In recent decades, the Republican Party of Texas has periodically revised and approved its official platform, and by any fair measure, it’s always an extraordinary document. As we’ve discussed before, year in and year out, the GOP platform in the Lone Star State is consistently one of the more astounding — and hysterical — documents one will find in 21st century American politics.
The latest installment is no exception. The Texas Tribune reported over the holiday weekend on state GOP delegates voting on a platform with all sorts of notable ideas, ranging from demanding Bible classes in public schools to seeking UFO information to calling for U.S. military bases to be named after Confederate leaders who took up arms against the United States.
But The Texas Tribune also highlighted one of the state Republican Party’s newer priorities.
Perhaps the most consequential plank [in the platform] 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.
It’s been a few decades since a Democratic candidate won statewide office in Texas, and with that in mind, it’s tempting to think Republican officials would be satisfied with the state’s electoral system as it currently exists.
Evidently, that’s not the case. For the Texas GOP, the party’s decades-long winning streak might someday come to an end, and so now is apparently the time to make it effectively impossible for a Democrat to win a statewide election.
Under the status quo, candidates compete in elections, and those who win a majority take office. Under the model envisioned by the Republican Party of Texas, that would no longer be sufficient: Candidates might receive majority support from Texas voters, but they wouldn’t prevail unless they also carried a majority of the state’s counties.
What would be the point of this? GOP officials in the state seem to realize that Democratic candidates generate a lot of support in Texas’ large urban areas. As those cities grow, it’s at least possible that a Democratic contender might someday even reach 51%. And that’s where this newly proposed county-based requirement would kick in, shifting power away from voters in order to ensure Republican rule. As historian Kevin Kruse explained: 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.
Kruse added, “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.” This is, in other words, the latest example of Republicans looking at democracy as something that needs to be rigged, rather than a system that needs to be preserved.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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