November 21, 2016

The Trump Divide – 2

From the Upshot in the New York Times:

As American as Apple Pie? The Rural Vote’s Disproportionate Slice of Power

Rural America, even as it laments its economic weakness, retains vastly disproportionate electoral strength. Rural voters were able to nudge Donald J. Trump to power despite Hillary Clinton’s large margins in cities like New York.
In a House of Representatives that structurally disadvantages Democrats because of their tight urban clustering, rural voters helped Republicans hold their cushion. In the Senate, the least populous states are now more overrepresented than ever before. And the growing unity of rural Americans as a voting bloc has converted the rural bias in national politics into a potent Republican advantage. …
The Electoral College is just one example of how an increasingly urban country has inherited the political structures of a rural past. Today, states containing just 17 percent of the American population, a historic low, can theoretically elect a Senate majority … The bias also shapes the House of Representatives.
Today, the influence of rural voters also evokes deeply rooted ideals about who should have power in America. Jefferson and James Madison argued that the strength of the nation would always derive from its agrarian soil. …
Today, equal state representation in the Senate is the only provision in the Constitution that cannot be amended. But even as a deliberately undemocratic body, the Senate has slipped further out of alignment with the American population over time.  The Senate hasn’t simply favored sparsely populated states; politicians in Washington created sparsely populated states to leverage the Senate’s skewed power. …
“They justified it because that was a cultural norm; it was just the way things were,” said Stephen Ansolabehere, a Harvard professor of government. Rural legislators had no incentive to change a system that favored them. “They just let it keep getting worse. You’re in power. Why change?” …

These calculations also mean that populous states subsidize less populous ones, which receive more resources than the tax dollars they send to Washington.

The challenge for rural voters now is that their electoral strength, and even these funding formulas, have not translated into policies that have fixed the deep economic problems they face, from high unemployment to declining wages. And it’s unclear how Mr. Trump will do that for them, either — even if his major infrastructure proposal comes to pass and helps rebuild their roads.

Also this:

The Election Highlighted a Growing Rural-Urban Split

… the widening political divergence between cities and small-town America also reflects a growing alienation between the two groups, and a sense — perhaps accurate — that their fates are not connected. …
As the relationship between density and partisanship has grown stronger over the last half-century, the structure of the economy has also changed in ways that reinforce the divide.

“In a sense, the high-end economy in these urban areas is disconnected from the success from the rest of the country,” Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said. And the very things that drive success in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, or New York City’s financial sector, are what worries rural America: globalization, foreign trade, immigration. “Goldman Sachs and Google do not really need America to be a broad-based middle-class success in order for them to be personally successful.”

Those economic forces will probably grow only stronger, even as the effects of an election that pushed urban and rural America further apart recede.

Full article here.

 

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  1. The US electoral system used to elect its president seems indeed a bit outdated as it was invented with the horse being the only transportation option besides walking. Today, with railways, cars, planes, radio, TV and internet one has to wonder indeed if this is still appropriate. In addition, all votes of one state go to one candidate only. Why is that ? That means that no one ever campaigns in WA, OR, NY or CA as they always vote left, and no one in TX as they always vote right. Perhaps that needs some rebalancing.
    As a consideration though, one needs to give some value to “land” or “land mass” as we need agricultural land to feed people but in a more and more mechanized agricultural world one needs less people to farm an acre. How relevant is land mass in a democratic context ?
    Each US state has 2 senators. That could be rebalanced, like in Canada which has a more population based senate (albeit with far less power). But the idea of balance of wer was always meant to take into account the relevance of states vs cities. We can and should debate that, of course, as states (or provinces in Canada) matter less and less as cities have more and more people and that is where the power should rest. But as we see in Canada, cities get no share of income taxes, corporate taxes, GST or PST, but perhaps they should. In many European nations the city where the employer is situated is where the employee taxes get allocated, giving a strong incentive to create jobs (and not just housing, like in Vancouver).
    Keep in mind also that only about 52% of the adult population voted. So what do the 48% vote for ? left ? right ? don’t care ? Central ?
    The two party system is also somewhat unusual as many nations have more than two parties. Not every topic is easily dividable into pro-Trump or pro-Clinton or left / right. Many topics are far more nuanced.

  2. Yesterday, CBC ran a profile of BC’s Nechako Lakes electoral district. In the last provincial election, Nechako Lakes elected an MP to represent 17,000 registered voters. In contrast, my riding of Burnaby North has one MP for 41,000 registered voters. A vote is Nechako Lakes is worth 2.4 times a vote in Burnaby North. It seems that land is worth more (at least 140% more) than people.
    This is no accident. Nechako Lakes is a relatively new riding, created in 2008. Of course the CBC story mentioned none of this. The only reason I found out was that their map was so blurry I looked it up.
    Our democratic institutions are rapidly losing legitimacy. The phenomenon is clearly nonlinear. Trump is a tragic (in both senses of the word) expression of that failure.

  3. In the US system, the individual states control the electoral process in federal elections, thus you have a plethora of voting methods, from hanging chads to one-arm bandit electronic ballot machines. Part of state control that includes the highly outdated Electoral College.
    In Canada we have the feds alone controlling federal elections featuring the tried and true paper and pencil method. We complain much about the winner-takes-all system we have now, and rightfully so, but the US vastly complicates it with state control.
    The choices we have here are to get ourselves into a royal snit about Trump, or to carry on trying to make our lives better. I say keep calm and carry on, and reflect on how we can make our own lot better. One goal would be to establish proportionality in our electoral system, then even out the urban / rural divide with fewer rural and more urban ridings.

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