The crisis isn't too much polarization. It's too little democracy.

[tinrobot]

Insightful article by Ezra Klein about the real problem:

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 would’ve won because Republicans control more states, though not more seats. Trump didn’t 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. Vox’s 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 I’ve gotten the same question over and over again in the past week: What are we going to do about all this polarization?

America’s problem right now isn’t a surfeit of political polarization. It’s 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 it’s only broken for the Republican Party.

more: https://www.vox.com/21561011/2020-election-joe-biden-donald-trump-electoral-college-vote-senate-democracy