Can Democrats stop a return to nationalist white nativism?
Starbucks workers in Seattle in March 2022 (photo: Elliot Stoller (CC BY SA 2.0))
As the US approach the midterm elections, Paul Garver assesses the dangerous machinations of Trumpist Republicans
by Paul Garver
Since the turn of the century, the major political geography of the USA, the division into ‘red’ (Republican) and ‘blue’ (Democratic) states, has shifted only on the margins. National elections are normally decided by small voter shifts within a few ‘purple’ (battleground) states. The 2020 presidential election was decided by small shifts toward the Democrats in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona.
The hullabaloo around the failed January 2021 insurrection and the claims of election fraud from the dominant Trump wing of the Republican Party were based on a continuing feature of that political geography. Republicans have the support of over 60% of white voters nationwide, heavily concentrated in rural areas, small towns, and some suburban neighbourhoods. Democrats receive the votes of most African-Americans, Latino and Asian-American communities, as well as younger, more educated voters of all races in larger cities and university towns. However, in non-presidential election years, Republican voter turnout is higher than that of Democrats. As a result, Republicans now control 30 of the 50 state legislatures while winning a disproportionate share of mandates in the national House and Senate.
In most states, the legislatures decide how the national and state legislative districts are allocated. In some states, the Republican majority crams most voters of colour into a few districts, allowing Republicans to win more seats than their overall popular vote would indicate. The ultra-right majority on the current Supreme Court refuses to consider this as depriving anyone of their constitutional right to representation. The other built-in advantage for Republicans is that all 50 states, from the largest to the smallest, elect two US senators. The electoral vote allocated to each state also follows a formula that favours smaller, more rural states. Democrats often win the national popular vote by amassing millions of ‘wasted’ surplus votes in California, New York and Massachusetts, while losing the national election based on receiving fewer electoral votes elsewhere. What usually happens in presidential elections is that the early reported votes, based on rural areas and small towns, usually favour Republicans, while the votes from larger cities with a denser interracial electorate get counted more slowly and are registered later. Hence the outraged cries from conspiracy theorists that the big cities have stolen the election through fraud from decent white people by (over-)counting the votes of African-American and immigrant communities.
Republican strategists have laid the basis for minority white Republican control over the last two decades by focusing on state races, allowing them to control much of the overall electoral process. This was insufficient for Trump to hold on to the White House in 2020, since local non-partisan electoral officials remained uncorrupted, and even Republican secretaries of state defended the true voter outcomes in their states. Trump and his supporters are now using the Republican primary process to purge these honest officials and the handful of Republicans in Congress who refused to endorse the coup. As of now, about 50% of contested Republican primaries are being won by Trump-supported candidates promising to guarantee right-wing victories in 2022 and 2024 regardless of the actual count of votes.
This is an extremely dangerous time for American democracy. Trumpist strategists claim that state legislatures have the legal right to overturn the majority votes in their states and submit their own electors to the Electoral College. Trump supporters tried but failed to persuade Republican officials to do this in 2020-21. (He also criminally asked the top Republican election official in Georgia to find him the 11,000 votes he needed to win that state.) But with the ongoing purges of the few remaining genuine conservatives in the Republican Party, coupled with the willingness of the 6-3 right-wing majority on the Supreme Court to permit voter suppression and other anti-democratic measures, we have little confidence that the Republican Party will defend democratic institutions in the USA.
If the Trump-controlled Republican Party is working hard to install a racist, nativist white nationalist, even neo-fascist regime on the entire country, the Democratic Party has not decided how to counter that threat. One disturbing sign of confusion and hesitation is the little-publicised contributions that political action committees linked with the official party have been offering to the most right-wing challengers in Republican primaries, those endorsed by Trump. The rationale for this behaviour seems to be grounded, with little evidence, in the belief that far-right Republicans will be easier to defeat in the general elections in November 2022. This is playing with fire but is consistent with other political interventions from the official Democratic Party.
Several pro-Israel political action committees (the most prominent being the American-Israel political action committee, AIPAC) are combining with other major donors to both the Democratic and Republican parties to pour huge sums of money into Democratic primaries to defeat democratic socialist incumbents in Congress. DSA incumbent congresspersons Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush managed to overcome massively funded opponents in their Democratic primaries this past week. Some democratic socialist challengers did squeak through in open seats against heavily-funded corporate democrats, like Greg Cesar in Texas and Summer Lee in Pennsylvania. But in many cases, when Democratic Party leaders like Nancy Pelosi and other top Congressional Democrats joined them in the assault against progressive challengers to entrenched right-wing Democratic incumbents, this opportunistic alliance prevailed. Progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros lost by fewer than 300 votes to anti-abortion and anti-labour Democratic incumbent Henry Cuellar in Texas. Other incumbent Congressional progressives, like Marie Newman in Illinois, Andy Levin in Michigan and Donna Edwards in Maryland, lost their primaries to more corporate Democrats who were heavily funded by right-wing and Democratic donors and supported by the Democratic establishment.
If the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party is intent on purging genuine conservatives from the Republican Party, the centrist wing of the Democratic Party seems equally intent on blocking the ascent of a stronger democratic socialist/progressive wing within the Democratic Party. Many of us on the left want to forge a tactical alliance with Democratic centrists against the Trump-led Republicans. It is hard to build a principled united front against fascism when the centrist allies you need are out to destroy the progressive and democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party.