The most important job ahead for Democrats

(If you don’t want to read the post, click play above and I’ll read it to you.)

Hello, beloved readers and listeners! Today I’m going to make an argument that is very important to me: Democrats must pass substantial democracy reform before the 2022 elections. If Dems don’t get this done, the US is in for a long period of political darkness. Democracy in America could very well perish. Climate change will become unsolvable. Every goal progressives seek — taxing the rich, funding infrastructure, fixing immigration, boosting unions, you name it — will move out of reach. It is, I say with some risk of understatement, the most important thing in the world.

Let me try to explain why.

Biden’s 2020 victory temporarily arrested, but did not stop, the US slide toward minority rule

When Biden was elected in November, I felt a conflicting mass of emotions. Most of all, of course, was relief. It is no exaggeration to say that a second Trump term would have meant the end of the American experiment with democracy.

But alongside that relief was a persistent sense of dread. The larger context of the 2020 election is an ongoing process whereby America’s mostly white, rural, and suburban conservative minority — which hasn’t won the popular vote in a presidential election since 2004 — is gaining greater and greater structural political advantages each passing year. Republicans are overrepresented in the Senate, overrepresented by the Electoral College, gerrymandered into safe House seats, and busy passing voter suppression bills at the state level.

What Dems needed in 2020 was commanding majorities in both houses and a few key state legislatures, enough to stop the next round of GOP gerrymandering and pass substantial democracy reform through Congress.

They got majorities, but, far from commanding, they are whisker thin, smaller in the House than in 2018. And Republicans maintained control of all the state governments key to redistricting. That makes Democrats’ job much, much more difficult.

Nonetheless, it remains the job. Getting Trump out of office was the first step, but it won’t mean anything in the mid- to long-term if Dems don’t repair democracy. Absent substantial structural reform, the most likely outcome remains the one that Matt Yglesias predicted in 2015: “America’s constitutional democracy is going to collapse.”

I would put it this way: Democrats either pass substantial democracy reform (including statehood for DC) through Congress in the next 18 months or they will lose one or both houses in 2022 and remain locked out of congressional majorities for a decade if not longer.

Without voting system reform, Dems are screwed in 2022

The most likely outcome of the 2022 elections is that Democrats lose their House majority. To keep it, they would have to defy both history and Republican gerrymandering.

Historically, midterm elections are a “shellacking” for the president’s party, as Obama (whose party lost 63 House seats in 2010) put it. With only two exceptions — Clinton Democrats in 1998 and Bush Republicans in 2002 — this has held true all the way back to 1934.

Even if they defy that historical trend, Democrats won’t be fighting on a level playing field. Because they retained control of the key state legislatures involved in redistricting, Republicans could win a House majority in 2022 purely with new seats created by redistricting, even if they don’t flip a single blue seat red.

To buck these trends and keep the House in 2022, Democrats will need not just the historic turnout that elected Biden, but more. It would take something of a miracle.

“If we replicate the GOP’s post-9/11, 2002 midterm performance, we have a chance,” political analyst David Shor told New York magazine’s Eric Levitz. “If we replicate the second-best presidential-party midterm from the past 40 years, we lose.”

The Senate will be more competitive in 2022: out of 34 races, Republicans are defending 20 seats and Democrats 14. Nine of those races are considered competitive, roughly evenly divided between parties.

But it almost doesn’t matter: if Democrats lose the House, legislation of any substance will become impossible. And odds are getting increasingly stacked against Democrats in both houses, so it could be a long-ass time before they have Congress again.

Perhaps there’s some path to bipartisan democracy reform? Ha ha, no.

Republicans will fight democracy reform to the death

If either house of Congress goes to Republicans, any kind of positive voting reform becomes impossible. If they get unified control again, they are much more likely to pass national versions of the kind of targeted voter restrictions they are passing at the state level.

Democrats will never get a scrap of help from Republicans on democracy reform, only implacable, relentless opposition. Conservatives will fight it with everything they’ve got, for the same reason they fought it during Reconstruction or the Civil Rights era: to the extent voting in the US becomes easier, fairer, and more representative, they lose power.

The right has a congenial and enduring Supreme Court majority and a growing network of militias willing to use intimidation and the threat of violence against legislative activity they dislike, as they have in Oregon and Michigan (oh, and the US Capitol). They have shown no hesitation in using either.

Dems need to understand that Republicans will escalate the war over voting reform as far as they are able, full stop. It’s existential for them.

Passing democracy reform means doing the Manchin dance

With the current dysfunctional and distorted electoral system in place, this could be the last time Democrats hold the presidency and both houses of Congress for a decade or longer. That’s why it’s now or never on democracy reform.

Getting there will require a delicate dance. A lot of things have to line up.

My hopes for Democrats were dim going into 2021, but thus far Biden has been astonishingly effective. He led with a