The 2020 U.S. presidential election re-established majority rule on the federal level, following the 2016 election in which the vagaries of the electoral college handed victory to a candidate with fewer votes. But what is the health of democracy on the state level? Are the relentless assaults of hyper-partisans undercutting basic elements of competitive politics in these systems?
Yes. The vast majority of U.S. states – 39 of the 50 – emerged from the 2022 elections with one-party rule: the same party controlled both chambers of the state legislature and the governor’s office. In 27 states one party held a veto-proof majority, with enough seats to override a governor’s veto, or to make constitutional changes to consolidate its power.
In perspective, competitive politics on the state level has been withering away and in some places is almost non-existent. The New York Times recently noted that in Tennessee (which recently tried to expel two minority representatives), 60 of the 99 members of the state House of Representatives faced no opponent in their last election, and almost none of the other seats were competitive. Not a single seat flipped from one party to the other. With a majority of 75 of the 99, Republicans can count on dominating the chamber for the foreseeable future.
What happens in such cases? The general election becomes meaningless; the only real competition comes in the party primaries. This fuels hyper-partisanship and extremism as candidates vie with each other to mobilize the “true believers.” The winners reach office focused not on finding consensus with the other party but on maintaining their dominance. There is no accountability to the general electorate, only to their most rabid partisan supporters.
The main tool at their disposal in maintaining control is shameless gerrymandering, armed with modern computing that has made what was once a partisan game into an exact science. Both parties have gerrymandered, but since 2008 Republicans have made it a central strategy across the nation.
By 2012, following the reapportionment after the 2010 census, Republicans were able to secure a 33-vote majority in the U.S. House of Representatives despite the fact that Democratic candidates won one and a half million more votes. Pennsylvania, a state fairly evenly divided between adherents of the two parties, currently has 13 Republicans and only 5 Democrats in the U.S. House.
On the state level, the results are sometimes grotesque. In Wisconsin, with the help of a new map devised secretly on proprietary software, Republicans were able to translate a 52 percent edge in the overall vote into a 74 percent majority in the State Assembly. This supermajority, maintained to the present, enables the legislature to override the vetoes of a Democratic governor.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court has refused to intervene unless the motivation is clearly racial. But this is difficult to prove since injustice to African-Americans is difficult to distinguish from injustice to Democrats, and the latter case is – according to the court – perfectly acceptable. Nor is the current court likely to change its position soon.
This anti-democratic manipulation of elections is reinforced by other measures to give legislators (rather than election officials) more control over certification of election results, make voting more difficult for the young and minorities (bastions of the enemy), limit the use of initiatives and referenda that bring issues to a public vote, and put tougher limits on public protests and demonstrations. One organization has counted over 400 proposals along these lines in 2021-22, many of them passed into law.
And extension of this to the federal level is on the way. The “independent state legislature” theory, as interpreted by advocates, would allow state legislatures to bypass the vote in their states for the presidential electoral college and instead cast these votes as they choose. This theory was behind Donald Trump’s scheme of organizing fake slates of electors in January 2021. It is also due to be tested shortly by the Supreme Court, some of whose members have made favorable references to it.
So are Tennessee, and many similar states in the south and the west, still democratic? By a narrow procedural definition, perhaps. But the essence of democracy is on life support.
Not every state with one-party rule is an example of hyperpartisanship or gerrymandering. The government in my home state of California is solidly blue, but its Democratic officeholders are arrayed on an ideological spectrum. Our primaries are open -- any voter can vote for any candidate in the primary, and the top two vote-getters advance to the general, regardless of their party affiliations -- incentivizing a broad appeal to as much of the constituency as possible. And districts are redrawn not in smoke-filled rooms by legislative hacks, but in the open, by independent citizen commissions that are charged to create compact districts of like communities, without regard for partisan or incumbency concerns.
This is not to dispute your overall point. The deleterious effects of hyperpartisanship and gerrymandering in red states are very real, thanks to the intensive years-long campaign by Republicans (Operation REDMAP), which successfully achieved exactly the results you describe.