In this 21st century, minority rule has become the defining feature of American politics. For example, in 2000 and 2016 presidential candidates who received fewer votes than their opponents were nevertheless installed as president.
And in 2020, Joe Biden won nearly seven million more votes nationally than President Donald Trump. However, Biden barely won the presidency by receiving 200,000 more votes in a handful of swing states.
Minority rule starts with the Electoral College. As the New York Times proclaims, it is more than just a relic of the founding era of this country. It is a living symbol of America’s original sin, slavery. A big problem arose at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 as delegates sought to develop a representative government. The Southern States would be disadvantaged with the representation based on the free population in each State. Therefore, Southern States wanted to include black people and white people in the population count; however, that was not plausible because almost all blacks were enslaved, and slaves did not have rights as citizens. The South would not agree to form a union and have so little relative power if they could not count slaves as people, and the North did not want to count slaves at all. Consequently, they struck a compromise. They agreed to count each slave as three-fifths of a person, thus giving the South more population and more electoral votes.
Slavery is long gone, and African Americans are counted as whole persons in population censuses, yet the Electoral College still exists. As a result, a Wyoming resident’s vote counts over three and one-half as much as a person living in California.
Slavery built the foundations of this country, and as with many significant historical issues, the remnants of slavery are still with us–in more ways than one.
Nine states account for slightly more than half of the entire U.S. Population: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina.
However, these nine states have less than 47 percent of the total electoral votes, enabling the other states with less of the population to determine the president.
So, a minority of the population decides who the president will be. But there is more. These smaller states determine the makeup of Congress. They hold half of the population and elect 222 (50 percent) of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives. But they elect 82 (82 percent) of the U.S. Senators.
Once there was little correlation between the size of a state’s population and the political party that the state supported. However, there is now a clear and pronounced partisan small-state bias in the Senate thanks to mostly rural, less populated states voting increasingly Republican. These states are overwhelming White.
An analysis in 2018 showed that nonwhite voters are more underrepresented in the Senate than at any time since 1870, as political power is wielded more and more by predominantly white rural areas. In the current Senate, evenly split at 50 seats for each party, the bias toward mostly White, small states results in Democrats in the Senate representing 41 million more people than Republicans.
Nevertheless, Republicans controlled the White House and the Senate from 2016 to 2020. Coming to power on the backs of a white, conservative minority, they exercised power to appoint judges who make it even easier for Republicans to win elections.
Overall, judges appointed by President George W. Bush (2000 minority vote winner) and President Donald Trump (2016 minority vote winner) make up 48 percent of the federal judiciary. Judges appointed by Trump alone make up 28 percent.
There are consequences of this conservative minority rule. In votes by federal judges in 2020, Republican-appointed judges made 79 percent of the anti-democracy rulings, compared to 37 percent of Democratic-appointed judges. Further, judges appointed by Republican presidents made 90 percent of voter suppression decisions. This was true at the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Roberts carried out a long-held personal objective of gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013.
The current Supreme Court, with a conservative 6-3 majority, appears poised to make important rulings on issues such as health care, abortion rights, gun rights, and gay marriage. Thus, policies supported by a majority of Americans in opinion polls could be ruled unconstitutional, all because a president who lost the popular vote nominated three justices, and Senators representing a minority of the American population confirmed them.
The minority is ruling.