The economic historian Adam Tooze is becoming a naturalized American citizen which makes a certain sense since he teaches at Columbia in New York. He used to be a Brit and grew up in Berlin. He's a pragmatic leftist, escaped from youthful Trotskyism. His historical writings exploring of 20th century Europe and his current writings on the global economy show him to be a cosmopolitan guy.
All of which background makes reading his short description of the election we are currently enduring so broadening to a jaded American perspective.
If we imagine the US as one giant constituency of 160 million voters and arrayed all the voters from right to left along an ideological spectrum one can imagine a hotly contested election in which the country split, 80,000,001 voters v. 79,999,999. In that case you might say that the struggle came down to a handful of undecided voters in the middle of the ideological spectrum who ultimately picked the winner.
If that were the case, it would be no scandal. On the contrary it would be the logic of democracy in action. But that is not the kind of political contest that is going on in the USA today. The “scandal” of the US election is not that it is a titanic struggle for tens of millions of votes that will ultimately be decided by a fine margin. The scandal is that tens of millions of votes barely attract any attention at all. Only a few places matter and those places are determined by no obvious, larger-scale logic. Furthermore, their votes are often influenced by highly idiosyncratic local conditions. It is a few thousand voters, often in out of the way, “backwater” places, that decide the future of the USA and with it, the future of the world.
... If states were similar in their political make-up, all states would be swing states. The 18th century constitution provides the frame, but what creates the weird shape of US democracy today are further processes of differentiation, polarization and sorting, as Americans have increasingly migrated and congregated into communities that are relatively more uniform in political terms than the nation viewed as a whole.
That tendency has been reinforced as politics have become more polarized and have begun to color more and more areas of life, meaning that we can now meaningfully talk of “red” and “blue” states with different politics corresponding to very different modes of life. On a question like abortion rights it is no exaggeration to talk of the USA as one country with two systems.
Put all these factors together and it means that in most parts of the USA the local outcome of the US Presidential election is a foregone conclusion....
That means that the final outcome is decided by a handful of battleground or swing states. Many states in the US have small electorates of a few million or so. And then, at the state level, the same logic repeats with sorting and the formation of solid Blue or Red constituencies, in big cities and small towns and rural areas, which means that in the end the entire election comes down, not tens of millions or millions, but a few hundred thousand voters in “battleground counties” dotted around the country. If the true number is 150,000 decisive voters, that is one tenth of one percent of the entire electorate. ...
This is not a picture that flatters the wisdom of our Constitutional system. Yes, the survival of the Electoral College framework is a scandal in a modern democracy. Might the task of Americans who care about democracy be to figure out the daunting project of replacing it?
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