As much as Democrats would like to argue that the fact that Donald Trump is taking office after having lost the vote means he has no mandate to pursue the hard-right agenda his Republican colleagues are so giddy about, it won’t matter in a practical sense. They’ll do what they want to do now that they have the chance, and there’s almost nothing Democrats can do to stop them. But the GOP’s status as a minority party wielding near-absolute power is one of the most important facts about today’s politics, a profound distortion that affects nearly everything that happens at the federal and state level.

Before we go further, I’ll note that since I’ve been talking about the electoral college and the popular vote in the past few days, my Twitter feed tells me exactly what conservatives will say in response to this issue being raised. In its more polite form, it sounds like, “Shut up and stop your whining, liberal. YOU LOST! HA HA HA!” But the point of this discussion isn’t to re-litigate the election, which is over. It’s to understand the country’s political landscape and assess what the two parties, particularly the Democrats, might do in the future.

AD

AD

The Republican advantage doesn’t stop at the White House. It continues in the Senate, which is of course a profoundly anti-democratic institution by design, giving 600,000 residents of Wyoming the same two representatives as 40 million Californians. If Democrats and Republicans were equally present in small and large states, then this inequality would wash out, but they aren’t — more of the small states lean Republican, and more of the large states are Democratic.

If we look at the Senate that will be in office next year, we can see the disparity. Presuming the GOP candidate wins a runoff election in Louisiana in December, Republicans will enjoy a 52-48 advantage, but when we add up the votes Democratic and Republican candidates got in the three elections that put them there, we see almost a mirror image: In 2012, 2014 and 2016, Democratic Senate candidates got a combined 114.8 million votes, or 52.8 percent of the total, while Republican candidates got 102.6 million votes, or 47.2 percent.

There’s a similar distortion in the House, though it doesn’t cross the 50 percent mark as it has in the past, particularly in 2012, when Democrats got nearly 2 million more votes than Republicans but still found themselves in the minority. While there are a couple of races awaiting final results and two runoffs that have to be held in Louisiana, it looks as though the final divide in the House will be 241-194 in favor of Republicans. To put that in percentage terms, Republicans have 55.4 percent of the seats, while Democrats have 44.6 percent. Yet Republicans got only 51.5 percent of the two-party vote this year, while Democrats got 48.5 percent.

AD

AD

Those few percentage points of difference between the number of votes the parties get and the number of seats they wind up with translate into a huge advantage for Republicans. It means that in order for Democrats to win back the House, it wouldn’t be enough to get a majority of the votes; they’d essentially have to win in a blowout. (Side note: I got the 2016 presidential and House data from David Wasserman, 2012 and 2014 Senate data from the FEC, and 2016 Senate data from Dave Leip.)

Republicans have some other built-in advantages, like the fact that most governor’s races happen in non-presidential years, when the electorate tends to be older, whiter and more affluent. Some of the reasons the playing field is tilted in this way are simply good fortune for Republicans, especially the geographic sorting that advantages them. While both parties have many safe congressional seats, the safe Democratic ones often are 80 percent or 90 percent Democratic, while safe Republican seats are more like 60 percent or 70 percent Republican. That means that Democrats essentially have wasted votes that would be more effectively spread across a greater number of districts, the way Republicans’ are.

There’s not much you can do about that; it’s the result of millions of individual choices people make about where they want to live. But the Republicans have also very effectively maximized their ability to win before anyone casts a vote. They’ve gerrymandered districts to favor themselves, which doesn’t make an enormous difference but does give them an extra seat here and there. The conservatives on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and Republican-controlled states immediately went on a rampage of vote suppression, doing everything they could to make it harder for people likely to choose Democrats, particularly African Americans and young people, to register and vote, whether it was with voter ID requirements, limits on early voting or cutting back the number of polling places, ensuring that certain people would have to wait hours to vote.

AD

AD

Which, from a partisan standpoint, makes perfect sense. As Sean McElwee recently noted, those who are not registered to vote skew younger, less wealthy, more friendly to Democrats and more liberal in their policy opinions. As Joshua Holland put it, “If non-voters voted, the GOP would be hard-pressed to win anything outside of the deep South.” So it’s in Republicans’ interests to make registering and voting as cumbersome and difficult as possible, to keep non-voters from becoming voters. Which they do.

This all produces a self-reinforcing cycle, in which the Republican advantage helps Republicans maintain their advantage. Democrats might like to, say, promote ballot measures that would make registering and voting easier. But Republican success at suppressing Democratic votes makes those measures harder to pass, keeping the system as Republicans fashion it.