How Republicans Get Away With Fleecing Their Own Voters

We’re having this election on Tuesday. The way it works is that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris each tell voters what they want to do and then voters decide which set of policies they prefer. The same is true of Republicans and Democrats running for Congress and in state races. That’s how representative democracy works. You like what I promise? Elect me. You don’t? Elect somebody else.

Except it turns out that isn’t how representative democracy has been working lately. Nowadays, Democratic officeholders are much likelier to do what voters want than Republican officeholders. An investigative piece for Bloomberg Opinion by Mary Ellen Klas and Carolyn Silverman, published on October 22, documents this odd phenomenon at the state level. The same holds true, I believe, at the national level.

The Klas-Silverman piece didn’t attract much notice when it was published because it was packaged, in rather boring fashion, as a story purporting to show that in the 40 “trifecta” states where a single party controls both halves of the state legislature and the governorship, voter preferences get ignored. A plague on both your houses! But what the story really shows is that Republican officeholders in the 23 Republican trifecta states routinely ignore voter preferences, even as Democratic officeholders in the 17 Democratic trifecta states work much harder to do what voters want. Indeed, Democratic trifecta state government policies match up with voter preferences more frequently than in states in which power is shared between Democrats and Republicans.

Maybe Bloomberg Opinion feared this conclusion would seem too partisan on the eve of an election. (There’s a lot of that going around.) For whatever reason, Bloomberg Opinion’s writers and editors struggled mightily to obscure this striking distinction between the two parties. But it’s right there in the text.

“For the past quarter century,” Klas and Silverman write, “the public has become more progressive on many social issues,” including “abortion, gender identity, climate change, guns, immigration and voting rights.” Blue trifecta states have kept pace with these changes, they write, and red trifecta states have not. Instead, they’ve become known more for “rejecting Medicaid expansion, relaxing gun laws and cutting unemployment insurance.” The authors go on to explain that “Blue monopolies channel the goals of their voters, while red monopolies channel the goals of their legislators (often at the expense of voters).”

Klas and Silverman argue that blue and red trifectas are similarly bad because they contribute to political polarization. Maybe so. But I’m not going to lose sleep over blue trifectas adopting more liberal policies when Klas and Silverman’s own data shows that’s what the majority of voters want. It’s red trifectas ignoring the will of their constituents that we should worry about (and puzzle over).

I should stipulate that red and blue trifectas alike do what voters want most of the time. Democracy isn’t so broken that Republicans can get away with ignoring majority will 24/7. But where Republican trifectas match public opinion slightly more than half the time (53 percent), Democratic trifectas match public opinion nearly all the time (77 percent). Divided state governments fall in the middle, matching public opinion 65 percent of the time. There’s a clear lesson here: You want responsive government? Vote Democratic.

How on earth do Republicans get away with defying public opinion nearly half the time?

Gerrymandering is part of the answer. State legislative seats are so safe that nearly half of all incumbent state legislators face no primary challenges, and 35 percent go unchallenged in both primary and general elections, Klas and Silverman report, citing research from Saint Louis University political scientist Steven Rogers. Most of this can be attributed to Republican redistricting after the 2010 election. That election flipped 20 state government chambers from Democratic to Republican and doubled the number of Republican trifectas from nine to 22. In Wisconsin, a Democratic trifecta became a Republican trifecta, and, thanks to gerrymandering, remained so until 2019. In 2012, the first election after the Wisconsin legislature’s Republican majority redrew state legislative districts, the GOP managed the remarkable feat of filling 74 percent of all contested state Assembly seats with just 52 percent of the vote, and 55 percent of all contested state Senate seats with just 49 percent of the vote.

In his 2017 book Ratf**ked (coy asterisks his, not mine), David Daley assigns much of the credit for this Republican realignment to Chris Jankowski, executive director of a project of the Republican State Leadership Committee called the Redistricting Majority Project, or REDMAP. In 2010 Jankowski raised $30 million for the project, “the cost of one U.S. Senate seat these days,” Daley writes. The plan was to flip state legislatures, redraw legislative districts to favor Republicans, then harvest secure Republican majorities. “People call us a vast right-wing conspiracy,” Karl Rove, former top political aide to President George W. Bush, reportedly told potential donors at one fundraising meeting, “but we’re really a half-assed right-wing conspiracy.” Now it was time to get serious, and that’s what REDMAP did.

Klas and Silverman don’t discuss the extent to which Democrats manipulate the redistricting process for partisan gain, but the answer is “not that much.” A survey by the Princeton Electoral Innovation Lab and Represent US, an anti-corruption nonprofit, shows that among blue states, only Illinois and Georgia rate D’s and F’s on redistricting; the other blue states get A’s and B’s. Red states out West score A’s and B’s too, and so do Indiana and Kentucky. But red states in the South almost uniformly get D’s and F’s, as do Kansas and Ohio. The inescapable conclusion is that gerrymandering is almost entirely a Republican problem.

Another tool that frees Republicans from worrying too much about what a majority of voters want is the imposition of restrictions on ballot access. When your agenda is at odds with the majority, you can try to change voters’ minds, but it’s a lot easier (if less democratic) to thwart the majority. Since 2021, Klas and Silverman found, Republican trifecta states passed 120 laws to restrict ballot access and Democratic trifecta states passed nearly 200 laws to expand ballot access.

Berkeley political scientist Jacob Grumbach created a State Democracy Index based on 51 factors concerning how easy or difficult it is to vote. In 2000, all the states ranked about the same; indeed, red trifecta states were a whisker more democratic than blue trifecta states. That started to change as President George W. Bush, and especially Rove, flogged the voter fraud issue—never mind that Bush’s Justice Department and a task force Bush appointed on the matter could find little evidence of any. By 2018, Klas and Silverman report, red trifecta states’ Democracy Index had fallen from 0.3 to -0.7, while blue trifecta states had risen from 0.1 to 0.6.

Another layer of insulation between Republican state legislators and voters—one that goes for Democratic state legislators too—is voter inattention. Citing a 2023 book by St. Louis University’s Rogers, Accountability in State Legislatures, Klas and Silverman observe that, per Gallup, voters trust state officials more than Congress by 27 percentage points. But that opinion is rooted in belief rather than experience, since, per a 2018 survey by Rogers, 89 percent of voters can’t identify who their state representatives are. Rogers also found that more than 40 percent of voters didn’t have a clue what their state’s policies were concerning gun control, taxes, or abortion (this was before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade). For this substantial minority of voters, any similarity between what policies they favor and what policies their state government ends up promulgating is often sheer coincidence.

It’s tempting to conclude that Republicans take advantage of voter ignorance and Democrats do not. But a likelier explanation is that voters in red states are more ignorant. You’ve no doubt read about the collapse of local newspapers creating news deserts across the country. What you may not know is that this problem is especially acute in conservative areas. Steve Waldman and Lori Henson, crunching data from the 2023 Medill State of Local News report, note that fully 83 percent of those counties Medill judged either news deserts or in danger of becoming news deserts voted Republican in the 2020 election. The 13 states with the most news deserts—Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, etc.—were all red states except Georgia. In the absence of information, people vote based on cultural affinity. When people self-identify as conservative, as they do in many regions of this country, they vote Republican.

But not everyone who self-identifies as conservative actually favors conservative policies. Citing preliminary findings by Madison Schroeder, a doctoral student in political science at the University of Oregon, Klas and Silverman report that between 2016 and 2022, ballot measures in Republican trifecta states were left-leaning twice as often as they were right-leaning and that the success rate for left-leaning measures was almost as high (67 percent) as in blue trifecta states (74 percent). You might perhaps argue that states controlled by one party naturally invite ballot measures from the opposition for want of other avenues. But right-leaning ballot measures in blue trifecta states were comparatively rare, Schroeder found, numbering less than one-third the number of left-leaning ballot measures, and they usually failed. Right-leaning ballot measures in red trifecta states were similarly rare, numbering about half the number of left-leaning ballot measures, and their failure rate (57 percent) was almost as high as in blue trifecta states (60 percent).

Just about all of what Klas and Silverman report about state politics applies to national politics too. The same Republican trifecta states that gerrymandered state districts after 2010 gerrymandered congressional districts too, and they did it again in 2020. Had an anti-gerrymandering bill that cleared the House in 2022 not been blocked by a Senate filibuster, according to the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, 11 Republican-controlled states would have been required by law to redraw their congressional districts, against four Democratic-controlled states. The Brennan Center further reports that just about every red state has passed restrictive voting laws since 2021 (along with the blue states of New York, New Jersey, and Georgia). The same ballot you fill out (or can’t fill out) for state legislators also includes candidates for national office.

Red-staters almost certainly know more about the people running for Congress and for president than they do about the people running for state office. But a news desert is a news desert. As I observed last spring, Democrats’ primary obstacle to reaching voters isn’t Fox News, which reaches only 12 percent of the population in any given month. Democrats’ primary obstacle is that 80 to 85 percent of Americans pay little attention to any news source, readily available or not, according to the political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan, both of the University of Michigan. For Democrats, the good news is that these Americans aren’t especially partisan; partisanship requires paying some attention, however warped, to current events. Let’s hope Kamala Harris will reach this tuned-out majority. Even if she doesn’t, Klas and Silverman’s study suggests to me that a Democratic realignment is overdue. The GOP can’t keep our politics rigged forever.