Can urban Democrats? Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state won a seat last November in her rural, working-class Third Congressional District. She shouldn’t have. Wasn’t expected to. National Democrats wrote her off. Her victory was “widely considered the biggest electoral upset of 2022,” the New York Times reminds Thursday readers. We’ll come back to her. Q: When is majority rule not majority rule? A: When it’s washed through the legacy of the country’s slave-era constitution. That constitution, combined with a) political parties’ (one in particular) urge to gerrymander and/or legislate their way into permanent power, and b) left- and right-leaning people’s tendency to sort themselves into urban and rural areas of the country, means that in many statewide and local races, a majority of citizens do not get to elect candidates who reflect their views. Call this democracy-lite. There is no need to rehash how that’s played out in 21st century presidential outcomes. There is also my reminder from yesterday: The right’s existential crisis began on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, when the country elected a Black man to the White House. White conservatives until then could ignore repeated warnings that by 2042 demographic shifts would mean whites would no longer be a numerical majority in “their” country. That white voters had not been a voting majority for many election cycles was too subtle. But under our clunky system “not a voting majority” does not mean an electoral minority. The outcome of statewide and federal district elections depends somewhat on the urban-to-rural…