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But it is another thing for a partisan minority to consistently defeat or impose policies on larger majorities and, worse still, use the system to entrench its advantages. When this happens, you have minority rule, not democracy.
But two things changed over time. First, as the country expanded and America’s population grew, the asymmetry between low- and high-population states increased dramatically.
But there was another change: America urbanized. At the time of the founding, the United States was overwhelmingly a country of small towns and vast expanses of sparsely populated farmlands and forests. All states—large and small—were rural.
The rise of cities fundamentally altered politics.
This meant that rural jurisdictions were now overrepresented in three of America’s most important national political institutions: the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College, and—because presidents nominate Supreme Court justices and the Senate confirms them—the Supreme Court.
This is because for most of the twentieth century both parties had urban and rural bases.
Since both parties had urban and rural wings, rural overrepresentation did not consistently favor either side. This has changed in the twenty-first century. With the rise of the postindustrial knowledge economy, urban centers have become engines of economic dynamism and good jobs, while rural areas and older manufacturing centers have stagnated.
In the United States, this shift was exacerbated by the race-driven transformation of the party system.
Today, then, Republicans are predominantly the party of sparsely populated regions, while Democrats are the party of the cities. As a result, the Constitution’s small-state bias, which became a rural bias in the twentieth century, has become a partisan bias in the twenty-first century. We are experiencing our own form of “creeping counter-majoritarianism.”
The mapping of the partisan divide onto the urban-rural divide risks converting some of our most important institutions into pillars of minority rule.
One pillar is the Electoral College, which distorts the popular vote in two ways. First, nearly all states (with the exception of Maine and Nebraska) allocate Electoral College votes in a winner-take-all manner.
The Electoral College’s winner-take-all system may benefit losing candidates of either party. Indeed, in the 1960s, it was conservative Republicans who thought it was unfair.
However, a second distortion in the Electoral College, the small-state bias, clearly favors the Republicans.
Because the U.S. Senate heavily overrepresents sparsely populated states, the Electoral College has a modest rural bias of about twenty votes in the 538-seat college, which gives the Republicans a small but potentially decisive advantage.
If we rank states from the largest pro-Democratic margin (Vermont) to the largest pro-Republican margin (Wyoming) in the 2020 presidential election, Wisconsin was the tipping point state.
This is the Electoral College bias: Biden needed to win the popular vote by around 4 points to be elected president. Like in the basketball game described above, a 3-point Biden advantage would have led to a Trump victory.
A second pillar of minority rule—one with an even more marked partisan bias—is the U.S. Senate. Sparsely populated states representing less than 20 percent of the U.S. population can produce a Senate majority. And states representing 11 percent of the population can produce enough votes to block legislation via a filibuster.
That means it takes three elections over a six-year cycle to fully renovate the Senate. Although the Republicans have won the national popular vote for the Senate in a few individual elections (for example, in 2002, 2010, and 2014), the Democrats have won an overall popular majority for the Senate in every six-year cycle since 1996–2002. And yet the Republicans controlled the Senate for most of this period.
This means that the Senate’s partisan bias was such that Democrats had to win the nationwide popular vote for Senate by about five points to gain control of the Senate.
Or look at it another way: At no time during the twenty-first century have Senate Republicans represented a majority of the U.S. population. Based on states’ populations, Senate Democrats have continuously represented more Americans since 1999.
“The makeup of the Republican coalition these days is so ideally suited to winning elections in sparsely populated states that it takes political malpractice and misfortune on an almost comical scale for the conservative party not to win control.”
The Supreme Court constitutes a third pillar of minority rule. The court’s partisan bias is indirect but nevertheless is consequential.
Given the nature of the Electoral College and the Senate, Supreme Court justices may be nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote and confirmed by Senate majoriti...
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Recent research has found a growing gap between Supreme Court rulings and majority public opinion in the United States.
A fourth pillar of minority rule, which is not anchored in the Constitution, is an electoral system that manufactures artificial majorities and sometimes allows parties that win fewer votes to control legislatures. Nearly all U.S. congressional and state legislative elections employ a first-past-the-post (or winner-take-all) system.
The problem is most visible in state legislatures. Often viewed as the heart of our democracy, state legislatures are sometimes described as the bodies that are “closest to the people” and thus most representative of the popular will.
But in reality, America’s state legislatures are prone to minority rule.
Today, America is engaged in another—equally ambitious—experiment: the construction of a vast multiracial democracy.
But this majority alone isn’t enough to save our democracy, because in America majorities do not really rule.
There are paths forward. Other countries’ experiences, as well as our own history, offer some guidance.
One strategy, born in the darkest days of 1930s Europe, is to corral all democratic-minded forces into a broad coalition to isolate and defeat antidemocratic extremists.
In some countries, mainstream politicians responded by setting aside their intense ideological differences and forging broad left-right coalitions to defend democracy.
In Finland in the early 1930s, the leftist Social Democrats joined center and center-right parties in a broad-based Legality Front to face down the fascist Lapua Movement.
Some American politicians used this containment strategy during the Trump presidency.
Containment strategies were also employed in America’s state legislatures. In Ohio and Pennsylvania after the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats aligned with more moderate Republicans to defeat extremist Republicans for the statehouse speakership.
Containment is only a short-term strategy, however. Democracy at its heart is about competition, so short-circuiting it for too long can be self-defeating.
Indeed, evidence from Europe suggests that when “grand coalitions” remain in place for long periods of time, voters come to regard them as collusive, exclusionary, and illegitimate.
A second strategy for confronting authoritarians—known as militant or defensive democracy—also emerged out of the trauma of 1930s Europe. The idea is that government authority and the law can be used to exclude and aggressively prosecute antidemocratic forces. The strategy was first implemented in post–World War II West Germany.
So they wrote a constitution that allowed for the banning and restricting of insurrectionist or “anti-constitutional” speech, groups, and parties. Used on rare occasions to investigate extremist left- and right-wing parties (most recently in 2021), the mere existence of this authority to investigate groups that assault the “democratic order” arguably has a deterrent effect on extremist forces.
Militant democracy may at first glance seem at odds with America’s libertarian tradition, but the U.S. Constitution also possesses tools for combating antidemocratic extremism. As constitutional scholars remind us, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted to explicitly prohibit “insurrectionists” from holding public office in the aftermath of the Civil War.
America had never prosecuted a former president before 2023, but numerous other established democracies—from Japan and South Korea to France, Israel, and Italy—have done so, and their political systems were no worse off for it.
Like containment, however, the exclusion strategy has pitfalls. Most important, it is a tool that is easily abused. American history is replete with instances of such abuse: the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts; the imprisonment of the socialist leader Eugene Debs; the 1919–20 Palmer Raids; the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s political witch hunts; and the surveillance, prosecution, and even killing of African American leaders and activists.
Forging broad coalitions to defend democracy and rigorously enforcing the law against antidemocratic extremists can be indispensable strategies in the face of imminent authoritarian threats. But they are short-term strategies—imperfect tools to fight dangerous fires.
Madison believed that the need to win popular majorities would likely tame the most “sinister” political tendencies. But his formula requires that popular majorities actually prevail in elections. For that to happen, America must reform its institutions.
To overcome these problems, we must double down on democracy. This means dismantling spheres of undue minority protection and empowering majorities at all levels of government; it means ending constitutional protectionism and unleashing real political competition; it means bringing the balance of political power more closely in line with the balance of voter preferences; and it means forcing our politicians to be more responsive and accountable to majorities of Americans.
But reform never happens when it is never considered, so we ask readers to momentarily set aside concerns about how to bring about change—we’ll get to that—and consider three broad areas of reform.
UPHOLD THE RIGHT TO VOTE. The right to vote is a core element of any modern definition of democracy.
In nearly all democracies, voter registration is automatic. Once citizens turn eighteen, their names are added to the rolls. And voting is made simple. Nearly all democracies in Europe and Latin America hold elections on the weekend, usually on a Sunday, so that work does not discourage or prevent people from voting. In most established democracies, voter turnout can reach as high as 80
In the United States, to the surprise of many, there is no constitutional or even statutory “right to vote.”
Later amendments specified that suffrage may not be denied on the basis of race (Fifteenth Amendment) or sex (Nineteenth Amendment), but never has the Constitution positively affirmed Americans’ right to vote. Likewise, although there are many federal laws protecting voting, no single federal statute grants all adult citizens the right to cast a ballot.
