elections – Page 2 – Sheila Kennedy

So Much For Sportsmanship

Speaking of election denialism…

Most of us remember youthful ball games with the whiny little kid who responded to losing by taking his ball and bat and going home. Most of us also remember parental lectures on what “good sportsmanship” means, and why fair play and graciousness in losing is so important.

It appears that the GOP has jettisoned those values, along with the precepts formerly associated with genuine Christianity. (Evidently, none of those ethical principles are consistent with the party’s growing devotion to QAnon…)

The Washington Post recently questioned a number of current GOP candidates for public office, and reported that at least a dozen Republican candidates running for governor and Senate simply refused to say whether they would accept negative results of their contests.

In a survey by The Washington Post of 19 of the most closely watched statewide races in the country, the contrast between Republican and Democratic candidates was stark. While seven GOP nominees committed to accepting the outcomes in their contests, 12 either refused to commit or declined to respond. On the Democratic side, 18 said they would accept the outcome and one did not respond to The Post’s survey.

Trump, of course, has continued to claim– without a scintilla of evidence– that his loss to Joe Biden in 2020 was rigged. Since he attacks fellow Republicans unwilling to agree, the article notes that he has made election denialism the price of admission in many GOP primaries, with the result that more than half of all Republican nominees for federal and statewide offices that administer elections “have embraced unproven claims that fraud tainted Biden’s win, according to a Washington Post tally.”

As I’ve repeatedly noted, one of them is running for Secretary of State here in Indiana.

In competitive races for governor or Senate in Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas, GOP candidates declined to say that they would accept this year’s result. All but two — incumbent senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Marco Rubio of Florida — have publicly embraced Trump’s false claims about 2020, according to a Post analysis.

Seven Republicans did pledge to accept the results. One of them was Colorado Senate contender Joe O’Dea.

O’Dea, who is behind in the polls as he attempts to unseat incumbent Colorado Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D), did not reference Trump by name, but used his response to offer notably sharp criticism of candidates who refuse to concede when they lose.
“There’s no polite way to put it. We have become a nation of poor sports and cry babies,” said O’Dea. “We’ll keep a close eye on things, but after the process is done and the votes are counted, I’ll absolutely accept the outcome. If the Senator is up for it, we can certify it over a beer. It’s time for America’s leaders to start acting like adults again. Loser buys.”

This growing unwillingness to accept the results of an election is no small thing.

Elections have been defined as a substitute for armed conflict–rather than taking to the streets, democratic polities choose “champions” (aka candidates) who take their arguments to the people. The people vote, and the loser accepts their verdict (usually biding his or her time until the next election cycle). Violence averted, governance continued.

That, of course, is the ideal. And there are plenty of reasons to criticize America’s current conduct of elections– gerrymandering, the greater weight given to rural votes, social media campaigns sowing disinformation, the outsized influence of money, and the widespread lack of civic literacy among the voting population. I do not mean to minimize the significance of those factors, or their ability to affect the results of electoral contests.

We definitely need to address the multiple defects in our electoral processes. We need to streamline registration and minimize state-level game-playing, and we clearly need to make it easier rather than harder to vote.

But none of those defects means that the result of a given election contest is “rigged.”

“If I win, it was a fair election. If I lose, it was rigged.” Heads I win, tails you lose is, as O’Dea put it, the position of a cry baby–the modern iteration of the poor sport who responded to a loss by taking his ball and bat and going home. It is also a position absolutely incompatible with a functioning democracy.

Those of us who support a candidate who loses can point to lots of reasons why voters supported the “wrong” candidate. But in the continued absence of provable fraud, our civic obligation is to suck it up and concede.

The Republican candidates who are telling us they will refuse to abide by results they don’t like are telling us who and what they are. Believe them.

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State’s Rights

The importance of appointments to the Supreme Court isn’t limited to the issue of abortion, or to questions whether “religious liberty” protects the right to discriminate against gay people or refuse to be vaccinated, even when that “liberty” demonstrably harms others.

Thanks to Mitch McConnell, the Court now has at least four current Justices who appear ready to erase over a hundred years of precedent in order to protect the GOP’s electoral advantages. If the Court ultimately decides to ignore most of the jurisprudence that followed and applied the 14th Amendment, returning the United States to a decidedly ununited status under the rubric of “states rights,” it won’t take long before we inhabit a country that most Americans won’t recognize.

And that country will not be a democracy, if by “democracy” we mean majority rule limited only by the Bill of Rights.

The Court recently denied efforts by Republicans from Pennsylvania and North Carolina to overturn lower court decisions that found redistricting maps favoring Democrats were fairly drawn. The immediate result was positive (or negative, depending upon your political preferences) and most people didn’t read beyond the headline. If they had, they would have seen a chilling dissent filed by four right-wing justices who supported the Republicans’ argument that state legislatures have ultimate power to determine their own voting procedures, including the selection of presidential electors.

This–as several commentators have noted–is the old state’s rights argument.

If a state’s legislature can determine who gets to vote, or how votes are to be counted and by whom, states like Indiana that have already been gerrymandered to ensure Republican super-majorities can pass laws that further disenfranchise Hoosiers who disagree with their agenda, no matter how extensive that disagreement may be. (We saw the outlines of that agenda in the recently concluded session; Republicans and police officers opposed the bill that eliminated the requirement of a permit to carry a gun.It passed anyway. And Republicans in the legislature have already asked the governor to call a special session to outlaw abortion if–or when–this Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade.)

As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently reminded readers, in 1868, it was this very concept of “states rights” that Congress overrode with the Fourteenth Amendment–an amendment that the states subsequently ratified.

As others have noted, with appropriate alarm, at least four of the current Supreme Court justices have confirmed that they are ready to support this independent state legislature theory. That support requires what one pundit has accurately called “a radical reading of the Constitution that imbues state legislatures with total control over election and voting rules, and redistricting.”

The Supreme Court has already denied the federal courts authority to overrule partisan gerrymandering. If it endorses the independent state legislature theory, that would bar state courts from doing so as well. As the linked article summarized the situation,

f enough justices embrace this theory, it’ll give state legislatures — which skew Republican thanks to down-ballot investments and aggressive gerrymandering — free rein over redistricting, voting rules and, most disturbingly, elections.

“It is effectively an avenue to free state legislatures from the supervision of state courts, which play a critical check and balance on the power of those legislatures,” Daley added. “All you have to do is look at state legislatures around the country to get a really good sense of what the future would look like if these legislatures are free to enact election law with impunity.”

An embrace of that theory by the Supreme Court would further exacerbate the divisions between Red states and Blue states; as the old saying goes, what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. Many years ago, political scientist Theodore Lowi traced the resistance of local political pooh-bas to the 14th Amendment’s application of the Bill of Rights to state and local units of government. The result of that application, of course, was to create an American identity–to assure citizens that they would have the same basic rights if they moved from State A to State B.

Make no mistake: empowering state legislatures under this radical theory wouldn’t simply entrench political parties and eviscerate the 14th Amendment. It would be a retreat in the direction of the Articles of Confederation.

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The Density Divide

The Density Divide is the title of a very important paper issued in June by Will Wilkinson, Vice President for Research of the Niskanen Center. It looks in depth at the phenomenon that I usually refer to as the “urban/rural divide”–delving into the attributes that make individuals more or less likely to move into cities, and examining the consequences of those differences and the steady urbanization of the American polity.

The paper is lengthy–some 70 pages–but well worth the time to read in its entirety. it is meticulously sourced, and replete with graphs and other supporting data.

Wilkinson confirms what others have reported: a substantial majority of Americans now dwell in the nation’s cities and generate the lion’s share of the nation’s wealth. But he goes beneath those numbers, referencing a body of research demonstrating that people who are drawn to urban environments differ in significant ways from those who prefer to remain in rural precincts. He focuses especially on ethnicity, personality and education as attributes that make individuals more or less responsive to the lure of city life.

He goes on to describe how this “self-selected” migration has segregated Americans. It has not only concentrated economic production in a handful of “megacities”–it has driven a “polarizing wedge” between America’s dense and diverse urban populations and the sparse White populations remaining in rural areas. That “wedge” is what he dubs the “Density Divide.” (Wilkinson is careful to define “urban” to include dense areas of small towns–the divisions he traces aren’t a function of jurisdictional city limits. They are a function of residential density.)

Wilkinson finds that the “sorting mechanism of urbanization” has produced a rural America that is lower-density, predominantly White, and “increasingly uniform in socially conservative personality, aversion to diversity, relative disinclination to migrate and seek higher education, and Republican Party loyalty.”

That sorting has also left much of rural America in economic distress, which has activated a “zero-sum, ethnocentric mindset.” (That mindset is reflected in the angry rhetoric spouted by rural MAGA hat wearers about “un-American” immigrants and minorities, and disdain for “liberal elites”–all groups that are thought to reside in those multi-cultural cities.)

The density divide–together with America’s outdated electoral structures– explains the 2016 election. The “low-density bias” of our electoral system allowed Trump to win the Presidency by prevailing in areas that produce 1/3 of GDP and contain fewer than half of the population. That low-density bias continues to empower Republicans far out of proportion to their numbers.

Wilkinson reminds us that there are currently no Republican cities. None.

As he points out, the increase in return to human capital and density has acted to amplify the polarizing nature of selective urbanization. Temperamentally liberal people self-select into higher education and big cities, where the people they encounter exert a further influence on their political attitudes. They leave behind a lower-density population that is “relatively uniform in white ethnicity, conservative disposition and lower economic productivity.” Economic growth has been shown to liberalize culture; stagnant or declining economic prospects generate a sense of anxiety and threat.( In that sense, the political scientists who attributed Trump votes to economic distress were correct, but the distress wasn’t a function of individual financial straits–it was a reaction to the steadily declining prospects of rural environments.)

Wilkinson argues that there are no red states or blue states–not even red or blue counties. Rather, there is compact blue urban density (even in small cities in rural states) and sprawling red sparseness.

This spatial segregation of people with very different values and world-views is radicalizing; Wilkinson reminds us that a lack of exposure to intellectual diversity and broadly different points of view breeds extremism. Because urban populations are far more intellectually diverse, more homogeneous rural populations have shifted much farther to the right than urban Americans have shifted left.

The United States population is projected to be 90% urbanized by 2050–not too many years after we are projected to become “majority-minority.” Those projections suggest we will see increasing radicalization of already-resentful rural inhabitants.

The prospects for returning to rational politics and a truly representative governance will depend entirely upon reforming an outdated and pernicious electoral framework that dramatically favors rural Americans. Whether those reforms can pass our very unrepresentative Senate is an open question.

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FIXING it

Yesterday’s post focused on legal reforms aimed at official corruption. Important as those are, they aren’t the only reforms we need to make.

We need to fix our elections.

Even those of us who follow politics closely and who are familiar with the country’s legal framework often miss the way in which demographic shifts have upended America’s electoral system and shifted power to an unrepresentative minority of voters– aided and abetted by America’s minority party.

Over the last few years, more people have come to recognize the inequities caused by gerrymandering and the Electoral College, but beyond that, our comfort with “the way it is” has blinded us to the equally troubling consequences of equal Senate representation, for example. Currently, over half the U.S. population lives in just nine states. The result is that less than half of the population chooses 82 percent of the country’s Senators. And that means that the Republicans hold their current Senate majority despite the fact that the Democratic Senate minority represents more than half of the American people.

A recent article from Vox, which led off with that example of distorted representation, offered eleven proposals to fix what has evolved into an unfair and unequal system. The article began with a recitation of several of the most egregious elements of our decidedly undemocratic reality.

Intentional efforts to make it harder to vote, such as voter ID laws, are increasingly common throughout the states — and the Supreme Court frequently approaches such voter suppression with indifference. Gerrymandering renders many legislative elections irrelevant — in 2018, Republicans won nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Wisconsin state assembly, even though Democratic candidates received 54 percent of the popular vote. Wealthy donors flood elections with money, as lawmakers spend thousands of hours on “call time,”dialing the rich to fund the next campaign.

And looming over all of this is the problem of race. In some states, Republican lawmakers write voter suppression laws that target voters of color with, in the word of one federal appeals court, “almost surgical precision,” knowing that a law that targets minority votes will primarily disenfranchise Democrats.

After the Democrats took the House in 2019, the first bill they passed was the “For the People Act.” If that act passed the Senate– which did not happen and will not happen so long as Mitch McConnell is in charge of that body–Vox says it would be the most significant voting rights legislation since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (A companion bill, HR 4, would strengthen that original Voting Rights Act by restoring sections of the law that were eviscertated by the Supreme Court.)

That said, as the article correctly noted, even if those measures are enacted, they would still fall short of addressing the major and troubling challenges facing Americans’ electoral system. They wouldn’t address Senate malapportionment or the Electoral College –both systems that hand control of the government to an unrepresentative, predominantly rural minority of our citizens.

The eleven “fixes” identified by Vox include much-discussed measures like eliminating the filibuster and revitalizing the Voting Rights Act, but also less-often suggested changes like eliminating advance registration in favor of same-day voter registration. (A number of states are moving in that direction, which has the benefit of also eliminating flawed and partisan purges.)

Then there are the changes that would make it easier to vote: more early voting, no-excuse absentee voting and other measures that would actually facilitate the process of casting a ballot. What if we emulated Australia, for example?

In Australia, over 90 percent of eligible voters typically cast a ballot in federal elections. The nation achieves this feat by turning Election Day into a celebration, where voters gather at community barbecues to eat what are often referred to as “democracy sausages.” But Australia also uses a stick to encourage voting — nonvoters can be fined about $80 Australian dollars (about $60 in US currency) if they do not cast a ballot.

You really need to read the whole article, but even those who disagree with some of its specific recommendations will find it hard to argue with the proposition that it is past time for lawmakers and citizens alike to focus on the numerous, fundamentally unfair elements of the way we choose America’s leaders.

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Women To The Rescue

In the period between the 2016 election and the 2018 midterms, Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol published a fascinating study. (A quick and dirty google search failed to find the link–if someone has it, please provide it in the comments.) She and a graduate student studied resistance groups that had emerged outside dependably blue cities and coastal areas, and found that they defied the common clichés. Most were based in suburbs or smaller cities, they weren’t particularly leftist, and most were run by middle-aged and older women who hadn’t been politically active before Trump’s victory jolted them out of complacency.

They were predominantly middle-class women’s networks, although with some men in them, and Skocpol predicted that, if the Democrats took the House in 2018, they would be a major reason.

I thought of that research when I received a lengthy email from a reader of this blog, telling me about just such a group here in red Indiana. She said that her particular story had started “on that awful day in November of 2016, when we all woke up in a fetal position…” She had quit her job of 17 years, and devoted herself full-time to bringing women in her local community in northwest Indiana together. Their initial efforts met with frustration.

In 2018, some ran for office, many ran for Precinct Committee Chair. We all ran for State Convention Delegate. We had a grand day out, demanding the Dem party establish a Women’s Caucus with voting rights on the SCC. We navigated the convoluted system with no help from the party, and got a resolution passed and included in the platform package approved by the entire delegation. Our posse was walking on air for a few weeks when we were informed by the State Chair that there would be no Women’s Caucus. The Chair took a lesson from legislative committee chairs who listen to compelling testimony on popular bills, then decide not to take a vote.

The rebuff led to the establishment of a state-wide organization: 25 Women for 2020. The invitation to participate begins as follows, and explains the purpose of the new organization:

You are cordially invited to participate in 25 Women for 2020, an Indiana-wide network of Democratic women candidates running for the Indiana House and Senate.

An Historic Opportunity

2018 was a landmark year. 45 Democratic women ran for the Indiana state legislature. Only 18 won their seats, but the other 27 gained invaluable experience and name recognition, positioning them for success in 2020.

The electoral prospects of this cohort of candidates will help and be helped by a spirited and consequential Presidential election. The Democratic candidate will need the mobilization of voters in every corner of Indiana; and women Democratic candidates will be well-served by the political optimism and enthusiasm which only a Presidential race can bring.

Participation in the 25 Women for 2020 Network will bring you the support of other women who are facing many of the same challenges as you. Each will bring their experience, knowledge, understanding, and support to make ALL members of the Network much stronger. The Network staff, Board of Directors, and Advisory Board Members will bring their experience and expertise to further support the strength of the Network and each candidate’s campaigns.

The network promises to provide “open, supportive and effective peer support” to those candidates. They have a website, and a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Politically-active Hoosiers can appreciate the multiple barriers these Democratic women face in a gerrymandered, rurally-dominated state. But even the candidates who do not prevail will motivate turnout among Democratic voters in 2020, and test the limits of Trumpification in the state.

Women’s groups like this one were key to Democratic victories in 2018, and they will be critically important in 2020. They deserve all the support we can give them.

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