Julie Marquis is a recovering journalist of four decades. A veteran of the Los Angeles Times, KFF News and Reuters, she led teams that won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and a Selden Ring for Investigative Reporting.
At age 9, as I clung to a raft beside my father floating in Lake Tahoe, I took my first interest in U.S. government.
“What is democracy?” I asked, summoning the mysterious word from a school textbook. I remember, nearly verbatim, what my dad said: “The majority rules but the minority is protected.”
This civics lesson was foundational in my life as an American citizen, the first of many such colloquies with my father in California’s glorious outdoors. I supposed, for an embarrassingly long time, that we the people were in charge. Sobered by my study of history and a hardbitten career in journalism, I still cling to my father’s words as a worthy ideal.
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By that standard, sadly, we haven’t got much of a democracy in America today, at least not at the federal level. We have rule by the minority, with the majority largely sidelined — and increasingly pissed off. Republicans, little more than a quarter of the U.S. voting population, dominate the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court. Elections don’t necessarily capture the popular will and are deemed suspect — by our own president — when they do. On many key issues, the Trump administration is sharply at odds with public opinion.
Most galling to this fifth-generation Californian is our state’s growing disenfranchisement. This is the most populous state, and among the world’s largest economies, typically paying billions more in taxes to Washington than we receive in federal funding. California should count far more than it does politically, and not just as Trump’s favorite punching bag.
Screwed from the start
The seeds of California’s plight were planted well before statehood, in the U.S. Constitution, with its provisions for the Electoral College and the Senate. To protect the interests of smaller and slaveholding states, every state got two senators, size be damned. But the country’s population and electorate bulged and split politically in ways the founders never foresaw, vastly worsening the Senate’s antidemocratic bent. Today, one resident of Wyoming has the same Senate representation as roughly 67 in California.
David Freed
We have been further disenfranchised by the Senate filibuster, effectively a 60-vote threshold for major legislation, often exploited to block gun control, climate protections and other goals dear to many Californians.
The Electoral College, based in part on flawed Senate representation, prevents direct election of the president, the nation’s increasingly powerful executive. This peculiar body, the legacy of elite, racist white men terrified of rampaging mobs (the rest of us), has overridden the popular vote twice this century, anointing George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016. California voted by significant margins against both. We might legitimately thank the Electoral College for the Iraq war and perhaps the ascension of MAGA.
Like the Senate, this system has become even less representative than the Constitution prescribes. In all but two states, the formula is “winner take all” — all Electoral College votes go to the victor at the polls. As a practical matter, this incentivizes a candidate like Trump to write off reliably blue California’s 54 votes to focus on a cluster of smaller swing states whose collective votes can neutralize ours. In his second term, Trump doesn’t even pretend to be our president: He issues vindictive decrees, such as plans to restart oil drilling off the California coast, and withholds critical funding while dismissing our governor, Gavin Newsom, with puerile glee as “New-scum.”
The California voters who did not back Trump — about 60% in 2024 — can feel reduced to teeth-gnashing and finger-wagging. “See you at the polls!” I recently sniped at Trump deputy Stephen Miller (our embittered native son) and White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt on X, a gesture so pathetic I hate to confess it.
Savannah Holguin
Newsom himself has resorted to trolling the president on social media, to much hilarity but unclear effect. More substantively, discontented Californians can flood the polls at the midterms, jam congressional phone lines, march against tyranny, etc. This, along with Trump’s own missteps and recklessness (e.g., in Iran) may help finally flush him down the political drain. But it won’t be enough to stave off the next threat to democracy.
Trump and MAGA have run a godawful stress test on our system of government, and it has largely failed. Californians should employ their collective influence to push for democratic reforms, some once unthinkable, before another would-be king crowns himself.
Dump the Electoral College
We should agitate for a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College, a move with broad American support. Unfortunately, this has been tried repeatedly to no avail. The framers set a high bar for amendments, requiring supermajority approval at the federal and/or state levels.
As Harvard historian Jill Lepore notes in “We the People”, we’ve passed precious few since the Bill of Rights, nearly always in times of war or serious conflict. It might behoove us to amend the amendments clause to make changes in general less onerous. No need to wait for bloodshed!
Another possibility is to effectively bypass the Electoral College. California has already joined an interstate compact in which each signatory would pledge its electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. But the compact won’t take effect until enough states join to account for a majority of all electoral votes nationally. The magic number is 270; though gaining momentum, the effort is still dozens short.
Bob Horning
The Senate’s even harder to fix. In theory, one could protect smaller states from the “tyranny of the majority” while correcting gross disparities in representation. Maybe add an extra legislator for, say, every 5 million people. Wyoming, with some 588,000 voters, would keep its two, and California would add seven or eight. Under the Constitution, however, every state must agree to a change in Senate makeup, and I’m pretty sure Wyoming — and the seven other states with populations smaller than San Diego’s — won’t budge.
More feasibly, the House of Representatives could be expanded, by statute instead of constitutional amendment, to compensate for the Senate’s inequities, says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law and a constitutional scholar. That would also make Electoral College vote tallies more reflective of the population, including California’s. In the meantime, the Senate could ditch the filibuster by a simple majority vote.
A new Constitution?
Ultimately, we’ll need a new Constitution, say Chemerinsky and other scholars. Originally written in secret by 55 men in the 18th century, it’s not a sacred text. We could keep the good stuff — the three branches, the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights (or most of it). At the same time, we could slip in protections against presidential power-grabs and partisan gerrymandering, curb the influence of money in elections and slap term limits on the Supreme Court.
Julie Marquis
In more mundane ways, California is already fighting back against federal overreach — through dozens of lawsuits, with some notable successes. But to register our discontent about fundamental inequities in our representation may require more imagination. Without resorting to full-blown secession (which for now appears unlikely), we might employ so-called soft-secession tactics such as leveraging our financial clout to win political concessions. One attention-grabbing possibility would be to divest our massive pension funds from companies in red states.
Lest some of these ideas be judged extreme, they are no more so than the circumstances that have left the largest and richest state kicked to the political curb. To ensure that democracy prevails, nothing can be deemed sacrosanct, not even the founders’ vision.
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