Sanders' ideals, Pelosi's deals, and how the system moves left

Yesterday, Alex Moe of NBC News asked Nancy Pelosi, "Will you be okay if Bernie Sanders is the nominee?" Pelosi said "Yes."

Then Moe asked, "Do you have any concerns that you could lose the majority?" Pelosi said "No."

Sanders' supporters often fear that the Democratic establishment will stop him from winning the nomination. Establishment Democrats often try to stop him by expressing grave predictions about what will happen downticket. But Pelosi is the center of the establishment, and she's refusing to do that.

As far as I can tell, Pelosi and Sanders have basically the same goals. It doesn't look like that because they act in fundamentally different ways. Sanders expresses ideals; Pelosi makes deals. But achieving their goals takes both kinds, as well as a number of Elizabeth Warren figures in between.

Sanders stands on the fringes of the system, where he can express his ideals with utter clarity. He's a powerful voice for humane views on all sorts of domestic and foreign issues. He wields less official power, because taking power constrains your ability to act so as to express ideals. But ideals attract followers, and a movement formed around him.

Between ideals and deals are plans -- how to set up universal child care; how to pass Medicare for All. That's the level where a President mostly has to operate in today's media environment and legislative landscape. Warren excels there, which is why I voted for her.

Pelosi is a central node in the system. Every deal belongs to her, and she to it. That includes good deals and evil ones; honest compromises and corrupt bargains. Playing her role in the system requires respecting all her deals, which deeply constrains what positions she can take. But it also means that when she moves left, that's the system moving left.

Pledged delegate majorities should win a brokered convention

The Nevada primary debate raised the issue of whether the candidate with the most pledged delegates should get the nomination. Here are some general ideas about the fairest way to do things.

The primary should be decided by pledged delegates, who are democratically chosen by voters. Decision by unelected superdelegates undermines the legitimacy of the process, disrupting the party coalition. Even if a completely unbreakable deadlock with pledged delegates somehow occurred, I might rather decide the nomination by a game of chance than have superdelegates swoop in. Better for Democrats to resent the Fates than to resent each other.

If you get more than half the pledged delegates, you should win. Someone could complain if they fell under the 15% threshold for delegates in many states, won other states big, and thus ended up down 51-49 in delegates despite receiving a majority of the votes. But it's hard to assess caucus and primary votes in a unified way, so we're probably stuck using delegate majorities as proxies for vote majorities.

Having the most pledged delegates shouldn't necessarily make someone the winner. In a 5-way race that ends up 22-21-20-19-18, the candidate with 22% shouldn't necessarily win. If all the other candidates are of a single ideological bloc and are ready to band together behind the candidate with 21%, that candidate should win, as they lead the bloc that won 78-22. (Note to Bloomberg: no buying delegates.)

In the future, it would be great for Democrats to set up some other voting system like IRV or approval voting. These systems are much better at representing voter preferences in multicandidate elections. They allow voters to rank candidates or choose more than one. (I voted for Warren; under IRV I would have ranked Sanders second; under approval voting I probably would have also approved Sanders.) The party could also do away with delegates and go straight to these nice IRV or approval-voting ballots.

Probably the best way to approximate those systems within the present mess is to let delegates reassemble into coalitions, guided by the candidate to whom they're pledged. That way, candidates from similar ideological blocs can combine their power. A majority wins, and if nobody has a majority, try to negotiate into a majority coalition. This system gets the right results in the majority and 22-21-20-19-18 cases by approximating the structures of these better voting systems.

I hope (and believe) one candidate will get a majority of pledged delegates. But in a mess, I think the right principles are: pledged delegates decide, you need 50%+ to win, you can get there by negotiating, Bloomberg can't buy delegates, and our dreams of better voting systems should guide our reasoning about fairness.

This may have been somewhat dense. So to symbolize the value of these principles to the Democratic Party, I'll just have a picture of a baby donkey romping through a field of flowers.

Not for sale

The story of the debate was Elizabeth Warren annihilating Michael Bloomberg. The winner was America.

The Bloomberg campaign is an experiment in whether money can buy the Presidency. His colossal ad spending got him to the mid-teens in national polls, and the 20s in some states. He bought his way into a debate. But when it became clear on the debate stage that he wasn't at all the kind of candidate that Democrats wanted, his billions couldn't buy him out of that.

That's how it should be. Billionaires can now see that if they try to buy the Democratic nomination and they're out of step with party values, they'll get wrecked by someone like Warren on the debate stage. If you want to stop Trump, you can donate lots of money and Democrats will appreciate that. But crude attempts to buy yourself the Presidency for a few billion dollars will just result in humiliation.

Everybody else did fine. Pete, Amy, and Joe don't have Bloomberg towering over them anymore. As long as they're tangled up with each other, Bernie has his path to victory.

Warren rightly benefits most of all. It was a great fundraising night, she's all over the news highlights, and her campaign has new life. The effect on Nevada will be muffled because early voting means that many ballots were cast before the debate, and she'll need a lot more than this to win. But whatever happens, her debate performance did a great deal to prevent obscene wealth from taking over her party and her country.

Thanks, Yang Gang! Let's do UBI someday.

Andrew Yang promoted the best vision of our long-term economic future. I'm glad he ran.

If all goes well, hyperefficient robots and AI will take most of our jobs a century from now. Instead of working, humans will get free money from the government to buy goods and services produced by robots. Kids today call this "Fully Automated Luxury Communism", though Yang used the more traditional "Universal Basic Income" (UBI). It's a future where advanced technology gives us economic freedom like old-fashioned aristocrats, and we can pursue whatever our hearts desire.

Yang wanted to implement UBI now, which isn't a good idea. Government can provide some things more efficiently than markets can -- public infrastructure and health insurance, for example. Better to buy people more of those things than to give them a $1000 monthly check to try to get them from the market. We aren't far enough into the automated robot future yet to run both UBI and all these services at once.

I might support UBI as a way to stabilize the economy in a recession. Instead of bailing out the banks to make sure paychecks still go out in a financial crisis, we can let them fail and give people free money to replace their paychecks. This might target people in dire situations better than traditional monetary policy does. If we started it off as an economic stabilization policy, we could ramp it up into a permanent thing as the robot future develops.

Yang wasn't the best choice for President. He doesn't have experience working within government. Obviously I'd take him over Trump, but that goes for probably 95% of the American population.

But it was good that Yang demonstrated the acceptability of UBI, at least within the Democratic party. Nobody tried to score points by attacking UBI, which they might have if it was anathema to Democrats for some reason. He carried the UBI flag all the way to New Hampshire, which is farther than many well-regarded Senators got.

I hope the Yang Gang will take note of this, and be part of Democratic policy conversations in the future. Perhaps I'll live long enough to see UBI become a reality.

Is Bloomberg manipulating the betting markets?

PredictIt gives Michael Bloomberg a 27% chance of winning the nomination. Nate Silver has him at 2.5%, which seems more right to me.

People pay some attention to betting markets. They're illiquid, so it isn't that expensive to move them. Buying his candidacy plausibility in the media by buying shares of himself -- isn't that just a perfect billionaire move?

Nancy Pelosi tore up the news cycle

Trump had a run of 20 tweets this morning, 19 of which were about Pelosi. (The other was a picture of flags.) He's attacking someone who keeps winning her San Francisco district with over 80% of the vote, instead of reinforcing the messages that his speechwriters crafted to promote his re-election.

It's sort of metaphysically picturesque to destroy a physical representation of a speech, and in doing so destroy the uptake of its content in other media.

The Trial Without Witnesses

Like the Red Wedding, the Trial Without Witnesses is an abomination deserving its own name. Not having witnesses or evidence violates the social purpose of a trial, just as mass murder violates the social purpose of a wedding.

Seven polls by six different pollsters demonstrate the high levels of popular support for having witnesses at Trump's impeachment trial. Some of these are from even before the John Bolton story broke:

Quinnipiac: 75
Monmouth: 80
Reuters: 72
CNN: 69
AP/NORC 68
Quinnipiac 66
WaPo 71

One reason I initially opposed impeachment is that I looked up the Senate rules and saw that McConnell could make whatever nonsense of the trial he liked. Pelosi knew that too. She also knew that she could withhold the articles of impeachment for weeks because of concerns about the fairness of the trial, putting media attention on the abomination McConnell would create. I changed my views because she changed hers; this was the strategy she saw. It neutralizes the political value of Trump's acquittal -- it came from the Trial Without Witnesses!

McConnell went for it anyway, in the face of this polling. Pelosi prevented Trump from getting any advantage from acquittal, but running a sham trial probably minimized McConnell's losses. The huge public support for witnesses won't bother him too much, because the Senate is a crime against democracy.

The Senate gives every state two votes, regardless of population. So if millions and millions of Californians know that trials should have witnesses, their support will matter no more than a few hundred thousand Alaskans who think otherwise. Because of this misalignment, McConnell can just ignore a democratic consensus. Support from the Trump-loving lords and barons of Alaska can preserve his power. It would be fair to create five to ten new Democratic-leaning states to rebalance the Senate, aligning it with national popular opinion. Best if we could disband the Senate and devolve its functions to the House, but our centuries-old Constitution is too badly designed to allow permanent fixes.

The Senate has always served to protect a corrupt status quo from democracy. It preserved segregation for decades, prevented Truman from setting up single-payer, and filibustered comprehensive climate change legislation in 2010. Today it produced the Trial Without Witnesses; tomorrow if we have a Democratic president, it'll be the main obstacle to good policy.

Bodies structured like the Senate shouldn't exist in modern democracies. As long as they exist, our politics remains halfway to a Game of Thrones.