Primary colors
It's Republican red versus Democratic blue in a cage match of crazy.
And so it begins. America’s shockingly undemocratic federal election process formally kicks off today with the Iowa Republican Presidential Caucus. It’s a fittingly ludicrous circus where small groups in the country’s 30th largest state by population and 31st by the size of its economy meet in churches and schools and who-knows-where to have a completely outsized role in deciding who leads the world’s most powerful country.
It is, let me repeat, ludicrous.
Maybe the American electoral system made sense to the founders back in the 1700s, although the country’s Black population and women would no doubt be first in line to disagree. But here’s a quick primer on the insanity: the whole system is skewed against minorities and those who most need representation in favor of elevating the voice of white people and smaller states. Its structural flaws dramatically silence the actual will of the American people, which is surely not the intent of the world’s self-proclaimed beacon of democracy. And the whole shitshow runs for almost a year, not even counting the two years of candidate jostling we’ve already had to endure.
Set aside the fact that Republican candidates have been elected president three times in the past six elections despite winning the popular vote only once (George W. Bush in 2004). Ignore the fact Hillary Clinton didn’t win despite garnering nearly 2.9 million more votes than Donald Trump. And brush over the fact Joe Biden trounced Trump by more than 7 million votes yet just 44,000 votes going the other way in key states would have resulted in a second Trump term. Let’s instead look at who Americans really are, and what they believe.
You’ll hear a lot in coming days about how the simple folk participating in the Iowa caucuses represent the “real America.” That’s always been bullshit, but it’s today bullshittier than ever. Nothing against Iowa or Iowans. But it’s a small state with a relatively small economy. While its biggest industry is life insurance and annuities (thanks to Des Moines being the headquarters of the Principal Financial Group), the three next biggest are all agriculture-related: farm supplies; corn, wheat, and soybean production; and meat, beef, and poultry processing. America’s agriculture sector contributed about $1.3 trillion to the US economy in 2021. Sounds big! But that’s barely one-twentieth of the country’s GDP.
In reality, the “real America” filled with “real Americans” has long been its cities. Metropolitan areas drive about 90% of US economic output, worth roughly $21 trillion. The biggest? Those cesspits of liberal anarchy: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, which alone make up a quarter of the world’s biggest economy. As it happens, those cities are also demographically very, very different to the “real America”—that is, they’re not just white. Iowa’s population is 88% white; New York’s is 32% (California’s is 35% white, with Latinos at 39%).
But, here’s the thing. Of the almost nine in ten Iowans who are white, there’s a subsection that are Republican. And of that subsection of Iowa’s population that identifies as Republican, a smaller subsection are actually registered Republicans. And of that sub-sub-section of registered Republicans, an vastly smaller subsection actually participates in the caucus process. So, again, we have the trajectory of the Republican nomination for President of the United States being heavily influenced by, oh, three farmers and maybe a cow.
Now, defenders of the American electoral system do exist and—shock!—they’re almost exclusively white people from small states. That makes sense: who wouldn’t want to retain a world where South Dakota (population 910,000) gets as many senators as California (population 39 million)? But the reality of this “equity” is now beyond parody. The net effect is a single voter in Wyoming has similar Senate representation to 59 voters in California. 59!
“The Senate today is split 50-50 between the two parties,” David Leonhardt said last year in the New York Times. “But the 50 Democratic senators effectively represent 186 million Americans, while the 50 Republican senators effectively represent 145 million. To win Senate control, Democrats need to win substantially more than half of the nationwide votes in Senate elections.”
This maybe wouldn’t be such a big deal if two things existed. First, if the political parties weren’t so polarized. Genuine bipartisanship would make the representation divide at least a little blurry, but cross-aisle cooperation is as dead as the dodo (even if 60% of Americans want more of it). Second, if politicians actually reflected the wishes of the people they are supposed to represent (rather than the views of, say, the tiny sliver of people who vote for them in a country where voting isn’t compulsory).
Because when you actually dig into the data, Americans aren’t that kooky. Remove the red Trump baseball caps and look beyond the matcha-sipping coastal elites and you’ll find the country’s citizens are shockingly united:
71% want stricter gun control
68% believe racism is a problem
60% support increased spending on public housing
73% believe teachers should be paid more
more than seven-in-ten Americans support social welfare programs (in all their forms)
64% believe in a woman’s right to choose, the same percentage that support nationwide availability of contraceptives (don’t get me started on the other 36%)
even 69% believe Catholic priests should be able to marry!
A lot of that stuff sounds pretty, er, liberal. And that’s the reality this interminable election process will obscure. Beneath the bluff and bluster and political craziness, my adopted country is filled with regular people yearning for progress on precisely the issues much of the rest of the world seems to have figured out. You might even say there’s a fair whack of the population quite enamored with the notion of accepting the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The problem? The electoral process that formally begins today is no longer a beacon of democracy, but an enabler of demagoguery. It encourages division—how else can you win a primary?—and the absence of compulsory voting and the craziness of gerrymandering means there’s increasingly little incentive to tack to the center.
So, buckle up. We’ll see if a guy who obviously and brazenly sought to overturn the will of the people gets a stacked Supreme Court to ignore that fact, and if Joe Biden makes it through the months ahead without committing the unforgivable electoral sin of acting his age. Welcome to 2024.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.