Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
48 μ£¥³¤ ¬μμ¬
Norquist explained the math to attend-
ees at the Conservative Political Action
Conference a few years back: “While
you don’t redistrict states, the nice
people who drew the map o the United
States districted in such a way that
we have all those lovely square states
out West with three people who live in
them—two are Republican senators,
and one’s a Republican congressman.”
The same problem aects the House
o Representatives, although in a less
obvious way. Democrats, whose support-
ers are clustered in cities, waste votes
by running up huge margins o victory in
urban districts, whereas Republicans,
whose supporters are spread more
eciently across districts, win a greater
number o seats by narrower margins.
Urban concentration hurts Democrats
at the state level, too, giving Republicans
an edge in state legislatures—an edge
they’ve then used to gerrymander both
state and federal districts to further
increase their advantage.
Thus, bias feeds on bias, allowing
the ³£¡ to Áout majority sentiment
while sustaining, or even expanding, its
political power. In recent House elec-
tions, Republicans’ share o congressio-
nal seats has exceeded their share o
the two-party vote by roughly Ãve per-
cent. In 2012, they even gained a House
majority with a popular-vote minority.
With much greater regularity, Republi-
cans have achieved Senate majorities
with a minority o national votes (calcu-
lated by adding up all the votes from
the three two-year election cycles that
elect the entire chamber).
Republicans have also lost the
popular vote in six o the past seven
presidential elections. Yet despite
all these losses, conservative justicesformidable right-wing media network.
Partisan media outlets aren’t unique
to the right, but the outrage machine is
much larger, more inÁuential, and less
tempered by countervailing voices on the
conservative side o the spectrum.
Indeed, the greatest victory o right-wing
outlets has been their ability to discredit
alternative sources o information.
The center-right media space has emptied,
and right-wing news and opinion have
cut themselves (and their audiences)
o from mainstream sources that try to
uphold the norms o accuracy and
nonpartisanship. The news consumption
o the most active elements o the
Republican base is increasingly limited
to a handful o ideologically convivial
outlets—especially Fox News, which is
now essentially a form oÊ Trump admin-
istration state ¢¦. This media isolation
both encourages and enables the con-
frontational, tribal politics o the ³£¡.
The Ãnal major contributor to the
³£¡’s radicalization has been electoral
geography. Over the last quarter century,
as prosperity has become concentrated
in urban and coastal areas, nonurban
areas have grown more Republican, and
urban areas, more Democratic. This
has not only hardened geographic
political divides. It has also given the
Republicans a signiÃcant electoral edge,
because the U.S. electoral system—its
severely malapportioned Senate; its
single-member, winner-take-all House
districts; and its Electoral College—
rewards parties whose supporters are
widely distributed across large swaths
o sparsely populated territory.
Nowhere is this rural advantage
clearer than in the Senate, with its huge
bonus for people living in low-population
states. The anti-tax activist Grover