Here's a nightmare scenario: Come November, President Donald Trump is reelected despite losing the popular vote by many millions. That happened in 2000, keeping climate champion Al Gore out of the White House, and again in 2016, giving us the most anti-environment—and most authoritarian—president in modern history. There's nothing to stop it from happening again in 2020.

In this election year, two vast systems upon which we rely are unraveling: the climate and our democracy. Unfortunately, one of the two major US political parties is ignoring the first and actively subverting the second, undermining democratic norms, disenfranchising opponents, and opening the door to foreign manipulation.

Two-thirds of US adults think that the federal government is doing too little to protect the environment and prevent climate change. But when strong environmental or voting-rights legislation passes in the House of Representatives, it dies in the Republican-controlled Senate. That's because the GOP's current hold on white rural voters greatly magnifies the party's strength: There's one Republican senator for every 260,000 Wyomingites but only one Democratic senator for every 20 million Californians.

In 2019, the House passed bills to return to the Paris climate accord, ban offshore drilling, expand voting rights, and reduce the power of money in politics. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—the self-avowed grim reaper of progressive legislation—kept bills, even those with bipartisan support, from coming to a vote.

Nothing in the Constitution requires McConnell to act on legislation from the House—or, for that matter, to hold hearings on a nominee to the Supreme Court chosen by a Democratic president, or to allow witnesses at an impeachment trial. They're just norms of democratic government under which Congress has always functioned, norms that McConnell and the GOP have learned they can violate with impunity. Academics have a name for it: "asymmetric constitutional hardball."

This hardball plays out in the congressional and legislative redistricting that follows the decadal census. The GOP's Tea Party–fueled sweep in 2010 allowed it to draw radical new boundaries in a host of states. "He who controls redistricting controls Congress," boasted George W. Bush's consigliere Karl Rove, and the party's aptly named REDMAP project (see "Partisan Monsters," March/April 2020) resulted in a turnover of some 700 state legislative seats across the country.

Missouri, for example, has a fairly even partisan split, and recent environmental ballot measures passed with 66 percent and 80 percent support. But in the past six general elections, gerrymandering resulted in anti-environment Republicans winning twice as many statehouse races as Democrats. "When Missourians have a statewide vote on environmental issues, the environment almost always wins," says Sierra Club Missouri Chapter director John Hickey. "But when you look at votes in the state legislature, the environment loses. That's the big disconnect."

The manipulator who produced the gerrymandered districts in Missouri and many other states was Thomas Hofeller, a Republican political strategist who died in 2018. Computer files obtained by his estranged daughter showed his work in numerous states to "create a system wherein the Republican nominee would win." It was also Hofeller who proposed that a citizenship question be added to the 2020 census; he secretly boasted that depressing participation rates of noncitizen Latinos would be "advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites."

The Supreme Court ultimately blocked the citizenship question from the census but punted on gerrymandering. In the latter case, a Republican member of the redistricting committee in North Carolina was quoted saying, "I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats, so I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country." Even so, the conservative majority on the court threw up its hands, declaring that the issue was too political for it to decide.

As a result, says Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center's Democracy Program, "it looks like Republicans will control redistricting in some of the fastest-growing, most-diverse states, like North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Georgia. You've got to be concerned that there will be a lot of aggressive gerrymandering as well as discrimination against communities of color."

GOP election manipulators are also preventing their opponents from voting at all—see "The Easiest and Hardest Places to Cast a Ballot." Seven states will not allow you to vote unless you have a specific photo ID. (In Texas, a license to carry a concealed handgun is suitable for voting, but a student ID isn't.) Eight states bar felons from ever voting again.

Attacks on voting rights are increasing leading up to the presidential election. In December 2019, the Associated Press obtained a recording of a speech made by Justin Clark, senior counsel to Trump's reelection campaign, to top Republicans in Wisconsin. "Traditionally, it's always been Republicans suppressing votes in places," he said. This year, the Trump reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee are putting more than $10 million into defending their voter-suppression efforts.

In February, Senate Republicans blocked three election-security measures, including one that would require campaigns to report offers of foreign assistance to the FBI. And intelligence officials are warning lawmakers that Russia is once again trying to interfere in the election, with the aim of reelecting Trump.

That makes our vote this November perhaps the most important of our lives. "The architecture of a republic is surprisingly easy to pull down from within," writes Russian chess grand master and democracy activist Garry Kasparov. "You never know when your vote will be the last meaningful one you cast."

This article appeared in the May/June 2020 edition with the headline "Minority Rule."