Off-year Voters Deliver Victory for Democracy and A Drubbing to
Trump
Democracy in America is under attack. Unlike the normal
disputes over economic, social and foreign policy; this year the integrity of the
system itself is under attack. Donald Trump claims that Hillary Clinton received millions of votes from illegal voters
in the 2016 presidential race.
Partisans of Bernie Sanders, aided by the new book by Donna
Brazile, the chairperson of the Democratic National Committee and the campaign
manager who couldn't figure out how to turn Al Gore's 538,000 vote margin into
a victory in 2000, claim that the Democratic
nomination was stolen by bias in the DNC. Hillary's 4 million vote
margin in the primaries doesn't count.
And Hillary herself is claiming
that Russian interference cost her the election. None of these claims are true,
so what's going on? As both the
Republicans and Democrats lose popularity with the voters, undermining confidence
in the electoral system is the only way these two minorities can retain
monopoly control of the political process.
It is a massive, bi-partisan effort to make the independents so
disgusted that they voluntarily stop voting.
With confidence in elections undermined, including
casting aspersions on the integrity of the vote
count and the accuracy of the voting technology, they hope voters will
accept as legitimate the officials chosen by the security services (FBI or
military), or the judges and prosecutors, anyone but the voters themselves.
However, on November 7th, the
voters struck back with a vengeance. In New Jersey, Phil Murphy was elected governor bringing an ignominious
end to the Christie disaster.
Low turnout
Phil Murphy won with the lowest percentage of the electorate
in the history of New Jersey, a hair over 20%.
The turnout was a historic low of
36%. In absolute votes, Murphy's win with 1,154,978 was the lowest in twenty
years, since Christie Whitman narrowly won re-election with 1,133,394. The difference is that there were more than 1.32
million more registered voters in 2017 than there were 20 years before. Even
worse, the winning candidate for governor in 1957, the year Phil Murphy was
born, received 1,106,130 votes, just
48,848 less than Murphy's total even though the electorate was less than half
the size it is today.
A look at the historical record
demonstrates the weakness of Murphy's victory.The highest vote total of any
governor candidate in New Jersey, 1,414,613 was received by Brendan Byrne in
1973, the first year that 18 year-olds had the right to vote. But the candidate
who received the highest percentage of the electorate, 43.5% was the 1,411,905
votes garnered by William Cahill in his landslide win over former Democratic
Governor Robert Meyner four years earlier when there were more than 2.5 million
fewer voters than now.
For
demographic and other technical reasons, it is reasonable that winning
candidates for governor would receive a smaller percentage of the registered
voters: young people vote in smaller numbers, and court decisions require
voters to remain on the rolls until two successive federal elections have
passed before their registrations can be removed. These technical factors
inflate the number of currently registered as opposed to those in the past, but
the magnitude of the decline as illustrated in absolute vote totals can not
mask the effective voter suppression that has been gathering steam in New
Jersey for the past fifty years.
But, by electing Democrat Murphy with an anemic turnout,
the voters put paid to Trump's absurd claim that Clinton's almost three million
vote margin came from fraudulent voters. See, a Democrat won in New Jersey with
almost one million fewer votes than Clinton received, but by almost the same
55%-41% margin. When almost two out of every three voters does not cast a
ballot, it is hard to believe that there are millions of ineligible people
clamoring to get into the voting booth. If the candidates do not excite the
eligible voters, what is the mechanism by which the illegal voters are
motivated?
Virginia and Gerrymandering
While
New Jersey was witnessing the lowest turnout ever and the lowest gubernatorial
vote percentages ever, Virginia, the only other state to hold an off-year
governor's race, saw the highest winning vote total in history
(1,408,832). As a percentage of the
registered voters, Democrat Ralph Northam's victory was the highest in twenty
years.
But the big news from Virginia is
that the gerrymandered House of Delegates where Republicans held a 66 to 34
margin before the election, was 51 to 49 after the election, in spite of the
fact that the Republicans had drawn gerrymandered district lines that were
considered impregnable.
The real message from Virginia is
that both parties should contest all races. In 2015, 71% of the Virginia House
of Delegates ran without major party opposition. The two parties colluded to
cut up the map. Some 44 Republicans ran without Democratic opponents, and 27
Democrats ran without Republican opponents.
In 2017,
while the Republicans passed on one more race, meaning that 28 Democrats ran
unopposed, the Democrats ran 36 more candidates in Republican-held districts.
The Democrats won 15, giving them 49 of the 100 seats, and came tantalizingly
close enough in three more to have almost taken control. It is significant that
Democrats were winning in both high turnout and low turnout elections in 2017,
a clear warning for the Republicans next year.
And no one should be surprised if
the Democrats take the House of Representatives next year because the last
three presidents: Clinton, Bush II, and Obama all lost their party's control of
the House in the second year of their presidencies: 1994, 2002 and 2010.
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