There is an interesting article on the Vox site, by Ezra Klein, which makes the case that too much polarization isn't the problem, it's too little democracy.
"If Republicans couldn’t win so much power while losing votes, the US wouldn’t be in the current crisis."
"The simplest way to understand American politics right now is that we have a two-party system set up to create a center-left political coalition and a far-right political coalition....Two reinforcing features of our political system have converged to create that result. First, the system weights the votes of small states and rural areas more heavily. Second, elections are administered, and House districts drawn, by partisan politicians....Over the past few decades, our politics has become sharply divided by density, with Democrats dominating cities and Republicans dominating rural areas. That’s given Republicans an electoral advantage, which they’ve in turn used to stack electoral rules in their favor through aggressive gerrymandering, favorable Supreme Court decisions, and more. As a result, Democrats and Republicans are operating in what are, functionally, different electoral systems, with very different incentives."
"To reliably win the Electoral College, Democrats need to win the popular vote by 3 or 4 percentage points. To reliably win the Senate, they need to run 6 to 7 points ahead of Republicans. To reliably win the House, they need to win the vote by 3 or 4 points. As such, Democrats need to consciously strategize to appeal to voters who do not naturally agree with them."
"For Republicans, the incentives are exactly the reverse. They can win the presidency despite getting fewer votes. They can win the Senate despite getting fewer votes. They can win the House despite getting fewer votes. They can control the balance of state legislatures despite getting fewer votes."
"And so they do. Their base, like the Democratic base, would prefer to run more uncompromising candidates, and their donors would prefer a more uncompromising agenda. A party that needed to win a majority of the popular vote couldn’t indulge itself by nominating Trump and backing his erratic, outrageous, and incompetent style of governance to the hilt."
"...Republicans are not irrational for spending down their electoral advantage on more temperamentally extreme candidates and ideologically pure policies. The process of disappointing your own base is brutally hard — just look at the endless fights between moderates and leftists on the Democratic side. What motivates parties to change, compromise, and adapt is the pain of loss, and the fear of future losses. If a party is protected from that pain, the incentive to listen to the public and moderate its candidates or alter its agenda wanes."
Yes the system is rigged against the Democrats and against democracy.
ReplyDeleteThe electoral college needs to be abolished in favor of direct election of the President. Why should only a few states decide the election, and only a few people within those states? We are headed for trouble if we continue to have presidents win by the electoral votes but not the popular vote. We are headed for even worse trouble if we have small vote margins decided by court. We should have the presidency decided clearly by popular vote, likely on election night.
Trump questioned the legitimacy of Obama, and will now question the legitimacy of Biden. Democrats need to question the legitimacy of the present system unless it become more democratic.
Agree that the Electoral College has outlived its usefulness. It is a relic of the 18th and 19th centuries. It would (I think) take a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Electoral College. Which seems unlikely in the present polarized situation. A work-around might be a solution, such as expanding the apportioned system used by Maine and Nebraska.
ReplyDeleteStanley has suggested ranked-choice voting to allow more parties. Not sure if that would require an amendment, but worth thinking about.
Katherine's work-around is worth doing in every state. It should be tied to independent bipartisan redistricting commissions, like Iowa's, to draw congressional (and state legislative) district lines.
ReplyDeleteOne huge problem of democracy is that the voters don't choose their representatives; the representatives choose their voters. Back in the old days -- gerrymandering is as old as the republic -- the legislators who drew the maps had to know the state intimately. Typically, one party's negotiators would give tentative approval to a district line, and then one of them would rush to a phone and call Ol' Mac Wiseman, who would listen to the description and then say, "You idiot, you just put a bunch of our most reliable voters into a district the other party is going to hold in perpetuity. Go back and re-draw the line." But there had to be Old Macs who knew the state well enough to offer such counsel. Today, any boob can play with a mouse and see on screen how his proposed district voted in the past three presidential and two off-year elections. Nobody involved has to know squat about the voters he is moving around. All he has to do is follow the numbers.
That is why The Don and Wilbur Ross twisted so many laws to produce a Census 2020 that is useless for most of the usual purposes, but good for electing Republicans.
And the money, but the Supreme Court said it's speech, and Congress can't mess with speech. And now judges are groomed to make sure that never changes, or they never will be justices. Incidentally, the grooming costs money, which is not spent in the public's interest. But you know that.
As I am conservative, perhaps it is to be expected that I'd wish to conserve the current system rather than enact bold reforms. I shall not disappoint :-)
ReplyDeleteMy view, FWIW, is that these objections to "insufficient democracy" are of a piece with desires to pack the courts, get around pesky legislatures with popular referendums, admit more (liberal) states to the union and abolish the electoral college. The umbrella term we should apply to all these initiatives is "power grab". In that, they are not really very different from - and possibly a good deal more dangerous than, because they are not as ineptly pursued - Donald Trump's ham-handed attempts to subvert the results of the recent presidential election.
Here is a friendly suggestion: if you wish to have more senators, better legislative district apportionment and friendlier judges on the bench - in a word, to win more elections - then run better candidates, support better policies and make better arguments. We know Democrats can do this. They achieved legislative majorities and enact major changes and reforms as recently as 2008. This was done without court packing, state packing or any of these other dodgy tactics.
Ah, the old conservative assumption that everything is (or should be) as the Founders made it and will be in saecula saeculorum. The first members of the House of Representatives represented 40,000 people. Today the average member has 711,000 constituents. Nobody can democratically represent 711,000 people, especially when half hate the other half. Politicians deal with that by drawing districts with majorities of people who hate the same people they hate. They save a lot of thought and compromise that way.
DeleteThat is why only about 35 House seats are really competitive in any election.
The House members have such large constituencies because there only 435 voting House members. That has been the case since 1929. The German Bundestag has 598 members, the British Parliament has 650. That adds up to 1,248 representatives for a total population that is about half of ours.
Nothing about those numbers, and nothing in the way the parties have worked around the numbers, carries the aroma of democracy or even a republican form of government. Our House is more like Wheel.Of.Fortune than anything the Founders tried to achieve. But what the heck. In saecula saeculorum, as the conservatives say.
"...run better candidates, support better policies and make better arguments." Jim, I totally agree that we should do that. And I don't favor packing the courts or adding more states. But that's not really what the article was about. It was about how a minority wins elections and entrenches power with no real incentive to cooperate or compromise. And they don't do it by means of their better ideas. In fact there was a dearth of any ideas at all in this election cycle, the Republicans didn't even bother with a platform. I think they just dittoed the one from last time.
DeleteThis is all the 2020 Republican Platform resolved:
DeleteRESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda;
RESOLVED, That the2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;
RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration;
and RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.
Putin couldn't have written a better one. But, as I said, they saved a lot of thought and compromise that way.
"I don't favor packing the courts or adding more states. But that's not really what the article was about. It was about how a minority wins elections and entrenches power with no real incentive to cooperate or compromise."
DeleteHi Katherine, I disagree.
I am sorry to say, I found Klein's entire article an exercise in dishonesty, couched in objective-sounding prose.
The fundamental problem for Democrats, as Klein notes, has been that their supporters are clustered in a relative handful of urban areas.
It makes no difference in our system whether a Democrat gets 50.1% of the popular vote in California or 90% - a differential which represents something like 5 million votes. (Which might approximate Biden's total national-vote advantage this year.) Biden gets the same number of electoral votes either way.
Klein posits that as a big problem. It's not; it's the way our system has been constructed from the beginning. To put it baldly, the Founding Fathers wanted to set up a system which would protect the rest of us today from the Tyranny of California - which nevertheless certainly exists today in some ways in spite of the Founders' precautions.
His analysis which concludes that Democrats need to choose a moderate candidate while Republicans have the luxury of choosing an extreme candidate, is specious. For one thing, it's based on a sample size of one, the one example being Donald Trump. The prior Republican-nominated candidates for president were Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W Bush, Bob Dole and George HW Bush. In the world of conservative politics, every single one of them would be considered a moderate.
As for Trump: he's governed as a Republican moderate, too. When he ran in 2016, the right wing of conservatism was represented by the Tea Party. But Trump smashed the Tea Party to smithereens. In terms of his policies, Trump is sort of an odd duck: his signature issues are anti-immigration, trade protectionism and foreign-policy isolation, all of which fit under a sort of populist, nationalist umbrella (and in none of which he succeeded very well, btw). None of those have been mainstream Republican core values during our lifetimes. Other traditional conservative issues, he has had no interest in except insofar as they might help him get re-elected.
It also remains to be seen whether Biden will govern as a moderate Democrat. He certainly is being pressured to pursue progressive policies. I believe his instincts are moderate, and it's possible that those instincts will prevail during his presidency. I hope so.
But back to Klein: national vote counts mean nothing at all in our system. When Klein and others cite them, they are making bad faith arguments. Even sillier is his aggregating the number of total votes from all the Senate races to come with some sort of a "national" Senate vote. Senators don't represent the United States. They represent their individual state.
Klein loathes the Electoral College because it reflects the reality that we are a union of states. The way to become President of the United States is to win many individual state elections. The way the electoral college aggregates the results of those state elections, large states like California, Texas, New York and Florida still carry far more weight than Wyoming and the Dakotas. Fundamentally, it is a democratic system. But a system which doesn't yield Ezra Klein the results he wants - except for 2008, 2012 and 2020.
As for the other items I mentioned - court packing and the rest - they all are of a piece. They all represent ways for disgruntled Democrats to work around the pesky reality that they are so unappealing at present to broad sectors of the populace that they could barely eke out an electoral victory over someone as monumentally inept and dangerous as Donald Trump.
I read an article by Michael Barone, saying why he thinks the pollsters were wrong about the way people were predicted to vote this time. His idea was that white college educated voters felt silenced and intimidated by "cancel culture" and political correctness, at work and in academia. That if they expressed their Republican views they feared retaliation. The noise you heard was my eyeballs rolling to the back of my head. Because people have been pretty leather-lunged about expressing their views, including and especially Trump supporters.
ReplyDeletePeople didn't answer polls if they had something better to do. Most people had something better to do. Barone's article even said that only 10% of people contacted about a poll will answer one. The "randomness" of the sample is lost. Most people think of phone calls (or emails) from strangers like mosquitoes. An irritant. They'd rather swat them than answer them.
That's likely. Robocalls are going to kill telephones. When I answer, I don't say hello right away. I wait for the sound of the robot to kick in, and then I set the phone down to delay its call to the next victim. I predict cells phones will become all-text in the near future as users seek ways to avoid the robots.
DeleteWe have answered a few polls because we felt sorry for college students who were trying to complete a research project. The sympathy started to evaporate about 15 minutes into the call, or sooner. Now we just pass on it.
DeleteWe actually do want to speak with family and friends on the phone, either by landline or cell. What they need is a better junk call blocker.