Many Americans are convinced that their country is the world’s oldest and purest democracy. But many others agree with president-elect Donald Trump’s claim – when he thought he was about to lose – that the process is “rigged”.
The American political system was carefully constructed to balance majority rule with other political values, such as individual and minority rights, especially for the wealthy.
The United States was never conceptualised or constructed as a democracy. Instead, it’s a constitutional republic in which majority rule is filtered through a variety of decidedly undemocratic structures and processes designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority.
By global and historical standards, the US constitutional order has demonstrated a remarkable ability to evolve and adapt, keeping pace with social and economic changes.
The Civil War of 1861-1865, and the radical overhaul and arguably reinvention of the political system that followed, was the anomaly that proves the rule. But even then, those aspects of the antebellum constitutional order in question – including provisions regarding slavery – were re-conceptualised, reinterpreted or clarified rather than scrapped.
On January 20, Donald Trump will become the 45th president. Yet his opponent, Hillary Clinton, received at least 2 million more votes. The potential for such an outcome is built into the federal and largely winner-take-all American political system. On its own, this result is not shocking.
But a deeper and more problematic anachronism is at work. The American system was developed by and for a society that was more than 90 per cent rural and agrarian. Now, however, the United States is majority non-rural, by over 80 per cent.
Of all of the profound social and economic divisions that characterised this year’s election, including race, class and education, the yawning gap between urban and non-urban America was most dramatic. Mrs Clinton prevailed in 31 of the 35 major urban areas, and Mr Trump owed his victory almost entirely to non-urban voters.
The disproportionate power of rural voters is only growing and that is starting to produce significant distortions for securing the consent of the governed, because the Democratic Party’s strength tends to cluster in urban areas and the Republican Party’s in rural ones.
The occasional instance in which the winner of the Electoral College – and therefore the president-elect – is the loser of the popular vote has been understood as an unavoidable pitfall of the federal system. But that scenario is becoming increasingly less unusual.
Democrats won the popular vote in six of the past seven elections, but twice lost anyway. Only three times in the rest of US history has the “loser” won.
But given the disconnect between an electoral system developed for a rural society and our contemporary urban social realities, this contradiction seems poised to become a frequent rather than rare occurrence.
Added to this is the structural bias towards the rural in the Senate. All states, no matter how sparsely populated, get two senators each. At least in theory, as things stand, states with a combined total of just 17 per cent of the national population could elect a Senate majority.
This “unintentional gerrymandering” between “efficiently” dispersed rural Republican voters and “inefficiently” clustered Democratic ones virtually ensures Democrats will get less representation in the House of Representatives than their share of votes indicates.
The way Electoral College representation is calculated further intensifies of the power of rural voters: it combines the number of House of Representatives members allotted to a given state based on population, plus their two senators. Therefore, a state with just one or two House members based on population still gets three or four Electoral College votes, respectively.
Moreover, House representation is based on the number of residents in a given state, not the eligible voters. This further empowers voters in rural and sparsely populated areas where there are fewer children, non-citizens or other residents not entitled to vote.
American votes are profoundly unequal in power, depending on where they are registered. Anyone in a heavily contested “swing state”, and especially in certain districts, has a vote with potentially enormous influence.
There is every reason to fear that popular-vote losers winning the presidency will become a regular feature of American elections.
Democrats have been notably subdued in their response to Mr Trump’s minority victory. Everyone knew the rules and the result was entirely legitimate.
Imagine Mr Trump’s reaction had he defeated Mrs Clinton by more than 2 million votes but lost anyway. Yet even an enraged response would probably only have undermined the legitimacy of the result in the minds of a vocal minority.
Still, the fact that the American system was designed for a rural society that no longer exists may increase the sense that it is no longer working as planned and that a kind of unintentional “rigging” is indeed taking place.
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington
On Twitter: @ibishblog
