By all rights, Donald Trump should have his power clipped after this autumn’s midterms. Fully 53% of Americans disapprove of his performance so far, and his Republican Party trails the Democrats by over 8% in the polls.
Nonetheless, the Republicans are expected to retain control of the Senate, perhaps even gaining some seats; analysts also reckon the party is in with a fighting chance of hanging on to a slim majority in the House.
How is this possible? In most countries with only two major parties, an eight-point lead would guarantee a strong Democratic majority whether a country used a proportional representation system or an American-style first-past-the-post(FPTP) approach. In both Jamaica’s 2011 elections and the Bahamian 2012 elections, for example, victorious margins of nearly 7% gave the winning parties huge supermajorities of legislative seats.
But America’s unique electoral laws and political geography currently mitigate against the Democrats. The party’s strength is not evenly spread throughout the country. Instead, it is highly concentrated in urban areas, especially in those dominated by ethnic majorities. Democrats will win these seats with extreme margins of up to 90% more than their Republican challengers, but those surplus votes are useless, since they only count within the seats where they are cast.
Republican strength, however, is more evenly spread throughout the country, allowing them to win more seats with fewer votes. We know all this from the 2016 election results. The Demographic disadvantage is easily seen on a map of the election returns.
Source: Metrocosm
Note how little of the country Clinton won (the blue areas). While it’s true that the blue areas are much more densely populated, the truth is that she won three million votes more than Trump by running up her margins in areas where the Democrats already did well. Trump exploited that geographic shortcoming to win the Electoral College despite his massive vote deficit.
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