There are a bunch of elections running around my mind these days: national, local, clubs and associations, and historic. In many of them (but not the one in which you’re a candidate, so don’t worry, I’m not talking about you), it seems to me the skill set necessary to be a successful candidate is not only completely different from the skill set necessary to be a good office holder, but sometimes completely at odds with it.
Consider, for example, the presidency of the USA. To be a good candidate for the job, one has to be an incredible fund-raiser, be a glad-hander, be photogenic (with an equally photogenic family, or at least a compelling family story), be able to whip up crowds of enthusiasm, and be able to speak in sound bites. And in the modern era, one also has to be a staunch ideologue, in order to whip up the enthusiasm of the extreme members of one’s own political party. But to be a good president, one has to be able to think deeply about important issues, and then make hard decisions about them; to be able to negotiate with people in equally powerful positions from (perhaps) less powerful countries; be able to keep secrets about the biggest issues that would bring in incredible amounts of publicity; be willing to compromise on almost everything in order to accomplish anything; and be able to inspire people to be selfless and to aspire for greatness.
Mind you, the same dichotomy (although on a much smaller scale) seems to obtain for most any office that is elected: mayor, congressman, club official, you name it.
Having grumbled about this state of affairs — which is the same state we’ve been in for a very long time — I can’t see that there’s any better way to choose who we want to elect to office. But I sure wish there was a better way.
I find it ironic that Donald Trump keeps pushing for “complete and total presidential immunity” to block his forthcoming trials for orchestrating an attempted coup (see, for example, this article). Follow it through logically: if a president has complete and total immunity, wouldn’t President Biden ordered Trump’s immediate imprisonment, probably in a supermax prison or a deep hole in the ground? “For the national good,” of course. But even if he shouldn’t do it, well, complete and total presidential immunity.
In other presidential news, last night I spoke to Central Texas Mensa about the presidents. My talk, “Hail to the Chiefs! (and their Vice Presidents, and First Ladies…)” was very well received, and I was thrilled with the audience. I’m available to speak to your group, as well.
I just completed my absentee ballot for this year’s election here in New York City’s 45th assembly district. As with the linked article, I, too, have a dearth of choices. For two of the races (judgeships), there was only one candidate, while for the State Supreme Court, there were seven candidates for the six seats (five of them were endorsed by all three parties represented on the ballot [Democratic, Republican, and Conservative], one is Democratic-only, and the other Republican and Conservative only). And in the City Council race, there is the incumbent (registered Democrat) running as a Democrat, Republican, and Conservative, while his opponent (registered Republican) is running as an independent.
For the unopposed judgeships, I wrote in votes for “None of the Above,” as I did for five of the six seats on the Supreme Court (I only voted for the Democratic-only candidate). For the City Council, the incumbent couldn’t be bothered to tell us his top issues, nor to answer the questions about his positions on the major topics, while his challenger strikes me as too religiously doctrinaire, so I wrote in myself.
Why am I posting this, along with that article link? Because I agree with it emphatically… and I can’t think of any simple way to get us out of the mess. We have the vote… but we’ve given the two major parties so much power over all the features of our government that they’ve made our vote completely meaningless. While political gerrymandering is less of an artificial impediment here in New York City (there’s no feasible way I can imagine to make the districts competitive between the parties, when the overwhelming majority of registered voters are all in one party), it also results in the extremists who can’t even talk with the other side, which is the dysfunction we’ve been seeing in Washington. So I’m voting “none of the above” in protest of the system. As absentee ballots, they won’t be noticed; as write-in votes, they’ll be recorded as “write-in votes,” and no one will even bother to read whose name I wrote in. I think I’m just shouting at the wind, but it does make me feel marginally better. Then again, climate change will probably kill us before the political extremists can truly ruin the world, so there’s that.
Watching the Keystone Kops routine in the House of Representatives as the Republican “party” tries to elect a Speaker, is it finally time for them to admit they are no longer a party, but a coalition? It sure seems to me like it’s time for the Republicans to cut loose the Trumpian party and admit they do not have a majority, that the Democrats currently have a plurality in the House. Then the Republicans could negotiate a coalition government with the Democrats, who are actually willing to govern, as most of the Republicans are, and cut out the Trumpians who only want to watch it all burn.
I just listened to Mike Pence announce his campaign for pope… er, priest… um, religious leader. I mean, wow! From his point of view, every right listed in the Constitution is a “god-given right.”
It started with his wife’s introduction of him, noting that he is here because of his humility before god. And then he took the stage to introduce himself, telling us he is a Christian first, a conservative second, and a Republican third. Well, that’s very nice, but we don’t (or shouldn’t) elect religious leaders in this country.
It’s almost like he’s forgotten the last phrase of the Constitution’s Article VI: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” While he wasn’t saying his Christianity is required to be president, he certainly made me—as someone who is not a Christian—feel like I won’t be welcome in his United States.
Mind you, none of this is a surprise; it’s nothing new from him. It’s just that a Christian President Pence would not be hidden by the masking effect that Vice President Pence had in Grifter-in-Chief Trump’s shadow.
The news programs keep showing clips from Congressional committee “hearings.” I keep watching them. And I keep wondering: when last did a Congressperson sitting on one of those committees ask a question of a witness to which the Congressperson did not know the answer? And when last did a committee, holding one of those hearings, learn something new that informed their decisions on pending legislation?
It may be that the media only show those clips they deem “entertaining” enough, rather than all the business, and that indeed there is some information exchange in these hearings. But it sure seems as if the only reason they hold these hearings is so that the Congressfolk can pontificate, can act outraged, can make speeches that can then be excerpted into television commercials in their never-ending quest to be re-elected. Today, it was Bernie Sanders yelling at the CEO of Starbucks. Yesterday, it was a Ted Cruz calling the Secretary of Homeland Security a liar.
When I sit on a board of directors, when I listen to the debate on the motions before we vote, I actually listen, to learn my fellow directors’ opinions, and sometimes to help me decide which course of action is best for the organization. I don’t go in to every meeting with my mind made up, looking only to score points. But then perhaps that’s the reason I’m not in Congress.
We frequently hear that the dysfunction in the US government is due to extreme partisanship. The few times our elected officials actually work with members of differing parties are hailed as wonderful examples of bipartisanship, rather than simply government as it ought to be.
But how much of that dysfunction, or that outright enmity, is a result of the team colors they all wear for no good reason?
Every time we report on those elected officials, whether on television or in print, it takes the form of Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) or Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Senator John Tyler (W-VA) or Representative John Quincy Adams (D-R – MA). What if we dropped that letter before the state appellation? What if we didn’t bother listing the political party? Does it really matter to us in the news report? Don’t we already know which party they belong to? And if we don’t, does knowing it change our view of the news being reported, of the things being said?
The Super Bowl is a similar label. The owners of that name want the news to report on it as if it were news, but they want entertainment to pay them for the rights to even say it out loud. Perhaps it’s time we started viewing political parties the same way. After all, they’ve paid for their members’ careers, so why should we be giving them free advertising?
Gratuitous George Washington quote on political parties: “Political parties may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
I’m watching the election returns (and still watching them). One thing I keep hearing is surprise that the predicted “red wave” did not materialize. I think the fact that the pundits expected one is a result of poor polling.
Specifically, I think political polls are too cut-and-dried, too black-or-white, without enough shades of gray. But none of us are so one-dimensional. I answered one phone call this election season which was a poll, and I tried to give them my thoughts. But the poll wasn’t robust enough to properly record them. The first question was “which is the most important issue for you when you’re voting this November.” The problem is, I’m not a one-issue voter, and I’ve a hunch most of us aren’t. But every poll which focused on “the economy/inflation” as the one issue voters would find most important missed the nuances.
Certainly, the economy is one of the issues I considered. But it’s not the only one. I also considered crime, and health care, and national defense, and voters’ rights, and the intrusion of the nanny state, and the environment, and appointments to the federal judiciary, and… well, you get the point. I think about all the ways the government can affect my life (for good or ill), and then I consider the candidates, and I choose those who I think will do the most good and the least bad. Asking me which one issue matters, and then which candidate I’ll vote for to serve that issue, means you’re gathering data that doesn’t reflect reality.
Another failing I saw in this year’s polling was the focus on President Biden’s approval rating, which is indeed quite low. But the polls only considered that, historically, a president with a low approval rating saw the other party win most of the seats in Congress. They didn’t consider that we can think poorly of Joe Biden’s job performance, while at the same time not wanting the Trumpian party candidates to win election and lend any more credence to that grifter.
Unfortunately, that’s the pity of most of our recent elections: very few of us are voting for the candidates; we’re voting against their opponents. I’m going to write directly to both Governor Hochul and Attorney General James, to tell them that my votes for them were not part of any mandate they might consider their elections to be. Rather my votes were against their opponents (well, in the case of James, I do favor certain of her ongoing cases that I fear would have been dropped had her opponent won).
I think that may be the big story no one is telling about the current election cycle: not many of us are truly happy with any of our choices. We’re voting to preserve what we have and improve our lives despite our representatives, not through them.
The current state of political strife in the United States is something we should all fear. It is dangerous to our continued mutual welfare and well-being, as well as dangerous to our hoped-for future.
But it is not something that simply arose, not a natural outgrowth of our thinking and feeling. It is a result, carefully built, that points to an incredibly successful, decades-long campaign. It is something from which we can recover, but that will take a lot of effort.
When I was in college, in the 1980s, one of my political science professors described the political spectra here and in the European parliamentary systems. Here, he said, the difference between the liberals and the conservatives is that the liberals want to set Social Security at $3.00, while the conservatives want to set it at $2.00. In Europe, the difference is that the liberals want to set Social Security at $5.00, while the conservatives want to set it at zero. He was teaching us that, though (at the time) we saw vast gulfs of difference between our liberals and conservatives, in comparison to the rest of the world, our extreme wings were so close to the middle of the road as made no real difference.
The reason for that very narrow, very central political spectrum was our electoral system. In the parliaments—and he was thinking more of countries such as Israel and the Netherlands, where members are elected at large from the whole country—a political party only needs to win two or three percent of the vote to earn a seat in the governing body. People can vote for a party that aligns precisely with their views, knowing that they can be represented, even if only by a small party. And in the no-party-with-a-majority outcomes of those elections, even the smallest parties have a chance to be important in the formation of a coalition government.
In the US system, however, our governmental representatives are elected by small geographic districts, each one a winner-take-all election. In such a system, if you don’t get the plurality of the votes, you don’t get a seat in the government. Such a system will naturally and instantaneously devolve into a two-party system. Each election, one wins and one loses. And the way to win elections in such a system is to get as close to the middle as possible. A candidate knows he has the support of the extreme wing of his party, because there’s no chance they’d ever vote for the other party, so he doesn’t have to convince them to vote for him. The votes that are up for grabs are the independents, the undecideds, the middle-of-the-road voters who see some good in each party. In that system, being extreme is a losing strategy. And so, for many years, we had a mostly middle-of-the-road government: perhaps not awe-inspiring, but comfortable.
But there was a snake in that grass: gerrymandering. In the early days of gerrymandering—the first decades of the 1800s—it was a blunt instrument, used to separate towns and communities, or group them together. But in the last two decades, with the growth of ever more powerful computing capabilities and incredibly precise polling data, the people redrawing voting district lines can map them to include and exclude specific houses. And the political parties have taken that ability so far beyond the bounds of reason. A phrase that’s been thrown around the news of late is “the politicians picking their voters, rather than the other way around,” and that really is what’s happening. In a district that is drawn to be “safe” for one party, the general election is a formality, a waste of time. In my own district, for instance, the closest election the incumbent Democrat has fought was in 2020, when she took only 83.1% of the vote. In the past 30 years in my district, there were only two other elections in which the incumbent got less than 90% of the vote. There is no point in a Republican even running in my district, though they usually put up a token sacrificial lamb for appearances’ sake. But that means my Representative doesn’t have to do anything to win except be a loyal Democrat.
U.S. congressional districts covering Travis County, Texas (outlined in red) in 2002, left, and 2004, right. In 2003, the majority of Republicans in the Texas legislature redistricted the state, diluting the voting power of the heavily Democratic county by parceling its residents out to more Republican districts. In 2004 the orange district 25 was intended to elect a Democrat while the yellow and pink district 21 and district 10 were intended to elect Republicans. District 25 was redrawn as the result of a 2006 Supreme Court decision. In the 2011 redistricting, Republicans divided Travis County between five districts, only one of which, extending to San Antonio, elects a Democrat.
U.S. congressional districts covering Travis County, Texas (outlined in red) in 2002, left, and 2004, right. In 2003, the majority of Republicans in the Texas legislature redistricted the state, diluting the voting power of the heavily Democratic county by parceling its residents out to more Republican districts. In 2004 the orange district 25 was intended to elect a Democrat while the yellow and pink district 21 and district 10 were intended to elect Republicans. District 25 was redrawn as the result of a 2006 Supreme Court decision. In the 2011 redistricting, Republicans divided Travis County between five districts, only one of which, extending to San Antonio, elects a Democrat.
It also means that the real election—if there ever is one (which doesn’t happen in my district)—is the primary election, when the Democratic party decides who is going to be their candidate. That’s what we had last year when New York City elected a new mayor. There was no discussion of the general election; everyone knew the Democratic primary was choosing the next mayor; Republicans need not apply.
But this shift means that the electorate a candidate has to convince is no longer the middle-of-the-road, could-vote-Democratic-or-Republican independent voters; they don’t matter, because the stalwart party members are the majority of the district. That means the middle-of-the-road, I-welcome-everyone type of candidate is an automatic loser. Because when the primary is the election, the way to win the primary is to appeal to the most ardent, strident, non-centrist members of the party. The candidate has to convince them that he will represent only their views, and screw the other party. When it’s the primary that matters, running to the extreme is a winning strategy. Because whatever level the election is (primary or general), money talks. And those most willing to donate to a campaign are always the farthest-out fringe members, because they see not just bad ideas, but actual evil in the other party.
In the days when it was the general election that mattered, party leaders were smart enough to know that the way to win was to run to the middle. But now that the general election doesn’t matter, because the party leaders have already rigged the districts to be “safe” for the party, the way to win is to run to the outermost edges to get the funding to win the primary.
And that results in a Congress full of politicians who aren’t working for the common good, but for the party’s good. That’s what gives us a Mitch McConnell, who won’t allow a Supreme Court nominee to be considered because it’s an election year (2016), but will rush through a Supreme Court nominee because it’s an election year (2020), based solely on who put forth the nomination. And that’s what gives us an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won’t vote for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill because it does everything she wants, but she also wants Build Back Better right now at the same time, because she wants what she wants and she wants it all right now. It’s what gives us a country in which the continued health of our democratic republic truly is in jeopardy. It turns a deliberative, thoughtful body of legislators into a raucous madhouse of children trying to score points with “the folks back home” by being as nasty and uncooperative with their fellow members as possible.
I lay these problems squarely at the foot of gerrymandering. But we’ve gerrymandered ourselves into such a deep hole, and the two parties that won have so entrenched themselves in the system, that I fear we’ll never be able to get out of it. Ballotpedia, for instance, shows that in the election of 2020, only 41 of the 435 House districts were “battlegrounds.” That is, 394 of the Representatives knew they were winners as soon as the primary was over, and only 41 had to bother with the general election. (See https://ballotpedia.org/U.S._House_battlegrounds,_2020)
So how do we get out of our gerrymandered quagmire? It’ll take a true statesman. Actually, we’ll need two. Because to get out of it, each of the parties will have to say (of their own polities) “we currently have the majority, and we can redraw the districts to ensure that we always have the majority, but that would be bad. So we’re going to redraw the districts to ensure competition, for the good of the country.” If only one party does it, the other will swoop in and kill them as quickly as possible. Both parties have to do it, and they have to do it together.
And we’re all stuck in it like insects in a pitcher plant, because it feels good to be winning, to be on top, to be a supporter of the candidate and the party that wins. But we have to put aside that good feeling, and adopt a longer-term view that, though we feel good about winning today, if we break the system, we sure won’t feel good in the future.
What kind of morons are our Congressional representatives who claim to be Democrats? They’re the majority party (however slim a majority, it is a majority). They can actually adopt important, far-ranging, necessary legislation.
But every sub-group of Democrats in the Congress is doing its level best to kill the party, to make themselves look like the gang who only wants to shoot themselves.
And the Trumpians (the former Republican party) are keeping out of it all, laughing themselves back into the majority at the next election.
The little kids in Congress, the progressives, are quite emphatic that they want want want what they want and they want it all; most is just not good enough for them. Apparently they never bothered to learn negotiation or compromise. They’re continuing to flaunt the Democrats’ Achilles Heel of demanding absolute purity of their members, absolute fealty to their ideals because they seem to think getting most of the way there is unacceptable (but apparently they don’t have a problem with losing everything). And anyone who shows the least bit of fallible humanity is worse to them than the opposing party. If they’d stop being road blocks for five minutes, they could pass one major bill—which would be the first domino in an incredibly long and important chain—and then focus their energies on the next, rather than holding up one because they have to have everything right this minute, all or nothing!
And then we have their two senators, Manchin and Sinema, who early in these negotiations decided to set themselves up as the most powerful people in Washington. They’ve got it. We’re listening to them. No one has heard Chuck Schumer’s name in weeks. So what are they waiting for? What more do they think they can wring from their own party? Or do they think the Trumpians are going to give them more if they kill this legislation, and with it, the Democratic majority? It’s time for them to get their asses off the bench and vote for the damned bills, or else admit that they really are Trumpians in sheep’s clothing, and give the Senate back to Mitch McConnell and his twisted views of how the government should operate.
The Trumpians are laughing all the way back into power, and the Democrats’ loss will be squarely on the shoulders of the House Progressives and Manchin and Sinema. This has been the latest lesson in “how to throw away an insurmountable lead.”
The current state of political strife in the United States is something we should all fear. It is dangerous to our continued mutual welfare and well-being, as well as dangerous to our hoped-for future.
Ian Randal Strock 