The winner-take-all incentives that have racially polarized America – and led to Trump

US heading toward post-democracy, with our political institutions exacerbating racial tension and allowing populists to divide the nation

Will 2024 end up being the year US democracy crashes like a melting glacier? Will historians one day look back at this November’s election and mark this as Year 1 of American Post-Democracy?

If so, historians will give Donald Trump and his MAGA movement the blame, but in truth the slide toward post-democracy actually began some years before. In many ways it was preordained, because this is a natural evolution of America’s winner-take-all, “if you win, I lose” electoral system.

Now stir in the increasingly dominant communication technologies of our times, digital media platforms, which facilitate the viral spread and amplification of sensationalized misinformation, deep fakes and conspiracy scaremongering at the flick of a mouse. How could such a political ecosystem, in which one side in an election wins representation and all other sides lose, not foster toxic division and acrimony?

Amidst all the ink and electrons reporting on the bitter partisan divisions that gnaw at America’s soul today, what has been missing is due recognition of how extreme policy positions and failure to compromise are incited by certain fundamental realities of our national character as well as our political system. 

The first fundamental reality is simply demographics -- where people live, and how partisan demographics naturally line up along regional lines. In this era of the infamous Red vs Blue America map, the nation has balkanized along regional lines with heavy partisan overtones. Like other large winner-take-all democracies, such as the UK, India and Canada, entire regions of the U.S. have become one-party fiefdoms.

The Democrats control the cities, most of the coasts and a small chunk of the Midwest and Southwest, while the GOP dominates the South, the Plains, the Mountain West and most of the sparse flyover zones between the coasts. While a picture is worth a thousand words, the ominous-looking Red vs Blue map barely begins to encapsulate the consequences of these partisan-laden demographics.

The second fundamental reality is how those regional partisan demographics are funneled as votes through our winner-take-all electoral system. In over 90 percent of the “me against you” legislative districts -- at both federal and state levels -- it's only possible for one side to win. There are simply too many of one type of voters packed into that district.

In the vast majority of states, this effect is occurring outside whatever shenanigans take place as a result of partisan gerrymanders during redistricting. This is a matter of where people reside, and the fact that only one side can win in this zero-sum game. In the vast majority of districts, demography has become destiny. Someone should print that on a bumper sticker.

Consequently, party leaders and political experts can reliably predict who is going to win nearly all of the 435 US House seats. FairVote has forecast that in the 2024 elections, only 26 seats – six percent – will be toss-ups, the least in the last 25 years. FairVote not only can tell which candidate will win each race, they can predict the margins of victory. In a double-barreled corruption, that in turn allows party leaders to focus their “Pyramid of Money” resources on the handful of battleground districts and states.

In combination, these two realities of partisan regional demographics combined with the winner-take-all electoral system add a sharp geographic schism to America’s destructive polarization. This mix of geography and partisanship, especially when combined with race – which I will discuss in a moment – constitutes an extremely toxic brew that has usually been explosive whenever it has appeared in US history.

Polarize, Not Compromise

With the country now politically balkanized along regional lines, this raises a question of whether or not American voters themselves are also polarized into partisan camps.  The answer, perplexingly, is both “yes and no.”

According to the American National Election Studies, a series of public opinion polls taken over the last seven decades by the University of Michigan, voters’ attitudes on a range of issues and topics have been remarkably consistent -- except in two important areas.

The first is over the trustworthiness and confidence in government, with more Americans today less trusting and consequently opposed to “big government” spending and higher taxes; and the second is over government aid to African-Americans, minorities and immigrants, with more Americans today opposed than previously. And in the dominant public mindset these two are closely fused – “We don’t want big government wasting any of our tax dollars on those programs or on those people.” These two axes also are closely linked to issues like crime, public safety, welfare fraud, immigration, schools and gun control.

One analysis of eight ANES surveys across nearly three decades (1992–2020), found that “white Americans’ beliefs about the trustworthiness of the federal government have become linked with their racial attitudes…racial prejudice, measured in terms of anti-Black stereotypes, informs white Americans’ beliefs about the trustworthiness of the federal government.” The study found that “the racialization of government trust…can introduce serious obstacles in the ability of government to enforce rules and regulations meant to sustain the general welfare, including the democratic process itself.”

Remember the infamous black-baiting Willie Horton TV ads, which featured a convicted black murderer who raped a white woman while on prison furlough, that President George H.W. Bush’s campaign blasted to the public in the 1988 presidential race? It caused Democrat candidate Michael Dukakis’ double-digit lead to evaporate. Bush’s strategy mimicked Richard Nixon’s successful “Southern strategy” in the early 1970s, which used coded words and symbolic gestures and actions directed at white people in the South, particularly white men, to paint the Democratic Party as the party of racial minorities, rioting cities and civil rights agendas. In a winner-take-all system, this was devilishly easy to do, particularly after Democratic president Lyndon Johnson and a Democratic Congress passed the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).

GOP politicians have been copying and re-copying Nixon and Bush’s tactics ever since. Donald Trump’s entire political career is basically one long Willie Horton ad, always provoking white voters to overreact out of their fears of you-know-who. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police and subsequent nationwide protests, Black Lives Matter was used as a stand-in for Willie Horton. More recently, the “immigrant horde” at the border is serving nicely in this scapegoating role.

Some political analysts have tried to say that the divide in America is not directly race-based, it is more of an urban-rural split, some of it along education lines with better-educated white voters more supportive of liberal Democrats, while white voters without a college degree have moved toward the right and the GOP.

But other studies, measuring degrees of racial resentment among a range of Americans, tell a different story. From 2000 through 2020, the Democratic support margin among white people who score high on racial resentment scales has plummeted by 36 points for non-college white people and by 39 points among college-educated white people – both education categories recording near-identical declines in support. At the same time, the Democratic support margins among white people low in racial resentment rose by 58 points among non-college white people and by 32 points among college-educated white people.

So in contradiction to the “education divide” thesis, non-college white people who are not racially resentful have become more Democratic, while college-educated white people who are racially resentful have become more Republican.

Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., makes the case that “the unequal distribution of recovery after the economy crashed in 2008 has been profoundly overlooked” in how it has exacerbated racial division. “First, the election of a Black president, which sparked a backlash movement of grievance in those places left behind in the recovery,” says Podhorzer, “and second, the election of a racist president, Donald Trump — who stoked those grievances.”

Other cultural issues also come and go on the country’s radar (woman’s reproductive rights will be particularly salient this November), but election after election, trust in government and its related aversion to “big government” spending/high taxes, combined with perceptions of race, have played out in impactful ways among white voters, particularly in certain regions of the country, especially in battleground districts and states. This reality strongly reflects the degree to which national politics and partisan competition have become centered around appeals to racially-conservative white voters, who still comprise the bulk of the American electorate.

So the public indeed has become more conservative, and more polarized, along these two key axes of big government/higher taxes and race-based policy. This has prompted the GOP to aggressively exploit this crucial shift, along with other cultural wedge issues that have arisen from time to time. In this era of the Red vs Blue 49-49 nation, where there is so much at stake in a winner-take-all electoral system where you either win or lose every House district, every Senate seat, and the presidency, this has long been a primary way to mobilize key cohorts of the electorate and win elections.

Drawing racialized districts was a temporary fix that eventually backfired

Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, a full court press of legal actions to enforce the drawing of black-majority districts was unleashed. Long-overdue electoral justice was achieved relatively quickly, with the number of elected black House members tripling in 15 years, from 6 to 18, and continuing to climb steadily to today’s record of 53 (along with 46 Hispanic, 14 Asian American and 4 American/Alaskan Native members out of 435 – whites are still vastly overrepresented, with 72% of House members and only 59% of the U.S. population).

With the careful gerrymandering of legislative district lines to capture the right pockets of racially-minded voters, the winner-take-all electoral system has been literally twisted and contorted and forced to do something that it was never meant to do – elect representatives from a minority group.

But the achievement has become an increasingly pyrrhic victory for several reasons. First, as the US Supreme Court turned more right-wing (due to the constitutional bias that gives overweighted influence to nominee-confirming Senators from low-population conservative states), the federal courts began turning against the goals of racial representation. Supreme Court decisions like Shaw vs Reno, Shelby County v. Holder and others have made Swiss cheese of voting rights jurisprudence.

But just as alarmingly, decades of successful voting rights actions have served to perpetuate the continued use of winner-take-all districts and their racially-tinged context. It has unintentionally reinforced the same racialized culture that has fed into the current MAGA white backlash. It is understandable why voting rights leaders have continued down this loaded path, since it has led to levels of electoral success that had not been seen since pre-Jim Crow Reconstruction. But it contained the seeds of its own undoing.

Here’s how: the packing of high concentrations of minority voters into “majority-minority” districts not only elected more minorities, it also had the effect of bleeding minority voters out of all the surrounding districts. Given that minority voters were the most reliably Democratic voters, that made all of the neighboring districts more Republican.

It was a surprise to many when, during the 1991 redistricting, GOP House minority leader Newt Gingrich embraced this strategy of drawing majority-minority districts, as did the Bush Administration’s Justice Department. But the reason became immediately clear. In Gingrich’s home state of Georgia, the U.S. House delegation went from 10 Democrats -- one black -- and one Republican (Gingrich) in 1992 to eight Republicans and three Democrats -- all three black -- in 1994. The newly elected black (and later Latino and Asian) representatives mostly were replacing white Democrats, and the increase in minority representation came at the expense of electing fewer Democrats overall. Virtually overnight, white moderate Democratic House members disappeared from the South.

The regional partisan demographics expressed within a winner-take-all electoral system turned the Voting Rights Act into an effective GOP tool that allowed the party to take control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in four decades (Gingrich became Speaker of the House). The Democrats and minority voters were tripped up by a classic Catch-22: even as legislatures were becoming more diverse, they were ironically becoming less friendly to the agenda of racial minorities. Not only that, with the disappearance of many white Democratic House members, that allowed GOP strategists to “racialize” the Democratic Party and further alienate it from white voters.

Many Republican leaders still promote this “majority minority district” strategy, it's the only race-based remedy the GOP has supported in the modern era. The party has been more than willing to shelve its allegedly “race blind” ideology when it has suited their naked partisan interests. Republicans have found the Voting Rights Act to be a great ally, and it remains to this day a potent obstacle to the Democrats retaking control of the House of Representatives.

Many analysts incorrectly blame this partisan tilt on the extreme gerrymandering of legislative districts for partisan advantage. While gerrymandering adds a bit to this bias, especially in a handful of notorious states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina, the big culprit is single-seat, winner-take-all districts themselves, combined with regional partisan demographics.

The way out of this racially charged dilemma – Proportional Ranked Choice Voting

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” said Abraham Lincoln, as the nation stood on the brink of civil war over the nation’s original sin. The most beneficial arrangement for the Democrats and racial minorities would be for the electoral system to evolve from the current single-seat blueprint to a multi-seat system elected by Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV). With proportional voting, parties win seats in proportion to their vote share -- in a five-seat district, a party winning 40 percent of the vote wins two seats instead of nothing, and a party with 60 percent of the vote wins three seats instead of everything.

That would allow racial minorities to win their fair share of representation without gerrymandering any districts, and without hurting the electoral chances of other Democratic Party candidates. In the South, such a plan would elect more black and white Democrats, as well as some black and moderate Republicans. Under a PRCV plan, representatives in the South would reflect the actual demographics of the Southern electorate, instead of the MAGA white Congress members that dominate there today.

Despite ample opportunity in recent years, there has been little discussion by the national punditry about how the political mechanics and calculations of the winner-take-all system substantially drives pointlessly adversarial, race-tinged politics. The logic of winner-take-all dictates a singular ambition: that you beat the other side. It is instinctual to the “us against them” mechanism.

Deformed politics and policies have emerged as a result, further confusing an already disengaged and disgusted voting public which, within the paralysis of our winner-take-all two-party system, has nowhere else to go but the sidelines.  As more and more voters abandon the field, the game is left to the partisans to wage their battles using the mechanics of polarization, which then fuels a new round of voter alienation and withdrawal, which in turn cedes even more influence to the partisans.

For some, this kind of dumbed down winner-take-all politics helps them cope with the vertigo of thinking. But unfortunately it only results in a race to the bottom, where awaits -- ominously -- post-democracy. In a post-democratic future, the US will still hold elections but those democratic rituals will be increasingly less effective as a vehicle for finding compromise or resolving the nation's challenges. When a society is deeply divided by race, tribe, geography and partisanship, it becomes difficult to sustain democracy.

Truthfully, the racial brinksmanship and post-democratic pressures will continue their downward slide if we do not transform our winner-take-all political system into one based on a foundation of proportional ranked choice voting.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776