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On Oct. 6, 2018, Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court by the narrowest of margins, with 50 votes in favor and 48 votes against. He is the first justice in U.S. history to be confirmed by senators representing less than half of the country (44 percent), with a majority of the population (52 percent) opposed to his nomination.Kavanaugh is the second Supreme Court justice picked by President Donald Trump. Trump, in turn, is the second president in five elections to enter the White House after losing the popular vote. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore by 540,520 votes but won the Electoral College after the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount. Similarly, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by an overwhelming 2,809,197 votes. But like Bush, Trump won the Electoral College, and thus the presidency.The U.S. political system is institutionally rigged in favor of conservative white voters who drastically diverge from the political values of most Americans. This is why Kavanaugh was able to be confirmed by the Senate, and it’s the reason filmmaker Michael Moore, who predicted Trump’s victory in 2016, recently warned that Trump could very likely be a two-term president.I am a scholar of migration, which wouldn’t seem to be related to the U.S. electoral system at all. However, a close look at demographic shifts in the United States over the 20th century helps us understand just how rigged America’s government is, how Trump became president and why it’s more likely than not that he’ll be re-elected in 2020.Supporters of the Electoral College argue that the system insulates the executive branch from the whims of an uninformed public and balances power between sparsely populated rural states and densely populated urban states. As benign as this arrangement may seem, however, it’s steeped in the legacy of slavery, discrimination and racism. In practice, it systematically undervalues minority voters in urban areas in favor of white voters from rural counties.
The U.S. political system is institutionally rigged in favor of conservative white voters who drastically diverge from the political values of most Americans.
