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Imagine that, four years ago, Donald Trump lost the presidential election by 2.9 million votes, but there was no Electoral College to weight the results in his favor. In January 2017, Hillary Clinton was inaugurated as president, and the Trumpist faction of the GOP was blamed for blowing an election Republicans could have won.

The GOP would have been locked out of presidential power for three straight terms, after winning the crucial popular vote only once since 1988. It might have lost the Supreme Court, too.

And so Republicans would likely have done what Democrats did in 1992, after they lost three straight presidential elections: reform their agenda and their messaging, and try to build a broader coalition, one capable of winning power by winning votes. This is the way democracy disciplines political parties: Parties want to win, and to do so, they need to listen to the public. But thats only true for one of our political parties.

Take the most recent election. Joe Biden is on track to beat Donald Trump by around 5 million votes. But as my colleague Andrew Prokop notes, a roughly 50,000-vote swing in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin would have created a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, tossing the election to the state delegations in the House, where Trump wouldve won because Republicans control more states, though not more seats. Trump didnt almost win reelection because of polarization. He almost won reelection because of the Electoral College.

The Senate tells a similar story. It is likely, when the votes are counted, that Democrats will have won more Senate votes in each of the last three Senate cycles, but never controlled the Senate in that time. Voxs Ian Millhiser calculates that if Senate Democrats lose the two Georgia runoffs, they will still, in the minority, represent 20 million more people than the Republican Senate majority.

I wrote a book on political polarization, so Ive gotten the same question over and over again in the past week: What are we going to do about all this polarization?

Americas problem right now isnt a surfeit of political polarization. Its a dearth of democracy. The fundamental feedback loop of politics parties compete for public support, and if they fail the public, they are electorally punished, and so they change is broken. But its only broken for the Republican Party.

The simplest way to understand American politics right now is that we have a two-party system set up to create a center-left political coalition and a far-right political coalition.

Two reinforcing features of our political system have converged to create that result. First, the system weights the votes of small states and rural areas more heavily. Second, elections are administered, and House districts drawn, by partisan politicians.

Over the past few decades, our politics has become sharply divided by density, with Democrats dominating cities and Republicans dominating rural areas. Thats given Republicans an electoral advantage, which theyve in turn used to stack electoral rules in their favor through aggressive gerrymandering, favorable Supreme Court decisions, and more. As a result, Democrats and Republicans are operating in what are, functionally, different electoral systems, with very different incentives.

To reliably win the Electoral College, Democrats need to win the popular vote by 3 or 4 percentage points. To reliably win the Senate, they need to run 6 to 7 points ahead of Republicans. To reliably win the House, they need to win the vote by 3 or 4 points. As such, Democrats need to consciously strategize to appeal to voters who do not naturally agree with them. Thats how they ended up with Joe Biden as their nominee. Biden was not the choice of the partys more ideological base. He was not the choice of those who wanted to see Democrats reflect the young, multiethnic, majority-female voters driving their electoral victories.

Biden was the choice of Democrats who favored electability above all. Electability is a weird idea: It asks not that you vote for who you find most electable, but for who you think a voter who is not like you would find most electable.

Biden promised that he could lure back some of the white, working-class voters whod powered Trumps 2016 victory, and he could do it explicitly because he was an old, moderate, white guy who could talk to the parts of the electorate that feared the ideological and demographic changes sweeping the nation. Democrats bought that pitch, and Biden, to his credit, delivered on it. The Democratic Party is led by a center-left leader because thats what it believed it needed in order to win. And winning mattered above all else.

For Republicans, the incentives are exactly the reverse. They can win the presidency despite getting fewer votes. They can win the Senate despite getting fewer votes. They can win the House despite getting fewer votes. They can control the balance of state legislatures despite getting fewer votes.

And so they do. Their base, like the Democratic base, would prefer to run more uncompromising candidates, and their donors would prefer a more uncompromising agenda. A party that needed to win a majority of the popular vote couldnt indulge itself by nominating Trump and backing his erratic, outrageous, and incompetent style of governance to the hilt. A party that needed a majority of the popular vote to win the Senate and the House couldnt keep trying to rip health care away from tens of millions of people while cutting taxes on the richest Americans.

Republicans are not irrational for spending down their electoral advantage on more temperamentally extreme candidates and ideologically pure policies. The process of disappointing your own base is brutally hard just look at the endless fights between moderates and leftists on the Democratic side. What motivates parties to change, compromise, and adapt is the pain of loss, and the fear of future losses. If a party is protected from that pain, the incentive to listen to the public and moderate its candidates or alter its agenda wanes.

An argument I make at some length in my book is that polarization is not, in and of itself, a good or a bad thing. What matters is the way it interacts with the broader political system: how elections are won, how legislation is passed, how disagreement is resolved. At the simplest level, higher levels of polarization will make parties more desperate to win, which in turn will push them to adapt the strategies needed to win in the system they inhabit.

But our electoral system is imbalanced, and its led to imbalanced parties: It forces Democrats to lean into the messy, pluralistic work of winning elections in a democracy, and allows Republicans to avoid that work, and instead worry about pleasing the most fervent members of their base. It forces Democrats to win voters ranging from the far left to the center right, but Republicans can win with only right-of-center votes.

And that is how we come to the situation we face today: A party that adapts to anti-democratic rules will quickly become a party that fears democracy. A party that knows it cant win a majority of the vote will try to make it difficult for majorities to vote, and have those votes count. A party that isnt punished for betraying the public trust will keep betraying it.

If Republicans were more worried about winning back some of Bidens voters rather than placating Trumps base, they wouldnt be indulging his post-election tantrum. It would be offensive to the voters theyre losing, and whom theyll need in the future. But theyre not, and so they have aligned themselves with Trumps claims of theft with profoundly dangerous consequences for America.

Trump is not in the White House, refusing to accept the results of the election, because America is polarized. He is there because of the Electoral College. Mitch McConnell is not favored to remain Senate majority leader because America is polarized. He is favored to remain Senate majority leader because the Senate is the most undemocratic legislative chamber in the Western world, and the only way Republicans seem to lose control is to lose successive landslide elections, as happened in 2006 and 2008.

In politics, as in any competition, the teams adopt the strategies the rules demand. Americas political parties are adopting the strategies that their very different electoral positions demand. That has made the Democratic Party a big-tent, center-left coalition that puts an emphasis on pluralistic outreach. And it has let the Republican Party adopt more extreme candidates, dangerous strategies, and unpopular agendas, because it can win most elections even while its losing most voters.

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Trumps refusal to accept election results is not the only democratic crisis - Vox.com

With millions of mailin votes cast this year, it has been reported that the majority have been for Joe Biden. There are two main reasons for this development. First, Biden voters tended to be more apprehensive than Trump supporters about possible exposure to COVID-19 at polling stations. Trump voters, on the other hand, were more anxious about voting by mail, in part because the president himself instructed them not to trust this type of voting and to instead vote in person or drop off their absentee ballots directly at the polling location.

December 8is the deadline by which, under U.S. federal law, states must resolve any issues pertaining to the Electoral College. Hence, U.S. states have more than amonth after election day to tally the popular vote, settle any challenges, certify the results, and award their electoral votes. The American people expect both state and federal law to be followed in determining which slate of electors the states are sent to the electoral college.

Instead of doubting and possibly even undermining the democratic process, Americans, including their president, should trust their election process and understand that in its effort to be accurate, transparent, and fair, it takes time and verification in order to make the final calls. These are not determined by what politicians say, even if this politician is the President of the United States. Instead, they are decided by the citizens votes, with election offices enforcing the state election rules and the courts resolving potential disputes relating to the election process itself.

Read more here:
Democracy at Play or at Risk in the United States - Cato Institute

ByRonald J. Daniels

Image caption:Ronald J. Daniels has served as the 14th president of Johns Hopkins University since 2009. A law and economics scholar, Daniels is the author or co-author of seven books and dozens of scholarly articles on the intersections of law, economics, development, and public policy.

The following remarks by Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels were recorded on Oct. 28 and presented Nov. 3 as part of the Times Higher Education Leadership & Management Summit

In March of this year, I sent a message to the Johns Hopkins University community announcing that due to the mounting threat of COVID-19, classes would be remote for the remainder of the semester and that all but our most critical research operations would be suspended.

It was an excruciating decision, one virtually unprecedented in our university's history.

In an instant, the hum of discovery, conversation, and passionate debate that defined so much of our university's identity was gone.

The same was true at universities around the world.

But although our campuses had emptied significantly, we were not in retreat. Indeed, our universitiesas they have time and again in times of crisisleapt into the breach to understand and combat this pandemic.

At Hopkins, one such example is that of Dr. Lauren Gardner, an engineering professor.

In late January, Dr. Gardner spent a weekend with one of her graduate students designing an interactive dashboard to track the trajectory of COVID-19 when it was still confined to Wuhan, China. She put it online expecting that it would attract a small audience of mostly infectious disease experts.

But as the virus spread from continent to continent, Dr. Gardner's dashboard grew far beyond its initial audience, becoming a vital source of accurate, reliable information about this virus for individuals, governments, and media organizations around the world.

Over time, we developed the website into the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, which now serves as a critical source of information about testing, tracking, and contact tracing; a repository of analysis and insight from faculty at every division of our university; and a virtual convening space to host experts, policy-makers, and leaders from across the government and the academy. To date, the site has been visited more than 900 million times.

This is but one of a multitude of ways that universities have confronted this pandemic.

We have provided direct care to patients; contributed to vaccine development; collaborated with partners across the public and private sectors to develop coherent, evidenced-based health policy; worked with our communities to put sound information in the hands of our neighbors, among many efforts.

This panoply of activities has underscored, once again, the immense and singular contributions of the university not only to the flourishing of individuals, but to the flourishing of democracy itself.

And this is what I want to posit today: that universities are among the core institutions in protecting the vitality of the democratic experiment and securing its promises.

Universities rest upon a foundation of reliable facts, and they are committed to free inquiry and the peaceful contestation of ideas. They are places of pluralistic inclusion and gateways of opportunity; certifiers of expertise and educators of citizens. They are integral to the formation of good public policy and essential to checking the excesses of power.

They are, in a word, indispensable to liberal democracy.

Now, when liberal democracy is itself increasingly fragile, we need them more than ever. At this moment, a staggering 54% of the world's population lives under authoritarian rule, and that number appears to be rising.

For this talk, I want to focus on two distinct (and, in this moment, especially timely) ways in which universities exercise their indispensable role: the discovery and diffusion of facts and the education of democratic citizens.

Several weeks ago, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hosted Dr. Anthony Fauci for a conversation. When asked about the role of universities in policy-making, Dr. Fauci was unambiguous.

Universities, he said, are an "indispensable part of any effort in science or global health" because they are "the home of people who ... get down to the facts."

As usual, he's right. Getting down to the facts is one of the defining virtues of research universities. From their origins in the 1870s, research universities have been forging the frameworks and methodologies for ascertaining facts and for communicating new knowledge into the world to establish standards of truth, neutralize disinformation, and shape sound public policy.

By the mid-20th century, our great universities had secured their place as being among the most trusted sources of reliable information and research in democratic society.

But in recent years, we have seen some indications that trust in the academic research enterprise has become more fragile. The reasons are complex and multifaceted, but one cause is surely the hyper-polarization of our politics that has accelerated the spread of mis- and disinformation and cast even basic facts into sources of partisan division.

The COVID-19 pandemic has, in part, amplified these conditions by creating what the World Health Organization calls an "infodemic" due to the deluge of misinformation flooding social media.

But there are signs of hope.

The threat of COVID-19 has also revealed the capacity of the research enterprise to adapt to radical new conditions.

Indeed, science is now being conducted at a pace and with a level of transparency that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. And public trust in science appears to be on the rise. One recent report showed that in the summer of 2020, the fraction of people who said they were skeptical of science declined for the first time in three years.

In 1967, the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote that "the chances for truth to prevail in public are greatly improved by the mere existence" of universities.

Our collective response to this pandemic is demonstrating that these words can still hold true today.

But, of course, as essential as research is, universities are also educational institutions.

This leads me to a second way that universities serve democracy: civic education.

By civic education, I mean specifically an education in democracy, one that is willing to stake out a normative position in defense of the democratic project.

Such an education should not be mistaken for the indoctrination of students in either thin patriotism or nave nationalism.

Rather, I believe, our universities have a responsibility to cultivate in students a pride in the ideals of liberal democracy; a sober and clear-eyed recognition of its incompleteness and its failures; and competence in the practices necessary to improve it.

For too long we have assumed that K12 schools alone must shoulder this burden. But with 70% of high school graduates now enrolling in college and liberal democracy under attack from so many corners, we cannot shirk this obligation.

The idea that institutions of higher education should train democratic citizens dates back to the founding of the republic. George Washington, in fact, urged colleges and universities to help students "get fixed in the principles of the Constitution ... as well as the professions they mean to pursue."

Special coverage

Johns Hopkins scholars share thoughts on American democracy, looking for signs of peril, threads of hope, and perhaps a shared vision for a better, more inclusive future

Over the centuries, we've executed the second part quite well, but we have too often lapsed on the first.

Indeed, the history of civic education is littered with episodic bursts of collective willpower followed by long periods of stagnation and retrenchment.

Today, civic education at colleges and universities is often reduced to community service. And while service is integral to citizenship formation, it is only one part of an education in democracy.

We need to do more.

Millions of college students will be voting this Election Dayand in fact, are already votingin the United States. Colleges and universities must equip these young people with the knowledge, skills, and values they need to perform this sacred and foundational act of citizenship intentionally, as well as to carry the duties of citizenship forward into the time between elections.

Making such an education a reality is easier said than done, especially at a time when even the most foundational civic norms (of tolerance, of open dialogue, of the free exchange of difficult ideas) have been so thoroughly tainted by partisanship. When we can't even agree on what the basic tenets of civic education are, how can we possibly teach it in a classroom or on a campus?

In the United States, at least, our universities have an advantage.

From community colleges to liberal arts colleges to public and private research universities, American higher education is extraordinarily diverse and independent. Our colleges and universities can be laboratories of civic experimentation, with the freedom to seed civic learning in everything from new curricular options, to voting initiatives, to programming that cultivates core skills of citizenship.

We should, in other words, let a thousand flowers bloom. Even in as polarized an age as ours, we simply cannot shy away from embracing educating our students in democracy.

Over the past two centuries, American universities have enriched and have been enriched by liberal democracy. They are intertwined with its values and its ends. And in times of crisis they have responded with vigor and vision.

We have already seen them do so with great success during this pandemic. But as we look ahead to the moment when we emerge from this period of strainperhaps aided by a vaccine whose development relies upon research conducted in a university laboratorywe should remain vigilant in ensuring that our universities continue to reexamine and requite their role as an indispensable institution in the democratic project.

The future of democracy as a system of government is increasingly uncertain. With a rise of populist forces globally and many existing democracies in regression, liberty itself seems under assault. In the United States, a diminished or warped democracy could have far-reaching repercussions for voting rights, the rule of law, education, the application of science, immigration, citizenship, and long-held societal norms we take for granted.

As we near an election in which many of the defining principles of democracy seem to hang in the balance, an array of Johns Hopkins experts will share their greatest hopes, their deepest fears, and their informed insights on the state of America's democratic experiment. Read more from The Democracy Project

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Democracy and the university in the age of COVID-19 - The Hub at Johns Hopkins

Thomas Friedman| The New York Times

On Saturday morning I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, Ann, who was stirring her Cream of Wheat, when out of nowhere she surprised me with a question: Is not lying one of the Ten Commandments?

I had to stop and think for a second myself, before answering: Yes. Thou shalt not bear false witness.

The fact that the two of us even momentarily struggled over that question is, for me, the worst legacy of the Trump presidency.

You remember the old joke? Moses comes down from Mount Sinai and tells the children of Israel: Children, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I bargained him down to 10. The bad news is that adultery is still in.

Well, Ive got bad news and worse news: Were now down to nine.

Yes, this was a historic four years even one of the Ten Commandments got erased. Lying has been normalized at a scale weve never seen before. Hence Anns question.

I am not sure how we reverse it, but wed better and fast.

People who do not share truths cant defeat a pandemic, cant defend the Constitution and cant turn the page after a bad leader. The war for truth is now the war to preserve our democracy.

It is impossible to maintain a free society when leaders and news purveyors feel at liberty to spread lies without sanction. Without truth there is no agreed-upon path forward, and without trust there is no way to go down that path together.

But our hole now is so deep, because the only commandment President Donald Trump did believe in was the Eleventh: Thou shalt not get caught.

Lately, though, Trump and many around him stopped believing even in that they dont seem to care about being caught.

They know, as the saying goes, that their lies are already halfway around the world before the truth has laced up its shoes. Thats all they care about. Just pollute the world with falsehoods and then no one will know what is true. Then youre home free.

The truth binds you, and Trump never wanted to be bound not in what he could ask of the president of Ukraine or say about the coronavirus or about the integrity of our election.

And it nearly worked. Trump proved over five years that you could lie multiple times a day multiple times a minute and not just win election but almost win reelection.

We have to ensure that the likes of him never again appear in American politics.

Because Trump not only liberated himself from truth, he liberated others to tell their lies or spread his and reap the benefits. His partys elders did not care, as long as he kept the base energized and voting red. Fox News didnt care, as long as he kept its viewers glued to the channel and its ratings high. Major social networks only barely cared, as long he kept their users online and their numbers growing. Many of his voters even evangelicals did not care, as long as he appointed anti-abortion judges. They are pro-life, but not always pro-truth.

For all those reasons, lying is now such a growth industry it deserves its own GDP line: Auto sales and durables were each down 10% last quarter, but lying grew 30% and economists predict that the lying industry could double in 2021.

Israeli Bedouin expert Clinton Bailey tells the story about a Bedouin chief who discovered one day that his favorite turkey had been stolen. He called his sons together and told them: Boys, we are in great danger now. My turkeys been stolen. Find my turkey. His boys just laughed and said, Father, what do you need that turkey for? and they ignored him.

Then a few weeks later his camel was stolen. And the chief told his sons, Find my turkey. A few weeks later the chiefs horse was stolen. His sons shrugged, and the chief repeated, Find my turkey.

Finally, a few weeks later his daughter was abducted, at which point he gathered his sons and declared: Its all because of the turkey! When they saw that they could take my turkey, we lost everything.

And do you know what our turkey was? Birtherism.

When Trump was allowed to spread the birther lie for years that Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was actually born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be president he realized he could get away with anything.

Sure, Trump eventually gave that one up, but once he saw how easily he could steal our turkey the truth he just kept doing it, until he stole the soul of the Republican Party.

And, had he been reelected, he would have stolen the soul of this nation.

He and his collaborators are now making one last bid to use the Big Lie to destroy our democracy by delegitimizing one of its greatest moments ever when a record number of citizens came out to vote, and their votes were legitimately counted, amid a deadly and growing pandemic.

It is so corrupt what Trump and his allies are doing, so dangerous to our constitutional system, but you weep even more for how many of their followers have bought into it.

Lies dont work unless theyre believed, and nearly half the American public has proved remarkably gullible, my former Times colleague David K. Shipler, who served in our Moscow bureau during the Cold War, said to me. I think of each of us as having our own alarm and its as if half of their batteries have died. Lots of Trumps lies, and his retweets of conspiracy fabrications, are obviously absurd. Why have so many people believed them? Im not sure its fully understood.

That is why its vital that every reputable news organization especially television, Facebook and Twitter adopt what I call the Trump Rule. If any official utters an obvious falsehood or fact-free allegation, the interview should be immediately terminated, just as many networks did with Trumps lie-infested, postelection news conference last week. If critics scream censorship, just shout back truth.

This must become the new normal. Politicians need to be terrified every time they go on TV that the plug will be pulled on them if they lie.

At the same time, we need to require every K-12 school in America to include digital civics how to determine and crosscheck if something you read on the internet is true in their curriculum. You should not be able to graduate without it.

We need to restore the stigma to lying and liars before it is too late. We need to hunt for truth, fight for truth and mercilessly discredit the forces of disinformation. It is the freedom battle of our generation.

Thomas Friedman writes for The New York Times.

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Friedman: Only truth can save our democracy - The Register-Guard

Speaking of those advantages, do you hear any Democrats saying that the Senate was stolen, even though their minority has consistently represented many millions more Americans than the Republicans majority? Instead, after a disappointing election night, they regrouped and said, we have to get out the vote and win those two runoffs in Georgia. Thats what you do in a democracy.

Sure, Democrats are mad at Mr. Trump and opposed to his presidency not only because he lost the popular vote by so much, but because he was and remains so manifestly unfit to hold the office, as many top Republicans used to say themselves.

One of the countless measures of Mr. Trumps unfitness is his willingness to accept or even solicit foreign interference to win. That is why, if there was any cheating in the 2020 election, it was committed by the president himself, when he tried to extort a foreign nation to gin up dirt on Mr. Biden and his son Hunter. For this high crime he was impeached by the House of Representatives. To be clear, that impeachment was not the result of Democrats refusal to accept his legitimacy to govern; it was a result of his decision to squander that legitimacy yet again by behaving like a strongman.

But the bigger picture here is the decades-long descent of the Republican Party which now prefers conspiracy theories over facts, magical thinking over science and delegitimizing its political opponents over substantive and responsible governance. Just a few recent examples: The racist birther slurs that Mr. Trump spearheaded against Mr. Obama; the reflexive opposition to everything Mr. Obama tried to do, even before he took office; the blanket denial of his appointment of federal judges, culminating in the theft of a Supreme Court vacancy that arose nearly a year before he left office; and finally, the seating of Mr. Trumps Supreme Court nominee only days before an election that he lost fair and square.

Republicans have been working tirelessly to make voting harder for many years, and especially this year, for precisely this reason. They knew that Mr. Trump was unpopular and that Mr. Biden would probably win if more people voted. When voter suppression failed, they had only two options: accept their fate like serious and responsible people do, or claim that any loss they suffered was by definition the result of fraud.

Once again, they picked door number two. This is the problem with getting comfortable with the perks of minority rule, as Republicans have over the past several decades. Its not just that you can ignore what most Americans want. Its that you genuinely believe that theres no way your opponent can win much less by an absolute majority without cheating.

That attitude is fatal to a democracy, the survival of which depends, above all, on the loser accepting the results. The Democrats, along with most of the rest of the world, understand this. One party alone is responsible for dragging the nation to this perilous place.

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Trump, in Attacking the Election, Is Attacking Democracy - The New York Times