Maybe the US Constitution once worked for democracy at least for many, but it sure doesn't today as an autocratic chief executive, cowardly pols, and corrupt judges are now demonstrating. There are many examples of our founding document's failure; this post takes up one of the worst. "Broken Constitution" will be an ongoing series here; the potential posts are legion but we have to think about this stuff if we are ever to move in a better direction.
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It would be the course of least resistance for a political statistics expert to turn his data into a platform to promote his own political hobby horses. In fact that's what most do. Some sell their insights (if any) as consultants to politicians' campaigns; that can be honest work though the associated temptations and incentives to be something less than truthful are pretty overwhelming. Others feed our apparently insatiable political media, always looking for an angle. Some, mostly academics unnoticed by the general public, publish data-based studies after campaigns are concluded.
G. Elliot Morris, writing at Strength in Numbers, tries to do a lot of these things (except perhaps the political consulting) with apparent integrity. He seems unusually and insightfully concerned to figure out what the structural implications for democracy might be, based on his numbers. This causes him to look deeply into the dysfunction of our political system.
According to Morris, the constitutional system as we know it is full of distortions. Left and right, we all feel this; Morris describes one source of our unhappiness:
... An urban party in a system with geography-based representation is disadvantaged by a national brand, whether that brand is left- or right-leaning, because its voters are split across electoral boundaries. That’s it.
Republicans won in 2024 nationally carrying just the lightly populated (red) spaces (49.8 to 48.3)This was not a problem for Democrats 60 years ago. Previously in American politics, there was much more geographic variation in what the parties meant to voters. Being a “Democrat” from Montana could mean something different from being a Democrat from New York City. This allowed candidates to distance themselves from the national party brand and from the perceived cultural sins of candidates in faraway places that shared the same party label. As regional variation in party labels has fallen, this has seriously disadvantaged the party associated with urban voters.
Call it whatever you want — polarization, nationalization, “Balkanization,” factionalism, etc. It is simply true empirically that individuals moderating their issue positions, but sticking within the same party label, is not a solution to that problem. ...this solution is analogous to putting a band-aid over a bullet hole. The root of the problem is not issue positions; it’s something much bigger.
To be clear, this isn’t just a problem for the Democrats — it’s a problem for democracy. As nationalization has decreased split-ticket voting, it has increased the number of safe seats in both the House and Senate. This decline in competition is bad for a lot of reasons: it limits accountability for poor performance of the government, leads to the entrenchment of members who are otherwise out of touch, and reduces incentives for parties to appeal to a broader range of voters. When politicians feel secure in safe seats, they have little reason to iterate upon their positions, listen to dissenting voices, or invest in genuine engagement with their constituents.
Over time, this can deepen polarization, weaken democratic responsiveness, and erode public trust in the political system itself. ...
This dysfunction is only one of many anti-democratic consequences of our broken Constitution. Morris is only the latest to point out the obvious, but he updates the observation. Trump actually did win a popular margin from all those red places, but the President's assertion this was some kind of landslide is just another lie, enabled by a bad system.
We need to figure out, collectively, how to overcome and restructure a broken Constitution -- just as our ancestors have done repeatedly.
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