Scattered across the United States, your faithful Mischiefs crew watched the last two days of presidential debates and formed some opinions. We offer those here.

Julia Azari

Identity politics was the winner of the debates.

This is a loaded phrase and I use it deliberately and advisedly. One big question in a field of 20+ candidates — perhaps half of whom are qualified and potentially viable — is which kinds of fault lines will arise. Tension between economic populism and (for example) racial justice has been part of the party’s move to the left.

No one really explicitly addressed that tension in the debates, but it’s notable that the two standard-bearers for left positions on economic issues did not shine on the more identity-related questions. Elizabeth Warren was basically left out of the immigration discussion in the first debate, with Julián Castro setting the agenda and forcing others to respond to him. Bernie Sanders was also tangential to the heated exchange of the second night, in which Kamala Harris took Joe Biden to task for both recent comments and past actions on racial issues. Buttigieg’s answer to questions about his record as mayor of South Bend and a recent incident of police violence is another standout moment of the second night.

Candidates also positioned themselves on gender and LGBT issues. Booker and Castro both mentioned the needs of transgender Americans on the first night. The discussion on Wednesday night also featured the candidates jockeying for who could most forcefully come out in favor of abortion rights and against the Hyde Amendment. On the second night, candidates pushed the envelope less but embraced liberal positions in clear terms. Kirsten Gillibrand highlighted women’s issues (using fairly traditional, gender binary language, in a stark but probably unintentional contrast with Castro). Buttigieg talked about his marriage in his closing statement.

Each night, the candidates answered questions about health care, the overall orientation of the economy (phrased in the second night in terms of socialism), and the need to address the needs of middle class and working American — whatever those terms may mean. The debate structure probably shaped this. If Warren had been on the second night with the other major players, she might have pushed them to address more economic questions and the populist framework in which she (and Sanders) present them. Similarly, if Warren and Sanders had been on the same stage, we might have seen an exchange between them about how exactly the rich and the corporations are messing everything up, and what to do about it.

It’s also worth noting that identity and economics don’t operate in parallel in real life. Marginalization and underrepresentation have economic consequences. But for right now, the discourse in the Democratic primary still kind of treats these as separate tracks, and this week’s debates brought the identity questions into the spotlight. 

Jonathan Ladd

In a crowded presidential field (and this is an extremely crowded field), the first task for most of the candidates is to be considered one of the top three or four contenders. You need to get voters to see you as a serious candidate so you are worth investing attention in learning about, and supporters will not be wasting their votes. 

So the big task for all of the candidates except Joe Biden is getting noticed by viewers and getting attention in post-debate news coverage. No matter how much people like your position or your ability to defeat Trump, you can’t ask people to throw their vote away. In that regard, in the first debate, Warren, Castro, and Booker did what they needed to do, and in the second debate so did Harris, Buttigieg, and Sanders. Add Biden to these six and it’s hard to see how the remaining 13 candidates can get attention going forward.

Kamala Harris’s performance stood out from all 20 candidates over these two nights. That is very hard to do in such a big field. But her ability to clearly press her points, which she has shown as a prosecutor and in Senate hearings, was on display here. Harris, Warren, Castro, and Booker were all able to clearly explain their plans in very limited time. But only Harris showed that she could also effectively go on the attack. Her attack on Biden’s record working with segregationists in the Senate and opposing busing worked both to hit Biden on a weak point and build up her own appeal to the African American community, given that some on the left have criticized her previously as being too aggressive as California Attorney General.

Finally, this was a bad night for Joe Biden. It was completely predictable that he would be attacked. Yet when he was attacked on his most obvious weaknesses — his age, his record on race, and his 2002 vote for the Iraq War — he had no good response to any of them. Compared to the others onstage, especially Harris, his answers were unfocused and his tone was tentative. These weaknesses have the danger of playing into concerns about his age.

Will this hurt Biden in the polls? It’s hard to say. It seems like his African American support is particularly vulnerable to the kind of attacks Harris laid on him. Time will tell. Debates often don’t lead to any movement in the polls, but Biden’s campaign can’t be happy with his performance last night.

Seth Masket

Overall, I didn’t see a lot from these two debates to shake up the larger presidential field. The real action was centered on a handful of candidates: Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Harris, Sanders, Warren, maybe Klobuchar, and maybe O’Rourke. These candidates, for the most part, are the ones who have some party support behind them, in terms of endorsements, money, staff, etc. 

I’ll note that the candidates who stand to benefit the most from these debates — especially Booker, Harris, and Warren — are the ones who have been standing out in my surveys of early-state activists but not necessarily dominating public opinion surveys. The strong public performances we saw onstage this week are similar to what those activists have seen in the candidates; they’re just now being made available to the rest of us.

The other candidates got in a few good moments and few did anything to actually embarrass themselves, but they didn’t really do anything to destabilize the rankings, either. Swalwell got in an effective dig at Biden’s age, but that is likely to hurt Biden more than it helps Swalwell. My guess is that this bottom tier of candidates will have a harder time qualifying for later debates as more donors and backers concentrate their support on the upper tier.

It was hard not to be impressed by the exchange between Harris and Biden. Biden’s greatest strength so far in this contest has been his perceived electability; even those who do not necessarily prefer him as a nominee have been willing to support him because they believe he’s the most likely to defeat Trump. Harris, by sharply critiquing him on his recent comments regarding his collegiality with his segregationist colleagues, not only attacked him on an issue of great importance to a vast segment of the Party, but also made him look vulnerable and defensive about his record. His nomination may well still happen, but its aura of inevitability was punctured.

Hans Noel

The last two nights have revealed a new model for debates, building on the foundation that the Republicans began last cycle. Two debates, without even a hint of a top tier and an “undercard,” is the way to go. Even with a field as small as eight or 10 people, I think it makes sense.  

Some worried that spreading the debates over two nights, without an obvious top tier, would be trouble. Would it matter who you were drawn against? I don’t think it was a problem at all. 

Presidential nomination debates have never really been debates, in the sense of conflict over a proposition. They’re definitely not like high school or college competitive debates, or even a legislative debate, where different sides of an issue clash against each other. They have always been more like side-by-side press conferences, especially when there are more than two candidates.

So why not just have a series of press conferences? The “debate’’ format allows for accountability. While journalists can ask follow up questions in a town hall meeting, they often don’t. There is nothing like the incentive of an opponent to make sure a candidate doesn’t get away with anything. When Beto O’Rourke touted his plan for immigration reform, Julián Castro called him out over the details, notably Castro’s call for repealing Section 1325. If the moderators won’t ask Joe Biden about his record on race, Kamala Harris can do it.

None of this requires that all of the candidates be present. At this stage, all we want is to sort out the candidates who deserve more attention from those who do not. If Tim Ryan can’t stand up to criticism from Tulsi Gabbard, he should probably drop out. 

If everyone were on the stage at the same time, or if the “top’’ candidates were together, I don’t think my conclusions would change about who deserves more attention (Harris, Castro, Klobuchar, Gillibrand) and who does not (O’Rourke, Ryan, Yang, Williamson, and, yes, Biden).

We’re going to have a lot more debates, both this cycle and — probably even with reforms to the system — into the future. The split format is a great way to handle a field of eight or more. 

Richard Skinner

These were two bad nights for two old men. Biden and Sanders both looked and acted their age and then some. Biden began well by seeming above some of the squabbling among the other candidates and continually tying himself to Obama. But as the debate went on, he just seemed older and more sluggish. We’ll see how people react to the substance of the Biden-Harris exchange (I’d be pretty surprised if Harris talks about bringing back busing), but their optics were obvious: Harris seemed young, energetic, and unintimidated, while Biden appeared old, defensive, and caught off guard.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders kept shouting about the same handful of topics that have always obsessed him. Red-faced and surly, he was probably the most unpleasant presence onstage. Biden seemed like an out-of-touch grandfather whose time has passed, while Sanders was more like an ill-tempered neighbor yelling on his front porch. Everyone will probably forget Wednesday night’s debate, but the candidates who did best were generally the most liberal — Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, Cory Booker — and perhaps will compete with Sanders for support.

Kamala Harris put on one of the best debate performances I have ever seen. Sharp, energetic, well-informed, immaculately prepared, she seemed ready to take on Donald Trump. (Her experience as a prosecutor clearly has its advantages). Her attack on Biden’s record on race was expertly choreographed and beautifully delivered. (Smart move making it more about empathy than policy).

Before this debate, most Democratic voters liked Harris but relatively few supported her. This debate could change that. She’s already received an impressive number of endorsements; will her performance garner more? Two potential problems for her: Her call for ending private health insurance could be a real liability in the general election (will she flip-flop again?) and older voters may react differently to her exchange with Biden than did the throngs on Twitter. This could mean that her appeal will be less to the older moderates who currently back Biden and more to the younger liberals who like some of the other candidates.

Oh, there were other candidates? Pete Buttigieg seemed polished and well-informed, but the racial tensions in South Bend are clearly a lingering problem for him. Michael Bennet knew his stuff and made pointed criticisms of the two old men. But I doubt many will remember him. Andrew Yang mercifully said little, while Marianne Williamson not-so-mercifully did not. Eric Swalwell kept trying to make “pass the torch” happen. (Harris could have told him about exploiting the generation gap: “Show, don’t tell.”) Kirsten Gillibrand and John Hickenlooper performed well enough but were dwarfed by the bigger egos onstage.   

Debates rarely have a huge impact, but these may end up boosting Harris and perhaps some of the other mid-range candidates (Warren, Booker, Castro, Buttigieg), while dinging the support of Biden and Sanders. (Does Biden have anyone on his staff who can talk frankly with him about his performance?) I don’t think any of the candidates in the bottom half of the field got much out of these debates, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see many not qualify for the third round in September.

Jennifer Nicoll Victor

The Democratic Party’s first debates are a peek inside the sausage factory of American electoral politics. The process now playing out in public view is one that Democrats have done mostly behind closed doors for the last several generations. Winnowing a wide field of candidates to a single nominee is a complex process involving political connections, experience, policy knowledge, fundraising, and, of course, charisma. Democrats came under fire for following an elite-driven, somewhat closed process in 2016, and as a result they are airing their laundry now to settle on a candidate to oppose Trump. 

On Wednesday night, candidates concentrated on introducing themselves and displaying their qualifications. On Thursday, we saw more candidates position themselves vis-à-vis one another and Trump. The most meaningful exchange of the night was between Harris and Biden on the topic of civil rights. Harris directly challenged the frontrunner using a personal anecdote laced with experience and knowledge. Her example both dated him and exposed a fissure in the Democratic Party that she is trying to use to her advantage: How far are Democrats willing to go to correct civil rights injustices? Importantly, race is also the issue Donald Trump uses to appeal to supporters. In this way, Harris challenged the frontrunner in her party and previewed how she might confront the president.

The last two candidates Democrats have nominated are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama: big-city, over-educated, policy-wonkish, non-white-men. Of the current field, candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Julián Castro, and Elizabeth Warren look most like the party’s most recent choices.

But prior to the debates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders were clear frontrunners. While they performed fine in Thursday’s debate, they did not shine. Candidates like Harris and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg were notable breakouts. Biden is already well known, and so is Sanders to some extent, so the early debates cannot help them that much. But for lesser-known candidates like Harris, Warren, and Booker, the debates can move their needles.

Debates are not likely to shake up the rankings in the field too much because the debate audience is primarily made up of people like those who write for and read Mischiefs of Faction. But, if Kamala Harris becomes the nominee, everyone will point to Thursday’s debate as a key moment on her road to success. 

We know there are problems with electability arguments, but to what extent should party elites still be thinking about it? We decided to sit down and discuss it.

Hans Noel: You just wrote a piece arguing that electability isn’t a very useful concept in choosing presidential nominees, mainly because it is used as a proxy for ruling out women and underrepresented minorities. The piece was pretty nuanced, but the takeaway, from the headline to how you and others have discussed it on social media, has been that we should just abandon “electability.” Are you really saying that a party shouldn’t have a discussion about whether its candidate can win in the general election?

Seth Masket: We could have a whole conversation about how to write a nuanced headline — but my take is not that people shouldn’t discuss or think about electability at all. Rather, it’s that the concept of electability is a) not well defined, b) not well supported by evidence, and c) conflated with stereotypes about female candidates and candidates of color. So we should be extremely cautious when making this kind of argument.

HN: I suppose not supported by evidence depends on what definition we’re using. The term “electability” is confusing. It sounds like you either have it or you don’t. But broadly speaking, I think it’s coherent to talk about candidate-specific characteristics that affect election outcomes. And there are a lot of them.

Some of them we have some evidence on, no?

SM: Well, we have some evidence that ideologically extreme or hyperpartisan congressional candidates do worse than moderates, although the evidence isn’t that strong in presidential races.

HN: And some evidence that scandals hurt, although that could be because most allies and donors abandon the candidate.

SM: Right. And there’s some evidence that white voters are less supportive of African American candidates, although it’s possibly because they think the African American candidates are too liberal. So maybe that’s race, maybe that’s ideology, or maybe they’re hopelessly conflated.

HN: But these effects are all pretty small, and maybe especially small in presidential elections.

SM: Exactly. If 2016 showed anything, it’s that it’s pretty hard to get Democrats to vote for a Republican and vice versa, even if your own party’s nominee is quite unpopular.

HN: So I think we’re starting from the same place. When you think about the most important things to understand about a presidential election, candidate quality is not at the top of the list. Is the incumbent running? What is the state of the economy? Are we involved in a foreign war? What is the partisan division in the country? You can answer all those without knowing the candidates’ names. But I think part of that is that the nomination process, for all its flaws, usually picks candidates who are pretty appealing. If a party actually nominated Jonah Ryan, we’d see what that looked like.

SM: Sure, but arguably, 2016 provided that. Donald Trump kind of went out of his way to be unappealing, and 90 percent of Republican voters convinced themselves that he was still better than the Democrat.

HN: True. Although, Trump underperformed the fundamentals. If 80,000 people in four states had voted differently, we’d be saying that Trump proves candidate quality matters. What should have been an easy GOP win was actually incredibly difficult and maybe even a little lucky.

Meanwhile, one argument we hear is that Hillary Clinton could have won in 2016 if she had the mobilization of black voters that Obama had. That’s candidate quality too, although I don’t think anyone would say Clinton was “unelectable.”

SM: That’s fair. I suppose my main concern is the way “electability” concerns are used during the nomination process. I’ve seen and heard a number of arguments that only a white male Democratic presidential nominee can beat Trump. The evidence doesn’t really show that. But it’s apparently a pretty compelling argument for many, and it can be hard for candidates to overcome that perception.

HN: I’m in agreement with you here. There’s a case to be made that a woman or candidate of color has an advantage in the general election, because they would mobilize voters that a white dude can’t mobilize. If black voters had voted in 2016 like they did in 2008, they would have tipped Michigan and Wisconsin. But it’s not surprising that they were less excited about Clinton than they were about Obama. So race and gender should be part of the conversation.

SM: This is tricky, though. I’ve been leaning toward, “Let’s try to avoid the ‘electability’ argument since it hurts women and POCs,” and you seem to be suggesting, “No, let’s talk about it, but women and POCs may be more electable than white guys.” Is this right?

HN: At least partly, yes. The one thing that a wide-open nomination process does that also helps in the general election is that it can help nominate a candidate who is broadly acceptable to the party, which in turn mobilizes all the party in the general election. And I think it’s time that we think seriously about the Democratic Party, anyway, as being a party in which women and people of color, and maybe especially black women, have played a huge part. If you want to excite Democrats, maybe you think about what those parts of the party want.

SM: That’s a good message. But at least so far, the conversation has largely worked against women and people of color. That is, not only are many party elites convinced that white guys are more electable, but that information gets through to prospective candidates, and some women and people of color choose not to run as a result, knowing they’ll get less support. If African Americans (especially African American women) are more moving into the ranks of party elites — and they are in some parts of the country — that conversation changes. But not overnight.

HN: I agree. What’s interesting is that on race, we resist the changes. But on ideology, many people think that Bernie Sanders, who has a reputation as the most ideologically extreme person in the race, has no problem. The party has moved to the left, so it’s time.

But I think Sanders has an electability problem, not just because he’s ideologically extreme, but because he’s alienated a big part of the Democratic constituency. So he maybe can pick up some working-class white Trump voters, but he’s not going to do better than Clinton did with women and people of color.

SM: I think this is right. People employ the electability idea rather selectively. We have pretty good evidence that being an ideologue hurts, and less good evidence that downscale whites will vote for a white guy. I tend to think that Republicans will try to smear any Democratic nominee as a socialist, but it might be a more convincing argument if they can produce video of the Democratic nominee himself making that claim.

HN: I’m reminded of Matt Yglesias’s quip that “What Democrats need to do to win is enact my personal policy preferences.” That kind of myopic view is a problem. And someone who really wants to nominate a woman, an underrepresented minority, or a socialist could all be charged with it. But as you noted originally, we only interrogate the electability when it comes to women and POC.

SM: A couple of additional frustrating things about electability. One is that there’s an awful lot of faith placed in early primary polling as a predictor of general elections. People point to Sanders’s favorables in 2016 and say he would have been a much more popular nominee than Clinton, but Sanders never had to endure a major negative campaign from the GOP. He might have been less popular by November than she was. Similarly, we assume that just because Biden has high positives now, he will 18 months from now. We really don’t know.

Second, outside large-N academic studies, this is really hard to prove. Let’s say I somehow convince “the Democratic Party” that white men aren’t more electable. And they go ahead and nominate Kamala Harris, and she loses narrowly to Donald Trump. Then the party comes back and says, “You told us a black woman could win!” And I’d say, “No, I just said she’d do no worse than a white man.” And they’d say, “But Biden would have won!” And I’d say, “You can’t prove that.” And then we’re right back where we started.

HN: That’s true. That’s the same reasoning that concludes that Trump could win, even with all his baggage (so electability must not be about scandal) but Clinton could not (so electability must be about gender).

But what happens if we just stop talking about electability? Then we end up relying even more on early polls and primary outcomes. Whoever wins early elections, in unrepresentative states with tiny electorates and against different choices, is presumed to be electable. Maybe that’s the answer. The party should just step aside. But I don’t think so. I think primaries aren’t a very good way to figure it out, because the choice set and the constituencies are so different. Especially with the strange sequential system we have now.

SM: So this is an important question. If we allow that some discussion of electability is important, what is actually a good test? Like you allude to, there were some party elites in 2008 who were hesitant to back Obama until after he won the Iowa caucuses; they took that win as a sign that he could translate enthusiastic support into actual votes (unlike, say, Howard Dean). You’re right that it’s not really like a general election win, but is it irrelevant?

HN: No. In that case, it’s a lot like Kennedy winning in West Virginia in 1960. He showed he could win voters in a Protestant state. The problem is that Iowa and New Hampshire are super white, so they’re especially hard for candidates of color. So someone needs to interpret the results. Such interpretation is, in the end, a conversation about electability.

SM: Ah, you’ve been reading my book (which comes out next year). But yes, the interpretation of the last election is really important for how people assess electability!

For some, 2016 showed that a woman can do just as well as a man. (Clinton overperformed economic models and beat Trump by 3 million votes.) For others, her failure to win the Electoral College shows that women just can’t win.

HN: No (I mean, yes, your book is great, but), what I mean is, in the moment, people needed to interpret Obama’s win in Iowa as a signal that he could win elsewhere, but a narrow Obama loss in Iowa wouldn’t have meant he couldn’t win the general. If we don’t interpret the results during the process, we don’t get that nuance.

SM: Okay. Which means the people in charge of the interpretation are really powerful in determining the course of the nomination, right? So who does this? Is this a media role? Party elites? Bloggers? The Twitterati?

HN: Well, one argument is that’s it’s party elites. But they clearly don’t have a monopoly and maybe don’t have the influence they once did.

In our textbook (in progress), we say that the party has two tasks in choosing a nominee. They want the “best” candidate, defined in terms of how they would govern, who can also win, defined in terms of the general election. I think that balance is important and necessary. And I think “the party,” broadly constructed, should be thinking about it.

SM: We should probably wrap up. But here’s an analogy I’ve been thinking about. Electability is a lot like student numerical evaluations of professors. We know those scores are heavily biased against women, scholars of color, the LGBTQ community, and other underrepresented groups in academia. So I’d be tempted to just to ignore them altogether.

But there’s also some useful information in there. If a professor has been pulling all 5s in one class and then drops to a 3 one year, I’d want to know why. Did she try a new teaching method? Is she having some difficulties? Did she just draw a hostile set of students? Are there things we can do to intervene?

It strikes me as difficult, but not impossible, to separate out the useful information from the biases. It may be harder in presidential nominations. (Professors aren’t directly running against each other, generally speaking.)

HN: That’s a good analogy. And it’s maybe even harder because we don’t even have a plausible metric for electability that one could get a 5 or a 3 on, before the election itself, when it is too late. In the professor case, I think we’d recommend using the scores as a warning, and then looking more closely, but not using them directly as inputs into tenure, promotions, or raises. In the candidate case, I think we might say that there is no real way to get biases out of a political discussion. Which is a shocker, I know.

SM: I suppose we’re back at the point where we want people (party elites, in this case) to be making judgments using empirical evidence and trying to weed out bias, but I don’t know why they should be different from anyone else in any other field.

HN: They probably aren’t any different. But maybe in most cases, awareness of the bias, and especially increasing the diversity of those making the judgments, can go a long way.

The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last week spurred a lively discussion about institutional design.

After the vote a week ago, some noted that the 50 senators who voted to confirm represent about 45 percent of the population. 

A number of astute constitutional historians quickly spoke up to point out that of course that happens, because the Senate represents states and not people. If you want to see the people represented, look to the House.

But of course, the fact that the Constitution does something isn’t the same as that something being good. We continue to debate the Constitution itself, and specifically the disproportional Senate. If our intuition tells us that there’s something wrong when a minority has that much power, we should pay attention. The Senate’s equal representation of states — not people — should be discussed on its merits.

I don’t think it stands up.

The case for states

The United States is a federal system. Each state has its own sovereignty and has some authority over its own interests. The relative authority of the state and the national government is contested, but the states retain something. 

But since the federal government is so powerful, the states need a way to protect themselves. The Framers’ approach to this sort problem is to let ambition check ambition. The legislature and the president check and balance each other. Similarly, the states are not protected from the federal government by mere parchment barriers. They can defend themselves through their representation in the Senate. 

These concerns were central for the Framers, who were looking at the Constitution from the very state-centered perspective of the Articles of Confederation. Each state had its own government and identity, and their relationship to one another was weak. The Constitution aimed to make that relationship stronger, but states were still the players. An American was a citizen of their state first, and of the union second. 

The case for people 

We have come a long way since the founding. Political scientist Daniel J. Hopkins, in his new book, The Increasingly United States, traces how America has gone from “all politics is local” to a world in which national issues dominate even local conflicts.

Hopkins devotes an entire chapter to the question of whether people think of themselves as Americans or as citizens of their states. Across a wide range of measures, he shows that Americans see themselves as Americans first, citizens of their states second. As he puts it: “Compared to their attachment to the nation as a whole, their place-based attachment is markedly weaker. What is more, the content of state-level identities is typically divorced from politics.”

That finding doesn’t mesh well with the idea of people being represented in government through their states. And citizens, politicians and parties have all long realized that. Political strategies for all national offices involve coordination across geography. If you live in a deep red state, you can donate to a candidate running in a purple one. If your district is safe for the Democrats, you can travel to canvass for a candidate in a swing district.  

It is illegal for foreign nationals to contribute money to a US electoral campaign. It is neither illegal nor uncommon for citizens to contribute to electoral campaigns in other states. Some candidates receive sizable portions of their resources from out of their own state.

When Americans are hacking the Constitution to get around the geographic nature of our representation, that should be a red flag.

Balancing the representation of states and people

Of course, the Constitution does not only allow for the representation of states. The central debate at the constitutional convention was over precisely this balance. Doesn’t the House address that problem?

Yes, but poorly.

For one, because every state must have at least one member in the House, there are still distortions. But even aside from that, single-member districts means we’re still representing territory instead of people. These districts are almost impossible to draw so that the politicians elected reflect the balance of preferences across the entire country. 

Right now, that means a bias toward Republicans. Democratic candidates could outpoll Republicans by up to five points and still not be favored to take control of the House. It doesn’t matter whether this is due to conscious gerrymandering or because Democratic voters are concentrated in urban areas. The problem is single-member districts in the first place. 

I don’t know of any research to prove it, but I am pretty sure very few Americans think of themselves as first and foremost citizens of their congressional district. 

Even the president, for whom at least citizens across the country can vote, is elected through the Electoral College, which in turn filters votes through the states. 

In short, the supposed balance between state interests and individual citizen interests that the Framers struck isn’t much balance at all. Some Framers observed exactly that at the time. And as the country has evolved, the value of having such strong representation for geography seems to have only waned.

What can be done?

If you agree that we should rethink the way in which we over-represent the states, what could be done? Unfortunately, not much.

One thing we can’t do is make the Senate more proportional. Nothing in the logic of federal representation would prevent this. In fact, other countries have upper chambers in legislatures that represent constituent states but that also represent them proportionally. 

But we can’t do this, even with an amendment, because the only limit that Article V of the Constitution places on amendments is that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”

We could change the powers of the Senate. Why should a body whose unequal representation is justified by the need to protect federalism be so central in confirming Supreme Court justices, who rule on individual citizens’ rights? Why should it have a veto on any legislation that has nothing to do with states as states?

Around the world, most upper chambers are less powerful than the lower chambers that represent the people more directly. In the United Kingdom, the House of Lords can mostly only delay things that the House of Commons wants to do.  

If the Senate is to be justified on the grounds that states need a say, its powers should be determined by that justification.

Such changes would be hard to do, and might not make enough difference. The other thing, then, would be to correct the imbalance in the House and the Electoral College. Multi-member districts could make the House more reflective of the popular vote.

If we’re serious about trying to bridge the divide between red and blue America, a good start would be to have all of America elect more of the legislature.

FLORENCE, Italy — This Sunday, Italians will go to the polls to elect — they hope — a new government. I’ve been spending the past year in Italy, and it seems like the election here is a funhouse mirror version of the US election in 2016. And that, I think, tells us something about America.

For all the differences between the American and Italian experience, the main one is in the way governing coalitions are formed. We would understand US politics better if we paid attention to that.

Similarities between the 2018 Italian election and the 2016 US election begin with the moderate left party, currently leading the government. This party, headed by Matteo Renzi, even has a familiar name: the Partito Democratico, or Democratic Party. And as with the Democratic Party in America, many of its allies view it as too centrist, and some are defecting to minor parties to its left.

Meanwhile, the main opposition has been steadily moving to the right. In this election, it is a coalition of right-leaning parties, including Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go Italy), which is being pulled further right by Matteo Salvini’s anti-immigrant and populist La Lega (formerly “La Lega Nord,” or the Northern League) and Giorgia Meloni’s similar Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy).

The Italian election even has an anti-party populist challenge, from the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five Star Movement), which sometimes seems like what would happen if you put Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, and Jon Stewart in a blender. M5S was formed by a comedian, and its most consistent position is that it doesn’t want anything to do with the establishment. The big difference from the United States, then, is that this populist movement is separate from the left and right parties. It’s a big-tent coalition of extremists of any stripe.

There are surely several reasons why similar impulses are expressing themselves differently in Italy, but one has to be that the US system is aggressively a two-party system. Our electoral and governing institutions discourage successful third parties. So an anti-establishment populist movement will be most effective if it works within an existing party, as Sanders and Trump both demonstrate. This is the strategy that the populist Lega is pursuing. But that wouldn’t be an option for a movement that tries to bridge left and right anti-establishment attitudes, so populism of that form doesn’t thrive in US elections.

The M5S actively eschews coalitions. The new Italian system, in use for the first time in this election, is meant to encourage them. The ballot allows the center left and the center right to pool the votes from across their coalitions when determining strength. According to recent polls, M5S will likely win more votes than any other single party, but not more than the center-right coalition. And no one would win enough to form a government outright, so even a third-place center left may have a role to play.

Several scenarios are possible. The establishment Partito Democratico and Forza Italia may try to form a grand coalition to block out the anti-establishment populists. Such a coalition may or may not need to include other parties. Alternatively, the populists Lega and M5S might have enough to form a coalition if the latter will agree to share power. The point is, even once the votes are tallied, it’s not clear who will be in government.

These are concerns our majoritarian and presidential system never even notices. In a two-party system, the governing coalition is effectively determined before the election, through the selection of the party leaders. The 2016 election offered the choice of a Trump-led government or a Clinton-led government. In a multi-party parliamentary system, some negotiating will usually take place after the election. The Italian system tries to simplify this for voters, with formally established pre-electoral coalitions, but even they may not be able to form a government.

This is not a unique phenomenon. Every parliamentary system has the potential to form a coalition government, and there is nothing wrong with coalitions. What makes the Italian situation seem so dramatic is merely that the three main players have huge disagreements among them. Polarization in Italian politics is multidimensional.

All this has two implications, I think, for American politics.

The first is that one factor behind Trump’s inability to work with the Republican Party is partly the fact that the party is a coalition of interests that are held together by our system. The conservative ideology goes a long way toward defining this coalition. And polarization helps drive the factions on the right into each other’s arms. But the conservative coalition still has fissures; Trump amplifies some elements and diminishes others. He also has no experience working with a coalition, so he doesn’t know how to hold it together.

In a multi-party system, each faction can have its own leader. This can create its own issues: Who “leads” the center right in Italy? Salvini? Berlusconi? (Or, since Berlusconi is currently barred from holding office, someone else from FI?) But the factions themselves are easier to identify. Just because the factions are sometimes masked in the United States doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

The second implication is that ballot reformers in the United States would do well to think about the government formation stage. Some talk of the tyranny of the two-party system, but much of what is happening is the interplay of our party system and our presidential system. Even if voters had more options on the ballot, there would be only one presidential winner.

If we want to select leaders who proportionally reflect the support of different parties, we’d need other reforms as well. There are ways to do this, from fusion parties, in which multiple parties endorse the same candidate, to an outright parliamentary system. But you rarely see this part of the story on the agenda. Italy’s exciting election reminds us that we should.

Recently at Vox, Ezra Klein published a very smart discussion of whether the Democratic primary was rigged. His answer to that question is spot-on — it wasn’t rigged, but Democratic leaders did a lot to help Hillary Clinton. Just as they have in many other primaries, prominent Democrats helped coordinate resources for their candidate, and that candidate won.

But I want to take issue with the second part of Klein’s piece, which he correctly notes sounds odd to a political scientist. Klein says that informally favoring Clinton was a mistake. By clearing the field for her, they also cleared it for Bernie Sanders. In the future, the party should let the primaries play out as they will.

There are three problems with this.

First, yes, clearing the field probably helped Sanders. Without that, he would have been buried by traditional Democrats. But he still lost. And if we’re honest, he was never close. Barack Obama versus Clinton in 2008 was a close race. Clinton versus Sanders in 2016 simply was not. Even as Sanders was winning some delegates, at almost no time during the contest was he winning enough to be on track to win the nomination.

Still, his strong showing did hurt Clinton and the Democratic Party. Sanders had a platform to bash the Democratic nominee. Given the razor-thin margin by which Donald Trump won in a few states, even small things like that could matter. A more marginalized Sanders might have done less damage to Clinton’s campaign. Then again, a bloody primary with a more well-known, mainstream candidate might have left the eventual winner just as damaged.

Second, there’s no reason to believe that not clearing the field would have given a better outcome. Indeed, some argue that part of the Republicans’ problem in 2016 was precisely that the party failed to coordinate on a mainstream, acceptable candidate, and so the anti-Trump vote was spread too thin to block him. If Republicans had cleared the field for, let’s say John Kasich, maybe we’d be reading about how that helped Trump come in second.

Finally, there are issues with the conclusion that party leaders should just leave things to the primaries. Klein writes that “voters don’t like the feeling that someone is trying to make their choice for them” and that “the party doesn’t have very good information that far before a general election.” True. But the primaries are no better.

The sequential state-by-state primaries we have in the United States are not very democratic. They overvalue the voters in a handful of early states, and they disadvantage candidates who cannot raise money and an organization to continue to compete week after week. This is not an environment for voters to have an unbiased voice heard.

Something helps narrow voters’ choices for them. In a general election, voters can follow the cue that the party itself gives them. In the primary, they need something. It could be the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire who narrow the field. It could be wealthy independent donors. Or it could be party leaders, who are at least thinking broadly about the entire party.

It’s important to remember that throughout all of this, the influence that party leaders have is very informal and very minimal. They could make more careful leadership choices at a convention, the way party leaders do in most democracies. In the United States, they can’t do that. All they can do is nudge things; that is, they can lead. The biggest mistake, I think, would be for party leaders to not try to lead at all.

A whiplash of takes over the weekend began with the claim that Donald Trump, fresh off a bargain with congressional Democrats, is not really a Republican but instead the country’s first independent president. It didn’t take long for social scientists, commentators, and others in the common-sense-based community to point out that one mediocre bargain with Democrats does not an independent dealmaker make. 

And they are right. Trump is a Republican. But he’s not a very good one. And in a way, the clumsy argument that he’s somehow above partisanship is pointing in the right direction.

Political scientists have long noted that a significant share of independent voters aren’t all that independent. They may think they are, but they vote almost as reliably for their party as self-identified partisans do. Trump seems to think he is a “loose cannon,” even though he’s completely embedded in the GOP.  

But that doesn’t mean independents are just like other partisans. It matters that they don’t want to affiliate with one of the two parties. Samara Klar and Yanna Krupnikov show that many people identify as independents because they are turned off by partisan “politics as usual.” That sounds like something you’d have heard from Trump’s campaign. Trump is a partisan who doesn’t really know what that means.

And that’s why he’s not particularly good at politics. 

To be very clear, everything Trump has accomplished has come from his acting as a Republican:

• He won the Republican nomination by appealing to Republican voters who were frustrated with existing Republicans.
• He won the general election by appealing to Republican voters who would vote for any Republican before they voted for a typical Democrat.
• His agenda is mostly the Republican agenda. He nominated Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court because Republican-aligned interests told him to. He campaigned on the idea that the Affordable Care Act didn’t do enough, and then backed a repeal bill that moves in the opposite direction.

What’s more, the parts of the Trump agenda that aren’t very Republican — trade protectionism, the wall, health reform that would increase coverage — have been dead ends.

Why? Because Trump isn’t a team player. He wants to make his own deals, and he’s not well-versed in all the deals that are being made around him — all the deals that are embodied in a well-functioning political party. 

But each party represents a history of deals that can’t just be ignored. A political party is a coalition of political actors, from politicians to voters, who coordinate to get things done in a democracy. This means they have to set aside some differences. Someone says, “Okay, I want to restrict abortions, and you want to pay fewer taxes.” (Or “I want police to be more accountable in how they treat the black community, and you want a higher minimum wage.”) “How about we join forces and get both things?” And since there are so many people and so many issues, these trade-offs become complicated and are constantly renegotiated. This gets messy. Parties are institutions that manage those trade-offs, from nominations to campaigns to legislation to administration. 

Almost every real accomplishment of the Trump administration has been something that Republicans have been working on for some time. But credit Republicans (and the allied conservative movement) as much as you credit Trump.  

(Trump may end up changing the Republican Party and conservatism in some way, but that’s far from done at this point.)

So Trump is not a Republican in much the same way that Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. Except Trump won.

Sanders’s agenda overlaps with the Democrats’ agenda about as much as Trump’s does with the Republicans’. Both candidates were wise enough to run within the party they critiqued, knowing they could never win as independents. For all the attempts to compare Trump and Sanders, the only significant similarity is that both think the political establishment is a swamp, even as everything they have ever accomplished in politics has come from coordinating with a party. 

In the end, it doesn’t really matter whether Trump is a Republican who doesn’t play well with his party or an independent who is inextricably tied to the Republican Party.

The problem is imagining that whatever he is can be useful in a system with parties.

oxLike most Americans (see below), I have never been a fan of the Electoral College. And like most Americans, I figured there is little that could be done about it. Even after 2000, when the popular vote winner was thwarted by the institution, reform efforts went nowhere.

This time could be different. 2000 was a very close race between two fairly popular candidates. It didn’t seem obvious that such a reversal would happen again soon. Now it’s happened twice in as many decades.

Regardless of how the long-shot efforts to use the Electoral College against itself (such as the so-called “Hamilton Electors”) play out on Monday, reform is on many minds. Reformers face three big questions.

1. Should they try to amend the Constitution or just tinker through legislation?
2. What sort of replacement would be preferable to a large enough coalition to ratify it?
3. Is there political will to change it at all?

A backdoor fix?

Amending the Constitution is hard, requiring two-thirds supermajorities in both houses of Congress and then ratification by three-fourths of the states, or 38. So it’s understandable that movements have tried to find a way around it.

The strategy so far most likely to succeed is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in which several states with control of at least 270 electoral votes would commit to voting for the popular vote winner, regardless of the result in their own states. According to Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution, Congress must approve interstate compacts, but it could do so by a simple majority vote. So the NPVIC offers the opportunity to change the Electoral College with fewer states and a lower voting threshold in Congress. But even this is a hard thing to achieve. Supporters don’t yet have enough states or a vote of Congress.

Writing last week, Greg Koger proposed a different end run around the amendment procedure, suggesting that Congress could pass a law requiring states to allocate their votes proportionally (see more below).

Either of these plans to enact reform would face legal and even constitutional challenges. For now, I’m willing to grant that they could be done legally. The bigger problem is that these institutional redesigns are constrained to deal with only part of the problem, but the Electoral College is a complete system.

For instance, the popular vote compact does not do away with faithless electors. We are right now seeing an unprecedented systematic effort to persuade electors to switch.

More importantly, under the compact, not all states would be voting with the popular vote winner. Only those who signed on would be. This means that different states would be literally following different rules, and the states in the compact would effectively be imposing their will on the rest of the country. That’s essentially what happens now, when swing states impose their outcome on states that cannot affect the outcome. But it would not be perceived that way.

If we care at all about democratic legitimacy or political divisiveness, this is a problem. At best, the compact would hasten action to amend the Constitution for a more complete fix, and for that reason alone it may be a good move politically. But it’s not a long-term solution.

A constitutional amendment might be unlikely, but it’s not impossible. Two existing amendments involve the Electoral College. It would be the best way to deal with all of the problems with the Electoral College. And there are many.

There’s a lot on the table

The most important thing to remember is that the Electoral College, like nearly everything in the Constitution, is the result of compromise and political maneuvering. What the framers put together has several moving parts, and the system has evolved to have several more.

I think there are at least four things wrong with the Electoral College, but not everyone agrees. A resolution would require a compromise across these issues.

1) Faithless electors

You’d think it would be doubtful that anyone would defend faithless electors, but 2016 is revealing that if you haven’t fixed the other parts of an unfair system, people will want to use it to address that unfairness.

And they aren’t exactly wrong. Either you embrace the rules as they are written in the Constitution, in which case you must accept that electors are technically independent — or you impose some extraconstitutional norms of democracy, in which case why stop at faithless electors?

But in a better system, I doubt anyone would want free-agent electors.

2) Allocation of electoral votes to states

Each state has the same number of Electoral College votes as they have representation in Congress. (The District of Columbia, which lacks representation in Congress, is given the minimum of three votes.) This creates an obvious bias toward small states, since every state gets two senators regardless of population. In other words, while House seats are assigned based on population, every state, even the smallest, gets a “Senate bonus” of two electoral votes.

Some people see this as a feature and not a bug. Why should large states with large urban populations get all the say? We have a federal system, so every state should have some voice.

But a more proportional allocation wouldn’t let large states dominate. If you stripped states of their Senate bonuses, the results in 2016 would have been a 190-to-246 Trump victory. In that allocation, the states with the 10 largest urban areas in America (including red Texas and Georgia) would still be 52 electoral votes short of a victory. A winning coalition could ignore some states — just as they do today. But it would still need many states to win.                                                                                                               

3) Winner-take-all

In all but two states, electoral votes are allocated winner-take-all.

This is an odd institution for those who worry about giving all portions of the country a voice to defend. Each state is ignoring the preferences of as many as half its own voters. Compare Illinois with Pennsylvania, each of which has 20 electoral votes. In Illinois, Clinton won with an overwhelming 16.95 percentage point margin, earning all 20 votes. That’s treated as equivalent to Trump’s narrow 0.72-point margin in Pennsylvania. Similarly, Clinton’s narrow 1.52-point win in Minnesota is worth the same 10 electoral votes as Trump’s 18.64-point shellacking of Clinton in Missouri. In both states, many voters backed the other candidate and were ignored.

The natural solution here is to move to proportional representation, which Koger recommended last week. But that’s not so simple.

In principle, proportionality is straightforward. If you get 60 percent of the popular vote, you should get 60 percent of the electoral vote. But how should we handle fractions? How should we count minor parties? Since most democracies use some sort of proportional representation, there are several ready solutions, but they give slightly different answers. The following figure shows the results in the past five elections using two common formulas for finding proportionality. The first is the Hare greatest remainder formula, which allocates fractional seats (or electoral votes) to the parties with the largest such fractions. The second is the d’Hondt highest averages method, which is more complicated and less generous to minor parties.

The main lesson from the figure is that, yes, proportionality more closely represents the popular vote. But also, in the two cases where the popular vote was not reflected by the Electoral College, proportionality prevents any candidate from winning a majority.

That makes sense, if you think about it. In 2000, we had essentially a tie. When you start rounding numbers that are close to 50-50, you might get 50-50. With the Hare formula especially, the large third-party vote eats into the top two candidates, which further prevents a majority.

Even under the current rules, this is possible. But it’s far less likely. A too-often-overlooked feature of the Electoral College is that it exaggerates victories. This is why Donald Trump’s historically very narrow win feels like a landslide to some. Under proportionality, without the exaggeration, a virtual tie will return a real tie much more often.

And it’s a problem because the rules for what happens in such a case are maybe the worst part of the system.  

4) Contingent elections

This is the kind of trivia that a lot of people seem to know, so say it with me: If no one wins a majority, the House of Representatives selects the president from among the top three electoral vote recipients, with each state voting as a bloc.

This is, of course, an astoundingly undemocratic mechanism. It is even worse than the bias in the Electoral College itself. The current House is 57 percent Republican. But 66 percent of states have a majority of Republicans in the delegations. If each Utahn citizen’s vote is worth 3.6 times that of a Californian in the Electoral College, it’s worth 7.8 times as much if each state is treated equally.

It’s no surprise that the first time this mechanism was needed, in 1824, the result was decried as a “corrupt bargain” that put the second-place popular vote and electoral vote winner in the White House.

This is the biggest problem with Koger’s legislative solution. It might be able to bind states to be proportional, but it probably can’t create a new contingency plan if no candidate gets an Electoral College majority. For now, as with faithless electors, the terrible contingency plan isn’t a big deal because it’s unlikely to come into play. But it’s still lurking in the system.

If we don’t want to elect someone with a minority of electoral votes, this isn’t the way. Perhaps a runoff. It’s also not unheard of simply to go with the plurality vote winner if they reach some threshold short of a majority. 

A root-and-branch reform of the election system is the only way to get rid of all of these problems. The popular vote is one path, one that I would support. The presidency is the one office everyone votes for. There’s no reason it can’t be the one thing that doesn’t transcend America’s otherwise extreme federalism.

But other paths are reasonable, too. I’d probably be more comfortable with the bias toward small states if votes were proportional. But that works only if we have a better tiebreaking procedure, since we’d be using it more often. In the unlikely event that the Hamilton Electors succeed in stopping Trump, you can be sure that Democrats won’t back a reform binding electors unless the reform also addressed other issues with the system.

Political will

So reformers have a nearly impossible task. A shortcut around the amendment process isn’t satisfying. Could an amendment happen?

In the short term, no. In the long term, maybe. (And in the very, very short term, a long-shot maybe.)

As I noted above, support for ditching the Electoral College is generally high — except for in 2000 and right now. When the electors contradict the popular vote, some people suddenly see the merits of the system.

More precisely, Republicans do. As you can see in this figure, support for change is generally fairly high, but right after the reversals, Republicans suddenly like the Electoral College. I am sure if a Democrat were to benefit, Democrats would react similarly. Yet that preference faded as the 2000 election faded into memory, a pattern we may see again as we leave 2016 behind us.

Since Republicans now control Congress as well as a majority of state legislatures, the path to reform goes through Republicans. So no reform.  

But Republicans probably won’t control everything forever. I suspect that the seesawing we’ve seen in the past handful of elections may settle down a little as the economy recovers, but the tide will turn. Suppose, in the meantime, the Democrats are denied or nearly denied the White House again.

It’s generally accepted that in order to get rid of the Electoral College, both Democrats and Republicans will need to get burned by it. But in a zero-sum political system, that means both also have to benefit from it. If it’s bad for both, then it’s good for both.

No one has replaced the Electoral College, despite general dissatisfaction with it. That’s because no one has had the incentive to do much. Now Democrats have the incentive.

I think a major lesson from 2016 for the Democrats will be the importance of electoral integrity. Everything from controversial “voter ID” laws to, yes, the Electoral College will become an issue for Democrats. And it has the potential to be a winning issue.

If electors deny Trump the White House on Monday, the issue will be on the table very soon. That would be a genuine crisis, and change happens in a crisis. Both Democrats and Republicans would have lost in the same year. But short of that, reform takes time, and it takes work.

Until now, neither party had much incentive to do that work. Now one does.

NOTE: Mischiefs of Faction writers and Georgetown professors Hans Noel and Jonathan Ladd will be discussing the Electoral College on Facebook Live this Monday. Bring your questions to the Georgetown University Facebook page at 3 pm Eastern.

One item of growing consensus in the Democrats’ postmortem is that the party lost the white working class because the party is perceived to have abandoned them.

The perception is definitely real, and it may explain the outcome. But is it true that the party really has, as a matter of policy goals, ignored the working class?

Among the policies that the Democrats and President Obama enacted in the past eight years are:

• The Affordable Care Act, designed to make it easier for working people to get access to health care.
• Financial sector regulation, including Dodd-Frank, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and reform of the credit industry
• Extending the auto industry bailout
• The stimulus package
• Updated overtime rules to protect workers from unpaid overtime

In addition to these accomplishments, the party actively sought to do more, including:

• A major infrastructure bill
• The American Jobs Act
• Improved access to community college
• Trade Adjustment Assistance, meant to directly address the impact of trade on American workers
• A $12 minimum wage

These last attempts failed or were significantly diluted because Republicans, who have controlled the House of Representatives since 2011, did not like them. In an era of divided government, both parties get a say. Republicans can and did argue that these were bad policies, but it’s hard to look at the list and conclude that the Democrats have cozied up to the 1 percent.

There are many things you could say, though:

The Democrats have also done a lot for other elements of the party’s coalition, notably women and minorities. If you ask Obama fans to list off the president’s chief accomplishments, they could go for a while without mentioning the items above. But that’s not abandonment. It’s caring about more than one thing.

In some cases, other policies represent a direct trade-off across different constituencies, as one policy is good for, say, Latino families but perhaps not as good for manufacturing jobs. In other cases, we could talk about opportunity costs, as efforts to make progress in one area mean the party can’t succeed in another area.

But for most party leaders, who are likely ideological liberals, all of this stuff matters. Even if it didn’t, parties are coalitions, and it is not possible to pay attention to only one coalition partner.

Democrats have backed trade and immigration, two things that are thought to hurt the working class. There is debate on the actual impacts of these policies, but it’s true that Democrats have joined Republicans on trade, and that Democrats favor a more inclusive immigration policy.

I’m not going to argue the merits of either of these policies, but there are sound reasons why economists believe that trade barriers will not bring back manufacturing jobs. Meanwhile, Democrats led on trying to protect workers from the impacts of trade policy, with the auto bailout and the trade adjustment package. It’s hard to argue that the party was giving up on the working class in general, but it is possible to argue that the pro–working class policies have not included two options that many disagree over.

Maybe Obama and the Democrats could have “tried harder” to succeed on the issues where they failed. Republicans fought against them, but perhaps their will was lacking.

Many of these successes were in Obama’s first term, which is a while ago now. That is, they occurred when Democrats controlled Congress and were able to craft legislation. More recently, many liberals have shifted their attention to arenas, like the courts, where they can do things.

But the last time Obama could count on support from Congress to pass legislation, he was passing economic legislation. Since then, he’s relied on executive orders, which have a much narrower scope. Indeed, in recent years, neither party got very much accomplished.

The Clinton campaign could have done better in communicating these accomplishments and her goals for doing more if she were elected. Electoral politics is about campaigning as much as it is about policy. Clinton’s campaign focused on Trump’s character — and, by extension, on many policies of concern to women and people of color. But the economic policies were not the focus.

Together, these four points contribute to a sense that the party didn’t do enough for the white, especially rural working class. And that sense is very real. That’s a failure. But it’s very different from a party actually pivoting away from the working class.

Thinking harder about the Affordable Care Act is illustrative. This is without question a policy aimed at helping the working class. It’s also incredibly unpopular with the white working-class voters who voted for Trump. Maybe it would have been more popular if it were structured in a different way, if premiums hadn’t gone up, if it included a public option, if it worked better, if it had done more. I doubt it. The Affordable Care Act is unpopular because Republicans have spent years making it unpopular, from the beginning.

In any event, Democrats did try to do more. Obamacare barely passed, and it took all the combined power of the Democratic Party across multiple institutions to get it passed. Again, policy is the product of our political system, which includes Republicans.

If the white working class voted against Clinton because they think the Democratic Party sold them out, that is a reality, and the Democratic Party doesn’t get to pretend it isn’t so. But it is not a reality it can respond to by simply “returning” to something it never really stopped doing.

I recently had a piece in the New York Times singing the praises of contested conventions. It being an op-ed, I didn’t have the space to elaborate on some of the details. So I have been elaborating here.

The short version of the argument is this: A convention of unbound delegates would be a great way to choose a nominee. And we could get that, at least sometimes, if the parties used proportional representation and a shortened calendar. Then if we had a divided field, each would be represented at the convention in proportion to their popularity. But this would require taking delegate selection seriously.

In Part I, I elaborated on the case for contested conventions as a place to choose nominees.

In Part II, I argued that proportional representation and a shorter calendar would be more democratic.

Part III: Choosing delegates

If delegates are supposed to make the decision, we’d need good delegates. If you are planning for a contested convention, delegate selection matters more, because the delegates themselves would matter more.

But voters can’t be expected to know much about individual local politicians — the sort of people who run as delegates. So they would run, as they generally do now, as affiliated with candidates. States differ on the technical details, but in a true proportional system, it might work like list PR does in most other democracies.

In list PR, each party has a list of candidates, and election officials go down that list until they have reached the right number of delegates. The parties, of course, choose candidates they believe will serve their party well.

For the nomination, each candidate would have a list of delegates who would be chosen because they would serve their candidate and their interests. Sanders would choose delegates who want to move the party to the left. Rand Paul would choose delegates who share his libertarian view of the Constitution. Ted Cruz would choose Tea Party delegates.

This might have several great side effects. It would encourage presidential hopefuls to develop good relationships with activists in many parts of the country. Politicians already need the support of local activists in state after state, but they don’t need to get to know or trust them.

It also means being a delegate is more than just a perk for a politician. It requires those on the floor to be able to negotiate, bargain, and learn about the rest of the party. A party that needs those skills will cultivate and seek out those skills. Politicians who have had to bargain with those within their party may be better suited to bargaining with those across the aisle when, later in their careers, they win legislative office.

If we want robust parties, they need to be made up of politicians who are invested in them. Making the national party convention matter helps cement those investments.

This week, I have a piece in the New York Times singing the praises of contested conventions. It being an op-ed, I didn’t have the space to elaborate on some of the details. So I have been elaborating here.

The short version of the argument is this: A convention of unbound delegates would be a great way to choose a nominee. And we could get that, at least sometimes, if the parties used proportional representation and a shortened calendar. Then if we had a divided field, each candidate would be represented at the convention in proportion to his or her popularity. But this would require taking delegate selection seriously.

In Part I, I elaborated on the case for contested conventions as a place to choose nominees.

Part II: Proportional representation and a shorter calendar

Suppose you buy my argument that a real convention is better than what we have now. How could we get there?

A contested convention is already technically possible. Right now delegates are bound to vote for the candidates to whom they were allocated on the first ballot. (In fact, every state has its own specifics; the drama on the floor this week was largely over some delegations wishing their own states rules weren’t what they were.) But if no candidate wins an outright majority on the first ballot, the delegates are generally freed for later ballots.

So all we need to do is make it easier for the primary process to end with no candidate with a majority. As a bonus, what we would do to get there would make the system more democratic, not less.

Primary elections are governed by state and national laws and by state and national party rules. If we wanted major changes, we’d need to get all of those actors to go along. But the national parties can do things to tweak the system. In particular, they can incentivize states to move in small directions, and they can make some rules narrowing the states’ options.

Two things are well within their power. First, they can encourage proportional representation.

Proportional representation is used in democracies around the world for the selection of legislators. It is well known that PR allows for multiple parties to win, whereas plurality rule tends to winnow the options down to two. Plurality rule does this by exaggerating the support for the winner, misrepresenting the voice of the people.

The current system is designed for winnowing. For the Republicans in 2016, early states did use some form of proportionality, but later states use winner-take-all. This helped Donald Trump win about 60 percent of the delegates with only 45 percent of the vote.

The Democrats use some kind of proportional system in every state, but they have high thresholds for marginal candidates, encouraging them to drop out.

A truly proportional representation system would match delegate shares to vote shares as closely as possible. Assuming everyone voted as they did, that would mean about 45 percent of the delegates for Trump and about 25 percent for Ted Cruz. Marco Rubio and John Kasich would each have more than 10 percent. Trump would be in the driver’s seat, but the others could force a compromise if they truly were not happy with him.

But everyone probably wouldn’t vote as they did under the old rules. The votes were very affected by the long calendar. Jeb Bush ended with less than 1 percent of the vote, but he did much better in the three states he competed in. If you need to win it all, then it’s hard to stick around after doing poorly in Iowa and New Hampshire.

That is fundamentally undemocratic. Fewer than 1 percent of Americans live in Iowa. Fewer still live in New Hampshire.

When he dropped out of the race this year, Bush said, “The people of Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina have spoken” — but the people who had spoken make up less than 3 percent of the country.

But if we aren’t interested in getting down to one candidate, we don’t need to encourage people to drop out. It’s a long slog from January to June. A second-choice-of-many candidate may not be able to stick around. A single-day primary with proportional representation would even work, but that’s not going to happen. The parties can nudge, but they can’t take away states’ primaries. And anyway, neither Iowa nor New Hampshire will give up its privileged status.

A shorter calendar, though, would make it easier for everyone to stay in. The long process is thought to help underfunded candidates claw their way to the top. But that doesn’t really happen now anyway. And I’m not sure that someone who exploits an idiosyncratic calendar really represents the people.

It is true that a shorter calendar will require candidates to build support in the invisible primary. They are already doing that, though. The main lesson from the past several cycles is that the invisible primary has become more visible, allowing outsider candidates to build their own support networks. So a shorter calendar doesn’t disadvantage them anymore.

Both of these changes — PR and a shorter calendar — could be incentivized. They would give us contested conventions. They’d also give us more democratic primaries.

Part III: Getting good delegates.