Blue State Blues

HOW THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE CREATES A WHITE, CHRISTIAN, AND CONSERVATIVE ADVANTAGE IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

In 2000, George Bush claimed the White House in large measure by winning the hearts and minds of America’s conservative small towns. “Where Bush really won the election in 2000 was among rural voters,” says top Democratic pollster and strategist Anna Greenberg.

Gore was pummeled mercilessly in small towns. Thanks to the rural-exurban vote in Tennessee, he even failed to win his home state, a humiliation that cost him the election.

Four years later, John Kerry and allied groups such as MoveOn.org and the Media Fund struggled to win back some of that ground, spending millions of dollars on rural marketing campaigns, deploying staff into the hinterlands, and even recruiting John Edwards to bleed some of the red Republicanism out of rural counties.

The effort was a dismal failure. Edwards’s name on the ticket boosted Democratic support in his home state of North Carolina by a measly 1 percent. According to a 2005 study by Congressional Quarterly, 87 percent of the country’s rural congressional districts swung for Bush.

“The belief was that if you could shrink Bush’s rural margin somewhat, you might be able to turn the election the other way,” Greenberg says. “In fact what happened was that Bush improved his margins significantly in rural states.”

When the dust settled, rural “homelanders” accounted for one of every four ballots cast for George W. Bush, an astounding fifteen million ballots. In contrast, African Americans delivered only about twelve million votes to John Kerry, one of every five Democratic votes.

In a nation that is increasingly urbanized — 80 percent of Americans now live in cities and suburbs — how can rural folks still wield so much power? In this excerpt of his new book, Welcome to the Homeland: A Journey to the Rural Heart of America’s Conservative Revolution, Brian Mann explains how the U.S. Constitution tilts the political playing field in the favor of a culture that is more white, more Christian, and more conservative than the nation as a whole.

Red President

Most Americans know that Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000 and still lost the election under the electoral college system, but few people understand that the outcome reflected a deliberate bias, hard-wired into our political system. In every presidential race the electoral college redistributes power to so called “lesser” states, such as Alaska, South Dakota, and Wyoming, which have small and disproportionately rural populations that tend to be whiter, more conservative, and more Christian than the nation as a whole.

Meanwhile, the system sharply penalizes big urban states that tend to be progressive, diverse, and more secular in their leanings, like California, Illinois, and New York.

One often hears the phrase “One man, one vote,” but in America it doesn’t work that way. It never did. A significant amount of political power was shuffled around by the founding fathers, not to protect individual rights but to insure the continued independence of states.

This arrangement is the legacy of an obscure and rather cynical debate held in summer 1787 at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Delegates from sparsely settled states such as Delaware and New Jersey fought all summer long to preserve their autonomy and influence.

“I suspect it to be of importance to the small states that their deputies should keep a strict watch on the movements and propositions from the larger states,” cautioned Delaware’s George Read. He and his allies fretted that powerhouse states like Massachusetts and Virginia “will probably combine to swallow up the smaller ones by addition, division or impoverishment.”

Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and James Madison thought this was nonsense. They were disgusted by the “demagoguery” of the small states, but in the end they capitulated. The deal struck by the framers made no provision for direct popular elections of the president. Instead, the new Constitution stipulated that each state would choose a certain number of presidential electors “equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”

In practical terms, this means that each state receives a minimum of three electoral college votes. The trouble, of course, is that quite a few of our states have such tiny populations that they don’t merit three votes. Based strictly on population, four states — North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming — don’t even merit one electoral college vote.

The impact of this deliberately imbalanced system wasn’t obvious at first. At the time of the first U.S. Census, in 1790, there were only sixteen states, so the number of bonus electors gifted to smaller states was negligible. What’s more, the disparity in population between large and small states was fairly modest. Virginia was just twelve times the size of tiny Delaware. (Currently, California is more than seventy times more populous than our smallest states — a ratio that’s expected to grow to at least 90 to 1 by mid-century.)

It’s also significant that the voting population in that era was almost entirely homogonous, with political power restricted to white men. As a consequence, the political and cultural values of “greater” and “lesser” states were nearly identical.

Still, the more thoughtful framers of the Constitution worried that significant cultural and political gaps might develop as new states of varying size joined the Union. An influential delegate from Massachusetts named Elbridge Gerry warned that sharing power with these latecomers would eventually mean “putting ourselves into their hands.” (Gerry is remembered these days primarily because he popularized the practice of gerrymandering political districts.)

Gerry suggested limiting the number of states so that any newcomers “should never be able to outnumber the Atlantic states.” Other delegates defeated the proposal, arguing (wrongly, as it happened) that “there was no probability that the number of future States would exceed that of the existing states.”

In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison tried to soothe fears, predicting that any new states would “advance in population with peculiar rapidity,” thus minimizing any demographic or cultural imbalances. Through America’s first century as a nation, this seemed to be the case. Former territories such as California, Florida, Ohio, and Texas matured quickly, developing into full-fledged mini-nations similar to the original colonies. They built diverse economies and thriving cities.

After the Civil War things changed. The nation’s geographic expansion accelerated. We added fourteen new states at the heady rate of one every six years. The westward push doubled the nation’s landmass, but most of the states incorporated between 1867and 1950 were essentially empty. With few exceptions, they remain thinly populated today, with settlement patterns that resemble the frontier of the eighteenth or early nineteenth century far more than the twenty-first-century urban reality that most Americans experience.

Taken together, the states created after the Civil War still constitute only about 11 percent of the nation’s population. In many cases their small towns and villages actually peaked half a century ago and are slowly dying away. Yet because of the rural tilt built into the electoral college, these new states enjoy nearly 14 percent of the clout in presidential elections.

That may not seem like a significant boost, but in effect the per capita clout of each homelander casting a presidential ballot in those states is automatically increased by about one-fifth.

It gets worse. In order to cede rural states more power, influence has to be drained away from somewhere else. That somewhere else happens to be the nine big metro states where most Americans live. Those states (five reliably Democratic, two battlegrounds, and only two reliably Republican) are home to nearly 55 percent of the population, but because of the system’s artificial redistribution of power, they receive only about 44 percent of the voting clout in presidential elections.

Consider the example of New York. With nineteen million people, it’s one of our most highly urbanized and progressive states. Social conservatives are a dying breed in statewide politics, and even the party’s moderate Republican establishment is struggling. New Yorkers wield thirty-one electoral college votes, which sounds like a big chunk. But it takes the combined population of fifteen rural states just to equal New York’s metro masses — and those fortunate homelanders receive a total of fifty-nine electoral college votes.

The same number of rural Americans are able to wield nearly twice the clout of their urban neighbors.

This homelander bias didn’t matter so much when rural Americans were splitting their ballots, but in recent decades towns have voted ever more loyally for Republican candidates. As a consequence, the system’s tilt can skew a presidential election dramatically, electing a candidate that America’s urban majority rejects, as in 2000.

Even when the results aren’t quite as dramatic, the electoral college offers the GOP an enormous strategic advantage — what amounts to a running head start. Put bluntly, conservative candidates are guaranteed to win most of the rural states that receive a supersized allocation of electoral college votes. Democrats, meanwhile, receive the bulk of their political support in the urban states that are most heavily penalized.

This imbalance was starkly visible in 2004. George Bush was able to reel in easy victories in twelve of those sparsely populated states that entered the union after the Civil War. (The two most highly urbanized states, Washington and Oregon, swung for John Kerry.) Taken together, the twenty-three million homelanders in this one rural-conservative cluster make up about 8 percent of the American population, but because of the system’s bias they receive 10.9 percent of the total electoral votes. They were able to ante up a whopping fifty-nine electoral college votes, fully a quarter of Bush’s entire tally.

Now consider John Kerry’s easy win in California, a metro stronghold. All by itself that state boasts roughly thirty-six million citizens, about 13 percent of the American population. But because of the urban penalty, Californians receive only 10.2 percent of the total electoral college votes. The disparity is dramatic. With roughly twelve million more citizens, the Golden State contributed four fewer electoral college votes than their rural neighbors.

If only one state were affected, it wouldn’t matter. But two-thirds of Kerry’s wins came in the big urbanized states — California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania — that suffer the biggest systemic cuts in power. Before they raise their first campaign dollar or snag their first endorsement, Democratic candidates know that their political base will be sharply discounted. The urban African Americans and Hispanics, the Jewish community, the gays and lesbians, the professionals, the academics, the union members, all the tens of millions of metros who trend reliably progressive, will be stripped of 10–20 percent of their voting power.

In tight contests — and these days, most of America’s national elections are tight — this kind of jury-rigging can make all the difference in the world.

To get an idea for how profoundly this homelander tilt has shaped America’s political landscape, consider for a moment how our country would look if the founding fathers had seen things differently. What if they had decided that women deserved extra voting power, or African Americans, or Native Americans? Or what if they simply decided that every citizen, regardless of their race, their geography, or their class, deserved equal representation?

In a country with proportional voting, urban Americans would have the same sort of influence that one sees in France, England, or Canada. Metros would dominate elections for the simple reason that they represent the majority of citizens. It’s likely that homelanders would still control many rural state governments, but their impact on the national dialogue would be no bigger (and no smaller) than warranted by their population.

This change would force Republicans to build urban constituencies, stumping in moderately conservative strongholds such as New York’s Long Island and California’s Orange County. The GOP would have to develop new campaign messages aimed at a wider cross section of minority and ethnic voters, a shift that would immediately empower the party’s moderate Rockefeller wing.

Candidates such as Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki, Colin Powell, and John McCain, all of whom have proven appeal with urban voters, would quickly supplant homelander icons like George Bush, Bill Frist, and Dennis Hastert. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates like John Kerry would be free for the first time to pursue their natural constituency, wooing voters who are urban, multiethnic, and progressive.

The party’s platform would focus deliberately on the issues that metro constituents really care about: not the right to own guns or school prayer or banning same-sex marriage or even lowering taxes, but other civic values such as health care, the environment, public safety, education, and cutting the deficit.

A level playing field would also offer Democrats significant tactical advantages that would help to offset the Republican Party’s traditional fund-raising superiority. Metro candidates would shuttle from city to city, focusing media dollars, personnel, and message on big pockets of urban and inner suburban voters. They wouldn’t even have to do that much traveling. More than half of the American population now resides in just 147 big metro counties — many of which are clumped in vast megacities with more than five million people.

It’s also safe to say that ditching the electoral college would end one of the more bizarre rituals in American political life: our rurally skewed primaries. Currently, presidential candidates spend years and tens of millions of dollars barnstorming through Iowa and New Hampshire. These states have come to serve as the gatekeepers in our National elections. They are a testing ground for politicians forced to compete in a homelander-biased political system.

“Iowa political leaders often say Iowans have the job of reducing the field of presidential candidates for the rest of the nation,” boasted David Yepsen, political columnist for the Des Moines Register. “The people of Iowa pick corn, the people of New Hampshire pick presidents,” quipped New Hampshire Governor John Sununu in 1988.

Politicians in these states insist that their primacy is a matter of tradition (the classic homelander argument), but the truth is that Iowa and New Hampshire no longer mirror mainstream America. The gatekeepers don’t look like the people living behind the gate. According to the U.S. Census, their residents are more than 90 percent white — compared with 75 percent nationwide. Hispanics have emerged as our largest minority group, comprising one in eight Americans, but Iowa and New Hampshire have Hispanic populations so small (2–3 percent) as to be politically invisible.

On the other hand, both states boast homelander communities dramatically larger than the norm — 40 percent of the population in New Hampshire and 32 percent in Iowa, compared with just 21 percent nationwide. It’s startling to realize that the rest of the country’s population hasn’t been that white or that rural since the 1930s.

Even without the electoral college’s influence, holding a make-or-break primary in these two states might make sense for the Republican Party. Rural values have emerged as the cornerstone of the GOP’s identity, and strong homelander appeal is required for national victory. But for Democrats, whose core voters are multiethnic and urban, relying on rural primaries to cull their field of candidates is simply bizarre. Frankly, it’s hard to justify even within the context of our homelander-biased political system. It would be like the GOP holding make-or-break contests in New Jersey or California.

In a system that relied on the principle of one-man, one-vote, Democrats would test their ideas and their campaigns in cities and inner suburbs, where the vast majority of their voters reside. (In the 2004 general election, John Kerry won only about a million votes in New Hampshire and Iowa combined, far fewer ballots than he received in the five metro counties around Philadelphia.)

But as things stand, Democrats are forced to play on the other guy’s turf and talk about the other guy’s issues. Once they’ve weathered the primaries, politicians like Kerry and Al Gore wind up slogging around on goose hunts, mumbling platitudes about NASCAR and family farms, desperately trying to scrape up enough homelander support to pick off a predominantly rural state like Arizona, Arkansas, New Hampshire, or Virginia.

Rural folks smell that kind of insincerity a mile away. Republican consultant Bill Greener tells the story of joining a panel discussion with a Democratic strategist, who announced that his party needed to win back the “Wal-Mart vote.” “God, do you know how patronizing that sounds?” Greener says. “Democrats sound like Republicans did ten years ago when we discussed going after votes from people of color. It’s not that we like you, not that we have to listen to you. We just need a few more votes.”

Urban voters, meanwhile, are outraged when their candidates do gutless, pandering things like proposing a constitutional ban on flag burning (Hillary Clinton) or refusing to talk openly about the environment (Al Gore). When Howard Dean suddenly starts quoting Scripture, metros shake their heads and think sincerely about voting for Ralph Nader.

But the hard truth is that Democrats don’t have a choice. They know from painful experience that the system is stacked — you can’t win the White House without winning small town votes. And for progressive politicians who reflect the political and cultural values of metro America, connecting with homelanders grows harder every election cycle.

Folks who think and write about rural issues, even liberal activists, often wax sentimental about our homelander-centric system for electing presidents. They insist that the process unifies the nation, forcing candidates to hear from and talk to a broader range of Americans. “I think it’s fair to say that the U.S. Senate and the electoral college create a less monolithic approach to things,” says Greener. By less monolithic, of course, he means less urban, less focused on the most populous states.

It’s true that direct popular elections would de-emphasize rural America. There would be fewer photo ops in country diners and cornfields, fewer whistle stops at county fairs, and no more plaid shirts. But as things stand, presidential candidates already neglect huge swaths of the country. In 2004, four of the five most populous states — California, Illinois, New York, and Texas — were essentially ignored, except as reservoirs of campaign cash. (According to New York magazine, Democrats in New York City contributed a third of John Kerry’s total war chest in 2004.)

The two major parties neglected to visit twenty-five American states. Half the country never saw a single top-of-ticket candidate, Republican or Democrat. The nonpartisan organization FairVote found that the two teams — Kerry-Edwards and Bush-Cheney — spent two-thirds of their campaign time in just six states, home to 13 percent of the nation’s population.

And the number of states where politicians spend time and advertising dollars dwindles every four years. John Kerry was lampooned for daring to commit resources in Virginia and quickly capitulated. George Bush’s half-hearted bid for New Jersey was seen as bold initially and then as hopelessly quixotic.

After 2004, Florida and Missouri may be added permanently to the list of red states, while Pennsylvania begins to look unassailably blue. Far from unifying the country, the electoral college is narrowing presidential politics, squeezing the battleground, leaving most Americans — and the vast majority of metros — watching from the sidelines.

Brian Mann

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