As any schoolkid might tell you, U.S. elections are based on a bedrock principle: one person, one vote. Simple as that. Each vote carries the same weight. Yet for much of the country’s history, that hasn’t been the case. At various points, whole classes of people were shut out of voting: enslaved Black Americans, Native Americans and poor White people. The first time women had the right to vote was in 1919. This week’s show is about a current version of this very old problem.
For this episode, Reveal host Al Letson does a deep dive with Mother Jones correspondent Ari Berman about his new book, “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People – and the Fight to Resist It.”
We go back to America’s early years and examine how the political institutions created by the Founding Fathers were meant to constrain democracy. This system is still alive in the modern era, Berman says, through institutions like the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, which were designed as checks against the power of the majority. What’s more, Berman argues that the Supreme Court is a product of these two skewed institutions. Then there are newer tactics – like voter suppression and gerrymandering – that are layered on top of this anti-democratic foundation to entrench the power of a conservative White minority.
Next, we trace the rise of conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan and how he opened the door for Donald Trump. Buchanan made White Republicans fear becoming a racial minority. And he opposed the Voting Rights Act, which struck down obstacles to voting like poll taxes and literacy tests that had been used to keep people of color from the polls. Buchanan never came close to winning the presidency, but he transformed White anxiety into an organizing principle that has become a centerpiece of much of today’s Republican Party.
The final segment follows successful efforts by citizen activists in Michigan to end political gerrymandering and reinforce the democratic principle of one person, one vote. Berman argues that this state-based organizing should be a national model for democratic reform.
Dig Deeper
Read: “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People – and the Fight to Resist It” by Ari Berman
Read: Minority Rule Is Threatening Democracy Like Never Before (Mother Jones)
Credits
Reporter: Ari Berman | Producer: Jim O’Grady | Editor: Michael Montgomery | Fact checker: Nikki Frick | General counsel: Victoria Baranetsky | Production managers: Steven Rascón and Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson | Special thanks: James West, Daniel Schulman and Clara Jeffery
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Park Foundation.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. You might’ve heard there’s a pretty big election coming up this fall, and as any school kid will tell you, US elections are based on a bedrock principle, one person, one vote. Simple as that. Each vote carries the same weight. Now, I don’t need to tell you that. For much of our history, that hasn’t been the case. At different times, huge classes of people were shut out of voting, enslaved Black Americans, Native Americans, poor White people. This is just a partial list. I mean, the first time women had the right to vote was in 1919. |
| Today’s episode is about the current version of this very old problem. Now, let’s start by acknowledging something that’s true. Overall access to voting rights is better today than it was in our nation’s founding. No question about that. But there’s something else that’s not really true that in America, each vote counts equally in every election. But let’s explore it for a moment. Lend me your ears as I play you a tone. This tone. | |
| Now, that represents the power of a vote cast by a Californian in a presidential election. Of course, in a presidential election, you’re not voting directly for Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Presidents are not chosen by a popular vote, but the Electoral College. So you’re voting to deliver your state’s Electoral College votes to one of the candidates. That’s important, so listen up. California has 54 electoral votes, 54. That comes out to roughly one vote for every 730,000 people. | |
| Now, let’s compare that to Wyoming, a state with three electoral votes. That’s about one for every 190,000 people. So let’s go back to our audio experiment. Here’s what the power of a Wyoming vote cast in the presidential election sounds like. You hear that? A Wyoming vote is louder and more powerful than a California vote, 3.8 times more powerful. And consider this, California is one of our most diverse states, and Wyoming is one of our least diverse states. | |
| What’s the outcome? Minority rule, a system in which some voters count more, nearly four times in the case of Wyoming versus California. And it’s not just presidential elections. Take the US Senate. Who decided that Wyoming gets two votes in the Senate and California, with nearly 69 times the population of Wyoming, gets the same two votes? What it all adds up to is less democracy than we deserve. | |
| We have author Ari Berman to help us make sense of how we got here and how some reformers are trying to strengthen our democracy by updating the rules of the game. Ari is the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and a reporting fellow at Type Media Center. He has a new book just out called, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People, and the Fight to Resist It. Welcome, Ari. | |
| Ari Berman: | Hey, Al. Great to talk to you. I’m excited for this conversation. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, so I’m sure you’d agree that for the longest time, most of the history books that we all grew up with regarded the Constitution as a work of pure genius and that the framers are sometimes depicted as if they had halos. |
| Ari Berman: | That’s right. The Constitution is the closest thing we have to a civic religion in this country. And that was before Hamilton came out. |
| Al Letson: | Right. It was the holy text. Here’s how Ronald Reagan described the Constitution in 1987 on the 200th anniversary of its passage. |
| Ronald Reagan: | This document that we honor today has always been something more to us, filled with a deeper feeling than one of simple admiration, a feeling one might say more of reverence. |
| Al Letson: | So, Ari, what you’re here to do is take us from reverence to reality. |
| Ari Berman: | Yes, far from me to rain on Ronald Reagan’s parade, but the fact is that the democratic institutions that the Founding Fathers created weren’t actually all that democratic. And there’s this fundamental contradiction that the country’s most important democratic document was actually intended to make the country less democratic. |
| Al Letson: | So let’s start this story in the action. The summer of 1787, the Constitutional Convention is going down in Philly, there’s a heat wave and the delegates are cranky, but they need to come up with a way to answer a question that’s been dogging them since the end of the revolution. How do we design a permanent government that abides by majority rule, but at the same time protects the rights of minorities? Is that fair to say? |
| Ari Berman: | Yeah. So the Founding Fathers in the 1780s are wrestling with all of these difficult questions. The country is only about a decade old. The Declaration of Independence has been signed, state constitutions have been drafted, state governments have been set up, but the country is really on the brink of collapse in the minds of the Founding Fathers. They see chaos. They feel like the central government doesn’t have any power, and they’re concerned, particularly that the democratic institutions that were created after the Declaration of Independence are threatening the rights of people like themselves. |
| They’re worried that propertied White men, which is a distinct minority in the country, are under siege from a broader population. And so they want to try to create a strong central government that will both represent the people more broadly, but make sure that their interests, the interests of the White male propertied minority are also protected. | |
| Al Letson: | And in your book, you pose a broader question, how much direct say should the people have in electing their leaders and the inner workings of the government? |
| Ari Berman: | Yes, because the Founding Fathers were very skeptical of direct democracy. They felt like things in Ancient Greece where the people made all of the decisions had led to mob rule. So they’re thinking, “How can we create a system in which wiser, more established men make decisions for the rest of the country?” They were trying to figure out, “How do we create a representative democracy where the representatives are insulated in some way from the people themselves?” |
| Al Letson: | So this is the puzzle that the delegates are trying to solve in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. I mean, Ronald Reagan talked about it in that speech. He quotes Delegate Edmund Randolph from Virginia who said this. |
| Delegate Edmund…: | From New Hampshire to Georgia, are we not on the eve of war, which is only prevented by the hopes from this convention? |
| Al Letson: | Is there ever a time in American history when it doesn’t feel like things are falling apart? |
| Ari Berman: | I think it’s useful to remember that all of the anxiety that we feel today about democracy falling apart, that’s how the Founding Fathers felt back in the 1780s. They felt like the country was on the brink of collapse, that the democratic experiment that America had entered into after fighting a war against England was possibly over. And they felt like they had to, in many ways, rescue democracy from itself. |
| Al Letson: | So the delegates are basically struggling to set up rules for our major democratic institutions, rules we pretty much follow to this day. Let’s go back to Edmund Randolph. What was his opening bid? |
| Ari Berman: | So Edmund Randolph is the governor of Virginia. He’s tall, he’s handsome, he’s 34 years old. He is the former aide to George Washington, and he introduces what is called the Virginia Plan, which formed the basis of the Constitution that would later be adopted. |
| And what Randolph does is he introduces a plan for a new federal government. The new national legislature will pick the president and the judiciary, and the Senate will be chosen by state legislatures and the House of Representatives, meaning that the public will only elect directly the House of Representatives. That means that only one branch of one house of the new national government will be elected directly by the people. | |
| And that’s a huge change from how America was set up after the Declaration of Independence, which says that democracy should be based on the consent of the governed. The institutions that are laid out by Randolph insulate the country’s leadership from the consent of the governed. | |
| Al Letson: | So it’s decided that the House of Representatives will be elected by the people. Why not do something similar with the Senate? |
| Ari Berman: | So there’s really two debates about the Senate. The first is, should senators be directly elected by the people? One of the people who makes that argument most forcefully is James Wilson, who’s a delegate from Pennsylvania, a close friend of George Washington, one of the most prominent lawyers in America. He’s from Scotland. He kind of has this great Scottish brogue, so he’s an intimidating character. The glasses are down on his eyes, kind of what you think of when you think of a stern founding father. |
| He argues that senators should be elected directly by the people, but he loses that argument very early on when the founders decide that senators are going to be nominated by state legislatures and chosen by the House of Representatives. So we already know senators aren’t going to be elected directly by the people. Then there’s a question of who should the Senate represent? Should it be based on proportional representation or should each state have the same number of senators? And that leads to a much more heated debate. | |
| Al Letson: | So this gets us back to the question of majority versus minority rule. The small states were claiming to be the vulnerable minority, right? |
| Ari Berman: | Yes. The small states were outnumbered and they felt like their rights were going to be trampled by the larger states. So there’s a major showdown on June 30th, 1787, Gunning Bedford, who is the Attorney General of Delaware, one of the smallest states in the union, he gets up and he stares down the delegates from the largest states and he says, “I do not, gentlemen, trust you. If you possess the power, the abuse of it could not be checked, and what would then prevent you from exercising it to our destruction?” |
| Then he issues this stunning ultimatum and he says, quote, “The large states dare not dissolve the confederation. If they do, the small ones will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith who will take them by the hand and do them justice.” So this is incredible. Bedford and his allies and the small states are threatening to leave the union and side with a foreign power, the very thing America has rebelled against. | |
| Al Letson: | So in other words, he’s threatening civil war. |
| Ari Berman: | Exactly. But his extortionist tactics work. What happens is the Senate is set up with two votes for each state, no matter how large or small the state. And it becomes known as the Great Compromise. But some historians have pointed out more accurately, it should be called the Great Concession. The idea that the Senate would represent each state equally, no matter the population. |
| Al Letson: | And now comes the issue of how to elect the president of the United States. And again, James Wilson plays a big role, but in an unexpected way. |
| Ari Berman: | So Wilson is arguing first that the Senate should be elected directly by the people. He loses that fight. Then he argues that the president should be directly elected by the people. He loses that fight too because most of the Founding Fathers believe that the public is too uninformed to be able to directly elect the president. So they want another system. |
| And Wilson proposes this complicated system that is known as the Electoral College today, which is that states will select electors who will then elect the president, and therefore a small number of basically elite White men will decide who the president is. | |
| Al Letson: | And it gets worse from there, right? |
| Ari Berman: | That’s right. Not only does the public not elect the president directly, but southern states are given more representation through the Three-Fifths Clause, which basically says that even though African Americans are enslaved in the southern states, southern states will get more representatives by counting them as three-fifths of a person, which gives southern states more power in the House of Representatives, and thereby gives them more power in the Electoral College as well. |
| So both the Senate and the Electoral College are biased in favor of two distinct minorities, the small states and the slave states. The result is that southern slave states have incredible amount of power over the new national government. 10 of the first 12 US presidents are slaveholders. Most of the Speakers of the House, until the Civil War, are slaveholders, and 18 of the first 31 Supreme Court justices are slaveholders. | |
| Al Letson: | And of course, we’re still stuck with the Senate and the Electoral College. How’s that playing out today? |
| Ari Berman: | The amazing thing is that those two institutions, the Senate and the Electoral College are biased still in favor of Whiter, more rural, more conservative states as opposed to larger, more diverse, more progressive areas. And even as those institutions have been reformed so that senators are now directly elected by the people, so that Electoral College electors now generally follow the popular vote winner of the state, there are still these anti-democratic remnants of a very different and far less democratic era. |
| Al Letson: | In everything we just talked about, it all comes down to this. You can hear how unequal it is. That’s what most of the delegates wanted. The system is working as designed. |
| And that leaves the design of our democratic system vulnerable, even in modern times because it can be exploited by politicians who want to maximize minority rule for their own gain. | |
| Pat Buchanan: | I’m telling the folks out in the country, they’re going to come after this campaign with everything they got. Do not wait for orders from headquarters, mount up, everybody, and ride to the sound of the gun. |
| Al Letson: | Mount up and ride to the sound of the guns. That was Pat Buchanan who ran for president in the 1990s, and this was Donald Trump in 2020. |
| Donald Trump: | After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down, anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol. |
| Al Letson: | How Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump pulled the levers of minority rule, that’s next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. We’re doing a deep dive with Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman about his fascinating new book called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist It. So Ari, you just gave us a backstage look at the founding of the United States and the drafting of the Constitution. |
| Ari Berman: | Yeah, so the real story of the founding in many ways is how certain factions slanted the rules of the game to keep themselves in power. We’re talking slaveholders, White male property owners, and small states over large states. |
| Al Letson: | One of the things your book Minority Rule does well is connect America’s origins to what’s happening right now. You take us from the Constitutional Convention to Donald Trump, a dude who’s benefited like crazy from minority rule, right? |
| Ari Berman: | That’s right. Trump is certainly an accelerant to the crazy undemocratic nature of American politics, but he’s also a product of a deeply undemocratic system. In 2016, he won the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. Then in 2020, he lost the popular vote by 7 million votes, but came just 44,000 votes away from winning the Electoral College. Trump is a product of minority rule. |
| Al Letson: | You also show how Trump is not the first modern politician to use minority rule to preserve the purity of the real America. |
| Ari Berman: | Definitely not. There is a really important transitional figure in the 1990s who was a key player in the Republican Party and his name is Pat Buchanan. |
| Al Letson: | I remember Pat Buchanan. In my memory of watching him as a child on TV, he was kind of a firebrand Republican. |
| Pat Buchanan: | Today, we call for a new patriotism, where Americans begin to put the needs of Americans first. |
| Al Letson: | What was he for and against? |
| Ari Berman: | He was basically for the rights of White Christian America and he was essentially against the rights of everyone else. He didn’t like the Civil Rights movement and he didn’t like demographic change and he felt like White Christian America was under siege. |
| Al Letson: | I mean, basically he’s the progenitor of a lot of our politics today. |
| Ari Berman: | That’s right. |
| Al Letson: | Now before Buchanan, Republican politicians like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan would use coded language to basically say, “White Americans need to keep wielding the majority of power in this country.” But then Pat Buchanan comes along, and he just says the quiet part out loud. |
| Ari Berman: | Buchanan was a young speechwriter for Richard Nixon in the 1960s and he helps conceive of the southern strategy. And the idea is that you’re going to move conservative southern White people away from the Democratic Party, where they had long identified, and into the Republican Party. And you’re going to do that through coded appeals on race. You’re going to talk about things like busing and affirmative action and quotas, things like that. But Buchanan just comes right out and says, “White America is under siege.” There’s no coding about it. |
| Al Letson: | And so this is kind of a turning point because now that he’s taken out all the polite niceties that covered it all up before, it begins to reset the conservative agenda and change the way conservatives talk. |
| Ari Berman: | It does, because what Buchanan is basically saying is that the White majority that he helped build for people like Nixon and Reagan is going to disappear. The 1990 census, which coincides with Buchanan’s first presidential campaign says that White people will one day be a minority in the country. And Buchanan starts warning about this. He says, “There’s going to be this majority minority future in which White people are going to be the minority, and if White people don’t do something about it, these demographic changes are going to make the Republican Party extinct because the Republican Party is so identified with White voters.” |
| Al Letson: | And he justifies this by saying, “This is the country the framers of the Constitution had in mind.” |
| Pat Buchanan: | We’re going to make America the constitutional republic again of our Founding Fathers’ dreams. I believe those of us in this room, we are the true sons and daughters, I believe, of the Founding Fathers. We are their legitimate and rightful heirs. We have never forgotten. |
| Ari Berman: | Buchanan describes his supporters as the true sons and daughters of the American Revolution, and he says the Founding Fathers didn’t believe in democracy. They didn’t believe in equality. They didn’t believe in diversity. So if the founders didn’t believe in any of these things, why should we believe in them either? That basically democracy, diversity, equality, all of those things are actually highly overrated. What matters is protecting the White majority that’s becoming a minority at all costs. |
| Al Letson: | So where does Pat Buchanan come from? In the early nineties, I was just about to graduate high school. I’m seeing this guy everywhere, and I had this really distinct memory of watching him on CNN, and just knowing deep down inside that this man does not like me. |
| Ari Berman: | Buchanan is kind of like Fox News before Fox News. He rides being a conservative pundit into a platform to run for president, and he challenges the Republican establishment. He runs against a sitting Republican president, George H.W. Bush. And even though he doesn’t win any states, the fact that he gets 3 million votes running against George H.W. Bush means he’s invited to give this keynote speech at the Republican convention, which elevates his profile even more. |
| Pat Buchanan: | No way, my friends, the American people are not going to go back to the discredited liberalism of the 1960s and the failed liberalism of the 1970s, no matter how slick the package in 1992. |
| Al Letson: | What does he mean by that? |
| Ari Berman: | It means he’s against all kinds of things. |
| Pat Buchanan: | Radical feminism, abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units. That’s change, all right. But that’s not the kind of change America needs. It’s not the kind of change America wants, and it’s not the kind of change we can abide in a nation we still call God’s country. |
| Ari Berman: | And in speeches and interviews, he’s also very anti-immigrant. |
| Speaker 4: | You said you wanted a five-year moratorium on legal immigration? |
| Pat Buchanan: | Still be the most generous country in the world, but it would give us time to assimilate and Americanize the 30 million who have come here in recent decades. |
| Speaker 4: | Less immigration? We need work- |
| Al Letson: | And I remember his stances on race, not good. |
| Ari Berman: | So Buchanan, not surprisingly, is very opposed to the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. He goes to the South during his presidential campaign in the nineties and he campaigns against things like the Voting Rights Act. |
| Al Letson: | So the Voting Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in voting. I mean, it was a landmark piece of legislation. It struck down obstacles to voting like poll taxes and literacy tests that had been used to keep people of color from the polls. |
| Ari Berman: | Buchanan called it, “An act of regional discrimination against the South”, but a lot of Republicans had spoken out against the Voting Rights Act. What makes Buchanan unique is he mixes antipathy towards the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s with antipathy towards non-White immigration. So he’s basically saying, “It’s not Black, it’s not Hispanic, it’s all of the minority groups combined that are going to drive White voters into the minority and make the Republican Party extinct.” |
| Al Letson: | So four years later in 1996, he runs in the Republican primary again. What happens? |
| Ari Berman: | He shocks the world by winning the New Hampshire Republican primary, and then he breaks into song. |
| Pat Buchanan: | With the light with the light from above. |
| Ari Berman: | At least if you call this singing. |
| Pat Buchanan: | God bless America. My home sweet home. |
| Ari Berman: | Buchanan’s win dramatically shakes up the race and turns him into a serious contender for the White House. |
| Pat Buchanan: | Four years ago, I stood in this very room when we made history, and we have made history again tonight, my friends, here in New Hampshire. |
| Ari Berman: | Buchanan speaks in a way that sounds very familiar to modern conservatism today. |
| Pat Buchanan: | Conservatism that gives voice to the voiceless. It speaks up for the right to life of the innocent unborn. |
| Ari Berman: | And he’s framing issues in an us-versus-them way that is very Trumpy. |
| Pat Buchanan: | It’s a victory. Victory for the good men and women of middle America who cannot understand why there is deafness in Washington and silence about the fact the standard of living of our working men and women in middle class have been stagnating while profits have been soaring. They call me names. |
| Ari Berman: | So he’s mixing populism with racism and nativism. He says in 1992 that there should be a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and he’s making campaign stops at Confederate monuments like Stone Mountain in Georgia where he’s questioned by a reporter. |
| Speaker 5: | You got a new ad, you’re talking about quotas. You’re coming to Confederate monuments, are you playing racial politics? |
| Pat Buchanan: | [inaudible 00:10:03] This is a monument for the entire South, Lee and Jackson. This is a landmark in Georgia. Everybody visits this place and it’s a wonderful place to visit. |
| Speaker 5: | Yankees do too. |
| Ari Berman: | For a brief moment, it looks like Buchanan could go all the way to become the actual Republican presidential nominee. |
| Al Letson: | And the thing that’s interesting to me about all of this is that there are parts of it that he’s not wrong about. Like our working men and women and middle class, they are stagnating while profits are soaring. I mean, we’re still seeing that today. I guess the issue obviously is that he’s mixing it with racism and the way he talks about working men and women. It’s like so immigrants and Black people aren’t included in that. So he’s taking a truth that I think if you are an American and you are a middle class person, you’re feeling these types of pressures, but then he’s adding in this racist ideology and it gives people somebody to be angry at. So what happens to him after that? |
| Ari Berman: | The Republican establishment turns on Buchanan. Bob Dole, who becomes the nominee in 1996 blocks Buchanan from speaking at the Republican convention. George Will, a very famous Washington Post columnist calls him Pitchfork Pat. And unlike in 1992, when the Republican Party embraces Buchananism, now they want to send him into the political wilderness four years later. |
| Speaker 6: | Critics accused Buchanan of flirting with racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and worse. |
| Ari Berman: | And one of those critics is none other than Donald Trump. |
| Speaker 6: | Trump said he agreed with them. He said Buchanan was only drawing support from a staunch right wacko vote. “On slow days,” Trump wrote, “He attacks gays, immigrants, welfare recipients, even Zulus.” |
| Donald Trump: | He doesn’t like the Blacks, he doesn’t like the gays. It’s just incredible that anybody could embrace this guy. |
| Al Letson: | The Blacks, the gays. I mean, even though he is against Buchanan in this instance, the seeds of who Trump is today are clearly there. |
| Ari Berman: | That’s right. And the irony here is that after Republicans sidelined Buchanan, his views became even more extreme. But now a lot of those extreme views and his aggressive tone are animating Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. So first, Trump criticizes Buchanan, then later he sounds just like him. |
| Donald Trump: | They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. |
| Ari Berman: | When Trump talks about immigration, he often focuses on the decline of White power. At its heart, that message is about minority rule. It’s the idea that some perspectives, some citizens count more. And you don’t have to look too far to see Trump employing that as a political strategy throughout his campaigns for president. |
| Take 2020, just two days after the election, Trump was calling to “stop the count.” | |
| Speaker 8: | Stop the count, stop the count, stop the count. |
| Ari Berman: | And that phrase was then picked up by his supporters, including crowds outside Detroit’s TCF Center. They banged on the glass, trying to stop the people inside from counting the ballots in that mostly Black, mostly Democratic city. |
| Counting every legally cast ballot, every vote. That is the foundational principle of our democracy. And Trump has helped popularize the idea, to his own benefit, that minority rule matters more. And as I write in my book, the Constitution leaves us in many ways vulnerable to this undemocratic system. | |
| Al Letson: | Are we just stuck? Is there nothing we can do to make the system at least a little more democratic? |
| Ari Berman: | So where change is most possible right now is at the state level, and I found an activist in Michigan who’s fighting back and winning. |
| Al Letson: | Coming up, that activist, Katie Fahey will join us to share her real David vs. Goliath story. That’s next on Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. I’m speaking with author Ari Berman about how our constitutional system was designed to help some Americans more than others. His new book is about minority rule. It’s one of those things that once you start looking for it, you realize it’s kind of everywhere. The US Senate. Yep. A product of minority rule. So is the presidency because of the Electoral College, and by proxy, so is the Supreme Court because Presidents nominate Supreme Court justices and the Senate confirms them. It can feel a little, well, less than democratic. But Ari, you write about a bright spot in your book. I’m thinking of the story of Katie Fahey, a grassroots activist, who woke up one morning and basically said, “You know what? I’m going to do something about how politicians stack elections in my state.” She was going to take on the problem of gerrymandering. |
| Ari Berman: | So remember, gerrymandering is the practice of manipulating election districts in a way that unfairly favors one party or community over another. And Republicans had been using it in Katie’s home state of Michigan to hold a majority of power despite winning a minority of votes. A Republican operative said the goal was to, quote, cram all of the Dem garbage into as few seats as possible. Katie felt that was wrong in principle and that it was leading to one-sided laws, so she decided to do something about it. |
| Al Letson: | Her story is surprising but also instructive. So you sat down with her and the story begins November 10th, 2016, two days after the election. |
| Katie Fahey: | In 2016, the election results once again did not align with how the people of Michigan had actually voted. And it was extremely frustrating and infuriating. The Democrats had won a slim majority of the votes, yet somehow the state House and state Senate were leaning extremely far to the right. And Michigan’s a very purple state. About half of us vote for Democrats. About half of us vote for Republicans. So you would’ve assumed, okay, we’ve got about 50/50 with a slim majority of Democrats, but this basically meant that Republicans didn’t even have to talk to any Democrats at the state level in order to try and pass policies. |
| Ari Berman: | Okay. So this is a classic case of gerrymandering. The shape of the election district maps, not the total number of votes, gave Republicans a total control of the Michigan State House. Even when Republicans are getting less votes than Democrats at the state level, they’re holding huge majorities in the legislature. That’s a textbook example of minority rule. So if Katie is going to change that, she needs to revise her state’s constitution by a ballot initiative. But her regular job had nothing to do with politics. |
| Katie Fahey: | I worked for the Michigan Recycling Coalition and I had an hour-long commute to work. And before going to work, I hopped on social media, quite a millennial, and just made a Facebook post that said like, “Hey. I think we should end gerrymandering in Michigan. If you want to help, let me know. Smiley face.” |
| Ari Berman: | Katie says she got a ton of responses. |
| Katie Fahey: | By the time I got to work and checked it at lunchtime, there were a bunch of private messages from people I had no idea who they were all saying things like, “Hey. I’ve cared about gerrymandering for such a long time. Let me know how I can help. I’m so glad you’re doing something about this. Let’s do it.” It was very shocking. I was super excited, but also then it kind of sank in like, “Oh, no. We have to figure out how to do something about gerrymandering now.” |
| Ari Berman: | Katie had no idea where to start, so she says she turned to a trusted friend, Google. |
| Katie Fahey: | “How do you end gerrymandering in Michigan?” And found a website that said that basically in Michigan we have this thing called the citizen-led ballot initiative process, meaning that everyday citizens could bypass the legislature by coming together, writing constitutional language, so writing our own law. Then we had to gather a bunch of signatures. But then we could put it up to the people of Michigan to vote directly on changing a law. So we could actually change the redistricting process through changing the laws about redistricting. We had to gather for the 2018 ballot 315,654 registered Michigan voter signatures in 180 days. |
| Al Letson: | Okay. So now she knows what it’s going to take, more than 315,600 signatures. |
| Ari Berman: | And this is the fascinating thing, Al. She’s 27 years old. She’s never done any kind of political organizing. So I basically said to her, “To be able to do this, you had to start a movement. Did you think that was possible?” |
| Katie Fahey: | I absolutely did not think that we would start a movement or that everyday people could have such a monumental impact on this. I figured that there was probably some really great organizations. Maybe they could use some more volunteers or maybe we’d have to write letters to our congressman. So when we looked at that big 315,654 number, “Okay. Can we even do this?” Traditionally what we had learned was that a lot of campaigns pay for people to gather signatures. Well, we didn’t even have a bank account for this effort, so we couldn’t pay millions of dollars to try and gather these signatures, but we had seen that this was an issue that really resonated with the people of Michigan. |
| Ari Berman: | There were some big questions they had to figure out. What do the people of Michigan want their election districts to look like? And how should the process work to make those changes? Katie and her group decided, “Let’s just ask the voters directly.” |
| Katie Fahey: | And so we organized these town, 33 town halls in 33 days, where we went and had conversations with people of all political stripes about what is redistricting, what is gerrymandering, what does it look like in Michigan and how would we want it to look if we were going to do something different. And by going to people and actually asking their opinion and inviting them into the political process, we saw they didn’t want to stop with just having their input heard. They were willing to go and talk to their neighbors about redistricting. So we basically tried to divide up that big number and get a couple thousand people to gather signatures. “If you can gather 17 signatures a week for eight weeks, we think we can do this.” And we slowly started to see that people were willing to at least do something. Some people gather a lot more and some people gather less. |
| Al Letson: | Okay. Now she’s all in. She’s sending waves of volunteers into the field to collect signatures. Did she talk about what motivated her to make this her issue? |
| Ari Berman: | She did. She said at the heart of the problem was the idea that Michigan politics was out of step with what the people of Michigan actually wanted. Remember, it’s a purple state, but Katie said that both Democrats and Republicans had used gerrymandering to gain these lopsided majorities and then pass policies that she thought were kind of extreme. |
| Katie Fahey: | I just kept seeing this pattern of ignoring the will of the voters. I was in the recycling industry and there was a local city that wanted to say, “Our grocery stores can’t give out plastic bags.” And the legislature the day before hearing this meeting made it illegal to ban plastic bags. So they did a ban on banning plastic bags. It was such an overreach, it felt ridiculous, like it wasn’t a big deal to now remove this right from 10 million people to be able to actually govern themselves. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. So if you’re a ruthless politician in a gerrymandered district, you’re not going to care about what voters from the other side think because you know your reelection is safe. |
| Ari Berman: | That’s correct. These tortured maps ensured one party rule in Michigan. And I asked Katie if she had an example of how it was playing out. |
| Katie Fahey: | Oh, so many. One district that stands out to me of being really gerrymandered was actually right near my house in the district that I went to college in. So there’s about six houses on one street. You had three different State House districts. So I am like not a super athletic person. I decided I’m going to try and run this and see how long it’s going to take me. It took me less than one minute to run through three house districts. And we ended up talking to people on that street and they said, “Candidates never know who they actually represent on the street. Our voting place where we go to vote changes all the time. We get mail from all the candidates.” And also whenever they try to advocate for a change, nobody wants to pay attention to this community because it’s divided into three different districts. So they’re barely represented three times. |
| Ari Berman: | So that’s an everyday example of the problems caused by gerrymandering. A tragic example was the water crisis in Flint. |
| Katie Fahey: | What a lot of people don’t realize is that the Flint water crisis actually has its roots in gerrymandering. |
| Ari Berman: | Flint, Michigan is a majority Black city. And in 2014, an emergency manager switched their city onto a water supply that corroded their pipes and leached lead into the water. |
| Katie Fahey: | So there was this law in Michigan called the Emergency Manager Law, which basically if a local city was in financial trouble meant that you got your financial responsibilities taken away and a manager got appointed to it. A lot of people in Michigan felt like it targeted communities of color. And the people of Michigan actually decided to use the petition process to repeal that law and overwhelmingly voted to say, “Hey. We want to get rid of this law.” |
| Al Letson: | Something tells me that didn’t solve the problem. |
| Ari Berman: | Nope. |
| Katie Fahey: | One of the very first things the legislature did was find a loophole. That loophole was if they could start tying a piece of money to legislation, citizens couldn’t veto it. |
| Al Letson: | So Ari, let me get this straight. The Michigan legislature found a way to nullify the people’s vote to get rid of the Emergency Manager Law? |
| Ari Berman: | It was crazy. The legislature, which again is super gerrymandered, not only reinstated that Emergency Manager Law, they took it one step further and basically made it impossible to repeal any law the legislature passed, no matter how unpopular it was with the voters. |
| Katie Fahey: | Later, Flint goes into financial crisis and an emergency manager gets put into place who then decides for a financial reason to switch the water source for the City of Flint, which then leads to the water crisis. |
| Al Letson: | And all that affected so many lives. Now I want to get back to Katie’s story. She and her group of volunteers are collecting signatures to force a referendum on gerrymandering reform onto the ballot. So how’s that going? |
| Ari Berman: | Remember, they had only 180 days to get 315,654 signatures on the ballot. |
| Katie Fahey: | Everybody told us it was impossible to do, but we were everywhere. We were in cow pastures, parades. We found the busiest rest stops in Michigan. We set up tables outside of those rest stops to talk to you about how do we end gerrymandering. It was definitely a machine, but a volunteer powered machine. |
| Ari Berman: | It turns out they gathered far more than they needed and they did it in just 110 days. |
| Speaker 4: | A group of activists against partisan gerrymandering are expected to turn in about 400,000 signatures by the end of the year. Right now, the legislature and governor control the redistricting process, but a proposed amendment would allow a commission of citizens to control it instead. |
| Ari Berman: | A lot of people at those town halls said that’s what they wanted, an independent citizens redistricting commission. |
| Katie Fahey: | They didn’t want politicians. They didn’t want lobbyists on this commission. They wanted representation from Democrats, Republicans and Independents. And they also wanted the diversity of Michiganders, age, race, gender, where people lived. The commission consisted of four Democrats, four Republicans, and five Independent or third-party voters. The rules basically said that we wanted to keep communities together and that those communities could define what those geographic boundaries are. It made gerrymandering illegal. It said, “You are not able to provide a disproportionate advantage to any party or individual candidate.” |
| Al Letson: | Who’s opposed to the initiative? |
| Ari Berman: | The usual suspects. |
| Katie Fahey: | It was the Michigan Freedom Fund, which is related to the DeVos Family. Betsy DeVos was the secretary of education under Donald Trump. We had the statewide Chamber of Commerce, as well as the Republican Party itself. |
| Al Letson: | So now it’s election night, 2018. The referendum is on the ballot. How’d it go? |
| Ari Berman: | I’ll give you a hint. I watched a video of Katie that night and she was holding a glass of champagne in each hand. |
| Katie Fahey: | Someone had left their glass of champagne up on the podium, and then I had my own. All right? Just for the record. So on election night, we were still campaigning all the way up until 8:00 when those polls closed. And so we had this big, we were hoping, party. I guess either way, we would’ve celebrated all of the hard work we had done, but there were probably several hundred of our volunteers there. |
| Ari Berman: | They won in a landslide. |
| Speaker 5: | Michigan yesterday voting in favor of proposal two, which will change the way the state’s political lines are drawn. |
| Speaker 6: | Katie Fahey from Caledonia started this whole thing almost exactly two years ago, and now her organization is seeing it pay off. |
| Katie Fahey: | So the passage of the initiative with 61% of the vote sent a very clear message that the people of Michigan wanted change and wanted accountability. And the other really exciting thing was Michigan wasn’t the only state with redistricting on the ballot that night. There were four other states that we were also watching to see was this really a nationwide movement. And it turns out that it was. |
| Al Letson: | Okay. So let’s skip ahead to whether it worked. Did the referendum change Michigan’s election system in the ways Katie hoped it would? |
| Ari Berman: | Here’s what she said. |
| Katie Fahey: | 2022 was the first year that our independent citizens redistricting commission had created new maps and they were going to be put to the test. Would they work? Would they have partisan bias? What does this look like? Can you actually improve democracy and have it work how you intend it to? |
| Ari Berman: | The impact of the new voting maps was stunning. This time, Michigan got what it voted for, fair representation in the State House, State Senate, and in Congress. |
| Katie Fahey: | 51% of the state voted for Democrats, and there was an exact match with representation. 51% of the seats in the House and the Senate got Democrats and 49% to Republicans. What you started seeing afterwards was almost every piece of legislation ended up being bipartisan because that’s an extremely slim majority. So it has been very exciting to see issues starting to be finally addressed that haven’t been addressed for 40 years. |
| Al Letson: | That is an inspiring story. |
| Ari Berman: | And that’s why I put it in my book to let people know that all is not lost, that there are things they can do to battle minority rule. Or as Katie Fahey put it… |
| Katie Fahey: | When you start feeling helpless and like, “Man, I don’t like the way the Supreme Court’s ruling. I don’t feel like Congress is ever going to actually address any of these issues I care about,” I do think that looking at a state and the state constitution can have a really big impact. It can be actually one of the only ways you can still make change and get accountability. |
| Al Letson: | Ari, thanks so much for bringing us this story. |
| Ari Berman: | Thanks so much, Al. |
| Al Letson: | Ari Berman is the National Voting Rights Correspondent from Mother Jones and a reporting fellow at Type Media Center. His new book is Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack Over the Will of the People and the Fight To Resist It. Our lead producer for this week’s show is Jim O’Grady. Michael Montgomery edited the show. Special thanks to Mother Jones editors Dan Schulman, James West and Clara Jeffery. Nikki Frick is our fact checker. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production managers are Steven Rascon and Zulema Cobb. Score and sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man, Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Our theme music is by Camarado, Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there is always more to the story. |