The elections of 2016 and 2018 clearly indicate that U.S. voters lack Donald Trump’s obsessive craving for a wall.
In campaigning for the 2016 election, Trump promised voters Mexico would pay for the wall. Though it should be easy to sell a free project, Trump received almost 3 million fewer votes than the most investigated and vilified woman in human history. In fact, Trump received a smaller percent of the popular vote than Mitt Romney did when running against the likable and scandal-free President Barack Obama.
The election of 2018 was even a more clear rebuke to Trump by voters than 2016. Voter revulsion at Trump enabled Democrats to gain 40 seats in the House of Representatives, with 8 million more votes than Republicans.
The “fundamental maxim of republican government,” asserts Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper #22, “requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.”
If our national government functioned as a republican government, in the Hamiltonian sense, it would avoid shutdowns.
But it fails to function as a republican government because it is dominated by institutions — the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate — that poorly represent the majority of Americans. Both institutions coddle the dominant people of the sparsely populated states and thwart the will of the majority. Both institutions illustrate why Hamilton passionately opposed “the impropriety of an equal vote between States of the most unequal dimensions and populousness.”
Both are incompatible with, if not a grave affront to, our seminal document, the Declaration of Independence, which declares governments derive "their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed."
Both institutions minimize or negate the impact of minority voters, which are most heavily concentrated in urban centers. Rep. Jamin B. Raskin, D-Md., studied the election of 2000. He found that 58 percent of African-Americans lived in former slave states, where 100 percent of the electoral college votes went to Republican George W. Bush, even though 90 percent of their votes went for Democrat Al Gore. Thus, more than 20 million African-Americans in those states could not produce one elector for Gore, yet 148,000 mostly white voters in Wyoming gave Bush three electors. Not all presidential votes are created equal. Leading candidates will sometimes spend 75 percent of all of their money in half a dozen states.
The Senate is even worse than the Electoral College in underrepresenting the majority. Thomas Jefferson observed “the House of Representatives is mainly republican (representative); the Senate scarcely so at all.” Moreover, the Senate has become much less representative. At our nation’s inception, the population ratio between the largest state (Virginia) and the smallest state (Delaware) was 11-to-1. Today the two Wyoming senators can cancel the votes of the two California senators, even though California has more than 66 times the population of Wyoming and has one-third of all of the nation’s minorities — 15 million Latinos, 5 million Asians, etc.
Steven Hill has noted the “U.S. Senate was founded on quotas — specifically a representation quota, a subsidy, affirmative action, whatever you want to call it — for low-population states. And this subsidy, this affirmative action for low-population states, has disproportionately favored conservative and white-dominated states.”
Voter equality would advance racial equality. There would be no Trump administration if we had voter equality (i.e., if all votes counted equally). The media have generally supported racial and gender equality. Why can’t they support voter equality? As the consequences of voter inequality are enormous and immeasurable, it deserves more attention than the personalities seeking the presidency.
The root cause of the shutdown is the preferential treatment, the affirmative action, that the sparsely populated states enjoy. The shutdown pitted an institution that reflects “the sense of the majority” (the House of Representatives) against two institutions (the Senate and the Electoral College-chosen administration) aiming to thwart the will of the majority. The two problematic institutions have such enormous power that they can make the desires of the majority of Americans utterly irrelevant to this nation’s future. Unless those unrepresentative institutions can quickly pretend to represent the American people and permanently reopen government by Feb. 15, as two-thirds of the country wants, their future might and should be in jeopardy.
Rick Edwin Jones
Rick Edwin Jones, West Haven, holds a master’s degree in political economy from the University of Utah and teaches economic history at Weber State University.