The US elections ended a week ago, but the majority in the House of Representatives is still up in the air. The reason? The extreme slowness in the counting of the western states, with California in the lead, the great Democratic bastion. How has an institution that used to give overwhelming majorities to one party come to be dancing between one side or the other for a handful of votes?
Commenting on what happens in the US elections on the same night is always dangerous. Especially since California, a state almost as populous as all of Spain, counts votes with the speed of a sloth with a leg injury. The electoral ‘geeks’ calculate that, when the count is closed, Trump will have fallen below 50% of the votes nationally and he will have beaten Harris by less than one point, a more than enough margin but much narrower than it seemed at first.
But the most surprising thing is that, despite clearly falling to the presidency, Democrats have only lost the House of Representatives by a tiny margin. Everything indicates that the majority in the next Congress will be five seats for the Republicans… which will probably drop to three, if it is confirmed that two of them will leave their seats vacant to enter the Trump Government. Three votes out of a total of 435, a narrower margin than the 8 that the Republicans had until now or the 9 that the Democrats had between 2020 and 2022, which were already historically scarce numbers. It is the narrowest majority since 1931, when Democrats governed by just one seat.
To a time traveler coming from just 40 years ago, those figures would seem incredible. Between 1931 and 1994, the Democrats maintained what was known as the “permanent majority”: 30 elections won out of 32, 60 years of control of the Lower House, 40 of them consecutive, and usually by margins of between 60 and 150 deputies. How was it possible?
‘Deep South’ Voters
That a party controls the Congress of a country almost uninterruptedly for six decades may sound more like a dictatorship than a democracy. But the most surprising thing is that, meanwhile, the Senate and the presidency were constantly changing sides. In other words, it is not that Democrats dominated the country’s politics: they only dominated the House of Representatives.
The explanation has several protagonists. But the most important are the voters of what is known as the “Deep South” of the country: the states that joined the Confederate cause in the Civil War to maintain slavery. These states lost the war, but their citizens did not forget that it was the Republicans, led by Lincoln, who led the Unionists and banned slavery.
The result is that all the racist politicians who, since they had been prohibited from enslaving black people, wanted to implement a system of discrimination and apartheid permanently, they went over to the Democratic Party, which even during the war had not stopped winking at them. And all the white voters went behind: in the former slave states of the South, the Democrats took absolute and permanent control of all political power. And they established a script that racist South Africa ended up copying: ban blacks from voting, demote them to second or third class citizens, and encourage whites to continue voting for racist candidates to perpetuate their privileges.
The result is that the southern states spent decades and decades commanding a battalion made up exclusively of Democratic representatives (and senators). It was what was called the “solid south.” And it made it practically impossible for the Republicans to win: how were they going to do it, if the Democrats began each election with almost 100 representatives already on their marker before even getting off the bus?
Gerrymandering
Added to this is another trap, which parties have been using for decades and which continues to work today: the so-called ‘Gerrymandering’. This term describes a practice that is quite undemocratic but that both parties continue to use when they can: that politicians draw constituencies on purpose to win them. Come on, let it not be the citizens who elect the representatives, but let the politicians be the ones who elect the citizens who are going to vote for them.
As in the US, deputies are elected in constituencies with a single candidate, in which the one with the most votes wins and the rest get nothing, the trick is very simple: concentrate the voters of the opposite party in a single constituency, so that they win. with 99% of the votes, and distribute yours into six or seven where you win with 55%. No straight lines: circumscriptions with delirious shapes and lines more crooked than those drawn by someone on the verge of an alcohol coma. It divides cities, divides towns, even divides the streets in two, puts the residents of number 25 in constituency 1, which they vote Democratic, and leaves the Republicans of 27 in constituency 2.
Thus, practically all the votes of the party that handles the pencil get representation, and almost all of those of the rival go straight to the trash can. And in the middle of the 20th century, there were hardly any protest campaigns against these traps, which left the hands free to those southern Democratic deputies to draw their electoral maps as they likedand ensure that the few Republican voters in the south took between zero and 1 representative of the hundred that were elected in those states.
When Schwarzenegger was ‘Governor’
Here we have to return for a moment to California to highlight ‘Governor’, none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, who forever changed the system for drawing constituencies in his state and opened the door to reforms in the rest of the country. The actor presented himself as a ‘loose verse’ within the Republican Party, and conquered a traditionally Democratic state like California. And one of his priorities was to change the system with which constituencies are created: instead of the deputies themselves drawing them to their liking, it would be a panel of experts that would ensure that the playing field is fair. : that the neighborhoods vote together, that the towns vote for a common representative instead of each block being in a different constituency, and that both parties have real options to compete in all possible constituencies.
Schwarzenegger’s success has caused many other states to follow the same path: in the last decade, states such as Iowa, Missouri, Virginia, Wisconsin and New York have approved commissions, laws or constitutional reforms to prohibit cheating maps that give him the majority. automatically absolute one party and make it impossible for the other to even compete. There is still a long way to go, but it had to be an Austrian actor who laid the first stone.
If the Democrats so clearly controlled Congress, how did they not take advantage of that power to approve their entire electoral program throughout those 60 years?
The reality is that, even if the Democrats were in control, those majorities were more fragile than they seemed. On the one hand, because the Democratic Party was a tense coalition between racist and more conservative deputies from the south, and more liberal deputies from the north and west, the areas that were against slavery and where southern apartheid did not attract votes. .
In practice, the hundred southern Democratic deputies had no problem supporting Republican proposals with a more conservative tone. Added to that was that Congress is only one of the three legs of the American system: without the Senate and the president nothing could be approved. So when the Republicans controlled one of the other two legs, they had to sit down and negotiate agreements that satisfied everyone. And when the Democrats controlled all the resources, they had to negotiate among themselves: Jimmy Carter stopped the idea of a public job guarantee for all AmericansFor example.
Newt and the Comeback
Most extraordinary, this permanent control withstood the biggest twist in the modern history of American politics: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Democrats, under the presidency of none other than a Texan, Lyndon Johnson, passed this law that prohibited ‘apartheid’ and guaranteed equal rights for blacks. Soon, white citizens who previously voted Democratic as if by reflex switched en masse to the Republicans, who began to wink at racism with Richard Nixon’s so-called “southern strategy”, to snatch that bloc from the Democrats.
Within a decade, Republicans had begun to win elections in those states where they were banned until 1964, often running candidates who had been Democrats until recently. But one level resisted them: Congress. Those states continued to vote for Democratic representatives en bloc. And the Republicans didn’t know what to do.
Or they didn’t know until 1992, when Newt Gingrich took control of the demoralized Republican minority. And he came with a plan to achieve the impossible and win the elections: polarize and demonstrate a real difference with the Democrats. First, he fired the party’s historical leaders, who had accepted their role as secondaries and mere negotiators with no power other than to influence the Democratic majority. And then he took advantage of the strength of the news television networks that had just appeared, with an incipient Fox News as their banner, to show that they were different, that there was an alternative to voting as usual. Added to this was an aggressive and polarizing tone to encourage his own ‘troops’.
And a tax increase approved by Bill Clinton was the perfect excuse to unleash a historic comeback: the Republicans entered the 1994 elections with the so-called “contract with America”, a list of measures that they would demand from Clinton if they won. And they won, for the first time in two generations. And American politics was never the same.
The infinite tie
After that comeback, the Republicans seemed to have turned the tables: They held power from 1995 to 200712 years that seemed endless for Democrats who had never seen themselves in opposition for so long. The final collapse of George Bush Jr.’s government restored their majority, but it only lasted 4 years. The Republicans recovered it for 8 years and lost it again with Trump.
And, at that moment, something happened that seemed impossible until then: the majorities went from being very wide to impregnable to being tiny and volatile. Until 2020, political turns were abrupt, with dozens of seats changing hands. A huge majority of one became a huge majority of the others.
But the polarization that Gingrich unleashed, the ‘gerrymandering’ that has become increasingly extreme in the states that maintain it, the concentration of supporters of one party or another by geographic areas (Democrats in the cities, Republicans in the field) and the fact that almost all voters support the same party for all possible positions, have achieved that 90% of the seats are already decided before even going to the elections. Like that ‘solid south’, but all over the country. Now only about twenty seats are actually up for grabs in each election. And so there is no one who gets overwhelming majorities anymore. If anything, three seats to spare and thanks.
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