Have Republicans Passed a “Tipping Point”?

In his most recent New York Times column Thomas Edsall expresses his worries for the state of American democracy:

Democracy — meaning equal representation of all citizens and, crucially, majority rule — has, in fact, become the enemy of the contemporary Republican Party. As The Washington Post noted on Jan. 24, “The last two Republicans to win a majority of the popular vote in a presidential contest were father and son: George H.W. Bush in 1988 and George W. Bush in 2004.” In the four elections since 2004, the Republican nominee has consistently lost the popular vote to the Democratic candidate, including Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.

The widely publicized efforts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to politicize election administration and to disenfranchise Democrats through gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws testify to the determination of Republicans — especially the 66 percent who say they believe that the 2020 election was stolen — to wrest control of election machinery. On Sept. 2, ProPublica documented a national movement to take over the Republican Party at the grass roots level in “Election Deniers Organize to Seize Control of the G.O.P. — and Reshape America’s Elections.”

These developments, taken together, are amplifying alarms about the viability of contemporary democracy in America.

“The nonlinear feedback dynamics of asymmetric political polarization,” a Dec. 14 paper by Naomi Ehrich Leonard and Anastasia Bizyaeva, both at Princeton, Keena Lipsitz at Queens College, Alessio Franci at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Yphtach Lelkes at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that in the case of polarization, there are:

critical thresholds or moments when processes become difficult if not impossible to reverse. Our model suggests that this threshold has been crossed by Republicans in Congress and may very soon be breached by Democrats.

I sent the five authors a series of questions asking them to elaborate on a number of points, and they replied in a jointly written email. My first question was: “Could you explain in terms accessible to the layperson how ‘political processes reinforce themselves’ in ways that can push a political party past a ‘tipping point’ ”?

Their reply:

Political processes, like any other natural dynamical process, in nature, technology, or society, have the capacity to feed themselves and enter an unstable positive, or, self-reinforcing, feedback loop. A classic example is an explosion: when thermal energy is provided to burn a few molecules of a combustible substance, they in turn produce more energy, which burns more molecules, producing more energy in a never-ending loop, at least until combustibles are no longer available.

A similar process can take place in politics, they argue:

For example, elected officials can respond to the signals of extremist donors by becoming more extreme themselves. When these extremist representatives become party leaders, they are then in a position to punish moderates in their party by backing more extreme candidates in primaries. This in turn leads to the election of more extremist candidates and the cycle continues.

In theory, voters

are a potential check on this cascading extremism, but they must be willing to punish ideologically extreme legislators by voting them out of office. As voters have become more concerned about party labels than ideology, they have become less willing to do that, allowing cascading extremism to continue.

What about the Democratic Party, I asked?

The Democrats are indeed still below the tipping point; therefore, their polarization state is still evolving slowly, or, linearly. But looking at the current policy mood trend and projecting our model slightly into the future, the present large left shift in policy mood due to the Trump era could easily cause the Democrats to tune up their ideological self-reinforcing behavior and let them pass their polarizing tipping point.

I presume that the contrast the authors of the study draw between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in that last section will draw some angry retorts but I want to focus my attention on the opening passage quoted:

Democracy — meaning equal representation of all citizens and, crucially, majority rule…

Being a “ways and means”, empirically-oriented sort of guy I’m going to present a snapshot of the five largest state, containing among them 41% of the U. S. population:

State	Population	% Democratic	% Republican	% Other		Congressional delegation
California	39,538,223	45	24	31		42–11-0
Texas	29,145,505	39	42	19		13–23-0
Florida	21,538,187	37	35	28		10–16-1
New York	20,201,249	51	22	27		19–8-0
Pennsylvania	13,002,700	48	38	24		9–9-0
Illinois	12,812,508	50	34	16		13–5-0
Total	136,238,372

Of those Texas is a Red State, Pennsylvania and Florida Purple, and the others Blue States so I think that’s a pretty good sample. My population statistics come from the Census Bureau; my voter registration statistics from Gallup.

To my eye it looks as though Mr. Edsall has a bit of a point: the states with Democratic majorities in their state legislatures are more democratic (in the sense of the quoted passage) than those controlled by Republicans. On the other hand no state whether Red or Blue actually meets his definition for the simple reason that you would expect many more “Others” to be in the states’ Congressional delegations. Frankly, I despair of ever meeting that definition of democratic with “winner take all first past the post” elections.

Just for the record whether because of my Swiss heritage or I see the sense in William F. Buckley’s jibe about the Harvard University faculty, I would have fewer problems with direct democracy than I do with our present system which I think is horrifically unrepresentative if

1. There were a consensus about the preservation of individual rights and conforming to legal precedents and
2. There were a commitment to gradualism

but, since there is neither I’m concerned that meeting Mr. Edsall’s definition of democracy would result in the effective equivalent of two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for lunch.