Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.opens in a new tab
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.
Gerrymandering, or the protocol where states allot congressional seats by population, is in the news recently, and some states do it transparently politically, depending on the makeup of their state legislatures. Others go through the operation, sometimes genuine, sometimes not so much, of having a nonpartisan body redistrict.
It’s very important because it’s based on the census, as well as within the state. The number of seats that the state is granted by the U.S. Census is then further determined by how you draw the lines for congressional districts. And as you know, birds of a feather flock together, so you can do it regionally in a way that would favor one or the other party.
Now we’re in a gerrymandering war where some of the states are trying to redistrict and improve either the Democratic or Republican turnout. Here in California, 40% of the state voted a little bit over, maybe 41%, for Donald Trump. And if this new redistricting protocol goes into effect, which it will by November, it’s likely that even though we have 53 congressional seats, we may only have seven or eight Republicans in the House.
We could go down, in other words, not getting 40%. We never get that. We get about 17% to 20%. We could go down to eight or 9% of the state’s House of Representatives members would be Republicans, even though 40% of the state shows that it’s Republican by their voting in national elections.
But this is what’s interesting.
Now that we’re in this war, the Democrats, I don’t quite think, have known what is going to go on. There were some recent studies by various pollsters about what would happen if all of the states decided to engage in redistricting, gerrymandering, based on the relative control of the state legislatures. And it came up with a very surprising result.
And that is, if the Republican red states or purple states that have Republican majorities decided to redistrict and Democrats did the same, an all-out war, there would be about 262 Republicans and only 173 Democratic seats.
And that’s not the end of it. We have had a massive population transfer of somewhere between 1 and 3 million people a year recently go from blue states and blue cities to red states and red cities. And that alone, according to many people, within just four years, is going to radically change the census allotment of congressional representatives.
Forget about redistricting. It’s the whole number that each state is granted, and that will have an effect on the Electoral College, which has a formula that your senators and representatives determine your electors that will select the next president. And in that calculus, people are suggesting they may lose, they being blue states, anywhere from 10 to 15 [seats].
Some quite outlier polls say they could lose 20 seats, and that’s not the end of it.
A third factor people are not taking into consideration is the Supreme Court just outlawed racial gerrymandering. It’s a question of whether that will be enacted in time for the November elections. It seems like it can.
Maybe not for the June primaries, but that will affect Democrat seats as well as the census and as well as just normal gerrymandering. But if you don’t have these special seats that are carved out to ensure Black people are the only two candidates, the Democrats could lose another 10 to 15 seats.
If you add it all up, you’re talking about a permanent switch of 40 to 50 seats in the House of Representatives, and it doesn’t end there.
If you look at the longer-term demographics, whether you use number of births per 100,000 population, or you look at by family, what is the fertility rate of the average state—is it 2.1, which is necessary for the replacement population—it turns out that with very few exceptions, the red states are usually reproducing about 1.6 to 1.9 in a few cases, and the Democrats are about 1.5 down to almost below [one].
So long term, people in blue states, for a variety of reasons, we don’t have time to get into them, I think you know what they are. There’s less emphasis on traditional religion, on traditional nuclear families, etc. They tend to be more urban than some of the rural states in the West, Midwest, and South. But in any case, the long-term prognosis for the Democratic Party is not good.
It could lose 50 to 60 permanent seats, and then you would have a sort of California-type one-party rule nationwide, except it might have implications for the Senate as well. What am I getting at?
It seems to me that the Democrats have lost confidence in their agenda.
In other words, they don’t believe that you, the voter, really do want an open border, or you want 53 million foreign-born without audits that ensure acculturation, integration, assimilation. And the same is true of critical race theory or critical legal theory or the emphasis and fixations on transgenderism or the Green New Deal.
It seems it would have been disastrous had we enacted the full agenda of the Left, given what the status of oil is, and we’re the largest producer of oil and gas in the history of civilization right now.
You put it all together, and that message of the Democrats is not appealing.
And so, of course, in the short term, their strategy has been: We’re not Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a fascist, and we’re going to go demonstrate against Tesla and ICE and “No Kings,” and we’re going to try to put him in jail and impeach him on third time— all of that.
But long term, it suggests that they have two choices. They either have to change their culture and go back to more traditional lifestyles to improve their demographics and to go back to the assimilationist model, as I think the Republicans have—I don’t see that happening—or they would have to lower taxes and cut back entitlements in these blue states to retain their high earners and their upper-middle-class people, who are for the most part leaving. They’re not going to do that.
As the historian Livy said about Rome’s problems in the Late Republic, the medicine for them is worse than the disease. They don’t want a society where a man and woman are married fairly early with two to three children. They really don’t want a society that is racially blind, and they don’t like the idea that a lot of red people stay in their states.
They welcome them to leave. And the result of all that is when they look at these long-term prognoses I just went over, they get very angry. And so what is the reaction? Is it to change the agenda to win you over the vote?
No. It’s to change the system.
And so if you want to know why they want to get rid of the Electoral College, or why they want the census to count residents that could be here, in many cases are here illegally, maybe 30 million, if you want to know why they want to pack the Supreme Court, if you want to know why they want the National Voters Compact to de facto get rid of the Electoral College, if you want to know why they want to pack the Supreme Court, it is that their message right now does not appeal to 51%, and the demography on which a democracy and a constitutional republic are based is not in their favor.
So their only alternative is to find radical changes in the system of governance to allow their unpopular agenda to be, what, de facto popular.
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