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Advantage, GOP?
Questioning an article that makes a statement.
Nathanial Rakich and Lauren Bronner recently published a feature titled Advantage, GOP on FiveThirtyEight. The thesis of the piece is that the deck is stacked in favor of the Republican Party. This is a dangerously wrong simplification, and it exaggerates the degree to which the system is undemocratically stacked in favor of the GOP.
And it’s not just the Senate — the Electoral College, the House of Representatives and state legislatures are all tilted in favor of the GOP.
It is dangerous for two reasons. Democrats are given a reason to discount elections as illegitimate and disengage from the democratic process; Republicans are given a reason to block sensible reforms to parts of the process that no longer work. The fact of the matter is that Republicans gained legislative majorities through large decisive majorities of the voting public, notably in 2010 and 1994.
In the long term, voters on both sides of the aisle benefit from eliminating gerrymandering, abolishing the Electoral College, and making other common-sense reforms to America’s election processes. With the notable exception of the Senate, the deck is not stacked against Democrats; Republicans have been…