NY Times: “Here, I should say that this critique of Sanders’s response rests on the supposition that Republican politicians want to build a national political majority. And why wouldn’t they? Political parties are supposed to want to win the largest possible majority. “Unless there’s a countervailing force,” the historian Timothy Shenk notes in “Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy,” “parties bend toward majorities like sunflowers to the light.” A large majority, after all, means a mandate for your agenda. With it, you can set or reset the political landscape on your terms.
But what if there is a countervailing force? What if the structure of the political system makes it possible to win the power of a popular majority without ever actually assembling a popular majority? What if, using that power, you burrow your party and its ideology into the countermajoritarian institutions of that system so that, heads or tails, you always win?
In that scenario, a political party might drop the quest for a majority as a fool’s errand. There’s no need to build a broad coalition of voters if — because of the malapportionment of the national legislature, the gerrymandering of many state legislatures, the Electoral College and the strategic position of your voters in the nation’s geography — you don’t need one to win. And if your political party also has a tight hold on the highest court of constitutional interpretation, you don’t even need to win elections to clear the path for your preferred outcomes and ideology.”