The Texas GOP's Bonkers Attack On Democracy

How'd you like to win an election with just 2% of the vote?

The 2020 presidential election results by Texas county

Texas has 254 counties, far more than any other state. The largest is Harris County, home of Houston; its population is over 4.8 million. But most of the 254 are small and rural; many have only a few thousand or even just a few hundred residents. The smallest is Loving County, whose population the Census puts at 43, though the bureau probably missed some people, given that in 2020, 66 votes were cast there for president. Donald Trump got 60 of them. Located in the western part of the state, Loving has only one resident for every 10 square miles. 

I bring up Loving County because we’re going to talk about an absolutely insane proposal from the Texas Republican Party that would put Loving on an equal footing with Harris County in statewide elections. If the party has its way, it would take the Electoral College, one of the worst provisions in our Constitution, and bring it to the state level, then supercharge it. 

And Texas isn’t alone. Republicans in other states are also asking whether they can bring this federal abomination to their states in various forms, using arbitrary geographic/political lines to ensure Republican power and conservative policy outcomes. In Missouri, Republicans were upset that the state’s voters kept passing progressive measures at the ballot box, including accepting the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, legalizing marijuana, and repealing an anti-union “right to work” law. So they came up with an idea to require that initiatives receive not only a statewide majority in order to pass, but a majority in five of the state’s eight congressional districts, which are of course gerrymandered to give extra power to conservative rural voters. The Missouri Independent calculated that under that system it would take just 23 percent of the vote to defeat an initiative. The proposal died after a Democratic filibuster at the end of the legislative session, but Republicans will no doubt try again. 

In Arizona, Republicans have placed an initiative on the ballot to change the signature requirements for future initiatives: Instead of meeting one statewide minimum of signatures to qualify (either 10 or 15 percent of the total number of votes in the most recent governor’s race), initiatives would have to gather the same total in every one of the state’s 30 legislative districts, once again giving conservative rural voters what amounts to veto power. 

The Texas two-step

Which brings us back to Texas, where things have really gone off the rails. The state Republican Party has put together its new platform, which is an amalgam of right-wing ideas including declaring abortion to be “homicide” and demanding that public schools “require instruction on the Bible, servant leadership and Christian self-governance.” And it proposes a truly incredible kind of Electoral College, in which statewide elections would be won by whoever got a majority in a majority of those 254 counties. Here’s how it’s worded:

“The State Legislature shall cause to be enacted a State Constitutional Amendment to add the additional criteria for election to a statewide office to include the majority vote of the counties with each individual county being assigned one vote allocated to the popular majority vote winner of each individual county.”

This would be unlike the Electoral College, which is at least somewhat proportional; the GOP proposal would assign the same weight to each county. It’s as though California had 1 electoral vote and Wyoming had 1 electoral vote.

Except it’s worse. The population ratio of California to Wyoming is 67 to 1. The population ratio of Harris County to Loving County is 112,445 to 1. Under the Republican proposal, winning Harris County would count exactly the same as winning Loving County.

Let’s dive into some numbers to see how truly bonkers this proposal is. In the 2020 election, Donald Trump beat Joe Biden in Texas by a margin of 5.6 points; it was closer than any election there since 1996. But Trump won 232 counties, while Biden won only 22. It was so close because Biden won all the counties with large cities, including Dallas, Tarrant (Ft. Worth), Harris (Houston), Bexar (San Antonio), and Travis (Austin), while Trump won almost all the small rural counties. 

To determine just how antidemocratic this proposal is, I did some math on recent Texas results, and you’re not going to believe the results. 

I sorted every Texas county by the votes cast for president in 2020 (the data can be obtained here), then multiplied each county’s total votes by 50% + 1, the amount you’d need to win there. Then I added together the results for the smallest 128 counties, or a majority of the 254 total counties.¹ That gives you the smallest number of votes you could get in a statewide election under the Republican proposal and win. 

In the 2020 election, 11,315,056 votes were cast for president in Texas. Fifty percent plus one of the votes cast  in the smallest 128 counties (almost all of which Trump won) produces a total of 191,978 votes. Which means that under the GOP proposal, a candidate could win a statewide race with less than 2 percent of the vote. 

That’s right: You could get blown out 98%-2% and become governor, attorney general, or any of the other statewide offices. The candidates who did this would inevitably be Republicans, because they’d be the ones winning all those small rural counties. Which of course is the point.

Now these are the right kind of Texas voters (University of Texas at Arlington Libraries)

The trouble with democracy

To people living in democracies anywhere else in the world, the Electoral College is utterly baffling. In every other democracy, here’s how elections work: People vote, and the candidate with the most votes wins. It’s not complicated. Only in America do we have this convoluted system that makes it possible for the loser to become president, as well as creating distorted campaigns in which only voters in a few states actually matter. It’s one of the most ridiculous and antidemocratic features of the Constitution, and a nation with any sense would have discarded it long ago.

Republicans’ attitude toward the Electoral College has always come down to “Too bad, sucks to be you.” When criticism mounts — after their candidate wins the presidency despite losing the popular vote, as happened in two of the last six elections — they’ll write some op-eds defending it, but the arguments are so pathetically weak you can tell they’re just going through the motions. Their real position is that the system is what it is, and if it just happens to work out to their advantage, too bad. 

But what we’re seeing now is different. It’s partly a product of the Trump era, not because Trump is asking state Republicans to do these things, but because his comprehensive contempt for democracy in any form has encouraged them to stop pretending that they have any belief in the idea of majority rule. Combine that with the conviction that any system that allows for the possibility they might lose is inherently illegitimate and must be changed, and this is what you get. 

As of now, these measures have not been turned into law. But it’s a good bet that other Republican-run states that are either trending away from the GOP (like Texas and Arizona) or offer some mechanism for the majority of voters to overrule the Republicans who are in charge (like Missouri) will start exploring them. And if Trump wins in November by taking a majority of the electoral votes while losing the popular vote — a distinct possibility — they’ll become even more convinced that a full-bore attack on democracy is just what they need.

1. In an earlier version of this post, the number of counties was incorrectly calculated; that has been corrected and the figures updated.