Lee Drutman | Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2026-02-26T14:46:56+00:00 https://www.vox.com/authors/lee-drutman/rss https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 Lee Drutman <![CDATA[US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again.]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=480280 2026-02-26T09:46:56-05:00 2026-02-26T06:00:00-05:00 an illustration of a red brick wall with barbed wire above it. A hole in the shape of the United States has been broken through the wall, revealing a sunny, blue-skied scene with a US flag stuck in the ground.

Donald Trump is not forever. 

There will be an after. It’s hard to see from the present, where everything feels frozen in place. But from history’s vantage, change is the only constant. American democracy has been remade several times — dramatically, unexpectedly, and often in ways that looked impossible until they arrived.

Key takeaways

  • American democracy has been dramatically remade roughly every 60 years: the 1770s, the 1830s, the 1900s, the 1960s. Each time, reform came when ambitious insiders recognized the old order was dying and switched sides before it collapsed on them.
  • Today’s dysfunction matches the historical preconditions almost exactly: institutional trust near historic lows, and both parties fighting the last war while new pressures accumulate with no political home.
  • The question is not whether reform is coming but what kind. Previous eras tried to work around parties and got hollow institutions captured by whoever was already organized. The next reform needs to change how parties themselves work.

The question is not whether reform is coming. It’s what kind of reform. 

Underneath the paralysis, pressure is rising: institutional distrust at historic lows, economic dislocation spreading, AI transforming work, and a generation increasingly locked out of housing, economic security, and political influence. The parties can’t process any of this. They’re locked in battle with each other, fighting the last war. 

Gridlock may look like stability; it is actually brittleness. Eventually, it will crack. In some places, it already has. A new generation will pick up the pieces and build something new. In some places, they already are. 

That’s the history of American democracy. And it is about to continue.

The pattern: How reform happens 

Political systems, like humans, are change-averse. Most of the time, the status quo prevails. After all, those in power have the most to lose from any new alternative. They know the current rules. They’ve mastered them. The old rules put them in power. Why would they want new ones? 

The outsiders are always the ones who demand change. But outsider energy alone rarely succeeds. Reform movements break through when ambitious insiders start to see that the climate is changing and decide to grow new lungs before the old ones become useless. 

History is full of examples. Theodore Roosevelt was an establishment party man until he wasn’t. Lyndon B. Johnson was a master of the Senate and a Southern politician until he became the president who pushed through civil rights over the objections of his own filibustering former colleagues. 

This, then, is the repeated pattern of American political reform: After a long period of stasis, the political system begins to falter. Outsider pressure builds. The old order loses legitimacy. New energy gathers behind new demands. New media disrupts the old landscape. A new generation challenges an older generation that has been in power for too long. 

Eventually, enough insiders switch sides to make a reform majority. The system adapts — slowly, then all at once. It happens every 60 years or so. The 1770s, the 1830s, the 1900s, the 1960s — and now, perhaps, the 2020s. 

Why the regularity? The political scientist Samuel Huntington offered an explanation for this pattern in his 1981 book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony. 

Huntington identified a tension at the heart of American political culture. The American creed — liberty, equality, individualism, democracy, the rule of law — is fundamentally anti-power. But governing requires power. This creates a permanent gap between American ideals and American institutions. Huntington called it the “IvI gap”: ideals vs. institutions. 

Most of the time, Americans tolerate this gap. We’re busy. We’re cynical. We’ve learned to live with the distance between what we profess and what we practice. Change feels too hard, too unlikely, too much work. 

But periodically — roughly every 60 years — tolerance collapses. The gap becomes intolerable. Americans enter what Huntington called a “creedal passion period”: an era of moral intensity, institutional questioning, and demands for reform. The 1770s (revolution). The 1830s (Jacksonian populist enfranchisement). The 1900s (the Progressive Era). The 1960s.

The reform ethos is both backward-looking and forward-looking — conservative and progressive at once. 

Huntington offered a metaphor: political earthquakes. “Stresses and strains develop along the major political fault line,” he wrote, “until a political earthquake occurs, releases the tension, and produces a new equilibrium.” 

The system survives these earthquakes. American democracy has weathered four creedal passion periods and emerged transformed — and, in important respects, more democratic. 

But Huntington also offered a warning. “The cry is reform,” he wrote, “the result is realignment.” Reform movements don’t just fix problems. They redistribute power. The reforms of one generation become the vested interests of the next. Direct primaries, created to democratize candidate selection, gave us the primary system we’re now trying to reform. 

The institutions that reformers create “reflect one constellation of political interests and purposes,” Huntington wrote. They’re built by temporary coalitions, moments of passion and mobilization. When that moment passes, the reforms become less effective, even counterproductive. They “lack a well-organized constituency to sustain and protect them.” 

Reforms have enthusiasm, but enthusiasm fades. Organization endures.

Why the Progressive Era is the most like our own 

The Progressive Era is the closest analog to our current moment, so close that the parallels can feel like a taunt, or a promise. It’s worth lingering there, to understand how reform eventually comes, even (especially?) when politics feel stuck and stagnant.

The early 1890s looked a lot like today. By the quantitative measures political scientists use, the Gilded Age was one of the most polarized periods in American history. Party-line voting in Congress exceeded anything we’ve seen until recently. Elections were knife-edge affairs, bitterly contested, decided by tiny margins. 

And the parties were fighting the last war. Politics was about group loyalties — regional, ethnic, cultural — not policy. Republicans waved the “bloody shirt” of the Civil War. Democrats were the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” 

Meanwhile, corporate consolidation was remaking the economy — and the parties couldn’t process it. Railroads were the transformative technology of the age, reshaping commerce, enriching a few men to cartoonish degrees, leaving everyone else to adapt or be crushed. The “money power” seemed to control everything. But the two parties, locked in their zero-sum warfare over Civil War grievances, had no answers. Congress passed the the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), but neither party made enforcement a priority, and the courts gutted both The pressure accumulated. 

Reform energy was building outside the major parties. In 1892, the People’s Party — the Populists — won outright pluralities in four states. But Populism was regional, agrarian, easily dismissed by the establishment as a fever of the plains. It wasn’t enough to break the system on its own. 

Then the Panic of 1893 hit — and validated everything the Populists had warned about. Banks failed, farms foreclosed, cities went insolvent. There was no polling then, but the wrong track/right track numbers were surely hell. 

The crisis broadened discontent beyond the agrarian periphery and into the urban middle class, where professionals and reformers who had once dismissed Populist rhetoric now found themselves asking the same questions.

The refusal to bend invited demands to break. 

The old order could not hold. The parties could not keep fighting about the Civil War while the industrial economy remade society. Something had to give — and eventually, it did. Political reform became the way to fight back: the public interest against the special interest, citizens against machines. 

What emerged was not a single great crusade but a scramble of overlapping fights that confused old party lines and old class allegiances. 

The unifying conviction was that the political system itself was the problem. Purify the procedures, and democratic outcomes would follow. If parties were corrupt, bypass them with direct primaries. If senators were creatures of state legislatures and the corporations that controlled them, elect them directly. If ballots were printed by parties and cast in public, replace them with secret government-printed “Australian” ballots. If legislatures were unresponsive, give citizens the initiative, referendum, and recall. If patronage was the currency of machine politics, replace it with civil service. 

The reforms needed champions — insiders willing to break with their own establishment. In Wisconsin, Robert La Follette built the “Wisconsin Idea,” turning his state into a laboratory for direct democracy and expert administration. At the national level, Roosevelt became the essential figure: an establishment man who recognized the climate was changing and channeled outsider fury into his “Square Deal” — changes the system could absorb without shattering. 

The ferment produced constitutional change. In 1913, two amendments were ratified within months of each other. 

The 16th Amendment authorized the federal income tax — a direct assault on the plutocracy, forcing the wealthy to fund the government they had long controlled. The 17th Amendment required the direct election of senators, bypassing the state legislatures that corporations had learned to manipulate. These were structural attacks on concentrated power, written into the nation’s fundamental law. 

Women’s suffrage followed in 1920, after decades of organizing — an expansion of the franchise that reformers had long demanded. 

Four constitutional amendments in seven years (including, yes, Prohibition, a reminder that reform energy doesn’t always flow in benign directions.). Imagine something like that happening again. 

By the 1920s, reform energy had dissipated — and darker currents filled the vacuum. The same moralizing fervor that produced Prohibition fed nativist restrictions on immigration. The Ku Klux Klan resurged. The crusading spirit curdled into reaction. Reform eras don’t end cleanly; they exhaust themselves, and what follows is not always what reformers intended. 

The Progressive legacy was mixed in other ways too. The organized forces reformers had tried to smash reorganized, eventually, under the new rules. Corporations adapted to regulation; machines found new levers. And the reforms themselves carried a flaw their architects never resolved. Progressives never had a real theory of power. They put too much faith in public participation and disinterested administration, assuming that if you opened the process, virtuous citizens would flood in. Instead, hollow parties got captured by whoever was already organized. 

The reforms of one generation became the vested interests of the next. 

The 1960s: The pattern repeats 

By the late 1950s, the old battles seemed settled. The parties had converged on a liberal consensus — welfare state, mixed economy, Cold War anti-communism — and politics had become technocratic management of a basically solved system. The great questions were answered; all that remained was administration. 

But consensus breeds its own opposition. A new generation — raised in postwar prosperity, coming of age under the threat of nuclear annihilation — looked at their parents’ settlement and found it hollow. 

The civil rights movement exposed a government that had tolerated segregation for a century. Vietnam exposed a government that lied to its own citizens. The military-industrial complex that Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned against seemed to run on its own logic, unaccountable to democratic control. 

The system itself was the problem, and opening it up would fix it. 

To young activists, the political system looked smug and self-satisfied. The technocrats had solved everything —  except the question of whether what they had built was legitimate.

Civil rights became the breakthrough. The movement had been building for decades, but what translated moral witness into legislative victory was a convergence of forces: the strategic brilliance and moral clarity of Martin Luther King Jr., whose campaigns in Birmingham and Selma broadcast the brutality of segregation into living rooms across the nation; and Johnson himself, a master of the Senate who decided to spend every chip he had accumulated over 30 years in Congress on the cause his Southern colleagues despised. 

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were not inevitable. They required outsider pressure and insider champions willing to break with their own coalition. 

But the civil rights victories didn’t relieve the pressure — they raised expectations. And then everything broke at once. 

In 1968, King was assassinated in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June; riots engulfed the cities; the Vietnam War ground on. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, antiwar protesters fought police in the streets while inside the hall, party bosses nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey — a candidate who had not won a single primary (though, to be fair, he didn’t lose any primaries either; he just skipped them entirely).

The chasm between the party’s activist base and its leadership was now undeniable, and Richard Nixon used it to propel himself to the White House. The old order had cracked open, and the question became what would replace it. 

What followed was another wave of ambitious process reform, driven by the same conviction that had animated the Progressives: The system itself was the problem, and opening it up would fix it. 

The McGovern-Fraser Commission rewrote the rules of presidential nominations, replacing backroom deals with primaries and caucuses, open to all who showed up  — if the bosses couldn’t be trusted, let the voters decide directly.

The Freedom of Information Act was strengthened, giving citizens new tools to see what their government was doing. 

After Watergate revealed the corruption at the heart of the Nixon White House, campaign finance reforms followed.

Like the Progressives, the reformers of the 1960s and ’70s achieved real things that had seemed unimaginable until they happened. They expanded inclusion. They democratized nominations. They exposed the government to unprecedented transparency. They constrained executive power after a president had demonstrated how badly it could be abused. 

But also like the Progressive reforms before them, the reforms of the 1960s and ’70s bore the seeds of their own undoing. 

The campaign finance reforms were steadily dismantled by courts. The diffuse “public” the reformers imagined never materialized; the well-organized and well-resourced won. 

And the primaries that reformers championed shifted power from party leaders to whoever could raise money or command media attention. Without strong parties to vet candidates and enforce norms, the door opened for outsiders with no loyalty to the system — and, eventually, no loyalty to democracy itself. 

Our current moment 

And now we may be back on the verge of another reform period. For almost two decades, we’ve been trapped in a two-party doom loop of escalating partisan trench warfare. Trump’s 2016 victory revealed a Republican Party held together by resentment more than vision — a coalition defined by what it hates, increasingly radical in its grievances, unable to articulate a governing program beyond owning the libs. 

One surprising thing

Between 1973 and 1978, Congress built almost the entire modern framework of executive oversight from scratch: the War Powers Resolution, the Congressional Budget Office, impoundment controls, campaign finance regulation, inspectors general across federal agencies, civil service protections, and intelligence surveillance courts.

Democrats, meanwhile, have spent those same years as the anti-Trump party — which means their identity has been hostage to his. Joe Biden was the transitional figure who never transitioned anywhere, a restoration that restored nothing. And now Democrats find themselves running the same play against the same opponent — oppose, oppose, oppose, and wait for public opinion to swing back. 

Meanwhile, new pressures accumulate with no political home. Economic inequality has returned to Gilded Age levels, and conspicuous consumption is once again on fire. Technology is remaking the economy faster than institutions can adapt. New media forms — podcasts and short social media videos — have given a whole generation of outsiders a whole new source of narrative power. The parties can’t process any of this. They’re too busy fighting each other.

The public knows something is wrong. When Pew Research Center asked whether the political system is working well, 4 percent said yes. In a New York Times/Sienna Poll; 55percent want major changes; 14 percent want to tear it down entirely. Eighty percent of voters say the United States is in a political crisis. A third of Americans now say the government is the US’s biggest problem, more than the economy.

Young Americans are the most frustrated — but they haven’t given up on democracy yet. Fifty-eight percent described Democrats negatively (“weak”), 56 percent described Republicans negatively (“corrupt”), and only 16 percent to 17 percent could muster anything positive for either. Among young people who are financially struggling, 70 percent say democracy is “in trouble or failed.”

Perhaps this is the chrysalis generation. Something is dissolving in there. What emerges won’t look like what went in. 

They’re locked out of housing, burdened by debt, watching the climate destabilize while Washington argues about the same things it argued about when their parents were young. They’re not asking for better messaging or more inspiring candidates. They’re asking why the system can’t seem to do anything at all. 

When Politico asked Americans whether “radical change” is necessary to make life better, 52 percent said yes. That sentiment cuts across party lines. The demand for transformation is there. The question is what form it will take. 

Huntington’s 60-year creedal passion cycle suggests conditions are ripe; the last such period was the 1960s. But there’s another cycle converging. The Reagan regime — built on deregulation, tax cuts, and skepticism of government — is exhausted.

If the pattern holds, reform is coming. The question isn’t whether, but what kind.

What kind of reform? 

Previous reformers held out hope that they could work around parties by directly engaging mass public participation. It was a natural instinct — the parties seemed corrupt, self-serving, obstacles to the popular will. If we could just remove the intermediaries, let the people speak directly through primaries and initiatives and referenda, then democracy would flourish. 

This era of dysfunction and discontent will end too. The real question is: What comes next?

It was a mistake. Reform movements face a recurring trade-off: inclusion vs. accountability. Open the process too wide, and nobody’s in charge — which means nobody can be held responsible when things go wrong. The Progressives got anti-corruption but reduced inclusion. The 1960s expanded participation but weakened governing capacity, making it harder for new leaders to take on concentrated power. No reform era has resolved this tension, because none changed the two-party system that produces it. 

Democracy at scale requires structure. Someone has to aggregate preferences, mobilize voters, vet candidates, broker compromises. That’s what parties do. When you try to remove them from the equation, you don’t get direct democracy. You get a vacuum — and the existing organized forces rush to fill it. The parties adapted and survived, but hollowed out. And hollow parties can’t deliver on the reformers’ original instinct: empowering new leaders to challenge entrenched interests. 

Winner-take-all elections mechanically produce two parties. Any third force either gets absorbed or destroyed. The two mega-organizations persist no matter how dysfunctional they become, because they don’t need to be good. They just need to be less unpopular than the other one. 

This creates a deeper dysfunction than mere incompetence. The coalitions are too broad, held together only by negative partisanship — by shared hatred of the other side rather than shared commitment to anything. The instinct is to leave problems unresolved, because unresolved problems are electoral weapons. Immigration, health care, housing, the debt — these fester not despite the two-party system but because of it. 

This is a tough time for democracies everywhere. But European multiparty systems are adapting — old parties fade, new ones emerge, coalitions reconfigure. In America, the pressure just builds. We are distinctly dysfunctional not because Americans are uniquely polarized, but because our electoral system is uniquely rigid. 

We are not short on ideas for how to reform democracy. Proportional representation, in which legislative seats are allocated in proportion to vote share rather than winner-take-all, would let more than two parties win seats, breaking the two-party doom loop at its source. Fusion voting would let new parties cross-endorse candidates and build power without acting as spoilers. Expanding the House, frozen at 435 members since 1929, would make districts smaller and representatives closer to the people they serve. These are just a few — there are many others, from the granular to the grand, that are worth pursuing. 

There will be an after. There always is. The Gilded Age ended. The boss system ended. The Solid Jim Crow South gave way to voting rights. This era of dysfunction and discontent will end too. The real question is: What comes next?

This story was supported by a grant from Protect Democracy. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

]]> Lee Drutman <![CDATA[The 65-year-old theory that helps explain why the Democrats keep losing]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=459715 2025-09-02T13:55:10-04:00 2025-09-03T06:45:00-04:00 Protect Medicaid sign
Democrats tried to emphasize Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, but this is hard to message, as the program goes by different names in many states. | Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images

Democratic strategists think the party has a messaging problem. Post-election autopsies overflowed with countless cross-tabs of how Democrats “underperformed” with demographic after demographic. There are endless debates about which words poll better (should Democrats stop using “microaggression”?) — as if anybody were even listening.

Third Way’s “Signal Project” exemplifies this paralysis. The center-left think tank launched an 18-month project to identify which Trump actions are “most relevant to key voters.” Their profound discovery? “Shuttering USAID, using government power to attack political opponents, firing indiscriminately, degrading the civil service, releasing J6ers, or blaming Ukraine for the Russian invasion all are a combination of unwise, unethical, illegal, or unconstitutional,” according to Axios. “But none resonate much with key voters.” Who knew?  

Should we say “working families” or “working people”? Frame ourselves as “Team Normal” versus “Team Extreme”? Who notices? House Democrats test “America is too expensive” versus “People Over Politics.” Say  “poor,” or say “economically disadvantaged”? “Addiction” or “substance use disorder”? Who cares?

Yet, leading Democrats seem to think that if only they spend another $50 million to identify the right message for lost working-class voters, they can “win them back” (tellingly, the “them” in the “Win Them Back Fund” gives away the flawed premise of the project).

Certainly, polling and focus-group testing have their place. Polling, when done well, offers a snapshot of public opinion to see what is resonating (though even polling results are highly sensitive to question wording). Focus groups, when done well, can better capture the complex and often contradictory ways in which citizens think through politics, and can pick up on concerns that poll writers might miss or struggle to distill into simple questions (though moderators can very easily direct the results, often without realizing it).  

They have accepted a losing political battle they never chose without even realizing it.

But both are reactive to current news, almost by definition. They can never shape the dominant conflict. Only political leaders taking decisive actions can do that.

The Democrats don’t have a messaging problem. They have a much bigger problem: They have accepted a losing political battle they never chose without even realizing it.

Messaging is how you talk about the fight once the battle has been chosen. It’s the tactics, slogans, and talking points deployed within an accepted frame. The conflict defines the possible frames. The frames — the greater story — shape the specific messages.

Democrats have a framing problem — once you’ve accepted a losing political gambit, it’s hard to regain your position with language alone, no matter how many focus groups and polls you commission. The lines are not always clear, but if politics were a pop song, think of conflict as the mood, instrumentation, and beat; frame as the melody, chords, and bubble-gum lyrics; and messaging as the vocal flourishes. 

As the opposition party in Congress, Democrats’ ability to shift the conflict in Washington is depressingly limited. But America is a big country, with many Democratic governors and even more Democratic mayors. Consider the gerrymandering wars. Democratic governors have responded to Texas’s new gerrymander by promising to redraw their own lines, thus accepting the brutal reality. But why not use this focusing moment to instead call for proportional representation as an end to single-member districts that enable gerrymandering altogether and an end to the two-party system that single-member districts create, thus reshaping the conflict entirely? 

A theory of conflict

Consider this: What was Kamala Harris’s 2024 slogan?

Most people can’t even remember, because the campaign never settled on one. The closest thing — “We’re Not Going Back” — defined the party in purely defensive terms. Campaign slogans may be silly. But they are the one opportunity to distill a campaign and define a conflict. And all successful political movements understand, whether by design or accident, that the side that defines what the dominant fight is about usually wins. 

 Take the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill: After some message testing, Democrats settled on calling it “One Big, Ugly Bill.” (How much did that message-testing cost?) Democrats tried to emphasize the cuts to Medicaid, which were generally unpopular, as were most pieces of the bill. But this is hard to message: In many states, Medicaid operates under a different name, and its funding flows through different programs, so it’s hard to see it as a direct benefit. Plus, these cuts will go into effect after the 2026 midterm elections. 

By contrast, Vice President JD Vance telegraphed Republicans’ strategy clearly on X: “Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.” 

Come the midterms, which conflict — Medicaid policy or border security — will resonate more? Which conflict has been more central to American politics for a decade? If you are not sure, you may not understand how conflict works in politics; the more emotional, high-intensity conflict dominates. 

Conflict defines politics. And if you don’t have a theory of conflict, it doesn’t matter what your theory of messaging or mobilization or issue-speak looks like.

So what does a theory of conflict look like? The best guide remains E.E. Schattschneider’s 1960 classic The Semi-Sovereign People. He writes:

What happens in politics depends on the way in which people are divided into factions, parties, groups, classes. The outcome of the game of politics depends on which of a multitude of possible conflicts gains the dominant position. 

His insights are deceptively simple: Conflict organizes politics because conflict is interesting, and the most important political battle is always the battle over which battle matters most. Coalitions and majorities follow from the battle lines. 

“The definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power,” Schattschneider argues. “He who determines what politics is about runs the country, because the definition of the alternatives is the choice of conflicts.”

Another example is President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Trump has framed tariffs as a recipe for American greatness and strength. Trump defines the conflict as between those who see the long-term benefit of an American manufacturing renaissance (a promise about the future), against those who might complain about having to pay a little more. 

By focusing on prices, Democrats are accepting this frame, and thus, the conflict about American greatness. They are ignoring that the larger story is about the status and might of America. Even calling it a “tax” accepts this premise. People may grumble about taxes, but they can be willing to pay higher taxes if they think they are getting something in return. 

So why not name the tax more directly to make its unpopularity stick a little more? ? Naming things gives them a specificity that makes them more memorable. 

Could Democrats define the conflict around tariffs not as a generic tax, but as an “isolation tax” — a premium we are paying to isolate ourselves from the world? This substitutes a different conflict: whether America wants to cut itself off from the world. Or: a “nostalgia tax” — a premium we are paying to recreate the past. This substitutes in a new conflict — past vs. future. 

Such conflicts only work, however, if they fit with a larger set of policy fights that reinforce the conflict. They can’t just be floating messages. The important thing here is to understand how conflicts define the alternatives. And most importantly how consistent actions reinforce the conflicts, even if they are stunts; as long as they are interesting stunts. Trump showing up to work at McDonald’s or dressing up as a garbage collector during the campaign was an obvious stunt. But it was interesting and memorable. 

This works in mundane contexts too. When I want my kids to clean up, I don’t ask whether they want to clean or not — I ask whether they want to clean now or in five minutes. They always choose five minutes, having failed to recognize my displacement of the real conflict by my strategic definition of alternatives. They would make excellent Democratic campaign managers.

How conflict definition works

For a master class in political conflict definition, consider how Franklin D. Roosevelt framed the 1936 election. Rather than defending New Deal policies on technical merits, he redefined the entire battle as a struggle between ordinary Americans and corrupt elites. His October 31 speech at Madison Square Garden demonstrated this strategy perfectly:

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. … Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

The MAGA-infused Republican Party’s frame has in many ways echoed the broad strokes of the FDR-led Democratic Party. Mitt Romney’s Republicans fought on traditional conservative terrain: “job creators vs. job takers,” with immigration as a technocratic problem requiring “self-deportation.” Trump torched this framework entirely. His conflict: Corrupt elites betrayed ordinary Americans. Immigration became invasion. Republicans transformed from the party of capital gains tax cuts and H-1B visas into the party of working-class rage against globalist elites who shipped jobs overseas.

At times, Democrats have steered the conflict. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign defined a brighter future against the failed politics of the Bush administration, particularly around the Iraq War. But Obama’s “hope and change” offensive became eight years of governing reality. By 2016, Democrats had transformed from insurgents into incumbents, with Hillary Clinton running explicitly as Obama’s third term — defender of Obamacare, guardian of norms, and seller of the narrative that  America already was great.

Joe Biden doubled down on the defensive, campaigning as democracy’s bodyguard who would restore “normalcy” and “decency.” When Trump redefined politics as “the people vs. corrupt institutions,” Democrats defended those very institutions against populist insurgency. Democrats have been struggling on this battlefield ever since. They never recognized how they got trapped there. In casting themselves as the stewards of democracy in 2024, they offered only a meager defense of the unpopular status quo.

How to create a new conflict

As Schattschneider understood, “Strategy is the heart of politics, as it is of war.” When frontal assault produces stalemate, you don’t need better tactics — you need a different battlefield. 

New conflicts can emerge from identifying real contradictions that current politics can’t resolve and starting new fights. These are hard to find, and even harder to commit to, because to succeed they often require picking fights with your own side (as Trump did in 2016).

One leading contender on the Democratic side comes from the Abundance movement. The movement identified a genuine problem: America struggles to build. Housing, clean energy, transit — all blocked by regulations, lawsuits. Their solution: Make it easier to build.

New conflicts create excitement — they bring in people who were sitting out the old fight. They create new enemies and new allies. They scramble existing coalitions.

Sounds nice. But where’s the conflict? It’s too polite, too technocratic. Who exactly is doing the blocking? The movement gestures vaguely at “NIMBYs” and “regulations,” but it doesn’t name names. 

Real conflict transformation requires what FDR understood: You need villains. (As he famously put it: “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”)

What if you take the Abundance insight, but name the enemy? Call them the Extractors. These are the people who hoard their existing wealth, be they private equity firms, the oligarchs, NIMBY homeowners, monopolists, or Trump and his cronies.

They extract your rent through housing monopolies. They extract your data through tech monopolies. They extract your repair rights through hardware monopolies. Trump extracts your wealth through tariffs (a Trump Extraction Tax) — creating artificial scarcity at the border, then selling exemptions to the highest bidder. Extraction without building. 

This also inverts Romney’s old frame about “makers” and “takers.” The nurse in the understaffed private equity hospital? She’s a maker. She’s making people healthier. The firm that cut staff to extract fees? They’re the takers. The farmer growing food? A maker, producing sustenance for the country. John Deere blocking their right to repair their own tractors? Taker.

New conflicts create excitement — they bring in people who were sitting out the old fight. They create new enemies and new allies. They scramble existing coalitions. When you redefine the conflict from “liberal elites vs. the real Americans” to “builders vs. extractors,” the farmer who voted Trump because of cultural grievances might join with the young progressive who can’t afford rent along with the entrepreneur who can’t start a business and the social media content creator who finds all her data is now being used against her. All are makers and builders, oppressed by current extractors. And the extractor-in-chief, Trump, is getting rich while creating the ultimate scarcity through executive graft and tariffs. 

Maybe “builders vs. extractors” isn’t the right conflict. Maybe it’s something else entirely. But the point is this: You can’t message your way out of fighting on unfavorable terrain. You need new terrain. You need a new conflict if you are losing the old one. 

Schattschneider called the people “semi-sovereign” because they can only choose between conflicting alternatives, developed by the major parties. The implication: Popular sovereignty depends on leaders willing to open up new conflicts and create new choices. As he understood: “The people are powerless if the political enterprise is not competitive. It is the competition of political organizations that provides the people with the opportunity to make a choice. Without this opportunity popular sovereignty amounts to nothing.”

The people are waiting to be sovereign. They just need somebody to give them a fight worth joining.

]]> Lee Drutman <![CDATA[The big reason why Republicans should worry about an angry Elon Musk]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=415876 2025-06-06T17:38:02-04:00 2025-06-06T17:40:00-04:00 Elon Musk, wearing a black suit with a black t-shirt and hat, laughs while standing in front of a window framed by gold curtains.
In the November 2026 midterm elections, Elon Musk could have much more impact for much less money. | Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images

How the Musk-Trump blowup ends, nobody knows.

Most commentary gives President Donald Trump the advantage. But Elon Musk’s willingness to spend his fortune on elections gives him one distinct advantage — the ability to drive a brittle party system into chaos and loosen Trump’s hold on it. 

Thus far, Musk has raised two electoral threats. First, his opposition to Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill has raised the specter of his funding primary challenges against Republicans who vote to support the legislation. Second, he has raised the possibility of starting a new political party. There are limits to how much Musk can actually reshape the political landscape — but the underlying conditions of our politics make it uniquely vulnerable to disruption.

The threat of Musk-funded primaries might ring a little hollow. Trump will almost certainly still be beloved by core Republican voters in 2026. Musk can fund primary challengers, but in a low-information, low-turnout environment of mostly Trump-loving loyal partisans, he is unlikely to succeed. 

However, in the November 2026 midterm elections, Musk could have much more impact for much less money. All he needs to do is fund a few spoiler third-party candidates in a few key swing states and districts. In so doing, he would exploit the vulnerability that has been hiding in plain sight for a while — the wafer-thin closeness of national elections.

In a straight-up battle for the soul of the Republican Party, Trump wins hands down. Not even close. Trump has been the party’s leader and cult of personality for a decade. 

But in a battle for the balance of power, Musk might hold the cards.

Currently, the US political system is “calcified.” That’s how the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck described it in their 2022 book, The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy. Partisans keep voting for their side, seeing only the reality that makes them the heroes; events may change, but minds don’t. 

In a 48-48 country, that means little opportunity for either party to make big gains. It also means a small disruption could have massive implications. 

Elon Musk doesn’t have a winning coalition — but he may not need one to hurt Trump

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that Musk is serious about starting a new political party and running candidates. 

He will quickly find that despite his X poll, a party that “actually represents the 80 percent in the middle” is a fantasy. That mythical center? Being generous here, that’s maybe 15 percent of politically checked-out Americans.

Realistically, the coalition for Musk’s politics — techno-libertarian-futurist, anti-system, very online, Axe-level bro-vibes — would be small. But even so, a Musk-powered independent party — call it the “Colonize Mars” Party — would almost certainly attract exactly the voters completely disenchanted with both parties, mostly the disillusioned young men who went to Trump in the 2024 election.

Imagine Musk funds his Colonize Mars Party in every competitive race, recruiting energetic candidates. He gives disenchanted voters a chance to flip off the system: Vote for us, and you can throw the entire Washington establishment into a panic! 

Practically, not many seats in the midterms will be up for grabs. Realistically, about 40 or so House seats will be genuine swing seats. In the Senate, there are realistically only about seven competitive races. But that means a small party of disruption could multiply the targeted impact of a precision blast with a well-chosen 5 percent of the electorate in less than 10 percent of the seats. Quite a payoff. 

The short-term effect would be to help Democrats. Musk used to be a Democrat, so this is not so strange. If Musk and his tech allies care about immigration, trade, and investment in domestic science, supporting Democrats may make more sense. And if Musk mostly cares about disruption and sending Trump spiraling, this is how he would do it.  

Musk is an engineer at heart. His successes have emerged from him examining existing systems, finding their weak points, and asking, What if we do something totally different?

From an engineer’s perspective, the American political system has a unique vulnerability. Every election hangs on a narrow margin. The balance of power is tenuous. 

Since 1992, we’ve been in an extended period in which partisan control of the White House, Senate, and the House has continually oscillated between parties. National electoral margins remain wickedly tight (we haven’t had a landslide national election since 1984). And as elections come to depend on fewer and fewer swing states and districts, a targeted strike on these pivotal elections could completely upend the system. 

A perfectly balanced and completely unstable system

It’s a system ripe for disruption. So why has nobody disrupted it? 

First, it takes money — and Musk has a lot of it.  

Money has its limits — Musk’s claim that his money helped Trump win the election is dubious. Our elections are already saturated with money. In an era of high partisan loyalty, the vast majority of voters have made up their minds before the candidate is even announced. Most money is wasted. It hits decreasing marginal returns fast.

The very thing that makes our politics feel so stuck is exactly what makes it so susceptible to Musk’s threat.

But where money can make a difference is in reaching angry voters disenchanted with both parties with a protest option. Money buys awareness more than anything else. For $300 million (roughly what Musk spent in 2024), a billionaire could have leverage in some close elections. For $3 billion (about 1 percent of Musk’s fortune) the chance of success goes up considerably.

Second, disruption is possible when there are enough voters who are indifferent to the final outcome. The reason Ross Perot did so well in 1992? Enough voters saw no difference between the parties that they felt fine casting a protest vote. 

In recent years, the share of voters disenchanted with both parties has been growing steadily. The share of Americans with unfavorable views of both parties was 6 percent in 1994. In 2013 it was 28 percent.  In a recent poll, a plurality of adults (38 percent) now say neither party fights for them. Both parties (and Trump) are very unpopular. The overwhelming majority of voters (70 percent) describe themselves as disappointed with the nation’s politics. Voters are angry, and eager for dramatic change. 

Election after election, we’ve gone through the same pattern. Throw out the old bums, bring in the new bums —  even if 90-plus percent of the electorate votes for the same bums, year in and year out. But in a 48-48 country, with only a few competitive states and districts, a rounding-error shift of 10,000 votes across a few states (far fewer than a typical Taylor Swift concert) can bestow full control of the government. Think of elections as anti-incumbent roulette.  

The system is indeed “calcified,” as Sides, Tausanovitch, and Vavreck convincingly argue. Calcified can mean immovable. But it can also mean brittle. Indeed, the very thing that makes our politics feel so stuck is exactly what makes it so susceptible to Musk’s threat.

Most money in politics is wasted. But if one knows how to target it, the potential for serious disruption is quite real.

]]> Lee Drutman <![CDATA[Democrats keep saying America is an “oligarchy.” Is that true?]]> https://www.vox.com/?p=410415 2025-04-25T14:07:19-04:00 2025-04-28T06:00:00-04:00 Tech CEOs.
Tech billionaires lined up in support of Donald Trump’s inauguration. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Joe Biden, in his farewell address, argued that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America.” More recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a crowd of 10,000 in Arizona that “we are witnessing an oligarchy in America.”

Biden and Ocasio-Cortez are hardly the first to diagnose the United States as an oligarchy. Sen. Bernie Sanders has been warning about it for years. So have many others, though, recently, Sen. Elissa Slotkin has pushed back against Democrats using the word.

So, are they right? Are we an oligarchy? If so, when did we become one? And: How bad is it?

What exactly is an oligarchy, anyway?

The concept of oligarchy goes back to ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle’s concept of oligarchy is laid out in his Politics, in which the philosopher distinguished among six possible forms of government. The best form was divine kingship: The monarch rules for the good of all. But this was unlikely. More likely was that the monarch would rule only for the monarchy, hence devolving into its deviant twin, tyranny.

Aristocracy, or rule by an enlightened elite, was a better alternative, assuming a virtuous few could be found to serve. But like kingship, aristocracy ran the risk of devolving into its ugly doppelgänger — in this case, oligarchy.

In an oligarchy, the elite few rule for their own personal enrichment, leaving everyone else worse off.

Which is similar to Biden’s definition: “…extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

And Ocasio-Cortez’s definition: “…When those with the most economic, political and technological power destroy the public good in order to enrich themselves at the price of millions of Americans.”

Some might prefer the label “plutocracy” because it more literally means “rule by the wealthy.” But effectively, the two have become synonymous in the US, where wealth all but ensures political purchase. The basic idea is consistent — a handful of very wealthy individuals use their riches to shape and influence the government on their own financial behalf.

Democracy and oligarchy can coexist because they operate on different axes, the political scientist and oligarchy scholar Jeffrey Winters told me. In short, the more power is in the hands of the very wealthy, the more oligarchic the society. But even under these conditions, if elections are free and fair and formal individual rights are secure, we are still living in a democracy.

The tension arises when the majority of voters decide they don’t like an unequal distribution of wealth and want a more equal distribution.

The tension deepens when the very wealthy — the oligarchs — use their wealth to influence political outcomes in their favor to prevent this democratic redistribution.

Even here, some tug-of-war is normal. Oligarchs may prefer to maintain a democracy and accept some level of redistribution because that is the price of stability. But the more concentrated the wealth and power, the more uneasy the bargain. And the bargain is indeed growing uneasy in the United States.

Is America an oligarchy? 

Oligarchy exists on a continuum, so there is not a single moment someone can point to and say that a country is now officially an oligarchy. But by analyzing data on economic inequality and money in politics, America starts looking distinctly oligarchic by the beginning of the 21st century.

Consider some stats from a comprehensive 2020 RAND report: In 1975, the median full-time American worker earned $42,000 (in 2018 dollars). In 2018, the median was $50,000, a slight increase.

But for those in the top 1 percent of earners, the bottom salary went from $257,000 in 1975 to $761,100 in 2018 — almost tripling. And the average income in the top 1 percent went from $289,000 to $1,384,000 — more than quadrupling.

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In other words, almost all gains in the economy have gone to the very top of the income distribution. The paper’s authors estimate that if the US had maintained the 1975 distribution of income, the median income as of 2018 would be $92,000 instead of $50,000.

Similarly, the share of income going to the top 1 percent has gone from about 10 percent in 1980 to over 20 percent in 2023. During this period, the level of inequality in the United States has gone from being pretty typical of developed countries to being on the extreme fringe.

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Then there is the active involvement of the super-rich in politics. 

For example: that iconic image from Donald Trump’s inauguration, with tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Elon Musk lined up in support, with Apple’s Tim Cook and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew nearby.

There is the official Cabinet of oligarchs. Though precise net worths are hard to pin down, the concentration of wealth is undeniable. Linda McMahon at Education (net worth estimated at $3 billion, combined with her husband); Howard Lutnick at Commerce (at least $2 billion); Kelly Loeffler at Small Business (at least $1 billion); Scott Bessent at Treasury (at least $500 million, combined with his husband); and Jared Isaacman for NASA (a longtime ally of Musk, also worth more than $1 billion). Plus Trump himself, who’s reportedly worth $5.1 billion, though his accounting is famously untrustworthy. (By contrast, Biden’s Cabinet members were mostly mere millionaires.)

And Congress. Though there are no billionaires, roughly half of the current Congress has a net worth of over $1 million, according to one tracker. The richest member appears to be Rick Scott, a former health care CEO, worth about half a billion. Very few representatives come from the working class.

“One reason oligarchs are in such a giddy moment is because they have picked up on the signals that what they are doing is permissible.”

Jeffrey Winters, political scientist and oligarchy scholar

Finally, there is the money spent on politics. Campaign finance limits who can even run for office, with early fundraising success as the golden ticket.

This fundraising money comes from some of the wealthiest Americans. Take the brazenness of the world’s richest man, Musk, spending $291 million, or billionaire Timothy Mellon shelling out $197 million, or billionaire Miriam Adelson spending $148 million, all to support Republicans in the last election. These are extreme sums of money. They make Michael Bloomberg’s $64 million in 2024 seem small.

By one estimate of publicly disclosed contributions, the 0.1 percent wealthiest Americans contributed about 16 percent of campaign dollars in the 2020 presidential election, while the top 1 percent contributed about 33 percent, a figure that has been roughly consistent throughout the 2010s. 

“One reason oligarchs are in such a giddy moment is because they have picked up on the signals that what they are doing is permissible,” Winters said. “In the past, there was a sense it was not okay to commandeer entire campaigns with just a handful of people funding them — that seems to have been lost.”

In earlier years, the very wealthy tended to prefer less transparent, stealthier ways of influence. Many recognized that being too public was likely to backfire. They preferred to hide their contributions through “dark money.” But these days, the super-wealthy are hiding less and getting out front more.

There are certainly divisions among super-rich political financiers. On many social and cultural issues, the very rich are deeply polarized.

But on fiscal issues, there is much more consensus. The political opinions of the very wealthy are more fiscally conservative than the average voter. For example, in survey data from 2009, 52 percent of the general public supported a redistribution of wealth via taxes on the rich. In contrast, only 17 percent of the wealthy agreed.

Meanwhile, corporate lobbying dramatically outspends countervailing forces like unions and public interest groups. In my 2015 book, The Business of America Is Lobbying, I calculated that there is 34 times more spending by business interests than by these countervailing groups. This allows powerful companies to maintain a constant presence in the halls of power.

While money doesn’t guarantee specific outcomes, it effectively constrains the policy options that both Republican and Democratic majorities are willing to consider, particularly regarding tax and regulatory advantages that benefit the wealthy.

So while America has been moving in this direction for a while, “we are really at peak oligarchic power,” Winters said. “This is in-your-face oligarchy. … The sheer visibility is incredible.”

Now what?

The US has always had aspects of oligarchy. The Senate (originally appointed by state legislatures) was to represent the elite; the House was to represent the people. The Electoral College was to keep the people at a distance from the presidency.

And America’s republican form of democracy has always wrestled with the same tension that Aristotle faced: How do we share power and wealth?

More economic inequality weakens social trust and government legitimacy, which in turn weakens support for democracy.

All forms of government give power to some group of decision-makers and not others. All free economies generate some level of inequality. No successful government has ever shared power or resources completely evenly, but successful governments have found a balance. 

So what happens now? 

American voters are extremely angry and distrustful. They think our political system is fundamentally broken and needs major change. Trump has long been the successful avatar of that anger and distrust. But he is also supported by some of the very wealthiest Americans.

This is not necessarily a contradiction. It is one tried-and-true answer to what the political scientist Daniel Ziblatt has called the “conservative dilemma.” In an unequal society, the party of the wealthy has a choice — it can embrace democracy even if it means some redistribution. Or it can try to undermine democracy by elevating divisive cultural and racial issues that will redirect conflict away from questions of wealth redistribution, further polarizing and dividing society. This appears to be what Trump is doing.

The political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call this situation “plutocratic populism,” in their book, Let Them Eat Tweets. Similarly, a new paper calls the GOP’s tense coalition of uber-wealthy elites and resentful non-wealthy regular people “plutopopulism.” The wild card aspects of Trump’s populism — and its uneasy electoral dependencies on anti-elitist grievances — reflect the tenuous coexistence of democracy with increasingly excessive concentrations of wealth.

Meanwhile, as the Democrats also attract more uber-wealthy supporters, anti-establishment attitudes are turning against both parties. 

Consider the relationship between support for democracy and share of income going to the top 1 percent: The more unequal the economy, the less support for democracy. More economic inequality weakens social trust and government legitimacy, which in turn weakens support for democracy.

And support for democracy has notably fallen in the US, at a time of increasing inequality.

Higher income inequality correlates with lower support for democracy

Support for democracy in the US dropped from 2010 to 2020 as the share of total income held by the top one percent of earners grew. Support for democracy in the US dropped from 2010 to 2020 as the share of total income held by the top one percent of earners grew.

One possible future is that the rich continue to defend their wealth, but the quality of democracy continues to decline, perhaps sliding into autocracy. Elections become less fair; political corruption becomes more blatant. Cynicism turns to apathy. Citizens focus on their own survival, and that of their immediate families, and go more quietly. 

Progressives are often fond of quoting Louis Brandeis, who served on the Supreme Court: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Yet, the reality has been otherwise here for decades. We have had both.

But the tensions are mounting. The balance is increasingly unstable. At some point, one will have to win out. The question is whether we will actually get the choice.

]]> Lee Drutman <![CDATA[The two-party system is killing our democracy]]> https://www.vox.com/2020/1/23/21075960/polarization-parties-ranked-choice-voting-proportional-representation 2020-01-22T11:44:07-05:00 2020-01-23T09:00:00-05:00

There is nothing inevitable about our dysfunctional government. 

There is no good reason why our national political institutions should descend into zero-sum hyper-partisan trench warfare, or why we should experience yet another year of existential political dread, fearing that if our side loses the 2020 election, America will be irrevocably broken.

The reason we are in this mess is because we now have, for the first time, a genuine two-party system. We’ve had two major parties for a long time, but for many decades Republicans and Democrats weren’t cleanly split. Some liberals inhabited the GOP; some conservatives called themselves Democrats. The two parties contained enough multitudes that American politics functioned sort of like a multiparty democracy in practice. 

That’s all changed. We are now in an era in which we have two truly distinct national parties, organized around two competing visions of national identity. It works against, not with, our political institutions. It’s a disaster and it’s driving us all crazy.

The way out is to replace our current two-party system with a system that represents the true diversity of Americans — a multiparty system that’s more fluid and responsive to Americans’ political preferences and that dissolves our binary partisanship. 

To get there, we need to change the way we elect our representatives. Instead of holding elections in congressional districts where the single candidate who gets the most votes wins, we need to move toward a proportional representation system, currently used in many advanced democracies. In such a system, if a party gets 40 percent of the vote in a state, then 40 percent of that state’s congressional delegation will represent that party — straightforward and intuitive.  

Our two-party system is largely a product of our antiquated voting process. We have plurality voting in the US — that is, the winner is whoever gets the most votes in the field even if they don’t nab a majority of the votes. For example, if candidate A gets 49 percent of the vote, candidate B gets 48 percent, and fringe candidates combine for the remaining 3 percent, candidate A is the sole winner — even though 51 percent voted against them.

But nothing in the Constitution requires this system. Congress could pass a bill tomorrow changing how we vote.

Change won’t happen overnight. And yes, change of any kind at all seems unlikely. But big democracy reforms have happened throughout American history. Women’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, the Voting Rights Act – all these were at some point improbable notions. They happened when citizen dissatisfaction rose to unsustainable levels and crystallized into demand for specific reforms.

We are in a new age of dissatisfaction. More and more Americans are afraid for our political future. Our democracy is flashing warning signs; all-or-nothing hyper-partisanship is destroying the overarching norms of democratic stability, mutual toleration, and forbearance. This is exactly how democracies die.

Our two-party doom loop, explained

In a democracy, we need to be able to agree to disagree, and agree on a fair process to resolve what we disagree about. Self-governance depends on electoral losers accepting their losses, and on electoral winners giving the losers the freedom to dissent and criticize, and a fair chance to compete in the next election. 

Hyper-partisanship threatens all this by raising electoral stakes to impossible heights, and making the other party seem so extreme and dangerous that the thought of them winning is simply unacceptable.

Once the parties polarize in a two-party system, the danger is that polarization becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic — a doom loop. The more the two parties take strongly opposing positions, the more different they appear. And the more different they appear, the more the other party comes to feel like a genuine existential threat to the other. 

Understandably, many on the left believe the problem is simply the Republican Party, and if only Democrats could win decisive majorities, American democracy would work better. After all, Republicans have pushed a much more aggressive version of “constitutional hardball” — they’ve pursued partisan gerrymandering more enthusiastically, they’ve actively impeded the ability of Democratic constituencies to vote, and they broke precedent by not giving a sitting president the opportunity to get even a hearing on his Supreme Court nominee.  

But given the evenly balanced strength of the two parties nationally, and the ways in which the Senate and the Electoral College are biased toward the rural party (generally Republicans), Democrats are not likely to win decisive majorities any time soon. Even if you believe Republicans are the problem, the two-party system ensures that Republicans can keep doing what they are doing simply by virtue of being the only viable alternative for voters who can’t see themselves as Democrats. 

Moreover, the idea that if only one party could gain the permanent upper hand is itself a perpetuation of the doom loop. And yet, it’s a natural and sensible reaction to current politics, if you think that we’re stuck with our two-party system. 

Senate Impeachment Trial Of President Donald Trump Begins

Why multiparty democracy?

The way out of the crisis is to break the zero-sum doom loop of hyper-partisanship. That means having more than two parties, ideally between four and six — enough to represent the ideological diversity of the country, and offer enough space for different coalitions and alignments, but not so much fragmentation to render coalition formation overly difficult and overwhelm voters with too many choices.

To allow for more parties, we’d have to change the way we vote. Right now, we elect our congressional representatives in single-winner, plurality elections — that is, we hold 435 separate elections for the House, each decided by a plurality. So a party that gets 48 percent of the vote gets in a district wins everything, while a party that gets 46 percent of the vote gets nothing, since there can only be one winner. This system renders third parties as spoilers and directs almost all political ambition into one of the two leading parties.

Instead of the current system, I propose that we elect representatives in multi-winner, proportional elections, in which multiple members of Congress represent an electoral district, and parties’ share of seats more closely reflects their share of votes. Multiple parties can thrive because they don’t need to win a plurality in order to get representation.

Many versions of proportional representation (PR) exist in the world (including ones that generate too many parties, like Israel’s version of hyper-PR, which has 17 parties with representation in the 120-seat Knesset — and even more competing in elections). The version of proportional representation I favor is a version that Ireland has used for almost a century, which combines multi-member districts with something called ranked-choice voting (RCV).  

With ranked-choice voting, voters indicate their preferences by ranking their candidates on the ballot. If your top choice is the lowest vote-getter when the votes are first counted, that candidate gets crossed off — but your number two choice then gets counted. In the single-winner version, candidates then get eliminated from last place up, until one candidate emerges with a majority. In a multiple-winner system, say five, the process ends when five candidates remain (after all vote transfers are completed). 

We should also use ranked-choice voting for Senate elections — though because states have only two senators, typically elected at different times, Senate elections would still have to be single-winner, ranked-choice voting.

For president, I’d replace the Electoral College with a national ranked-choice voting election. Here’s how it might play out: We might see at least two parties running candidates on the left, one represented perhaps by Sen. Bernie Sanders, and another represented by former Vice President Joe Biden, and at least two parties running candidates on the right, one represented by President Donald Trump, another represented by former Ohio governor John Kasich (or another more centrist Republican). We might see more candidates, too. With ranked-choice voting, candidates would reach out to each others’ supporters, promising broad governing coalitions in exchange for second-choice preferences. 

Changing the way we vote to allow for more parties might seem radical, but it really shouldn’t. 

First, it’s the hyper-partisan two-party system of the last decade that marks the true deviation from our history. America has had something more like a multiparty democracy within its two-party system for most of the country’s history. Conservative Oklahoma Democrats and liberal Illinois Democrats were once in Congress alongside liberal Vermont Republicans and conservative South Carolina Republicans. Depending on the issue, they formed different kinds of coalitions.

Second, proportional, multiparty democracy is the norm among advanced democracies, and has been for over a century. Yes, it’s true that under such systems, parties sometimes struggle to build governing coalitions. But that’s politics. Compromise and coalition-building are always hard. But because multiparty systems require both to form a government, parties eventually figure it out. 

Proportional multiparty democracy would likely increase voter turnout. US voter turnout has long been at the bottom of OECD countries, despite countless efforts to improve participation. But perhaps our low participation shouldn’t be that surprising. Our two-party single-winner elections generate lots of lopsided districts where residents’ votes are irrelevant. When your vote is irrelevant, why bother?

Under proportional representation, by contrast, all votes matter equally. If the party you support gets 30 percent of the vote in your state, it doesn’t mean you get to send zero representatives — it means 30 percent of your state’s congressional delegation will be composed of the party you supported. Because all votes matter, parties and candidates have more incentive to mobilize more voters. 

Third, multiparty democracy shouldn’t seem radical because it embodies the same values — fluid compromise and flexible coalition building — that the Framers, particularly James Madison, saw as essential to self-governance. The Framers despised political parties, but what they really feared was a binary two-party system. They feared that if just one party became the majority, it would use its power to abuse the remaining minority party, and that close two-party competition would be destabilizing. They were spot-on.

U.S.-NEW YORK-MIDTERM ELECTIONS

Reform is hard, but not impossible

Maybe you’re thinking: Okay, that all makes sense. But c’mon: We can barely pass a budget on time. How are we going to upend our entire voting system?

We’re not — at least not immediately. The electoral reforms I propose would be a major change. And it would take a broad social movement and lots of public pressure to help bring about change. 

But the seeds for reform need to be planted first.

Change is already taking root at the state and local levels. Maine adopted ranked-choice voting in 2018. New York City adopted ranked-choice voting in 2019, joining several other major cities, and Massachusetts may adopt it in 2020. Democracy reform in the US has almost always been a state-led process. And there are plenty of state-level opportunities. 

Moreover, the history of American democracy is also a history of reform. We’ve repeatedly changed our voting rules, making our democracy more inclusive and representative. The primaries, direct elections of senators, and single-member districts were all affirmative reforms that changed American democracy.

In the first two decades of the 20th century, most Western European democracies adopted proportional representation. Though each country had its own distinct path, in each country a majority of democratically elected representatives moved to a different voting system because they thought it would be an improvement over the status quo. In the 1990s, New Zealand ditched first-past-the-post elections and adopted a version of proportional representation, responding to massive public discontent with the existing system.

Reform is always unlikely. But moments do arise when the case for reform becomes so clear, and the demand so high, that it becomes only a matter of time before the right spark catches and reform seems inevitable.

Perhaps our current discontent is combustible enough for that coming spark. Dissatisfaction with and distrust in our current political system is at its highest levels in the history of modern polling, and probably comparable to levels in the lead-up to the Progressive Era. The raw material for a major democracy reform movement exists. 

But it is still inchoate. That means it will depend on what we all do to help it grow and develop. The first step is understanding just how dangerous the status quo would be, if left to continue its democracy-destroying doom loop.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at the think tank New America, co-host of the Politics in Question podcast, and author of the new book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America. 

]]> Lee Drutman <![CDATA[Ranked-choice voting faces its biggest test yet in New York City]]> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/1/20941870/ranked-choice-voting-new-york-city 2019-11-26T11:04:34-05:00 2019-11-05T15:03:57-05:00

On Tuesday, New York City residents will vote on whether to double the number of Americans who use a new system of voting — ranked-choice voting — to elect officials.

Technically, Ballot Question 1 amends the City Charter to “Give voters the choice of ranking up to five candidates in primary and special elections for Mayor, Public Advocate, Comptroller, Borough President, and City Council beginning in January 2021.”

But practically, it would be a tremendous lift for a growing electoral reform movement that includes Maine; Sante Fe, New Mexico; Oakland, California; and Memphis, Tennessee. As the biggest city in the nation (population 8.6 million), New York City would add considerably to the users of ranked-choice voting.

As the name suggests, ranked-choice voting lets voters mark their first-choice candidate first, their second-choice candidate second, their third-choice candidate third, and so on. Each voter has only one vote but can indicate their backup choices: If one candidate has an outright majority of first-place rankings, that candidate wins, just like a traditional election.

But if no candidate has a majority in the first round, the candidate in last place is eliminated. Voters who had ranked that candidate first have their votes transferred to the candidate they ranked second. This process continues until a single candidate gathers a majority.

Most expect New Yorkers to approve ranked-choice voting on Election Day. A wide range of groups and local leaders have endorsed the reform, and it has faced little opposition. New York City has often been on the forefront of good government reforms. Its small-donor campaign finance matching system was the first in the nation, and a model for the campaign finance proposal in HR 1.

Supporters argue that ranked-choice voting can reduce polarization and divisive campaigning by changing the incentives. Instead of just competing to be voters’ first choice, candidates are also competing to be voters’ second, third, and sometimes fourth choices, encouraging candidates to make wider appeals. Ranked-choice voting also tends to encourage a more diverse candidate pool, and leaves voters feeling happier about the process, both because their vote is more likely to matter and because they can vote for their favorite candidate without worrying about playing spoiler.

Vox is covering the results live, here.

Ranked choice voting, explained

New York City may become the most populous place in the US yet to adopt ranked-choice voting, but it’s hardly a pioneer.

Twenty cities in the United States have already adopted ranked-choice voting. In 2018, Maine became the first state to adopt it for federal elections. That catapulted the reform to a national spotlight, with presidential candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bennet now championing it. Australia has used ranked-choice voting for 101 years, and Ireland has used it for 98 years.

Studies have shown that in places that have adopted it, ranked-choice voting has made politics a little less nasty. Candidates spent less time attacking each other, as compared to similar cities that didn’t adopt ranked-choice voting. Voters in cities with the system reported being more satisfied with local campaigns as a result (again, as compared to similar cities).

Ranked-choice voting has also increased the share of racial minority, female, and female minority candidates running compared to similar cities. The scholars who have studied this most closely believe more minority candidates ran because under ranked-choice voting, such candidates could reach out to other communities where they might not be the natural first choice and ask for second-choice votes.

The researchers believe women were more likely to run because under traditional winner-take-all elections, “women were deterred from running for office by … negative campaigning.” But with less negative campaigning and more cooperative campaigning, women are more likely to run. They’re also more likely to win, scholar Sarah John and her colleagues concluded.

Under ranked-choice systems, voters don’t have to try to figure out whether to support the candidate with the best chance of winning or the candidate they like best but fear can’t win. They can vote sincerely for their favorite candidate on their first choice, and then select back-up choices if their preferred candidates don’t do well. This also allows voters to express their full range of preferences, sending clearer signals than the traditional approach to voting. And in the end, more voters are likely to wind up voting for a winner. Voters prefer this kind of “preferential” voting because they consider it fairer.

No voting system is perfect. Critics of ranked-choice say the task of having to rank multiple candidates unfairly overwhelms low-information voters, and that the added complexity hits low-income minorities hardest. The editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle last year called the process — in place for more than 15 years — “a baffling experience for many voters,” and decried a plan by two San Francisco mayoral candidates to defeat another, London Breed, by “gaming” the ranked-choice system.

However, surveys have shown no difference in understanding of ranked-choice voting between white and nonwhite voters, and more than 90 percent of voters who have used the system describe it as simple. Some studies show turnout declines among minority voters. But most likely, when properly accounting for other factors, turnout has probably remained stable, with no declines in poorer precincts.

Americans are showing greater interest in alternatives to our voting system

While some cities with ranked-choice voting have used it to combine primary and general elections or general and run-off elections (saving taxpayers money), New York City would be unusual in applying ranked-choice voting only to the primary election and not to the general election.

However, in a heavily Democratic city like New York City, the deciding election is often the Democratic primary. Because of this, the primary often generates a crowded field, which means that a candidate can win with a mere plurality — not a majority — of votes under the current rules.

According to one analysis, in the last three election cycles, almost two-thirds of multi-candidate city primary contests (64 percent) did not generate a majority winner. And in almost a third of those elections (30 percent), the winning candidate got less than 40 percent of the vote. In other words, under the current rules, candidates preferred by far less than half of their constituents get to represent all of their constituents.

Under ranked-choice voting, outcomes like this can’t happen. The winning candidate needs to earn true majority support — a plurality does not make a victory. And if no candidate gets a majority of first-preference votes, that’s when the rankings kick in, and candidates are eliminated and their preferences redistributed until one candidate has a winning majority. This ensures that candidates need to build broad appeal. A candidate who doubles down on an intense but ultimately narrow group of supporters cannot win.

If New York City adopts ranked-choice voting, it will join Eastpointe, Michigan, a Detroit suburb, as a fellow 2019 adoptee. Eastpointe agreed to switch to ranked-choice voting in June as a remedy for Voting Rights Act violations. The Department of Justice approved the new voting system as a way to help the city’s minority voters better elect their candidates of choice. According to the American Community Survey, the white population of Eastpointe is 48 percent, and the black population is 46 percent. Yet it wasn’t until 2017 that the city elected its first black city council member, Monique Owens. This year, she was elected the city’s first black mayor.

There’s more to come. 2020 is shaping up to be a big year for ranked-choice voting. Four states will use it in the Democratic primary — Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, and Wyoming. And Maine voters will use it for the first time in the general election for president. And both Alaska and Massachusetts will likely vote on ballot measures in 2020 to adopt ranked-choice voting statewide.

So ranked-choice voting is catching on. If New Yorkers vote themselves into the ranks, it will be yet another sign of the movement’s momentum — and a growing desire among Americans to improve our political institutions.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that the white population of Eastpointe, Michigan was 42 percent. According to the American Community Survey, it is actually 48 percent. We regret the error.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at the New America think tank and the author of the forthcoming book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

]]> Lee Drutman <![CDATA[Laboratories of Democracy: San Francisco voters rank their candidates. It’s made politics a little less nasty.]]> https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/24/20700007/maine-san-francisco-ranked-choice-voting 2019-09-06T12:30:51-04:00 2019-07-31T09:24:09-04:00
The Highlight by Vox logo

Looking at the nation’s most intriguing experiments in local policy.

The policy: Ranked-choice voting

Where: San Francisco

In place since: 2002

The problem:

In March 2002, San Franciscans were ready for some new voting rules. The city had long used a two-round runoff system for elections, which usually meant a second round in December to get a majority winner. Voters were tired by then. Taxpayers complained of the cost. 

San Franciscans had experienced runoffs in 2000 and 2001, with turnout declines of 51 percent and 44 percent, respectively. Six of the past eight city elections had asked voters to come back to the polls a month later to ensure all city office holders won a majority of votes.

So voters approved Proposition A and became the first US city to adopt instant-runoff voting in the modern era. A coalition of good-government reformers and progressive politicians got behind the voting system, a variation on a system that 24 US cities (including New York City and nearby Sacramento) had adopted between 1915 and 1948 in an earlier era of municipal reform.

These days, IRV goes by ranked-choice voting. Same thing, different feature highlighted. 

As the name suggests, ranked-choice voting lets voters mark their first-choice candidate first, their second-choice candidate second, their third-choice candidate third, and so on. Easy as 1-2-3. Each voter has only one vote but can indicate their backup choices: If one candidate has an outright majority of first-place rankings, that candidate wins, just like a traditional election. But if no candidate has a majority in the first round, the candidate in last place is eliminated. Voters who had ranked that candidate first have their votes transferred to their backup — that is, the candidate they ranked second. This process continues until a single candidate gathers a majority.

In San Francisco, there was another selling point besides eliminating costly low-turnout runoffs: Voters could vote with their heart first and their head second, picking their favorite candidate first without feeling they had “wasted” their vote, then picking the lesser of two evils second or third, knowing their vote would still count.

But more than anything, the hope was that ranked-choice voting would encourage more civil campaigning, more engagement with voters, and better coalition-building. Candidates would now be angling for second- and third-choice preferences. They’d be nicer to each other as a result. They might even campaign together.

How it worked: 

As San Francisco goes, so goes everyone else. In 2004, Berkeley followed suit; Oakland adopted the practice in 2006. So did Minnesota cities Minneapolis in 2006 and St. Paul in 2009. Unlike San Francisco, Minneapolis and St. Paul didn’t have two-round elections that spent taxpayer dollars on low-turnout December runoffs. They spent it on low-turnout primaries where fewer than one in 10 residents turned out. So why not just have one election, primary and general, rolled into one, where a ranked ballot did the whittling? Most there thought it was a good idea.

Minnesotans were also familiar with the shortcomings of simple plurality voting. In 1998, Jesse Ventura became the state’s governor with just 37 percent of the vote in a three-way race. In 2002, Tim Pawlenty won with just 44.4 percent, also in a three-way race, with an independent getting 16.2 percent of the vote. (Pawlenty won again with a mere plurality in 2006 — 46 percent, with an independent getting 6.4 percent.) 

Against the backdrop of plurality elections producing mere plurality winners, the case for ranked-choice voting got stronger: Shouldn’t the winning candidate have to earn a true majority? Ranked-choice voting meant that once second- and third-choice preferences were counted, the winning candidate was indeed the most broadly preferred — a strong selling point.

Twenty cities in the United States have now adopted ranked-choice voting. But the big news was that in 2018, Maine became the first state to adopt it for federal elections. This has catapulted the reform to a national spotlight, with presidential candidates like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bennet now championing it.

As promised, it has made politics a little less nasty. In cities with ranked-choice voting, candidates spent less time attacking each other, as compared to similar cities that didn’t adopt ranked-choice voting. Voters in these cities reported being more satisfied with local campaigns as a result (again, as compared to similar cities). 

Ranked-choice voting has also increased the share of racial minority candidates, female candidates, and female minority candidates running compared to similar cities. The scholars who have studied this most closely believe more minority candidates ran because under ranked choice, such candidates could reach out to other communities where they might not be the natural first choice and ask for second-choice votes. They believe women were more likely to run because under traditional winner-take-all elections, “women were deterred from running for office by … negative campaigning.” But with less negative campaigning and more cooperative campaigning, women are more likely to run. They’re also more likely to win, scholar Sarah John and her colleagues concluded.

No voting system is perfect. Critics of ranked-choice voting say the task of having to rank multiple candidates unfairly overwhelms low-information voters, and that the added complexity hits poor minorities hardest. The editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle last year called the process — in place for more than 15 years — “a baffling experience for many voters,” and decried a plan by two San Francisco mayoral candidates to defeat another, London Breed, by “gaming” the ranked-choice system.

However, surveys have shown no difference in understanding of ranked-choice voting between white and nonwhite voters, and more than 90 percent of voters who have used the system describe it as simple. Some studies show declines among minority voters. But most likely, when properly accounting for other factors, turnout has probably remained stable, with no declines in poorer precincts. 

But cities are one thing. The RCV cities are solidly on the political left, and some are technically nonpartisan. How it works at the state level, or even the national level (as many, including me, have proposed) with contested partisan elections, is another. 

But the national stage is where RCV has its greatest promise. The zero-sum, binary nature of our two-party elections rewards negative campaigning, where winning comes from disqualifying the opponent. It pushes politicians into us-against-them rhetoric so many now decry. Ranked-choice voting would make space for political alternatives to emerge without being spoilers, potentially reorienting our stuck partisan division.

Here, we might look not to the handful of reform-oriented cities but to Australia, which has used ranked-choice voting nationally for 101 years, and with a strong track record of moderate and stable politics. Most likely, the next step for ranked-choice voting is for more states to follow Maine’s lead, adopting it statewide. Maine’s first ranked-choice voting run in November went smoothly, though we’re most likely to see effects kick in with the next election, as candidates adjust to the new system.

But Maine’s adoption did provoke some backlash from Republicans, including Gov. Paul LePage, who was twice elected with a mere plurality. LePage called it “the most horrific thing in the world.” 

As for San Francisco, it had a somewhat wild eight-round ranked-choice voting special mayoral election in June 2018. In the end, Breed became the city’s first female African American mayor, with 50.6 percent of the vote after all transfers, even though her two leading opponents joined forces. With 12 years of experience, San Franciscans have learned to use the system. They will use it again this November, for the city’s normally scheduled mayoral election.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America.

]]> Lee Drutman <![CDATA[The problem with Joe Biden’s Republican “epiphany” theory of bipartisanship]]> https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2019/5/14/18623829/joe-biden-republican-epiphany-theory-bipartisanship-president-candidate 2019-05-14T17:51:48-04:00 2019-05-14T17:27:29-04:00
Former Vice President Joe Biden on the campaign trail. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

All successful politicians traffic in feel-good fantasy. After all, who doesn’t want to hear that hard problems have easy solutions and that whatever feels troubling today is but a passing storm cloud.

Perhaps it is in this spirit, then, that we should interpret candidate Joe Biden’s campaign trail remark that once President Joe Biden kicks Donald Trump out of the White House, Republicans will have an “epiphany” and start working with Democrats toward consensus.

“I just think there is a way, and the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” Biden said. (Though the “not a joke” qualification does raise the obvious question of whether it is, in fact, a joke.)

Certainly, such an epiphany would be a welcome development if it were to occur. And perhaps many voters believe it should be this easy, which is why Biden is peddling this line. Perhaps Biden even believes it himself. But, spoiler alert: It’s not that easy.

Why there will be no “epiphany”

In June 2012, Barack Obama made a similar prediction about Republicans embracing bipartisanship after Obama was re-elected:

”I believe that If we’re successful in this election, when we’re successful in this election, that the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that. My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again.”

Obviously, Obama’s prediction did not come true. Republicans did not suddenly embrace bipartisanship on November 7, 2012.

Biden’s prediction and Obama’s prediction have the some underlying logic: that Republicans’ hostility to Democrats is personality-based. In Obama’s explanation, it was a fundamental hostility to him personally. In Biden’s case, Republicans are deeply under the spell of Donald Trump, who is uniquely hostile to civility and consensus.

The problem with Obama’s theory was that, once Obama was out of office, Republicans’ hostility transferred seamlessly to another Democrat, Hillary Clinton. The problem with Biden’s theory is that Republicans’ hostility to Democrats did not begin with Donald Trump (see, the Obama administration).

Today, as in 2012, the partisan hostility is highly transferable. It is based neither in opposition to one president nor loyalty to another. It is based in the underlying zero-sum electoral logic that defines the American two-party system and the winner-take-all elections that make the two-party system possible.

As political scientist Frances Lee has eloquently written in her book, Insecure Majorities:

“The primary way that parties make an electoral case for themselves vis-a-vis their opposition is by magnifying their differences. In a two-party system, one party’s loss is another party’s gain. A party looks for ways to make its opposition appear weak and incompetent, and to seem extreme and out of touch with mainstream public opinion. As parties angle for competitive advantage using such tactics, the upshot is a more confrontational style of partisanship in Congress.”

Lee has argued that today’s close partisan balance, with control of national governing institutions potentially up for grabs with every election, has made bipartisan compromise very difficult. The more the “out” party obstructs and attacks the “in” party, the less legitimate the “in” party will seem in the next election.

In short, if Joe Biden assumes office in 2021, what incentive will congressional Republicans have to work with him? Helping a President Biden achieve his policy goals would help Democrats become more popular. Republicans’ future electoral success would depend on Democrats becoming less popular. It’s the same as when Obama began his second term in 2013. This is why the “fever” didn’t break.

It’s also why congressional Democrats immediately went into resistance mode following the 2016 election. Why would Democrats ever work with Republicans to help Donald Trump achieve anything? It’s the same logic, but with a very different emotional feel.

Of course, if you are a Democrat, you might now be thinking something like this: “Of course Democrats had to oppose Trump. He is anathema to everything Democrats stand for.”

And this takes us to the second reason why Republicans are not going to suddenly work with Democrats. Republicans and Democrats represent very different constituencies, with different values. The two parties today have very little overlap. And because their coalitions are so different, they deeply distrust and fear each other.

The parties are really different today

In his campaign remarks, Biden recalled how, over his career, he worked with “a lot of good people” in both parties. “We can get back to that place,” Biden said optimistically. Again, it’s a nice sentiment. But unless Joe Biden has a secret time machine, it ain’t gonna happen.

Joe Biden was first elected in the United States in 1972, when partisan polarization was at a low. In the 1970s, it was fashionable to argue that political parties were on the verge of extinction; there was so much cross-partisan deal-making that partisan labels had become basically meaningless. Congress operated very differently as a result.

Over the course of Biden’s career, partisan polarization has grown steadily. The liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats who once crossed party lines have gone extinct. When Biden was first elected in 1972, Mississippi had two Democratic Senators (John C. Stennis and James Eastland), and Vermont had two Republican Senators (George Aiken and Robert Stafford). Split-ticket voting was at an all-time high.

In short, there were bipartisan deals to be made because genuine cross-party overlap existed on many issues, and many lawmakers were responding to genuine cross-party constituencies.

Those incentives simply don’t exist today. The two parties today are actually two separate parties, with little overlap, in large part due to the nationalization of politics. The two parties today represent genuinely different constituencies and coalitions. The old liberal Republicans from the Northeast who Biden once had lots in common with are now gone. The new conservative Republicans from the South (who replaced the conservative Democrats) have little interest in consensus politics.

Moreover, in the 1970s and into the 1980s, Democrats appeared to have a lock on the House of Representatives, while Republicans appeared to mostly have an advantage in presidential elections. Nobody expected the balance of power to change all that much from election to election, and so there was not much sense holding out for partisan control to shift. Besides, both chambers were mostly decentralized committee-based institutions, where partisan leadership exerted minimal agenda control, so partisan control of the chamber didn’t matter as much.

This is very different today. Today, leadership in Congress is highly centralized, and control of the chamber means total agenda control. It’s a grand prize that demands high-stakes electoral fighting.

What Biden could have said instead

Rather than peddling a fantasy theory in which electing a Democrat to the White House causes a sudden epiphany of bipartisanship, Joe Biden could have said that the political incentives in our system are all screwed up, and that until they change, our politics is going to get even nastier. He could have said that if we want more functional politics, we’re going to need to change the winner-take-all electoral system that has created today’s zero-sum toxic politics.

But that would require some hard explaining. And sunny nostalgia is a much easier, on-brand sell.

But if Biden should have an epiphany of his own and become interested in tackling the hard problems of our broken political system, his staff should let me know — I can get him an advance copy of my forthcoming book. It explains how to change the political incentives so that compromise doesn’t rely on epiphanies that are unlikely to be forthcoming.

]]> Lee Drutman <![CDATA[Almost everyone got 2016 wrong. We should try to predict 2020 anyway.]]> https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/1/18287124/2020-election-trump-democratic-primary-forecast-predictions 2019-04-03T14:28:20-04:00 2019-04-01T12:10:00-04:00
Voters line up outside the polling place at Fire Station Number 2 on Election Day, November 6, 2018, in El Paso, Texas. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

On the day Beto O’Rourke announced his candidacy for president, I went on Twitter and made a prediction: The El Paso Congress member would be the next president of the United States, propelled into the Oval Office by his narrative gifts and charisma.

My prophecy took my Twitter followers by surprise and earned me a few sneers, and, for my sins, I was ratioed. Some took it as an endorsement (it wasn’t). It was instead my attempt to elaborate on a working theory about what drives success in today’s politics, and to make a prediction based on it, far enough in advance so it actually means something.

Most scholars and commentators these days are overly cautious about venturing predictions. It’s understandable: After so many got so much wrong in 2016, the natural response is to step back and “get out of the prediction business.”

This is too bad. If anything, we should make more predictions — if so many once-reliable theories crumbled in 2016, there’s all the more need to come up with new ones. And making predictions is the best way to test our theories and assumptions, and therefore an excellent way to learn. Yes, it means sticking your neck out and maybe being wrong. The safest way to always be right is to never make any predictions. But without venturing testable hypotheses about the future, it’s harder to distinguish rival theories.

Like it or not, the demand for predictions exists. Our minds are wired to hate uncertainty, to know the next turn in the story. Predictions fill a deep need.

Without scholars and commentators making informed predictions in the accountable spirit of the scientific method, the market is left to those who care less whether they are right — they just want to be interesting. This reduces the quality of predictions — more vague and wild predictions, fewer ones resting on specified theories. The result: We understand less about the world.

Psychologist Philip Tetlock has found that the more specific predictions we make, the better we get at predicting. Like anything else, we learn more from our mistakes when we hold ourselves accountable.

How to think about theories and predictions

To live in the world is to develop many predictive models about how everything operates, based on experience. The subway is faster than the bus; if you want to get a table at this restaurant, you have to arrive before 6 pm; if my kids have a late dinner, they will get very cranky.

The same applies to politics. We have lots of predictive models about what we think will happen and why. One common example of a predictive theory is the old political saw, “It’s the economy, stupid!” The slogan oversimplifies a theory that the better the economy is doing, the more likely an incumbent candidate will get reelected. Certainly, this doesn’t capture everything. But as a modest estimation, it works pretty well.

One popular economy-focused presidential election model is Douglas Hibbs’s “bread and peace” model. The more “bread” (i.e., the more economic growth), the more votes the incumbent party is likely to win. And the less “peace” (i.e., if the country is in an unpopular war), the fewer votes the incumbent party is likely to win. Add these together and you can explain a good deal of the variation in presidential election results going back to 1952.

But the model made a wrong prediction in 2016. It overestimated the share of the two-party vote going to the incumbent (Democratic) party candidate. Hillary Clinton underperformed the model and Donald Trump won the election. Some other factor (or set of factors) outside the model mattered.

Here’s the thing: Even good models and good theories spit out wrong predictions sometimes. Models are not one-to-one maps of the world. They are probabilistic abstractions that attempt to simplify a complex world into a parsimonious hunch.

The more observations, the more accurate the theory can be. But often, you’re working with a limited number of observations, especially when it comes to important historical events. This is a problem with, say, presidential elections, which don’t happen that often. That makes election models difficult to get right.

I use the example of a statistical model because it’s easiest to explain and generates the most precision. Though we should strive for as much precision as possible, not all important factors are easily quantifiable. Sometimes, the quest for precision can direct us away from important but difficult-to-quantify factors and lead us to search for our keys under the streetlight. Sometimes we have to settle for proxies or expert judgments instead of clear metrics.

Learning from our mistakes

So what happens when a model makes a wrong prediction? A forecaster might come to a few different conclusions:

  1. No big deal — the model is as good as it can be. No model is perfect, and one wrong prediction doesn’t mean you should abandon a pretty good model. The world is full of random flukes.
  2. The model is still right generally but could be better. The wrong prediction revealed something about the underlying relationships and can allow us to improve the model.
  3. Something is different now. The assumptions about underlying relationships have changed. The model is now junk. We need to build a new model.

Let’s apply this to Hibbs’s model. Maybe the model that got so many of presidential elections right but got 2016 wrong needs another variable, like the “time for a change” factor — that after eight years of one party in the White House, the electorate wants another party. If so, that’s a tweak: Add in another variable. But the challenge is that the more variables you add, the less parsimonious your model becomes, and the harder it becomes to test.

Or maybe something fundamental has changed. Maybe the economy matters less than it once did, because partisanship is so dominant, and even evaluations of the economy are partisan. If so, maybe we need a different model.

One area where a new model might be needed is presidential nominations. Four years ago, I (along with many others) was confident Jeb Bush would be the Republican nominee. Like most scholar and pundits, I believed in the Party Decides theory, which had convincingly explained recent party nominations by showing how party elites coordinated endorsements and money to help favored candidates win. And Bush looked like the favorite of Republican Party elites — hence, the future nominee.

Even as Trump led the field for most of 2015 and into early 2016, I still believed money and endorsements would matter, as they had in the past. But then Trump won. Something was missing from the old theory, at least as applied to the GOP in 2016.

But we still don’t know for sure whether our old theories were just incomplete or whether they are now outdated. To find out, we need to make more predictions.

One big challenge in almost all of social science, political science included, is that it is “observational.” That is, unlike bench science, where you, say, get to inject various mice with different chemical compounds and see how they react while holding everything out constant, observational social science lacks a clear “treatment” and “control.” Instead, we have a bunch of “cases” (like presidential elections) and a bunch of variables (like economic growth) that we might correlate with different outcomes (like the incumbent’s share of the vote).

Now, you might say: Why make predictions when we can just wait for the outcome, and then make a post-hoc judgment call? But once we know the outcome, post-hoc rationalization sets in. Hindsight is always 20/20 (and not just in 2020).

If you have a new theory, there’s only one way to know whether it might be any good: make predictions and see how well you do.

It’s okay to make mistakes

Understandably, many in the scholar-pundit industrial complex are hesitant to make predictions for 2020. If we collectively got so much wrong in 2016, what does that say about our abilities? And who wants to put themselves out there and be wrong again?

Yet we learn more from our mistakes than our successes, in life as in making predictions.

If our old assumptions were wrong, we need some new ones. We need to make sense of a changed political landscape.

But there’s a way to make predictions responsibly. It’s not just forecasting what’s going to happen — it’s about specifying a theory, a rationale, an underlying causal mechanism about how the world works.

Responsible prediction depends on a clearly specified theory, one that is tight enough to be useful and broadly applicable. Irresponsible prediction is wild speculation, making predictions based on random feelings and hunches without clearly articulating what’s behind the hunches. They’re irresponsible because they’re not contributing to broader knowledge and understanding — because they’re not specifying a generalizable and therefore testable theory.

Which brings us back to the prediction I tweeted out (again, not an endorsement): Beto O’Rourke will be the Democratic nominee, and he will defeat Trump in November 2020.

Here’s my theory, informed by what we’ve seen from recent elections: The candidate who is best able to get by on “authenticity” and charisma and can keep from getting mired in policy specifics has the best chance of winning. The current era of social media- and internet-driven small-donor financing has made politics more unmediated, more direct-to-voter than ever.

Perhaps others might think another candidate fits this assessment better (some might say Bernie Sanders, others Kamala Harris, others Pete Buttigieg, etc.). I admit I’m making a personal judgment call here, a precursor to a more rigorous model. We should devise ways of measuring these kinds of qualities better, perhaps by analyzing social media mentions and trends to effectively crowdsource voters’ judgments of candidates, looking for key words and sentiments, or treating small-donor fundraising as a proxy. Let a thousand dissertations bloom, if anybody else finds this plausible.

I would only apply this theory from 2008 forward, when social media and small-donor fundraising reached their modern scale. Before, when politicians had to work through intermediaries and elites, when there was no online fundraising and no Twitter, traditional gatekeepers mattered more, and gatekeepers cared more about experience. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.  

My theory is based on Obama’s and Trump’s successes. Among Democrats in 2008 and among Republicans in 2016, Obama and Trump both were charismatic men who also deployed social media and leveraged their brands extremely well.

This theory only works when there’s a field in which one candidate exemplifies these traits. In fields that do not have one clear charismatic storyteller, this theory doesn’t predict much.

But I do think this theory will have even more predictive value going forward. Social media will only become more important, and new technologies will enable voters to see candidates up close and personal more and more. Soon, we’ll enter an era in which candidates campaign in virtual reality, and voters can put on a VR headset and see a candidate give a speech right in front of them. Just as television put a premium on looks and charisma, social media and virtual reality will put an even greater premium on those qualities.

For the general election, I have a different theory: Beto will defeat Trump in November 2020 because no president whose approval rating has been underwater the entire first two years of his presidency has ever won reelection. Of course, the only president with a similar pattern of consistently low approval is Gerald Ford, so this is a small sample.

I may be wrong. And that’s okay. If I’m wrong, I’ll learn, I’ll adjust and update, and make new, ideally better, predictions.

I hope more folks will join me in specifying theories enough to make testable predictions. At the very least, they’re fun to debate. And if you’re skittish, you can always couch your predictions in probabilities and say you’re 70 percent sure. I’m 70 percent sure we’ll collectively know more.

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]]> Lee Drutman <![CDATA[If we’re abolishing the Electoral College, let’s also have ranked-choice voting for president]]> https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2019/3/21/18275785/electoral-college-ranked-choice-voting-president-democracy 2019-03-21T11:26:52-04:00 2019-03-21T11:26:48-04:00
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has proposed abolishing the Electoral College. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

I’m glad we’re once again debating the antiquated Electoral College, inspired by Elizabeth Warren’s recent call to abolish the vintage 1787 Rube Goldberg-style invention for picking a president at a time when popular democracy was highly suspect and slave states were fearful of losing their power based on population alone.

Abolishing the Electoral College is a modern-democratic-principles slam dunk: Every vote should count the same, no matter where you live. Absent a baroque defense of hyper-federalization or a nakedly partisan argument dressed in the breeches and waistcoat of blind traditionalism, there is no good case for the Electoral College. Rather, the more interesting question is what to replace it with.

There’s a very good reason no other democracy has ever copied our cockamamie system: It makes zero sense

The most popular replacement proposal is a direct popular vote: Whoever gets the most votes nationwide wins. Certainly, this is an improvement over the Electoral College. But it still employs the worst form of voting — simple plurality. I say worst form because simple plurality means a candidate does not have to win a majority of votes to win the election, and leaves open the possibility that the least-preferred candidate wins because two other candidates split the remaining vote. Or, as more commonly happens, plurality elections marginalize third parties as spoilers, and campaigns become simply lesser-of-two-evils contests.

The two-round system, which most presidential democracies use, is an obvious improvement over the single-round plurality system. In the second round, the winning candidate mathematically has to appeal to a majority. This generally produces more moderate winners than simple plurality elections, which generate more extreme winners and more divisive politics. Eric Holder, among others, has proposed the two-round system.

France as a case study in the two-round presidential election

To understand how a two-round system might work, consider the 2017 French presidential election, which can illustrate both the benefits and the dangers of a two-round system. In the first-round election, centrist Emmanuel Macron got 24 percent of the vote and far-right candidate Marine Le Pen got 21 percent, narrowly coming in second.

In the second round, Macron won handily, defeating Le Pen 66 percent to 33 percent. In a head-to-head contest, unclouded by long-standing partisan affiliations, the French people solidly rejected the far-right populist, and France wound up with the candidate that most citizens could ultimately agree on.

The adage in France goes like this: On the first ballot, the voters select. On the second ballot, they elect. Or, put another way, on the first ballot voters choose; on the second they eliminate.

The 2017 French election shows a benefit of the two-round system: It created space for a shake-up of the existing ossified party structure. France’s two long-standing major political parties, the center-left Socialists and the center-right Republicans, had lost considerable support. In the two-round system, it was possible for a party to emerge without being dismissed as a spoiler.

But things could have easily gone differently. The fourth-place finisher was Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left populist, who won just short of 20 percent of the vote. But Mélenchon might have done a little better, Macron a little worse, and the French people might have been left to choose between a far-left populist and a far-right populist.

A two-round system encourages more candidates but then requires a high level of strategic voting for voters, who might have complicated preferences about who they think can win, versus who they’d most like to win.

Moreover, Macron may have won with 66 percent of the general election vote, but the large margin was not so much a reflection of his broad-based popularity as it was Le Pen’s unpopularity. On his own, his popularity has fallen after he tried to claim a broader mandate than his support deserved.

Why ranked-choice voting is superior to the two-round system

A better alternative would be ranked-choice voting for president. As the name suggests, ranked-choice voting lets voters rank their choices. Voters mark their first choice candidate first, their second choice candidate second, then their third-choice candidate third, and so on. Easy as 1-2-3. Think of it as a political listicle: Candidates in this election, ranked.

 The votes are then tallied as follows: If one candidate has an outright majority of first-place votes, that candidate wins. But if no candidate has a majority in the first round, second-choice preferences come into play.  The candidate with the fewest number of first-choice votes is eliminated, and voters who had ranked that candidate first have their votes transferred to the candidate they ranked second. This continues until a single candidate gathers a majority, with subsequent preferences transferring as candidates get eliminated from the bottom up.

Ranked-choice voting improves on the two-round runoff elections in the following ways. First, it is more likely to produce a broadly acceptable winner. Ranked-choice voting rewards candidates who can appeal most broadly, because candidates compete to be voters’ second and third choices as well as their first. By contrast, in a two-round system, it’s quite possible for the two candidates with the most dedicated but not necessarily broadest support to advance to the final round, recreating the lesser-of-two-evils problem.

Second, a two-round system demands complex strategic calculations for voters, who face a trade-off between who they want to win and who they think can make it to the second round. This can lead to very different outcomes based on small variations in polling. California’s top-two primary displayed this problem last year, when Democratic voters struggled to coordinate around the candidate most likely to advance to the second round and avoid splitting a crowded field and allowing two Republicans to advance to the general election.

The complexities of these strategic calculations can also invite political operatives to support “loser” or “dummy” candidates designed to fracture the field, confuse voters, and pull away crucial support from frontrunners in crowded fields (as also happened in California). The ranked-choice voting renders this strategy pointless. There are no spoilers in ranked-choice voting.

Third, the two-round election can also lead to unintended vote-splitting among candidates competing for similar voters, denying voters the ability to find agreement through ranking. In ranked-choice voting, voters can vote sincerely. They don’t need to worry if they are wasting their votes. And nobody has an incentive to run loser candidates.

Fourth, an instant runoff is both less costly for governments (one election costs less than two) and for voters (one visit to the polls takes less time than two). Voter turnout often declines in a second round, either because voters’ preferred candidate didn’t advance or because voters simply lose interest. The voters most likely to drop off in the second round are the least educated.

Additionally, if we’re going to incorporate ranked-choice voting into how we select presidents, we should also use it for the primaries.

All else equal, a popular vote is better than the Electoral College (for obvious reasons). And a two-round popular vote is better than a single-round plurality popular vote, because by requiring the winner to earn a true majority, it avoids the problem of extreme minority candidates.

But ranked-choice voting is superior to the two-round system because it simultaneously maximizes voter participation and broad-based coalition-building. It also allows voters to vote sincerely and is most likely to avoid perverse outcomes. 

We know more today about elections than we did in 1787. Our institutions should reflect that.

The Framers were political scientists with no existing model for electing a president and tremendous ambivalence over what they wanted out of an executive. They were practical politicians trying to work out an acceptable compromise.

We can forgive them for coming up with a sub-optimal approach given the urgency and limited time and political constraints. But with 230 years of experience in modern democracy, we now have plenty of data on what works best.

No electoral system is perfect. But some are demonstrably better than others. Rather than limit ourselves to an antiquated and inferior tradition, we should strive for the best possible. National popular ranked-choice voting is the best possible way of electing a president.

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