RAW POWER

According to a 2017 Gallup poll, only 24% of Americans identified as Republicans, compared to 31% for the Democrats (the rest are independents).   That number for the Republican party has dropped five points since Donald Trump was elected in 2016.  If the Democrats have a pretty strong advantage in numbers, and with demographic polls showing that younger voters and America's growth in diversity favoring them over Republicans in the future, why then do the Republicans currently own the White House, the Senate and a majority of Governorships in the country?  Because, quite simply, the Republican party only cares about gaining power for themselves and has no qualms about how they get it.  Their macho swagger, with an  entitled sense that they should always run things, has lead to them find ways to game the system in their favor.  Consider that in this century there have been five presidential elections, and a Republican candidate has only won the popular vote once (in 2004), and yet by 2020 a Republican will have held the White House for 12 out of the past twenty years.
Recently, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell showed just how deeply he doesn't care about being a hypocrite: when asked what the Senate would do if a Supreme Court vacancy came up within ten months of the 2020 election, he quite simply answered "We'd fill it."  This is the same man who refused to allow a confirmation vote (or even to meet with) President Barack Obama's supreme court choice Merrick Garland ten months before the 2016 election, an unprecedented power grab that he vaguely justified as "letting the voters decide", a view point that he now completely refutes when the tables are turned.


And just look at the picture  of him smiling as he said "We'd fill it"; it's the look of a man who realizes how dishonest he was in the past and just doesn't care as long as he wins.  This is, after all, the same Senate leader who led his party to filibuster everything that then president Barack Obama did when his party was in the minority in the Senate, and said that his number one priority was preventing Obama from winning a second term.
And McConnell is certainly no outlier in the party: in 2009 the Republicans targeted state elections, realizing how important it was to control states that would be redistricting after the 2010 census.  Once power was gained, they used computerized voting lists to gerrymander state districts to their advantage, with strong results.  In 2012, more voters voted for Democratic candidates in the House of Representatives, but Republicans still held control because their manipulations had rendered many votes useless.
Along with gerrymandering, the party has also pushed the  notion of wide spread voter fraud, which has never been proven despite many accusations.  Not that that matters, it's just a convenient way for the party to pass laws that will lead to lower voter turnout in Democratic districts; from voter ID laws to restricting early voting, the Republican party has shamelessly exploited this false narrative to gain an advantage.  After all, what else can you expect from a party led by a man who claimed, without an ounce of proof, that he lost the popular vote in the presidential election because millions of people voted illegally?
Finally, this brings us the issue of the 2020 census.  The Trump administration has decided, for the first time in decades, to add the question "Are you a citizen of the US?" to the census form.  Although this may seem like an innocuous question, many political analysts have stated that it will greatly harm the political influence of more diverse, urban areas because many immigrants will fearfully refuse to fill out the form, fearing government deportation (and can you blame them?).  The administration has been saying that the citizenship question should be added to help aid the Civil Rights Voting Law, but this is a lie, as we now know for a fact.  Why?  Because recently Thomas B. Hofeller, a Republican party member who was famous for gerrymandering, passed away and his daughter released to the press computer files he had discussing the citizenship question issue in which  he blatantly admitted that this was a pure and simple power grab that would benefit the Republican party.  This is just two weeks before the Supreme Court is due to rule on whether the question is constitutional.  Given the brazen partisanship nature of adding the question to the census, it would seem to be common sense for the court to disallow it, but the court has become more and more partisan in recent years, and it sadly appears that the question will be allowed.
So what can Democrats do to prevent such naked lust for power on the part of the Republicans?  In the short run, not a lot; even if Trump is a one term president, the number of life time court appointees he has made will insure his insidious influence for years to come.  While I'm optimistic on the idea the country is slowly turning to the left politically, the fact that the Republicans have so openly worked to cement their advantage even with a lesser percentage of the vote shows that they will not go down slowly, and that the Republican party will have power despite its dwindling numbers for years to come.