Coward of the County

I noted in my last post that the Republican Party is engaged in an anti-democratic campaign of minority rule, and the Texas GOP has helpfully provided yet another stark illustration of that fact.

The excellent reporting of the Texas Tribune tells us that the Texas Republican Party is currently considering this plank as part of their platform:

Perhaps the most consequential plank calls for a constitutional amendment to require that candidates for statewide office carry a majority of Texas’ 254 counties to win an election, a model similar to the U.S. electoral college.

Under current voting patterns, in which Republicans routinely win in the state’s rural counties, such a requirement would effectively end Democrats’ chances of winning statewide office. In 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott carried 235 counties, while Democrat Beto O’Rourke carried most of the urban, more populous counties and South Texas counties. Statewide, Abbott won 55% of the popular vote while O’Rourke carried 44%.

However, some attorneys question whether such a proposal would be constitutional and conform with the Voting Rights Act because it would most likely limit the voting power of racial minorities, who are concentrated in a relatively small number of counties. (The party’s platform also reiterates its previous calls for the repeal of the Voting Rights Act).

If this sounds like a throwback to the decidedly undemocratic systems that southern states had before the civil rights era, well, you’re exactly right.

At the start of the 1960s, several states, especially in the South, still had century-old laws on the books which gave uneven power to voters in sparsely-populated rural districts at the expense of voters in more concentrated urban areas. 

Georgia, in particular, had a complicated "county unit" system that sounds a bit like what the Texas Republican Party is considering. As I detailed in White Flight, the system had been designed to protect the power of white rural conservatives in the early twentieth century. Soon after those forces enacted a series of schemes to minimize and marginalize the presence of African Americans in state politics — the white primary, a grandfather clause, a literacy test, etc. — they moved to sideline another perceived threat to their power, the growing cities of the state.

Under the “county unit” scheme, installed in 1917, statewide and congressional contests were determined not by the popular vote, but through an arcane electoral arithmetic instead. Originally, each of Georgia’s 159 counties was granted twice as many “unit votes” as it had members in the lower house of the state legislature. The eight most populous counties received six votes each; the next largest thirty were given four votes each; and the remaining 122 smaller counties each had two. In any election, the candidate who won a plurality of a county’s votes won all of its “unit votes,” and whoever had the most “unit votes” won the election. (It was, as you can tell, a crude counterpart to the Electoral College.)

Now, when the system was first installed, the distribution of unit votes roughly corresponded to that of the state’s population. But the allotments were fixed, and not tied to any shift in population. As the cities grew and rural areas shrank, the county unit system thus guaranteed that smaller counties wielded wildly disproportionate political power.

By World War II, a single vote from the state's smallest county was essentially equal to 325 votes from an urban area like Atlanta. The result, of course, was that state politics were dominated by white, segregationist politicians from rural areas. Not only could they completely ignore major population centers and still win resoundingly, they could lean into the dynamic, playing to the sense of resentment of those rural white conservative voters about the city dwellers by bragging about how they’d put them in their place. The result was a system the political scientist V.O. Key called “the rule of the rustics.”

In the early 1960s, the Warren Court began to strike down practices like Georgia's by initiating what came to be known as the principle of "one person, one vote." The first breakthrough came in a reapportionment decision that involved a similarly unfair system in my home state of Tennessee, a case called Baker v. Carr.

Tellingly, when Earl Warren was later asked what was the most important decision of his time on the Supreme Court, he didn't say Brown v. Board. Without hesitation, he picked Baker v. Carr. And with good reason. More than any other single decision, Baker ushered in a more truly democratic era throughout much of the country.

The Voting Rights Act, which cam just a few years later, helped complete this revolutionary creation of a true multiracial democracy by sweeping away the racially discriminatory measures that went hand in hand with these measures that discriminated against city dwellers.

And just as the right-wing majority on this Supreme Court has cynically eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, so too are right-wing partisans seeking to roll the clock back on reapportionment.

If Texas Republicans embrace this return to a county-unit type of system, they’ll actually have created something even more unequal than the scheme concocted by segregationists of a century ago.

Harris County, the home of Houston, has a population of 4.7 million, while Loving County has a total population of 64. Harris County has a sizable black population, while Loving is (as far as I can tell) entirely white. But one vote in Loving would mean more than 70,000 votes in Harris.

It’s staggeringly unequal, and silencing an “urban” vote that is of course now not just coded as more liberal but racially diverse too. And that, of course, is the point.

But if Texas embraces this, the case will speed to a Supreme Court that has proven it will toss aside even the most long-established precedents to see its agenda secured. I’m sure they’re looking for an excuse to tear down Baker v. Carr and its descendants in order to enshrine their vision of (white rural conservative) minority rule.

And if they have to toss aside democracy itself, well, so be it.