Dayton Daily News

Senate America increasing­ly doesn’t reflect Real America

- Paul Krugman

Everyone is delivering post-mortems on Tuesday’s elections, so for what it’s worth, here’s mine: Despite some bitter disappoint­ments and lost ground in the Senate, Democrats won a huge victory. They broke the Republican monopoly on federal power, and that’s a very big deal for an administra­tion that has engaged in blatant corruption and abuse of power, in the belief that an impenetrab­le red wall would always protect it from accountabi­lity.

But given this overall success, how do we explain those Senate losses? Many people have pointed out that this year’s Senate map was unusually bad for Democrats, consisting disproport­ionately of states Donald Trump won in 2016. But there was actually a deeper problem, one that will pose long-term problems, not just for Democrats, but for the legitimacy of our whole political system. For economic and demographi­c trends have interacted with political change to make the Senate deeply unrepresen­tative of American reality.

Immigratio­n and our growing racial and cultural diversity are only part of the story. We’re also witnessing a transforma­tion in the geography of our economy, as dynamic industries increasing­ly gravitate to big metropolit­an areas where there are already large numbers of highly educated workers. It’s not an accident that Amazon is planning to put its two new headquarte­rs in New York and the Washington D.C., metropolit­an area, both places with an existing deep pool of talent.

We are increasing­ly a nation of urbanites and suburbanit­es. Almost 60 percent of us live in metropolit­an areas with more than 1 million people, more than 70 percent in areas with more than 500,000 residents. Conservati­ve politician­s may extol the virtues of a “real America” of rural areas and small towns, but the real real America in which we live, while it contains small towns, is mostly metropolit­an.

But here’s the thing: The Senate, which gives each state the same number of seats regardless of population — which gives fewer than 600,000 people in Wyoming the same representa­tion as almost 40 million in California — drasticall­y overweight­s those rural areas and underweigh­ts the places where most Americans live.

I find it helpful to contrast the real America, the place we actually live, with what I think of as “Senate America,” the hypothetic­al nation implied by a simple average across states, which is what the Senate in effect represents.

We’re all Americans, and we all deserve an equal voice in shaping our national destiny.

Not to put too fine a point on it: What Donald Trump and his party are selling increasing­ly boils down to white nationalis­m — hatred and fear of darker people, with a hefty dose of anti-intellectu­alism plus anti-Semitism, which is always part of that cocktail. This message repels a majority of Americans. That’s why Tuesday’s election in the House — which despite gerrymande­ring and other factors is far more representa­tive of the country as a whole than the Senate — produced a major Democratic wave.

So what happened Tuesday, with Republican­s getting shellacked in the House but gaining in the Senate, wasn’t just an accident of this year’s map or specific campaign issues. It reflected a deep division in culture, indeed values, between the American citizenry at large and the people who get to choose much of the Senate.

We may, then, be looking at a growing crisis of legitimacy for the U.S. political system — even if we get through the constituti­onal crisis that seems to be looming over the next few months.

He writes for the New York Times.

Exit polls aren’t always 100 percent reliable. For example, in 2016, the exit interviews suggested that Donald Trump would lose Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvan­ia and North Carolina by small margins. He won all of them.

Let’s take it as given that 2018’s exit polls are likely flawed in the same way. Still, they are among the most interestin­g polls because they reflect the views of actual voters — not “registered” or “likely,” but the real McCoy. Margins of error we shall always have with us, but they shouldn’t stifle all punditry.

Some of the data about this year’s crop of voters is similar to what we’ve seen in past contests, but there are some trends that should

She writes for Creators Syndicate.

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