When you lose a game, especially one you had reason to expect to win, do you try to figure out how to play better? Is your first reaction to a request to change the rules?
In the case of the Democratic Party, it’s the latter. Perhaps that’s natural for a party that prides itself on supporting changes to rules that everyone now considers unjust (even ones it itself passed, like segregation laws). But sometimes it’s wiser to change the game than to condemn long-established rules.
Democrats claim to win more votes but do not control the federal government. They have won a majority of the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, but have elected presidents in only four of them. That cursed Electoral College—“land,” as one liberal commentator put it—gave George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.
Of course, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns knew that the winner was determined by electoral votes, not the popular vote. But that didn’t stop many Democrats from calling for a change to a popular vote.
Or complaints about the makeup of the Senate. Most senators, writes prominent election analyst David Wasserman, represent only 18 percent of the country’s population. That’s because the Constitution requires each state to elect two senators, and most Americans now live in just nine states.
It has been suggested that the framers of the Constitution did not expect the population to be so heavily concentrated in a few states. In fact, it was similarly concentrated in gigantic states 50, 100, 150, and 200 years ago. And when the framers met in 1787, the compact states demanded equal representation in the Senate for fear that the gigantic states would dominate.
In addition, the compact states today are not uniformly Republican. Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Hawaii currently send two Democrats to the Senate, while Maine, North Dakota, and Montana send one each. The 12 smallest states are represented by 13 Democratic and 11 Republican senators.
Moreover, Article V of the Constitution provides that “No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of an equal Suffrage in the Senate.” Changing that would require a modern constitutional convention. It’s not going to happen.
Democrats also complain loudly that, as The Economist puts it, “in the last three elections, Republicans’ share of House seats has been 4 to 5 percentage points larger than their share of the two-party vote.”
This isn’t earth-shattering. Winning parties typically receive more seats than votes in any system, and three elections isn’t much. Republicans enjoyed an advantage in redistricting after the last two census cycles, but Democrats held it in the 1970s and 1980s.
That advantage has proven reversible, and Republicans apparently have, too. Democrats are favored to win governorships and majorities in state legislatures, and some states are establishing supposedly nonpartisan (in practice always liberal) redistricting commissions.
Other reforms are being considered. Maine is experimenting with a class-based voting system that supposedly encourages the emergence of a moderate candidate. Of course, the proliferation of parties has not always produced a functional government, even in countries as full of original and talented people as Italy and Israel, and many reforms have unintended consequences.
It is true that the Electoral College works against a party whose voters are geographically and demographically concentrated. For the framers, this was a feature, not a bug. They feared the dominance of a concentrated bloc of voters without broad support across the country.
A party that wants to win more elections should take this into account, rather than demanding impossible changes to the constitution and tinkering with amendments that may have unforeseen negative consequences.
Once upon a time, Bill Clinton showed Democrats how to do it. He won a presidency from which his party had been excluded for 16 of its 20 years by tailoring its platform to appeal to more voters. In 1996, he won 174 electoral votes in states his wife would lose 20 years later.
Clinton has twice won California by a solid 13-point margin. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won by 30 points, but with positions that antagonized the “deplorables” in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa.
Now Democrats—fervently determined to impeach Donald Trump, charmed by youthful socialists, in the thrall of identity politics—are rejecting Bill Clinton’s course and doubling down on Hillary’s. Maybe they would do better if they learned to play by the rules instead of defying them.
