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The Myth of the Legitimate Republican Majority [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-05  

I am not a big fan of Michael Steele, but he's right more often than the typical conservative pundit broken clock, so I will listen without turning him off when he comes on one of the shows. In this appearance on Joy Reid, he blithely drops in one of my biggest pet-peeve political myths, and I just can't stand that Joy Reid let it go by without challenging it. But that's not unusual, because everyone does.

What I am also aware of is that the country voted for this. We can't... take that and set it aside. The country had a choice to hand this majority... knowing all of the crazy... that was fomenting inside of the party... They handed them the majority. [time code 17:45]

No, that's not true. A majority of the country did not vote for Republican control of the House. That majority victory is an illusion that was engineered with a lot of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and outright cheating. In the House, Republicans have five more members than Democrats, so if only three seats had been D instead of R in the last election, Democrats would be in the majority. And there were more than three seats that Rs won because courts let illegally gerrymandered maps stand for the 2022 election because it was "too close to the election" to change them, so they just gave those seats to Rs and manufactured a false majority. Then there's George Santos who lied his way to an undeserved victory, and independent spoiler candidates in Florida who helped steal seats from Democrats. It's easy to find enough seats that Rs won illegitimately that we can see their majority is illusory and doesn't indicate anything about national sentiment, and that’s not even counting the usual garden-variety gerrymandering.

I am picking on Steele here because he's just the guy who said it this week and there was a video clip for me to post, but I have heard this exact point for years, and it has never made sense to me. But it is always accepted without challenge that the faked-up majority means something real, when all it means is that Republicans are good at cheating. Even the guys on Pod Save America fall for the same trap, and I have heard Dan Pfeiffer say the same thing Michael Steele did, so it's not even a partisan attitude. Everyone did the same thing when Trump took office – they ignored how he only won by cheating and Russian interference, and accepted his illegitimately manufactured victory as representative of our national sentiment. Hell, after 2016 there was a whole genre of interviewing "Trump voters" in midwestern diners like they represented America's true feelings.

The Republican "party" majority is an illusion, and has been for decades. America is a minority rule country, at least when Republicans are in control. Gerrymandered maps, the Electoral College, the many small, red states with 2 Senators - all of those let Republicans hold power with a minority of votes. I am sick of how we accept that illusion as real and pretend that this manufactured fake majority means anything about what the true majority of Americans actually want.

How do we dispel this illusion that Republican victories mean they represent national sentiment, when they mostly mean that Republicans have rigged the system so they don't have to represent voters? Do we have any chance at all, when even Democratic partisans accept the Republican framing that their victories are real and meaningful? It feels like after Bush v. Gore, America just gave up on majority rule and decided to play along with the comfortable narrative that our democracy still works because it was too hard to fight it anymore.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/5/2197588/-The-Myth-of-the-Legitimate-Republican-Majority?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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