The Speaker of the House just got humiliated by another Winner Take All meltdown
America's broken political system continues to drag our politics toward post-democracy
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Wow, what a remarkable week in the House of Mis-Representatives. In one of my previous books, Fixing Elections: The Failure of America’s Winner Take All Politics, I detailed a relentless critique of the broken, antiquated, 18th-century winner-take-all political system in the United States. That book was published in 2002, during the aftermath of the presidential election meltdown in Florida in 2000 that was decided by a Republican-biased Supreme Court decision which inexplicably halted a recount of an election that was decided by 537 out of nearly 6 million votes cast. As some of us said at the time, “Five votes beat a reason any day.”
In chapter 13 of Fixing Elections, “The Roller Coaster Policy Ride of Winner Take All,” I did a detailed policy analysis of how the perverse incentives of our winner-take-all system thwarted majoritarian policy on a range of issues, including tax cuts, anti-crime legislation, minimum wage, military appropriations, cities vs. suburbs, agricultural policy and more. The intense incentives to win elections and congressional majorities – appealing to a handful of swing voters in a handful of battleground districts and states – drove the policy priorities of GOP and Democratic leaders alike, both during and between campaigns, especially during the legislative sessions in what has become called the “permanent campaign.” These winner-take-all incentives regularly undermined majoritarianism and resulted in anti-democratic minority rule.
Since Fixing Elections was published, these trends have gained even more momentum, reaching ever more dangerous levels of dysfunction and instability. More recent books like Tyranny of the Minority and Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop have added to the overall analysis.
So I am deeply familiar with congressional unruliness and irrationality. But two days ago, on October 4, the Republican Party crawled even deeper into the muck and mire of winner-take-all. It’s amazing to me how, just when you think the US has reached the bottom of the barrel and can sink no further, our broken political system manages to find a way to sink even lower.
The Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, was tossed overboard into the drink by backstabbing machinations within his own political party. “Et tu, Brute?” A handful of rogue MAGA representatives were able to manipulate a confidence vote of the speaker and bring down McCarthy’s tenure. This was the first time in US history that a speaker of the house was voted out of the position by his colleagues. It was almost like how a European-style parliamentary system works, in which the prime minister loses a confidence vote and is booted from her/his premiership.
But this was worse. It was gut wrenching to watch because it was so humiliating for McCarthy, trying to save his failed speakership, indeed for our entire political system. Now there is no Speaker and no obvious candidate who will be able to pull enough votes in the fractious GOP caucus to get ratified as Speaker. The House is now for the most part leaderless; without a Speaker virtually no business can be conducted and no legislation can move. The Congress is paralyzed for the foreseeable future.
427 members of the globally powerful US House of Representatives were unable to stop eight far-right “anarchists in neckties” from toppling the second most powerful political leader in the country. It was like watching a coyote chew off its own leg to get out of a trap. Grisly stuff.
The failure of America’s winner-take-all politics, redux
Much of the commentary about this sordid episode focused on the obvious: McCarthy’s disgrace first began last January when he sold his soul to the devil, i.e. a couple dozen MAGA Republicans, to win their support for the speakership. McCarthy made a number of concessions, he gave them key positions on committees, permitted them to introduce extreme measures, he loaded bills with poison pills to sabotage the chances of those bills making it through Congress, and recently he agreed to open impeachment hearings against President Joe Biden without allowing the House of Representatives to vote on it, and he blamed Democrats for the recent budget impasse created by the MAGA demolition team. For many months, McCarthy paid the political ransom demanded by these rabid sect of Trump loyalists, led by Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, who have used their stranglehold over the speaker to extort the country through unnecessary debt ceiling fights in the spring and again in the fall.
But what has not been pointed out is the nefarious role that the winner-take-all electoral system has played in contributing to this gut-wrenching moment. Most of the eight GOP members who rolled McCarthy and threw the government into turmoil represent some of the most partisanly lopsided House districts in the country. Seven out of eight of those districts were won by landslide margins of 15 points or higher. The average victory margin for all eight seats was a whopping 23 points.
Most of these Notorious 8, as well as another dozen or so MAGA Republicans in the House, owe their seats to low-plurality victories in low-turnout primary elections. For example, six of the eight were first elected with a minority of GOP primary votes, including ringleader Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz with only 36% in his first Republican primary victory in 2016, Arizona’s Andy Biggs with only 29.5% and Eli Crane from Arizona with a mere 36%. Another MAGA insurgent, Rep. Byron Donalds from Florida, won his GOP primary in 2020 with just 22.6% of the vote. All of these primary winners then cruised to victory in their gerrymandered districts during the November general election. In House districts with nearly a million people, these MAGA Republican are winning with an alarming 3.0% or so of the vote from all residents in their districts.
Contrary to popular perception, the vastly noncompetitive nature of our congressional elections is not primarily due to the gerrymandering of legislative district lines. Certainly there are notorious examples from a handful of states where the gerrymandering reached outrageous proportions. But for the vast majority of House districts, the lopsidedness is determined by partisan demographics – where people live. Democratic voters tend to populate the urban areas, Republican voters in the rural areas and exurbs, with the suburbs as the battleground districts.
For example, a Republican cannot win in liberal San Francisco, just as a Democrat can’t win in Idaho, no matter how the lines are drawn. It turns out most congressional districts are this way – strongholds for one party or the other, purely as a result of where people live, not how the district lines are drawn. Demography is destiny.
Thanks to the lopsided nature of our winner-take-all elections, the vast majority of House districts are safely red or blue — 364 of 435 (84 percent) districts were won by a double-digit landslide in November 2022. So in the vast majority of House districts the election is decided in the nominating primary of the party that dominates the district. And those party primaries tend to have extremely low voter turnout, often as low as 20 to 30 percent of eligible voters. With large fields of candidates running in the primaries, the vote becomes so fractured that the winner of the primary often has no more than 35 percent of the vote.
It is this winner-take-all dynamic that allows a handful of Congress members to usher in such chaos and gridlock. And since those congressional members win by huge landslide margins, they don’t pay an electoral price for irresponsible brinksmanship, such as willingly shutting down the government and its ability to pay its debts.
This dynamic of our winner-take-all system is what two Democratic members of Congress, Reps Jamie Raskin and Don Beyer, have called “structurally empowered political extremism.” And here is what is so deeply ironic about this -- many defenders of winner-take-all criticize alternative voting methods of proportional representation because of the latter’s alleged propensity to elect small parties that may hold the balance of power in a parliamentary government and cause the collapse of the government-- the so-called “Italy and Israel effect.”
Yet the same thing just happened in rather dramatic fashion in the winner-take-all House of Representatives. Under winner-take-all, representatives from the most lopsided districts have incentives to appeal to the most extreme base voters. Grandstanding is rewarded rather than legislative skill and innovation. And small slices of the electorate acquire vastly exaggerated power and determine which not only which candidates win but which party wins a majority. They are able to hold hostage any semblance of sane policy, as the middle erodes and legislative bridge-builders disappear.
Ditch antiquated winner-take-all; proportional representation is the future
There are fixes to these anti-democratic tendencies, but they will be challenging to enact within the straitjacket of winner-take-all. The most profound reform would be to get rid of single-seat, winner-take-all districts and change the method for electing all our legislatures to proportional representation (such as ranked choice voting in multi-seat districts). With PR, as it is sometimes called, voters win representation based on what they think, instead of where they live (though there are different configurations, including hybrids that allow both geographic and ideological representation).
With PR methods, there is no “phantom representation” since the vast majority of voters actually help elect someone and the number of “orphaned voters” is negligible. Multiple parties can win representation in the legislature, including minor parties, and there are no artificial majorities since a majority of votes always wins a majority of seats. Because multi-seat districts are used, redistricting of district lines would no longer be necessary and so gerrymandering would lose its insider power. Also no candidates would be winning by enormous landslide margins from a single-district seat in a low turnout partisan primary. And with a range of viable political parties from a wider ideological spectrum to choose from, there is more choice, more competition and higher voter turnout because all voters become swing voters.
Partisanship doesn’t disappear but it finds a softer voice, both during and between campaigns. Politics has a better chance of finding a win-win common ground among the different political forces.
This is not just a pipe dream. A bill has been introduced into Congress, the Fair Representation Act, which would create a uniquely American form of proportional representation, proportional ranked choice voting, that would tame these gremlins. House members would be elected in multi-winner districts of up to five seats, cultivating “moderate proportional representation” in which every part of the US would be competitive for both major parties. Monopoly representation by one party in any state (with more than one representative) would be a thing of the past.
And a well-organized minor party and independents would have new opportunities for winning representation and holding the major parties accountable. Parties would not be so beholden to their own fringe extremes, and the ideological diversity within each party would not get strangled by scheming, unscrupulous party leaders.
The tendency towards an anti-democratic, exclusionary, “If you win, I lose” politics is an inherent part of the winner-take-all system’s DNA. These challenges have been exacerbated as the US has become more diverse and socially complex. At this point, the winner-take-all political system and its mischievous gremlins undermine political participation and authentic representation, increase polarization and nasty mudslinging campaigns, and undermine legislative majorities, cross-partisan bridge-building and government's legitimacy. And just this past week, in a stunning display of dysfunctionality, winner-take-all dynamics toppled the speaker of the House of Representatives.
I wrote about these dynamics 20 years ago in my book Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics, and they are even more visible today. This is a worrisome sign, not only of the failure of our political system but of the failure of political leaders and reformers to end the duopoly, overturn minority rule and support majoritarianism. Acting in devious concert, these winner-take-all dynamics could well continue to push the US down a worrisome path toward a future of post-democracy.
The “Democracy Imperative” grows stronger with each passing crisis.
Steven Hill @StevenHill1776
I would expect proportional representation to result in even higher numbers of the Demolitionist Caucus. 35% of Republican primary voters nationally is a good chunk of the House. However if the different factions could separate their branding more (even of not into new parties), it might be easier for the rest of the Republicans to stomach alternative coalitions leaving out the insurrectionists.
How extreme is Matt Gaetz? Off the top of my head, he lead a doomed amendment to ban the United States export cluster bombs. He seeks independent oversight for Pentagon and Ukraine spending. He wants a single subject rule for bills in the House — instead of legislation that is so long, it's virtually impossible to read. Deficit spending is fine, however, Gaetz rightly is concerned with the current high levels of debt the federal government has amassed. I do not believe these are extreme policy proposals.