Episode 25: The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Our Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy
Part 2 of a book ‘review’
During my congressional campaign, the question I got the most often by far was: “You seem really great, but if you win and go to Washington, what will prevent you from becoming just like the rest of them?” The fact is, a lot of people go into politics for noble reasons, but once enmeshed in the machine, the structures and incentives currently in place prevent them from having the kind of impact they hoped to have. They become part of “the swamp”, to use Trump’s parlance.
In part 1 of this book ‘review’, we looked at an analysis of politics as an industry, and we came to understand not just that it’s a duopoly (that part seems intuitively obvious), and not just that it’s an unhealthy duopoly (that part also seems intuitively obvious), but that the reasons *why* it’s an unhealthy duopoly are both clear and identifiable. That’s actually great news, because it means there should be some clear and identifiable ways to improve the system.
And our authors do have some. They fall into two buckets: changes to how politicians get elected in the first place, and changes to how politicians work once elected.
We’ll look at one of each. There are others, but that’s why you should read the book.
Changes to how politicians get elected: Conduct open primaries where the top 5 advance to the general election, and then ranked choice voting in the general election.
My counter-proposal: Open primaries where the top 3 advance to the general, and approval voting in both the primary and the general.
First, I accept wholeheartedly that how we elect politicians needs to change, and I say that as someone currently running for office. Specifically, the process needs to be changed in a way that promotes more competition. But, 5 people in the general is too many; there’s plenty of social science to support that people experience choice paralysis with more than 3 choices. It would be one thing if people only had to weigh in on one or two races per general election, but in 2024 we’ll be voting for President and the House and the Senate and the state Assembly and the state senate and school board and special districts and judges and so on. 5 candidates to sift through in each race is just asking too much of folks.
The reality is, 3 candidates is enough to essentially guarantee at least two parties represented in the general election, and maybe three. In my congressional district, which had 7 candidates in the primary, I finished 3rd and would have gone to the general. Ditto in the neighboring congressional district and in the neighboring assembly district: the Republican candidate finished third in both. And all of these districts are among the bluest districts in the country. In more balanced districts you would definitely get at least 2 parties in your general election, and quite possibly three.
The author’s proposal mentions ranked choice voting (RCV). Here's what I think of RCV: mathematically, it’s the ideal way to run an electoral system. The problem, as my wife likes to often remind me, is that life isn’t just about math. RCV is too complicated, especially with 5 candidates to sort through, and asking people to follow all the tallying and re-tallying of RCV is simply not realistic. That’s why I support approval voting: it gets you at least 80% of the benefits of RCV, and it’s really easy to explain: you just select “yes” for everyone you like, and the one who gets the most likes wins.
At this point, everyone including my mother is on social media, so everyone understands “the one who gets the most likes wins”. But like RCV, approval voting solves a problem that faced a lot of people who wanted to vote for me: they were worried I couldn’t win, so they felt they had to spend their vote on whichever Democrat they felt was the least unappealing. With approval voting, they could have done that AND voted for me. Lots of Dem voters who liked what I had to say could have voted for me while also picking their one or two favorite Dems. That would have made for a much more interesting general election than what we actually got, and not just in my district.
Changes to how politicians work: create a legislative machinery innovation commission
Here the authors display some wisdom by not trying to figure out themselves what the exact changes should be; instead, they propose creating a working group composed of a range of experts, including former politicians, political scientists, and others, to identify best practices for facilitating constructive negotiation, communication, and problem-solving. They would create recommendations and present those to Congress with the goal of getting them to adopt as many as possible. The authors note that this is probably not possible until after you’ve done the electoral reforms, because only a more competitive electoral process would produce, at scale, the kind of people who would be willing to change the legislative process to be more focused on problem-solving.
This proposal and the reasoning behind it I fully agree with, and I will further mostly adopt the wisdom of the authors in not trying to suggest what the answers are, since I have not been in Congress myself. Except for one thing, which is that Congress should fund more policy staff for its members, so that they wouldn’t need to depend on lobbyists for all their ideas and draft versions of bills. There’s no way that policies focused on problem-solving for regular people will ever emerge from a lobbyist-driven legislative process. Put another way, funding more policy staff is a simple thing that would actually help “drain the swamp”.
There’s more in the book, but if you’ve read this far, you’re interested enough in politics to read it yourself, and I highly recommend that you do. In the end, the most important idea in it is that none of these changes will happen unless regular people get more engaged in the political process. That’s why “engagement” will be a theme I’ll be talking about a lot over the coming months.
So get engaged! It’s never too late. If you’re not sure how, my campaign is a great place to start!