Why Blue States Are the Real ‘Tea Party’
By STEVEN JOHNSON
DECEMBER 3, 2016
When the modern Tea Party movement coalesced in the early days of the Obama presidency, its allusion to the political grievances of the protesters in Boston Harbor a couple of hundred years earlier seemed plausible enough: Its members felt that their taxes were too high and their interests not adequately represented by the remote authorities in Washington.
But the election of 2016 presents a challenge to that historical lineage. The home states to the Tea Party are actually doing great on the taxation and representation front. It’s the progressive blue states that should be protesting.
Start with the Electoral College. It has always deviated from the one-person-one-vote system that most Americans imagine they live in, but demographic shifts in recent years have made its prejudices more conspicuous, culminating in the striking gap between Hillary Clinton’s decisive popular vote victory and her Electoral College loss.
Thanks to the two extra votes delivered to each state for its two senators, the Electoral College gives less populated states a higher weight, per capita, than it gives more populated states in the decision of who should be the next president.
This was always a betrayal of one-person-one-vote equality, in that a voter in rural Wyoming has more than three times the power of a voter in New Jersey, the country’s most densely populated state. But those imbalances have become far more glaring, thanks to a filter bubble more pronounced than anything on Facebook: the “big sort” that has concentrated Democrats in cities and inner-ring suburbs, and Republicans in exurbs and rural counties.
The right way to think about the political conflict in this country is not red state versus blue state, but red country versus blue city. And yet we are voting in a system explicitly designed to tip the scales toward the countryside.
But that’s only part of the imbalance. When the founders were plotting the Electoral College, more urban states to the north had significant debt, while the rural Southern states were in better financial shape, thanks in part to the free labor of slavery. Recall the line from “Cabinet Battle #1” from the musical “Hamilton”:
“If New York’s in debt —
Why should Virginia bear it? Our debts are paid, I’m afraid
Don’t tax the South cuz we got it made in the shade”
There’s a straight line that connects that caricature of more urban Northern states living beyond their means in the late 1700s to Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens in the 1980s: the prevailing sense that the big cities are dependent on government bailouts and benefits, while the less dense regions live responsibly. That sketch might have been accurate two centuries ago (at least if you took slavery out of the equation) but it bears no resemblance to the current economic map of the United States, where the major cities are now overwhelmingly the engines of economic growth and wealth creation — and also tax revenue.
For complicated reasons — some of which have to do with rural poverty, some of which have to do with the basic physics of supporting infrastructure in low-density regions — a disproportionate amount of per capita federal spending and benefits now flow down to the low-density states.
According to a study by the Tax Foundation conducted several years ago, for every dollar New Jersey pays in federal taxes, it receives 61 cents in benefits and other federal spending. For the same dollar of taxes Wyoming spends, it gets $1.11 back.
Put those two trends together and you have a grievance worthy of the original Tea Party: more taxation with less representation. The urban states are subsidizing the rural states, and yet somehow in return, the rural states get more power at the voting booth.
You can represent the injustice of this arrangement mathematically. Think of it as two different kinds of return on investment: how much does each state receive for every dollar it pays in taxes, and how much Electoral College influence does each state get for each vote cast. Take the average of those two data points and you have a measure of which states are getting shortchanged by the system. Call it the disenfranchisement index.
The states that rank at the top of this list are the ones that are paying the highest proportion of the country’s bills while ranking lowest in terms of voting power in the Electoral College. The first 12 on the list have all voted for the Democratic candidate in at least two of the last three elections, and all but two of them went for Mrs. Clinton in 2016: New Jersey, Minnesota, Illinois, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin, Michigan, Connecticut, California, Washington and Oregon.
Those states make up the overwhelming majority of Hillary Clinton’s Electoral College support in 2016. They are also paying billions of dollars of taxes and receiving only a fraction back in benefits and other federal spending. By contrast, 19 of the 25 most empowered (and largely rural) states went for Mr. Trump.
The gap between the two extremes is remarkable. South Dakota, one of the most empowered states in the country, received almost twice the return on taxes as California, the country’s most populated state, while also commanding nearly twice as much power per capita in the Electoral College. If anyone should be declaring themselves the heirs to the Boston patriots who rebelled against the unjust taxation of King George, it’s the big city blue state citizens who are funding a system that by law undercounts their votes.
To date, wealthy states like California, New York and New Jersey have not expressed much outrage at this situation, in part because they have experienced less economic anxiety than some of the struggling red states and in part because the injustice has not been as visible during the Obama years, thanks to his Electoral College victories. But as our cities get wealthier and more diverse and begin to realize how the system is genuinely “rigged” against them, tectonic forces may well be unleashed.
If a Trump administration that urban states voted overwhelmingly against starts curtailing voting rights and rolling back drug-law reform, reneging on the Paris climate accord, deporting immigrants and appointing justices that favor overturning Roe v. Wade, states like California and Massachusetts are sure to start asking hard questions about why they are subsidizing a government that doesn’t give them an equal vote.
