The Electoral College is Undemocratic...Too Bad

That's the gist of Steven Teles' recent op-ed in the NYT and Ezra Klein's article at Vox. An asymmetry exists in the American politics because the current system weights the votes of small states and rural areas more heavily than that of big states with significantly more people. Add in aggressive gerrymandering and you have electoral rules that favor Republicans. In effect, to win the Presidency Democrats must win the popular vote by 3-4 percentage points. To win the Senate, by 6%-7%; the House by 3%-4%. So to win, as Klein argues, "Democrats must appeal to voters ranging from the far-left to the center-right, but Republicans can win with only right-of-center voters." In a sense, we really are a center-right nation.

These fault lines are further divided by differences in race and wealth. Republicans dominate rural areas that are predominately white, while Democrats control big cities that are far more racially mixed. A relatively small number of, mainly Democratic, districts also drive the lion's share of the nation's economy (e.g. <500 of the counties won by Biden this election generated 70% of the US GDP in 2018 versus >2400 of the counties Trump won that generated only 30% of GDP).

And while other federal states, like Germany, Australia and Canada have similar deficits in their constitutions, they do not, as Teles points out, have "the same degree of representative inequality that the Electoral Collage and the Senate generate between a citizen living in California versus one living in Wyoming."

Ultimately, these structural imbalances are bad for democracy itself. As Klein argues, "what motivates parties to change, compromise, and adapt is the pain of loss, and the fear of future losses. If the party is protected from that pain, the incentive to listen to the public and moderate its candidates or alter its agenda wanes." 

This imbalance and "unfairness" looks set to continue for the foreseeable future (or at least until Texas flips). And a rationale Republican party will do everything it can to hold onto its advantage.