In the discussion section of yesterday’s post “Justice Department Aiming to Strip Ilhan Omar’s Citizenship,” longtime commenter @DK observed,
Why is it that when Republicans do awful things, the first word out of many Americans’ mouths is “Democrats”?
Democrats have been united in responding with outrage. Since Americans decided with eyes wide open to vote Democrats out of power and hand over the keys of government to fascists and racists, that’s pretty much all Democrats can do on this.
What Americans should do is stop finding excuses not to vote for Democrats (“Genocide Joe!”) and stop building a permission structure for others to not vote for Democrats (“I live in a blue state, so I’m going to protest vote because genocide”) and then come running for Democrats to save our asses from the consequences of our decision to not support Democrats.
I see this a lot, both in the OTB comment section and elsewhere. And, in a sense, it’s a fair point: Donald Trump has twice been elected President, the second time after fomenting an insurrection and having been found civilly liable for sexual assault, and Republicans have slim majorities in both the House and the Senate despite over a decade of slavishly backing Trump. Given that we have elections, who else to blame but the voters?
The system, mostly.
Trump was famously elected in 2016 despite getting almost 3 million fewer votes than his Democratic opponent. Because we filter the popular votes through the Electoral College, which disproportionately weighs votes in low-population states and (with two minor exceptions) is winner-take-all at the state level, it came down to 107,000 people in the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. As the Washington Post drolly noted, that’s “about the same as the number of people who can pack into Michigan’s ‘Big House’ stadium.”
In 2024, Trump won the popular vote by a little over 2 million. But Harris could nonetheless have won had she flipped 115,000 votes in three states. Trump won all seven so-called swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) that we focused on in the months leading up to the election, but the margins were tiny.
What’s noteworthy is that the outcomes in almost all races are baked in from the outset. To take the front pagers here, there’s nothing Steven or I could have done to affect the outcome. Trump won Alabama 65 percent to 24 percent (nearly doubling Harris’ 772,000 votes) and Harris won Virginia 52-46 (a margin of roughly 250,000 votes out of 4.5 million cast).
It’s true that 62,985,106 Americans voted for Trump in 2016 and 77,302,580 did so in 2024. We can certainly blame them for doing so! But the nature of a binary system is that, for most voters, they’re choosing between two candidates whose policy positions and/or character they find distasteful. And, because their platforms are so polarized at this point, it’s asking a whole lot of voters to go for a candidate who has pledged to vote against their preferences on all hot-button issues of the day.
Turning to Congress, we see the same thing: relatively few American voters have any real choice. Roughly 18 of 435 House seats are competitive; the rest are decided in the party primary. Only a third of the 100 Senate seats are up in any given cycle, and only 7 of the 35 seats up this year are competitive.
While Virginia was still considered a red state when I moved here in 2002, it has long since become purple, if not blue.* The state last voted Republican for President in 2004. The last Republican Senator, George Allen, was defeated in 2006. My House district and those surrounding it have been Democratic for years. Voting is really pro forma here.
It’s taking a wildly unpopular President, who’s waging a wildly unpopular war that has led to a horrible economy, to make it possible for the Senate to flip this cycle.** And even under those circumstances, it’s still coming down to seven states. While Steven and I both have the opportunity to vote, neither of us live in a state where the outcome is the slightest bit in doubt. In Alabama, Republican Barry Moore will easily beat Democrat Everett Wess. In Virginia, incumbent Democrat Mark Warner will easily beat Republican Bert Mizusawa.*8* In both cases, the margin will likely be 30 points or more.
*It’s true that Republicans swept the top state offices (governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general) in 2021. But that’s a function of incredibly low turnout in off-off-year elections, the hangover effects of the COVID pandemic, and Virginia’s weird penchant for voting opposite the presidential outcome the following year.
**A year ago, it was considered a near-impossibility because 22 of the 35 seats were won by Republicans the last go-round.
***Mizusawa, a retired Army major general, has an impressive resume, but I know nothing else about him. The race is so under the radar that I had no idea who he was until I looked him up. I’ve seen maybe three yard signs, despite early voting being underway.
