One Acre, One Vote

 Josh Marshall flags a candidate for Colorado governor that makes explicit the sort of anti-majoritarian position of the contemporary GOP. His proposal is that Colorado adopt an electoral college to elect its governor. 

What is interesting about this (aside from being terrifying as a prospect) is how it reflects some warped aspects of "originalism." Obviously, the Electoral College is an "original" method for selecting the President. It represented the Framers fear of democracy. They worried about a demagogue and looked to the election of popes and Holy Roman Emperors for their model. There would be a buffer between the people and the presidency. However, before all of the Framers had actually died, the country had shifted to embracing the idea of democracy. (Jefferson, famously, was not at the Constitutional Convention.) As a result of this embrace, large "catch-all" parties formed to consolidate the new democratic masses in ways that made sense given America's electoral system. There was some mucking about with third parties in the 1840s and '50s, but eventually we settled in to a two party system.

All of this made the Electoral College obsolete. Parties now nominated candidates, then the masses effectively voted for those candidates, because the Electors were mere proxies for the will of the plurality in each state.

The structure of the Electoral College meant that rural states were dramatically overweighted. This process was somewhat true in 1900, but 2000 it had become so extreme that we have now elected someone twice in 16 years who failed to win a plurality of the popular vote. Arguments from Republicans to keep the Electoral College used to be bound to traditional legitimacy: "This is the way we have always done it, and we shouldn't change just because one party doesn't like it." 

What is striking since 2016 is how explicitly the GOP is basically saying that urban voters - younger, more racially and ethnically diverse and usually better educated - are now no longer "equal" in terms of electing governments. In Reynolds v Sims, the Supreme Court ruled that districts must be roughly equal in population in order to fully satisfy the principal of "one person, one vote." As Earl Warren wrote, "legislatures represent people, not trees or acres."

The GOP is basically settled into the idea that acres are more important than voters.

Some of this can be traced back to a book called The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. The basic argument of this book was that demographics were going to favor the creation of a persistent Democratic majority, in much the same way demographics favored Republicans from 1968-1992. 

Most Democratic strategists no longer believe in this trend, but what's fascinating is that Republicans clearly do. This is what underlies Tucker Carlson's appeal to Replacement Theory and the broad efforts by Republicans to make it harder for certain groups to vote. 

They have basically accepted that they are a demographic minority. Their only hope is to create more anti-majoritarian rules. This is not "we should preserve the Electoral College because it's tradition," this is "we need to inject more anti-democratic structures into our politics to prevent 'those people' from winning."  For Alexander Hamilton, "those people" were the poor who would vote to take stuff from the rich. For Mitch McConnell, "those people" are, simply put, Democrats.

Aside from the stunning assault of the basic principle of elective government, what's really interesting to me is that maybe Judis and Teixeira were right about this emerging majority. Maybe we are a few electoral cycles away from a younger, more diverse electorate tilting the field towards Democrats for a couple of decades. 

Of course, we have to survive the last ditch efforts of Republicans from destroying the basic principle of democracy first.  Nothing to worry about there...