Defeating Republican gerrymanders in 2020

Exactly one year after Anthony Kennedy submitted his letter of resignation from the Supreme Court, his replacement was part of a 5-4 majority decision to stop the Supreme Court from overturning partisan gerrymanders. Today we move further towards an America where most people support Democrats, but vote suppression, gerrymandering, the structure of the Senate, and the Electoral College together result in permanent Republican rule.

This probably would've happened whether Trump or some other Republican (Ted Cruz, say) was President. The force behind this decision came from Republicans as an institution. It keeps them in office and helps them achieve their ideological goals, so it's what they're going to do. When Mitch McConnell stole Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination, this is one of the things he was hoping for.

The best way forward now is simply to focus on winning in 2020 as much as possible. It's a redistricting election, so whoever controls state legislatures and governorships gets to decide how districts are drawn, without the Supreme Court getting involved. This Sam Wang tweetstorm has a bunch of good ideas.

State legislative races can be good entry-level offices to run for. Conventional wisdom is that you need $20,000 to be competitive as a candidate in Kansas, and $50,000 would be great. Obviously many people won't have that much money lying around, but it's within the means of people who have had some career success. This article has four profiles of first-time candidates, three of whom ran for state House.

Some states have public financing programs for state legislative campaigns. If you're not in a state with public financing, and you're interested in running, send me a message! I might have money for you.

If you're not cut out to be a candidate but you know someone who is, maybe talk to them about it. Encouraging your friend to run for state legislature might be the deed that prevents Republicans from strangling American democracy.

The illusion of Joe Biden's electability

The Vice President doesn't do much, so the office suited Joe Biden well. Our calm determined overachieving President needed a warm-hearted goofball sidekick, and Biden was a perfect fit for the role. Republicans didn't really care to attack him either -- much better to go after Obama. So his poll numbers rose, and pundits praised his electability.

Biden isn't nearly as good at being a Presidential candidate. He lost in 1988 despite having the most early money, and lost in 2008 when he was one of the more experienced Senators. Message discipline and generally avoiding sloppy campaign mistakes are not his strengths.

One aspect of electability is: how good is the candidate at running for President? It's one you can emphasize a little less in making decisions, because a candidate who's really bad at running will usually crash and burn before the voting even starts, and you won't have to think about them.

But it may help to explain why the two successful Democratic Presidential candidates I've seen were the young upstarts of their times. If Bill Clinton and Barack Obama weren't good at running, they wouldn't have made it through the primary. Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton got their nominations more through institutional support than on the campaign trail -- and they lost general elections.

(I also wonder if it helps to fake out the right-wing media. National Republicans had been smearing Hillary for 15 years before the 2008 election, and they were all locked and loaded to do it again, and then... that's not Hillary! That's... some black guy? When you nominate someone they didn't expect and haven't propagandized against, they might not be able to get their work done in the few months they have.)

But this is all to say -- the idea of Biden as especially electable is probably an illusion. His numbers were inflated by being in a role that turned his weaknesses into strengths, and now they're going back to being weaknesses. Better to have someone who does things right during the election and moves upwards than the person who came in at the top.

Different parties

Under Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders), we'd still have Obama's Iran deal. There's more disagreement here among Republicans. Under Ted Cruz, I'm pretty sure war would have begun. Donald Trump backed out of war at the last moment.

The old Republican establishment liked the far cruelty. Trump overthrew them, so now we get the near cruelty instead. One would blow people up far away, the other would tear children from their parents and throw them into dungeons here in America.

This is why it's easy for me to devote so much attention to partisan electoral politics. The consequences of Republican victory are that bad, and even if they're sometimes different across Republicans, they're always really bad. So it's worth discovering what you can about how to help Democrats beat them.

Warren could work out well

Apparently Democratic centrists are seeing Elizabeth Warren as an acceptable candidate. If "Warren as compromise nominee" is defeat for Bernie the candidate, it's a victory for Bernie the movement. He moves the Overton Window for her; she moves the party to him.

She's just better, in lots of ways. As has been noticed, the best at plans. And better at procedural reform.

She wants to get rid of the filibuster. Bernie doesn't -- a common position among the more senior Senators. This is vexing because it'll block his agenda. You won't get 60 Senators for Green New Deal and Medicare for All. You need to pass them with 50. The filibuster doesn't do much to impede Republicans, because they can just rip out the funding from our programs with 50 in the budget (which is immune to filibusters).

Some of my friends on the left side of the Democratic Party may dream of crushing their rivals on its right side in a primary. Having them compromise behind Warren is probably better. Having your intraparty rivals reconciled and falling in behind you makes it easier to defeat Republicans and enact policy.

Remembering Duke Cunningham's bribe menu

It might get topped by Trump Administration revelations in the near future. But before it does, I thought I might let tell you the wildest corruption story of my time following American politics.

Back in 2005, Duke Cunningham was a Republican Congressman from California. Mitchell Wade was a defense contractor who found every chance to bribe him. When Cunningham was selling his house, Wade bought it for $1.675 million. Shortly afterwards, Wade's firm started getting tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The house was back on the market for $975,000 months later. That amounts to a $700,000 bribe.

The smaller bribes were more garish. In DC, Cunningham lived on Wade's docked 42-foot yacht. Cunningham would shop for expensive stuff he liked (Persian rugs, a used Rolls-Royce), and Wade would pay for it. Prosecutors uncovering the corruption found a strange memo on Cunningham's office stationery, in his handwriting:

What is this? My friends, it's a bribe menu. To complete the bribe for $16 million in contracts, Wade gave Cunningham control of the boat, which cost $140,000. For each further million in contracts, Wade would have to bribe Cunningham $50K. But after getting to $20 million in contracts, Wade would have to pay only $25K for each million. If you didn't know that you could get volume discounts in bribing corrupt politicians, well, that's the sort of information I'm happy to provide.

The prosecutors' document described it as "malversation unprecedented in the long history of Congress" which is some pretty serious... malversation? I've never heard that word before. Anyway, Cunningham was sentenced to 8 years in prison. 

But is he a blue whale or a right whale?

While it would be pretty neat if Trump were colluding with the Prince of Whales, I’ve never believed these deep state conspiracy theories.

Ethnic nationalism before and after the Cold War

I wonder if the rise of ethnic nationalism in recent years is simply a reversion to what was historically normal up until the Cold War.

This history is extreme in its horrors. Ethnic nationalist conflict in the first half of the 20th century included World Wars and genocides that killed tens of millions. For centuries before that, colonial empires enslaved and committed genocides against native peoples. The greatest slaughter occurred under governments whose ideologies were those of peoples with one blood -- the Third Reich, the Belgian monarchy, the British Empire, and everyone who sent their young men to die in the trenches of World War I.

With the Cold War came more universal, abstract ideologies. One might fight for communism against capitalism, or for democracy against dictatorship. These ideologies suited the purposes of decision-makers in Moscow and Washington, and made for better advertising to Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans who were rising in power after the end of colonialism. For obvious reasons, developing-country folk were an implausible market for Russian or American nationalism. But you could get them interested in communism or democracy.

When the Cold War ended and its banners were put away, the strongest political units in the world were still national rather than international. So it was easy for the old flags of ethnic nationalism to come out again, for whatever reasons people had flown them before. That's what we're seeing now.

Will new versions of the old horrors come back with them? This may be the great and terrible question of our time. I hope that global economic changes will help to dampen conflict -- for example, the rise in prosperity after the end of colonialism and the necessity of international cooperation in the modern economy. But there are reasons for pessimism too, as technology lets us harm each other much more easily than we could before, whether through war or climate change. And if the past is any guide, we can fall very far.

My role models for such times tend to be the old scientists -- in philosophy, I guess the flavor would be sort of Vienna Circle. They enjoyed the clever weird ideas of their smart friends from different countries, and faced their collapsing world more with public-spirited Enlightenment optimism than cynical postmodern world-weariness. I think their sort of liberal internationalism wins in the end -- well, there's optimism for you. But win or lose, those are the people I identify with in times like these.

How we got here on abortion

I just looked through the last 15-25 years of of polling on abortion. Depending on which questions you ask -- and Gallup asked a lot of them -- you can get opinions moving slightly in either direction over time. I'd say this means that opinions have stayed more or less the same.

The abortion bans we're seeing in Alabama and other places aren't the result of a change in public opinion. They're effects of Republican electoral success over the past few decades. Republicans pass these laws now because they expect Republican-appointed anti-abortion judges to approve them. The judges were confirmed because Republicans won elections. (Some people say the judges probably won't approve these extreme laws. But the laws they will approve will soon be forthcoming.)

I think Republicans won the key elections largely because of weird stuff involving electoral maps. Their party has become more rural and less urban, giving it increasing structural advantages in Congress and the Electoral College. If not for these advantages, Democrats would have won 6 of the past 7 Presidential elections and they'd have a solid Senate majority. (The Republican state legislators passing these bills are often in gerrymandered districts, so they made their own luck.)

Anyway, as far as I can tell, people didn't change their minds that much one way or the other. Republicans got stronger because we have a badly designed system that was established as a compromise with powerful slaveowners. They manipulated that system for their own purposes. Fixing the system so that it doesn't give Republicans constant partisan advantages is how you stop abortion bans, protect refugees from brutal mistreatment, and save the planet from climate change. So it's something I really focus on.

Getting electability right

It's important to win Presidential elections and not lose them. So it makes sense for Democrats to care about which primary candidates are more likely to win than others. Unfortunately, Democratic thinking on electability has followed a bad strategy: choosing the candidate with the most salient Republican cultural signifiers.

Today those are the whiteness and maleness of Joe Biden. But in late 2003, deep in the shadow of 9/11, it was John Kerry's record as a decorated war veteran. Unfortunately, a Republican smear campaign cast doubt on Kerry's reputation (some will recall the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth). Because of that and other things, Bush was re-elected in the depths of the Iraq War.

In 2007, still in 9/11's long shadow, probably nobody theorized that Democrats had to nominate an African-American whose dad was from Kenya, whose middle name was "Hussein", and whose surname rhymed with "Osama". But we nominated him, and he won the election and the next election.

The point here is that having Republican cultural signifiers just doesn't predict that much about how likely you are to win the general election. Maybe it helps a little in winning over persuadable Republican voters, which I guess is the whole idea. But that effect is mediated by big random things and can't be relied on.

Some people say that you should just vote for whoever you prefer, and that'll guide you to the most electable candidate. That's probably better than the Republican cultural signifier method. But we want to go beyond our own idiosyncracies, and I think we can do that.

My main method is to look at polling data. In particular, I like looking at candidates' national favorability ratings in a good selection of national polls, right when it's time to vote. In early 2008, Obama was pretty consistently getting net favorability numbers over +20 and occasionally over +30 (the best was 61 favorable, 27 unfavorable). This doesn't predict everything. The campaign can go badly, as it did for Kerry. But if a candidate is scoring high without exhibiting the Republican cultural signifiers, it's a sign of political talent, which Obama definitely had.

(Democrats also seem to do better when nominating relative neophytes like Obama and Bill Clinton than when nominating old party hands like Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. Maybe a shorter record just has less bad stuff. I count inexperience as a slight plus for electability, which is weird but fits the data too well. Maybe the favorability thing encompasses the whole effect? I want more data.)

Anyway, don't worry too much about electability now. There's a big campaign ahead of us. There's plenty of time for Elizabeth Warren to build a national reputation for having awesome ideas about how to give you more money, and put that weird Native American scandal behind her.

But if you want to think about it when the time comes, look at polls. They're a survey of the voters, and the voters decide. The information you want is there.

NUS hires Fatema Amijee and Ethan Jerzak!

NUS Philosophy is proud to announce the hiring of two young philosophers with prolific research achievements: Fatema Amijee and Ethan Jerzak!

Fatema's research has focused on metaphysics and the history of philosophy. Her forthcoming papers include "Explaining Contingent Facts" in Philosophical Studies, "Neo-Rationalist Metaphysics" in an Oxford volume on the Principle of Sufficient Reason that she is co-editing, "Metaphysical Explanation in Spinoza and Leibniz" in the Routledge Handbook of Metaphysical Grounding, and "Russell's Commitment to the Principle of Acquaintance" in the Oxford Handbook of Bertrand Russell. She got her PhD from the University of Texas in 2017, four years after publishing "The Role of Attention in Russell's Theory of Knowledge" in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

Ethan's research is primarily on philosophy of language, epistemology, and logic. He will receive his PhD this year from the University of California at Berkeley. Two of his papers have already come out -- "Non-Classical Knowledge" in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and "Two Ways to Want" in the Journal of Philosophy, for which he won a Sanders Graduate Award. He is also author of "Paradoxical Desires", forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

One of the best things about working at NUS is the constant stream of stellar junior colleagues who keep appearing around me. Adding Fatema and Ethan is a great success for our department, and I look forward to having them around in the coming academic year.