multi-year plan by the Republican State Leadership Committee to take over state houses before the 2010 Census, and control the redistricting process that followed.
And they gerrymandered with a vengeance. As Princeton University scholar Sam Wang
noted,
“although gerrymandering is usually thought of as a bipartisan
offense... partisan redistricting is not symmetrical between the
political parties.”
By my seat-discrepancy criterion,
10 states are out of whack: [Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin] plus Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and
Texas. Arizona was redistricted by an independent commission, Texas was a
combination of Republican and federal court efforts, and Illinois was
controlled by Democrats. Republicans designed the other seven maps. Both
sides may do it, but one side does it more often.
Surprisingly
absent from the guilty list is California, where 62 percent of the
two-party vote went to Democrats [which] exactly matched the [proportion
of the] newly elected delegation.
Democrats Are “Inefficiently Distributed”
But,
as a number of observers pointed out after the midterms, even this
aggressive effort to redraw districts in their favor wasn't quite enough
to lock in Republicans' control of the House. This is where the organic
trend comes in. Political scientists Jowei Chen of the University of
Michigan and Jonathan Rodden of Stamford explain (
PDF)
that as a result of migration and urbanization, Democrats tend to be
“highly clustered in dense central city areas, while Republicans are
scattered more evenly through the suburban, exurban, and rural
periphery.” This results in what the authors call “unintentional
redistricting,” with “a skew in the distribution of partisanship across
districts such that with 50 percent of the votes, Democrats can expect
fewer than 50 percent of the seats.”
Hyper-Partisan Districts
Those two trends have resulted in a dwindling number of competitive districts. As
New York Times numbers-guru Nate Silver
pointed out,
the number of “landslide districts” – which he defined as those that
went for one party by 20 or more percentage points than the electorate
as a whole – has doubled since 1992, while the number of swing districts
has fallen from 155 to just 64 over the same period.
When you
look at the racial composition of districts, the trend becomes even more
pronounced. According to the Census Bureau, 111 House Republicans
represent districts that are at least 80 percent white.
This
helps explain why immigration reform, desperately sought by the
Republican establishment as part of its “rebranding” strategy, is going
to face an uphill climb in the House, regardless of whether they achieve
some bipartisan agreement in the Senate. As the National Journal's
Scott Bland
put it,
“Not only have many of those members [in overwhelmingly white
districts] opposed measures beyond improving border security in the
past, but there are also no natural pressure groups for immigration
reform in their districts. The Democratic Caucus, which is largely
unified in support of some sort of immigration-reform proposal, has just
31 members from such very white districts.”
Center-Right Nonsense
It's
worth noting that while decades of polling suggests that Americans tend
to lean somewhat to the right on social issues – God, guns and until
recently, gays – they tend to lean somewhat to the left on economic
issues. Majorities favor higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations,
huge numbers want to see the minimum wage hiked and nobody outside the
Washington Beltway favors cutting Social Security or Medicare.
Yet
the Republicans' rebranding effort is entirely premised on moderating
on abortion and immigration and softening the hard-right's rhetoric to
avoid another Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin meltdown. Almost nothing has
been said about rejecting the economic nostrum of financing tax cuts for
the top by cutting social services, despite the majority's rejection of
that formula.
At least part of that is the result of a
conservative media project that has created a false sense of certainty
among Republican base voters with constant repetition of the narrative
that the United States is naturally a “center-right” country, and has
been since its founding.
Andrew Kohut, former president of the Pew Research Center,
wrote recently in the
Washington Post that
while the polarization of news consumption isn't a recent development,
“what is new is a bloc of voters who rely more on conservative media
than on the general news media to comprehend the world.”
Pew
found that 54 percent of staunch conservatives report that they
regularly watch Fox News, compared with 44 percent who read a newspaper
and 30 percent who watch network news regularly. Newspapers and/or
television networks top all other news sources for other blocs of
voters, both on the right and on the left. Neither CNN, NPR or the New
York Times has an audience close to that size among other voting blocs.
Conservative
Republicans make up as much as 50 percent of the audiences for Sean
Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’ Reilly. There is nothing like this on
the left. MSNBC’s “Hardball” and “The Rachel Maddow Show” attract
significantly fewer liberal Democrats.
This is the activist base of the party, the
people House Republicans need to turn out to vote every two years in
order to retain their jobs.
Deep-Pocketed Enforcers
The
RNC's recent “autopsy report” laments that “outside groups now play an
expanded role affecting federal races and, in some ways, overshadow
state parties in primary and general elections.” That's the final piece
of the puzzle of how the House Republicans came to represent a different
country.
With many deep-red districts dominated by an activist
conservative base that's been highly politicized by Fox News, Rush
Limbaugh and a slew of right-wing blogs, Republicans in the House face a
far greater threat from primary challenges from their right, and there
are a plethora of well financed outside groups that stand poised to make
those challenges possible. And they continue to proliferate in the age
of
Citizens United. Just this week, Tom Landry, a former
Congressman from Louisiana, announced that he was forming a new
super-PAC called Restore Our Republic that aims to, as
Politico put it,
“keep stirring up trouble on Capitol Hill from the outside” by
supporting “hard-right conservatives in the House of Representatives.”
It joins a crowded field. And a little bit of money in a primary goes a
long way for challengers who can often tap the energy of the GOP's tea
party base to
overcome an incumbent's cash advantage.
Most
of us look at the intransigence of the House GOP and shake our heads in
wonder. The party's favorability is at a 20-year low, and we tend to
see them as irrational ideologues. But as Nate Silver noted when you put
all of these factors together, “individual members of Congress are
responding fairly rationally to their incentives.”
Both Sides Don't Do It
There
has been an avalanche of lazy punditry of late that ignores all of
these developments, blaming both sides for a “fiscal stand-off” that is
well into its third year and Washington's inability to govern – this
game of lurching from one manufactured crisis to the next while failing
to advance legislation with broad bipartisan support.
Washington Post editorial boss Fred Hiatt, the dean of lazy punditry,
wrote that
what the country needs is “a president who would make the case to the
American people, repeatedly and clearly; who would provide cover for
legislators of both parties to cast hard votes; who would lead the way.”
Former
New York Times executive editor Bill Keller also
chimed in, blaming the failure of the sequester to bring about a “Grand Bargain” on Obama.
There
exist many outrages for which both major parties deserve our
opprobrium. Financial deregulation, trade agreements penned by corporate
lobbyists that have helped hollow out the middle class, deficit
hysteria and nonsense about the dangers of “entitlements,” the excesses
of the so-called “war on terror” and the cruel futility of the war on
drugs – all of these things can rightly be laid at the feet of both
parties.
But contrary to the views of Fred Hiatt or Bill Keller or
1,000 other wounded “centrists” desperate to see liberals trade away
what little economic security Americans still have for a few more
dollars in tax revenues, nothing anyone says or does is going to change
the rational, anti-democratic political calculus of the House
Republicans.
