Republican War On Democracy-- Losing But Still Not Vanquished

In an interesting, unsigned piece in The Economist this week, The Failure of Gerrymandering, the point was made that "Ever since district borders in America’s House of Representatives were redrawn in 2011, Republicans’ share of seats has exceeded their proportion of the vote. In 2012 Democrats won 51% of the two-party vote but just 46% of seats." However, "the Congress that began on January 3rd, however, has no such imbalance. Democrats won 54% of the total two-party vote-- and also 54% of House seats. Whatever became of the vaunted pro-Republican bias?"

Although Democrats won a comfortable majority in 2018, had they won the same share of votes in 2016, they would have remained in the minority-- even while winning the popular vote.

Indeed, in 2016, their structural advantages meant Republicans could expect to be over-represented in the House of Representatives unless the Democrats won 59% of the popular vote, a better showing than either party has had in the post-war era.

In 2018, however, the Democrats needed just 53% of the vote to overcome Republicans’ structural advantage. This is because the electorate has changed in the Trump era, mostly in ways that frustrate Republican efforts in 2011 to control their electoral fortunes through gerrymandering.

America’s political geography is shaped by education. In presidential contests the most influential voters are whites without college degrees, who cluster in “swing” states. By contrast, in House elections, white college graduates are unusually valuable, congregating in suburban districts where both parties are competitive.

Donald Trump has rearranged American politics, by courting working-class whites and alienating educated ones. That helped Republicans win the presidency. It should have hurt them in the House. But in 2016 the party got the best of both worlds, because many conservative whites with degrees split their tickets. In states whose presidential winner was never in doubt, they chose Hillary Clinton. But perhaps because they expected her to win and wanted a check on her power, they backed House Republicans in narrowly decided districts.

That changed in 2018, when educated whites abandoned Republican House candidates. Because Democrats were already competitive in suburbs, they needed only small swings. They won 13 of the 15 Republican-held districts where a majority of white voters have college degrees. That made the Democratic vote more efficient. In 2016 the party won 17 seats by single-digit margins; this time they took 40.

And what about gerrymandering, widely thought to protect incumbents? Republicans did draw the borders of more districts than Democrats did. But they only ran the process in 37% of seats. Of the 42 seats the party lost, it had gerrymandered just nine.



Those nine seats, however, show that extreme gerrymandering is risky. Many Republican mapmakers tried to neutralise Democratic voters by burying them in suburban districts full of educated whites. They never imagined that this ruse would backfire, but Mr Trump drove these once-loyal Republicans into Democrats’ arms.

Terrie Rizzo, chair of the Florida Democratic Party, yesterday: "This day is long overdue for millions of Floridians. These people have paid their debts to society and deserve to have a say in the future of their state, and their country. We will be working hard to expand the electorate in Florida and earn the support of these new voters." I was worried when Florida's neo-fascist new governor-elect and the Republicans in the state legislature started getting funny about the results of Amendment 4. First look at these results:

It's going to probably mean over a million new voters, many of then not especially GOP-friendly. Florida was one of only 4 states, the others being Kentucky, Iowa and Virginia, where convicted felons do not regain the right to vote after serving out their sentences. Amendment 4 was designed to automatically restore the right to vote for people with prior felony convictions-- other than convicted murderers or those who committed felony sexual offenses-- on completion of their sentences, including prison, parole, and probation. The victory for Amendment 4 was massive-- 64.55% to 35.45%. Compare that to Rick Scott's win in the Senate race (50.1-49.9%) or Ron DeSantis' win for governor (49.6-49.2%). 5,148,926 people voted to allow felons to regain their right to vote, over a million more people than those who voted for Scott and DeSantis (who both opposed the amendment). The potential to change politics in Florida is enormous. It seems like Republican politicians woke up to that after the vote and started moving against what they call "implementation," although the amendment seemed clear enough that no actual implementation was needed. But it was just part of the GOP's national assault on democracy and there was a growing concern that the Republican-dominated state legislature was finding ways to "slow-walk" the process, although most normal people exactly understand why there even was "a process," since the amendment was written to just kick in automatically; end of story. Alan Grayson told me to just turn off the noise and not to worry because the GOP couldn't do a thing about it-- not even with a legislature and a governor in their hands. He was right.

As of yesterday as many as 1.4 million former felons regained the right to vote, overturning a 150-year-old law that permanently disenfranchised people with felony convictions. Until yesterday more than 10% of Florida's adult population was not eligible to vote. Yesterday, Mark Young, reporting for the NY Times wrote that "Manatee County Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett said he won’t know for sure until later this week, but he doesn’t expect his office to be inundated with former felons looking to get registered. However, he is prepared to begin approving those registrations when asked. 'This is no different than any other philosophy when it comes to this office,' Bennett said late Monday. 'We make it as easy as possible for everyone to be able to vote.'" State Republicans are still not ready to give up though-- nor will they ever be. "[T]wo months after the election," reported Young, "the electoral waters remain muddied at the state level. The law requires that a former felon has completed all of his or her sentencing requirements, including probation, parole and/or restitution.

Right now, there is no communications link from the state to election officials to verify that is the case for every voter looking to register. Bennett said, for now, it will take some personal responsibility on the part of the potential voter to ensure they are not committing another felony by illegally applying to vote.

“Unless we know for a fact that you have not completed those requirements, I’m signing you up because I have no way to verify if you paid restitution or are off probation,” Bennett said. “If you check the box and are willing to commit a felony, then there is the personal responsibility.”


Bennett said there wasn’t anything special his office had to do to prepare for Tuesday’s law to go into effect, but he said state officials needed to work hard and fast toward making some clarifications. While murderers and sexual predators will remain ineligible to vote under the new law, Bennett said those crimes still have some interpretation issues to resolve, as well.

“Is DUI manslaughter a murder? What are we talking about here?” Bennett said. “If you have someone who is 17 and 15, is that a sex crime that keeps you from voting? I would rather have some clarification from the state.”

Newly elected Gov. Ron DeSantis agrees, but wants the law to go back to the legislature. Bennett said the Florida Secretary of State’s Office can clarify how the law is ultimately interpreted.

“I know the governor wants it to go to back to the legislature, but it doesn’t need to,” Bennett said. “I would have a problem with that. Clarification can come from the secretary of state and if it does, I think we have plenty of time to ensure those who are eligible to vote have the opportunity to vote under the law before the next election cycle.”

Otis Redding Died Yesterday, 50 Years Ago, Age 26... 26--Hard To Believe

I took my job as chairman of the Student Activities Board at my college, Stony Brook, very seriously. I did all I could to offer the students the best concert and lecture series anywhere in America. We had historic concerts by Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, Ravi Shankar, Smokey Robinson, The Byrds, Tim Buckley, Big Brother, The Dead, The Temptations and in 1967-- in between the release of King & Queen with Carla Thomas and his tragic death, at 26 years old, in a plane crash in bad weather-- Otis Redding. That tragic plane crash was on December 10 50 years and one day ago.

Sunday morning Jonathan Gould commemorated the day with a brief retrospective and memorial for the New Yorker. Gould wrote that Redding was "the most charismatic and beloved soul singer of his generation, the male counterpart to Aretha Franklin, whom he had recently endowed with the hit song Respect. In the preceding year, on the strength of his triumphant tours of Britain, France, and Scandinavia, his appearances at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, and his domineering performance at the Monterey Pop Festival, Redding had pushed beyond the commercial constraints of the so-called 'Chitlin’ Circuit' of ghetto theatres and Southern night clubs. He was determined to become the first African-American artist to connect with the burgeoning audience for album rock that had transformed the world of popular music since the arrival of the Beatles in America, in 1964." The concert at Stony Brook was part of that determination-- his and mine.

Redding’s success with this new, ostensibly hip, predominantly white audience had brought him to a turning point in his career. Thrilled with the results of a throat surgery that left his voice stronger and suppler than ever before, he resolved to scale back his relentless schedule of live performances in order to place a greater emphasis on recording, songwriting, and production. In the weeks before his death, he had written and recorded a spate of ambitious new songs. One of these, the contemplative ballad (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay, became his self-written epitaph when it was released as a single, in January of 1968. A sombre overture to the year of the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert Kennedy, and the election of Richard Nixon as President, the song went on to become the first posthumous No. 1 record in the history of the Billboard charts, selling more than two million copies and earning Redding the unequivocal “crossover” hit he had sought since his début on the Memphis-based label Stax, in 1962. To this day, according to the performance-rights organization BMI, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” remains one of the most frequently played (and streamed) recordings in the annals of American music.

In an age of pop culture replete with African-American superstars like Michael Jackson, Prince, Usher, Bruno Mars, Kanye West, and Jay-Z, it is hard for modern audiences to appreciate how revolutionary the self-presentations of soul singers like Otis Redding were when they first came on the scene. Prior to the mid-fifties, it had simply been taboo for a black man to perform in an overtly sexualized manner in front of a white audience in America. (Female black entertainers, by contrast, had been all but required to do so.) In the South, especially, the social psychology of the Jim Crow regime was founded on a paranoid fantasy of interracial rape that was institutionalized by the press and popular culture in the malignant stereotype of the “black brute,” which explicitly sexualized the threat posed by black men to white women and white supremacy. Born in Georgia in 1941, the same year as Emmett Till, Otis Redding grew up in a world where any “suggestive” behavior by a black male in the presence of whites was potentially suicidal.



In 2007, forty years on, a panel of artists, critics, and music-business professionals assembled by Rolling Stone ranked Otis Redding eighth on a list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time.” This placed him in a constellation of talent that included his contemporaries Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and James Brown, who together represented the greatest generation of church-bred African-American singers in the history of popular music. What distinguished Redding in this august company was the heartbreaking brevity of his career. In his five short years as a professional entertainer, his incomparable voice and vocal persona established him as soul music’s foremost apostle of devotion, a singer who implored his listeners to “try a little tenderness” with a ferocity that defied the meaning of the word. His singular combination of strength and sensitivity, dignity and self-discipline, made him the musical embodiment of the “soul force” that Martin Luther King, Jr., extolled in his epic “I Have a Dream” speech as the African-American counterweight to generations of racist oppression. In the way he looked and the way he sang and the way he led his tragically unfinished life, this princely son of Georgia sharecroppers was a one-man repudiation of the depraved doctrine of “white supremacy,” whose dark vestiges still contaminate our world.

Jim Morrison, Jim Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding were all kids when they died, each soon after I had gotten to know them, fell in love with their music and eagerly shared it with my fellow students. I buried the horror-- of that, of the assassinations, of the brutal war against Vietnam-- in drugs and then left the country for over 6 years to try to discover who I was and why this was all going on around me. I'm still working on it. But I sure do hope Otis and the rest are singing for Jesus in Heaven today.