That's really tricky when it comes down to the level of school board. When I was in Davis, I couldn't figure out who to vote for for schoolboard. I had caught a few minutes of their meetings, and the Republican had not seemed terrible, plus I had heard good things about him and how involved he was in the community. Plus, there were good write-ups. But there was a Democrat challenging him who seemed a little smarmy. I talked to the professor who was on the school board and clearly Dem, and she said that the Republican Dude was great: thoughtful committed and genuinely cared about the town. Sacramento Democrats had decided that it was important to have a Dem there, so a Gray Davis lackey had been swooped in. That guy sure did seem smarmy and poorly informed on the issues.
In Yglesias's post, he links to an article by Jeffrey Sachs about running a third party. (Clealry BAD), but I was struck and surprised by this from Sachs:
The stimulus legislation, pushed by Obama at the start of his term on the basis of antiquated economic theories, wasted the public's money and also did something much worse. It discredited the vital role of public spending in solving real and long-term problems. Rather than thinking ahead and planning for long-term solutions, he simply spent money on short-term schemes.
I thought that the stimulus was much too small etc., but I also thought that having some money go out right away was a good idea, thus the emphasis on "shovel-ready" projects. Does anyone know what the "antiquated theories" to which Sachs is referring are? Why are they antiquated?
I talked to the professor who was on the school board and clearly Dem, and she said that the Republican Dude was great: thoughtful committed and genuinely cared about the town. Sacramento Democrats had decided that it was important to have a Dem there, so a Gray Davis lackey had been swooped in. That guy sure did seem smarmy and poorly informed on the issues.
The trouble is that when some nutter (thank you Vince Cable) turns up at the school board and says "clearly we should switch to teaching Biblical physics, none of this suspiciously foreign-looking stuff about atoms", then the nice, thoughtful, committed Republican is going to fall into line without hesitation, because that's what they do.
2:Does anyone know what the "antiquated theories" to which Sachs is referring are? Why are they antiquated?
Well, remember X(more than half) percent of the stimulus was tax cuts, following New Keynesian theory of "jump starting" the economy with a dose of consumption. The Bush stimulus in summer 2008 was the same. This method, and a similar method of income transfers like UI, will always be temporary and not change psychology or expectations. Sachs mat be referring to tax cuts as growth inducing in general.
I don't know from "antiquated," New Keynesianism is pretty recent, and the Older Keynesians knew that a sustained recovery and expansion was built with tax increases and Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge...long term secure employment and predictable income.
"Shovel ready" is New Keynesian. Old Keynes stimulus doesn't ever stop (National Highway System, Space Program). It's a stabilizer.
3: There are no such nutters in this particular town. Further, I think that the guy was registered R but otherwise inactive in local politics. And technically, the election was supposed to be non-partisan. I don't think that the local school board had control over the curriculum, but I'm not sure.
Even locally, I wouldn't consider* voting for a Republican. "Reasonable" Republicans are still part of an infrastructure that promotes violence and ignorance. If Gray Davis wants to solidify political power by replacing a Republican with a Democrat, that's a good enough reason for me. Gray Davis's failure as a politician had awful consequences for California.
(Yes, I suppose I'd support a reasonable Republican in a school board race against a creationist Democrat. But that scenario doesn't seem to happen in the real world.)
It seems to me there needs to be a simultaneous push leftward of the Overton window among the general public as well. It will do you no good to run more left-wing candidates when the best you can do in the general is a blue dog. Of course, some part of pushing the window leftward is running more leftish candidates, since low-information voters generally form their idea of what's reasonable by splitting the difference between the two ideological camps. Meanwhile, the moneyed-interest juggernaut will have a hissy fit every step of the way.
Very hard, but doable. I'm reminded of a comment Krugman made once, something to the effect of, "Wresting our society back from the plutocrats is going to take decades of hard, discouraging siege warfare."
Someone (liberal) asserted to me the other day that Texas outcomes aren't as bad as in other states, because Texas is essentially a one-party state, and so the Republicans 1) don't have to waste their time undermining the other party at the expense of the people, and 2) will be blamed/get credit for everything, so they take some responsibility.
I don't know enough about state-level politics one way or the other, but everything is going south so fast that we might as well make up neat theories that upend conventional thinking.
The NY AG primary last fall was driven by a candidate presenting themselves as more liberal and their main opponent as an untrustworthy moderate Dem.
Even locally, I wouldn't consider* voting for a Republican.
If I'd believed that Ferrer had a snowball's chance in hell of beating Bloomberg in 2005 I would have voted for the R. Ferrer was a poor quality machine hack and Bloomberg had done a great job in his first term, other than on political protest civil liberties. Not only was he a very competent technocrat, but when cleaning up the fiscal mess left by Giuliani and the recession, he adopted a pretty progressive approach: big income tax hike for the rich, moderate property tax hike, tiny sales tax hike coupled with budget cuts that didn't single out the poor, accompanied by rhetoric that services for the poor are an absolutely essential part or a well functioning city. He's gotten worse since then while at the same time giving up the R. It is funny that his partisan Republicanism seems to be inversely correlated with his embrace of right wing policies.
Someone (liberal) asserted to me the other day that Texas outcomes aren't as bad as in other states
Assumes facts not in evidence.
It does? I thought that's what makes it an assertion.
It seems to me there needs to be a simultaneous push leftward of the Overton window among the general public as well.
Republicans have a functional mass ideology that works to translate peoples' general unease and discontent to a specific policy agenda. The left really doesn't have that on the mass level. This goes back to America generally being a highly individualist country. Liberals do have a sort of elite ideology linked to successful management of what we have of the safety net, but it's been sadly ineffective against pressure from right-wing radicalism.
Yglesias' post strikes me as somewhat short-sighted in that a third party at the national level could link up very well with increased pressure to elect left candidates in Democratic elections at the local level. The two strategies could easily be complements, not substitutes. The hypothetical third party would run candidates in the general at times, and endorse the leftmost Dem on the slate at others. However, advocacy of a third party probably crosses a line in DC discourse.
It does? I thought that's what makes it an assertion.
It is an assertion combined with an explanation of why the asserted statement is true. It looks vaguely like an argument, because the relationship between explainer and explainee is like the relationship between premise and conclusion. But it is not an argument, because you actually are supposed to accept the fact that Texas outcomes are better *first* and then evaluate the story about a lack of opposition as an explanation of how this came to be.
This is a common argumentative tactic, and people don't even realize their doing it. Basically they are saying "this would make sense if it were true." But you still don't actually have any direct, empirical evidence of the original statement.
So yes, it assumes facts not in evidence.
Republicans have a functional mass ideology that works to translate peoples' general unease and discontent to a specific policy agenda. The left really doesn't have that on the mass level.
I do think a populist 'fuck the bankers, fuck the rich, and fuck the moneyed interests' would go over like gangbusters if someone were a) willing to do it, and b) people believed the politicians meant it. Polls consistently show that people are very, very keen on raising taxes on the rich, preserving or strengthening SS/Medicare, and shitting on CEOs and I-banker types in various ways.
Perhaps NYC Democrats should start by figuring out how to elect a mayor.
An example of a successful primary challenge from the left was the 2010 DC mayoral election. As this illustrates the Democrats have a problem in that the most Democratic areas tend be ethnic enclaves and successful primary challenges there may tend to rely (at least in part) on catering to local prejudices that make it hard to succeed on a wider stage.
Republicans have a functional mass ideology that works to translate peoples' general unease and discontent to a specific policy agenda. The left really doesn't have that on the mass level.
This is true but completely insane when you stop to think about how we're the side with the policy agenda that actually makes people's lives better.
I still think we need to make a sincere play for people's stress level. "America is a country of stressed out people. People holding several jobs. People who have no security against catastrophe. We will do X,Y, and Z, and you and your loved ones will suffer less of this crazy ongoing stress."
13: Thanks. That's helpful for me, actually.
Texas has lately lagged in the Crazy Destructive Olympics being dominated by Arizona and Florida, so perhaps the argument works on these three states.
the Crazy Destructive Olympics being dominated by Arizona and Florida
Don't count us out yet!
14: I can think of reasons why this might fail, but I just can't grasp why nobody seems to want to even try it on a national level.
21: The short answer, I would guess, is that the media would fucking hate that shit like poison.
Edwards of course tried a hokey, cornpone version of it in 2008, but even back then he had a pretty serious sincerity problem.
17: Isn't Arizona also a reliably Republican state?
I agree competely with 14 and 16. As for:
I just can't grasp why nobody seems to want to even try it on a national level.
the reason is right there in plain sight .
The White House exerts influence throughout the left, because they can cut off fund-raising sources for major nonprofit organizations. So there are plenty of small organizations who use that line, but no big concerted push in part because the White House would not be hospitable to it.
One reason why you have to take third party challenges seriously is because insider/centrist/Obama-type domination of the only party you've got cuts off oxygen to the alternatives in all kinds of ways it's hard to understand from the outside.
24.2 Pleased to see the other five finance-related top tier-Obama bundlers include: John Emerson, of Capital Group Companies.
the reason is right there in plain sight .
I get that. As I said, I can think of reasons it might fail, and "money" is right at the top of that list. But what keeps it from being tried?
Another way of asking my question: Why is Alan Grayson so sui generis?
9: Ferrer was a poor quality machine hack and Bloomberg had done a great job in his first term, other than on political protest civil liberties.
I heard this a lot in that election, and I could never quite figure out what, specifically, people had against Ferrer that made him poor quality. I'd been around NY my whole life, and never noticed anything particularly bad about him (nothing remarkably good, but you could say that about lots of candidates). I didn't understand what about Ferrer was so unattractive that it drove people away from their ordinary party identification.
(And man, were you a sucker about Bloomberg.)
9: The NY AG primary last fall was driven by a candidate presenting themselves as more liberal and their main opponent as an untrustworthy moderate Dem.
And I voted for him on that basis. But it really is hard to tell as between Democratic candidates -- there aren't any reliable shibboleths that stand in for being globally committed to a set of positions on the left edge of the party. A Republican looking at a war-mongering creationist can be pretty sure that they're going to be rolling over for big business and treating taxes as if they were cholera as well, but it's not as easy with Democrats -- if Schneiderman ran for governor in a couple of terms and ended up as a business-friendly fiscal 'conservative', it wouldn't be shocking.
I guess I'm confused here. Isn't this a problem of urban/rural divides more than anything else? Here in MPLS, we have an overwhelmingly liberal Dem party. The people we send to the Capitol are very liberal. When we caucus for statewide races, it's always for the most liberal candidates. And yet, when it comes down to it, we're usually undone by the fact that the political center of gravity seems to lie in the deep suburbs and exurbs, where very liberal candidates can't seem to get any traction at all. I had always assumed that, some regional differences aside, this was how it worked pretty much everywhere -- city Dems voting for and supporting liberal Dems, country folx undermining that with their wacky homophobe Dem candidates. Is that not the case?
NYC Democrats are mystifying to me. Reliably left on social issues, sure, but all over the map on economics, in a way I find very hard to predict.
I would say that conservatives tend to value loyalty over rationality. This allows them to enthusiastically back primary challenges against 'disloyal' Republicans.
Find places where a constituency is materially leftward of the Dem incumbent, and I'm totally on board with this sort of thing.
Why is Alan Grayson so sui generis?
Because Tip O'Neill was right.
Ferrer had worked his way up the machine ladder as a corporate friendly socially conservative 'safe' (for business) dem. He had never done anything particularly noteworthy except working his way up the ladder. He then reinvented himself as a good liberal for the mayoral race. Plus I hated his 'I'll stop residential development if I'm elected' plank that catered to my new neighbours.
I don't see how I was suckered in by Bloomberg. I still feel his first term was excellent. Since then he hasn't been great but he hasn't been horrible either.
a corporate friendly socially conservative 'safe' (for business) dem
Which struck you as a negative sufficient to make him unworthy of your vote when the other option was Bloomberg, a billionaire Republican?
Bloomberg's first term did involve helping Bush get re-elected, which I take as a pretty strong strike against him.
31: places where a constituency is materially leftward of the Dem incumbent
Certainly, with a couple of exceptions (Keith Ellison being the primary one), this is the context we're operating in here. And yet, our incumbents are already significantly to the left of the rest of the Democrats in the MN legislature. We can just barely count on Duluth and some other parts of the Iron Range to send down some folx who are pretty good on economics, although only so-so on social issues.
I think people who are fairly far to the left in Minneapolis probably should try to take a more active role in ensuring that no moderate DFLers get a toehold, but I went to the last state senate district convention, and man alive! There were a lot of leftists there. It just doesn't seem to do any good when the forces of evil are so strong everywhere else. Frustrating.
That is, 29 is right. The question is how far can you draw those suburbanites leftward without risking them recoiling rightward.
One of the biggest problems Sen Tester is looking at is that he'll be sharing the ballot with Obama. And it's not a problem because Obama isn't liberal enough.
If I still lived in Philadelphia, I would be tempted to vote Republican for local offices just because the local political machine has gotten too cosy in their offices.
36: This is why we can't have nice things.
How do you change the culture of Duluth, then?
I have a love-in scheduled for Duluth next week. Enough bodypaint and groovy music, and they'll fall right into step.
41 written before seeing 40. I think we're on to something here, LB.
OT: This Saturday, there will be nerds in NYC, a great lowing, malodorous herd of them: FREE Outdoor Screening of The Captains, an EPIX Pictures presentation produced and directed by William Shatner with a in-person appearance and introduction by the legend himself.
God, you hippies. Duluthians only understand violence.
43: And it's on an aircraft carrier! I'm only sorry I won't be able to be there myself.
Find places where a constituency is materially leftward of the Dem incumbent, and I'm totally on board with this sort of thing.
How about the United States? There are polls I could cite as evidence, but how about this: The guy they elected in 2008 had a platform waaay to the left of the current incumbent.
44: Turn on, tune in, drop bombs.
38: That's a good question. Duluth Summer? I've been thinking a lot recently about how, in the heyday of the IWW, if a Wobbly got arrested for vagrancy or disturbing the peace or whatever in some small town, Wobs from all over would hitch or ride the rails in, and suddenly you'd have 300 of them lousing up the joint. What that implies of course, is that there were Wobblies going around and trying to organize the small towns. Nobody seems to want to do that anymore. And yet, I was hearing anecdotes from a woman who used to work for a big wind energy non-profit about how she and the rep from the coal industry would follow each other around to these little towns where they were considering ordinances about placement of wind turbines, and how they'd both try, with varying degrees of success, to win the hearts and minds of the villagers with fresh pies. She said there was a surprising degree of environmental advocacy to be found in the hinterlands, but the question was usually building up enough steam to make it a sure thing before the evil coal rep got there.
So maybe, if people in Frisco and Minneapolis and Portland and Boston can pretty much count on very liberal Dems being elected no matter what at home, the best thing would be to jump in the car -- or even the Greyhound -- and get out to the sticks with some pies and a good spiel.
33: The Bush thing was a definitely a strike against Bloomberg, but it said basically nothing about the way a second term would be expected to go. Bloomberg was a Democrat before he ran for mayor, and he more or less governed as one. I was working for the city during his first term (not as a political appointee), and was pretty favorably impressed, West side stadium insanity aside. I voted for the doomed Ferrer campaign in order to register my liberal policy preferences, but I wasn't particularly disappointed by the result at the time (2009 was a very different story).
Good pie for people out in the sticks. I'm warming to this whole 3d party thing after all.
My memory for specifics is terrible, and I may be moving things around in time, or simply getting them wrong. And my baseline assumption about billionaire politicians is that they're going to steal the polity blind, or at least enable their friends to, and that doesn't seem to have happened until his second term. But I remember being unhappy with mayoral control of the schools, both in general and in what he was doing with it, and unhappy with the sort of property tax abatements he was handing out like candy in response to bullshit threats to leave the city.
The first time I voted was in 1980, in my college district. The local far left wing state senator was running for Congress in a contested Democratic primary. His district included included the university, so he had a significant base of students. He had been a civil rights freedom rider in college, supported students in anti-Vietnam protests as a young local politician, and he took the left position on every issue.
Despite overwhelming student support, he lost the primary to a more typical machine politician. 1980 was a bad year for the Left. A few years later, he became the state attorney general and and then a U.S. Senator, where he remains to this day. He's also run for VP and for President.
Despite his later success, I really can't claim that my support for Joe Lieberman in one of his earliest campaigns has moved the Democratic Party to the left.
You people are seriously suggesting we adopt ogged's pie strategy?
James Parrott's study of commercial tax breaks - which mayoral administrations sell as "economic development" -- is revealing: In the four years after 2000, these increased over 72 percent, from $334 million to over $575 million. Parrott argues for a review of the rationales for these breaks, many of which were arguably unnecessary, especially in Manhattan; the developments would have gone ahead without deep city subsidies.
(While I'm badmouthing Bloomberg, I should say that I love what he did for bike infrastructure. But not enough to make a difference.)
And the pattern is repeating with my current State Senator, Stephen Sweeney, who is now the President of the New Jersey State Senate and is moving up. He got his start in politics by running fo rsome offic in his Ironworkers' Local, and his day job is still union rep for the Local. But he's been collaborating with the loathsome Governor Christie to destroy public employee unions and the public school sysmten anyway.
53: Yes. Exactly. I don't have any reason to believe that the liberal candidate who won the primary for NY Attorney General is going to drift right if his career continues, but it's the sort of thing that seems to happen with distressing regularity.
NYC Democrats are mystifying to me. Reliably left on social issues, sure, but all over the map on economics, in a way I find very hard to predict.
I heard recently that there are over 700,000 millionaires living in NYC. I'm sure that's skewed by the real estate prices but, still, that has to affect the politics.
To the OP, I think Yglesias's position is pretty standard but, given the recent blogspat, he is only mentioning half of the equation -- you also need strong organizations that can support people running for local office, and encourage the best and most active of those to run for larger offices. Democrats need an infrastructure which can recruit good state representatives to run for Congress, or city council members to run for the State house.
I know the Democratic party is working on that, but part of where the Republicans have an advantage right now is that there are more jobs outside of politics available to people in the "movement." One reason not to run for Congress if you have a state-level seat, is that you might end up unemployed, so it matters what options are available to the left Democrats who lose elections.
57: His current reluctance to sign on to the 50-state whitewash of mortgage servicing malfeasance is promising and should be supported.
I'm a little teapot, short and stout!
Here is my handle, you guys are the best!
38:How do you change the culture of Duluth, then?
Change the base, and the superstructure will follow. This is not merely economic determinism, really smart people can guide it, although they certainly make mistakes. Ford lost control of Fordism.
It wasn't the organization and volunteerism that created the modern Republican party, but the policies, starting with the end of the draft, and creation of derivatives and IRAs in the 1970s. And Jarvis. And ending Bretton Woods. Etc.
Give them gov't or gov't dependent jobs and they will like gov't. Eisenhower loved that National Highway System.
61 cont
This is a reason I was so horrified by the details of the ACA.
Suburbanization created the modern Republican Party.
Think like this.
61 is completely correct I think. It's why people "mysteriously" move right when they get in power, because they become responsible to the people who control the material base of the economy.
One of the biggest problems Sen Tester is looking at is that he'll be sharing the ballot with Obama. And it's not a problem because Obama isn't liberal enough.
The problem is certainly not because Obama pursued liberal policies.
6: I basically loathed Gray Davis, because he sort of operated a pay to play operation. And he was much, much to cozy with the prison guard union, and I don't think he ever let anyone out on parole.
Henry Farrell ...has a new post up at Crooked Timber which is on topic and more in line with what I am saying above
Here, Mettler's claim is not that the neo-liberals of the DLC are evil villains, or that their policies are useless - some of these tax breaks (the EITC in particular) have been valuable. But the turn towards submerged state measures as the "policy tool of choice" has pernicious broader consequences. It means that people fail to understand the ways in which they actually benefit from government. This not only makes it hard both to build a long term constituency for welfare state expansion where such is merited, it cripples democratic debate - people have difficulty in talking coherently about the role of the US state in providing welfare, when many US state functions are systematically obscured.
The pros are playing at an entirely higher level of analysis. Electoral politics is just the show. Obama designed the ACA to make people hate government. Seriously.
I do take it as the next thing to axiomatic that punishing a bad Democrat by voting Republican is poor tactics, because the chances that the effects of having the Republican in power are going to be better, rather than at the very best no worse, than even the worst Democrat are pretty slim. I'll vote for the Raving Loony party before I'll vote Republican (subject to reevaluation depending on circumstances, but it's how I'd expect to jump.)
66: Yes, that post is awesome. He didn't specifically mention the stimulus tax cuts that were designed deliberately to be difficult to notice, so that people would spend the money rather than saving it, but it's exactly the same sort of thing.
That post is awesome.
Clearly, the solution to all political problems is to move the Overton Window.
That post is awesome.
It is awesome but apparently I'm feeling contrary this morning because it reminds me of an old Dilbert cartoon about management cycles:
Step 1) Centralize everything that's widely distributed, "we need to improve efficiency and enforce standards."
Step 2) Decentralize everything that's centralized: "we need to remove bottlenecks, and improve flexibility."
Part of why that sticks in my head is because it isn't nuts -- it's easy to imagine benefits to an iterative process of centralizing/decentralizing.
Reading the post I wonder if there's going to be a similar cycle in terms of making government visible/discreet. That post argues for the advantages of visible government. It's worth remembering, however, that part of why the "submerged state" became more popular among policy wonks in the 90s was because the visible elements of the state became targets for criticism (or, somehow, stopped being visible -- don't forget that 40% of people receiving Social Security benefits -- checks from the US Treasury, say that they haven't taken advantage of any government programs).
I think about the point that Ezra Klein repeats from time to time that one important dynamic of politics is that making something visible encourages the opposition party to take a stand against it, even if it's something that you would "objectively" expect them to support.
I'd settle for simply defeating more far-right candidates. Make the GOP more reasonable and you've improved the chances for good policy. In fact, I'd say this is more important than electing more on the far left.
Reading the post I wonder if there's going to be a similar cycle in terms of making government visible/discreet.
I'd be happy to have some pendulum cycles, as that assumes some small improvement from the current hellishness.
71: I don't think submerging some programs, particularly the most beneficial, will inoculate government from right-wing propoganda.
Part of what was awesome about the post was that tinkering with the tax structure in lieu of visible social programs allows Republicans to have their cake and eat it too -- keep the spigot open for their supporters, while demagoging about the size of government to shut down programs for the poor/minorities/democratic coalition, so that even programs that are useful on the merits are net political losers for the left.
I mean, that's just a poor, possibly innaccurate summary of something you can read yourself by clicking on a link, but that's how I roll.
72: At least at the national level, once in office Republicans are homogenous in their voting, much more so than the Democrats.
I'd settle for simply defeating more far-right candidates. Make the GOP more reasonable
California switched to an open primary system that is supposed to have this effect. We'll know in a decade or so whether it works.
73/74/75 Sure, I left out the whole element of political power in my description but I don't believe that advocating visible, rather than invisible, programs will suddenly increase political power.
I'm also happy to believe that it makes sense in the current circumstances, and would be a smart political move. I'm just claiming that it falls into the category of, "identify ways in which the current political equilibrium is off-center, and advocate moving towards the center" rather than "I have a new theory of politics."
I still think we need to make a sincere play for people's stress level. "America is a country of stressed out people. People holding several jobs. People who have no security against catastrophe. We will do X,Y, and Z, and you and your loved ones will suffer less of this crazy ongoing stress."
I would love to see more of this platform and emphasis, but people seem to be ashamed to be concerned about their quality of life. Caring that you live a pleasant life is insufficiently rugged and individual, or something.
75:Focusing on Republicans from that post definitely misses the point. Yggles is outfront about saying he wants a carbon tax in order to re-urbanize the country. Neo-liberalism is the current theory of politics that informs all major praxis. It is the superstructure. It may not be directly confronted.
Note the praise for Bruce Wilder in the post comments. He is very good, but just a little too focused on institutions.
During my studies, I have always had a fear that I would become one of those people who say:"I have studied institutional economics for twenty years, and you know what our problem is? Our institutions!"
I am not going to become Mr Eclectic Super-Polymath. The ignorance and incoherence is part of my self-education, the actual plan!
Is that the lowest hanging fruit in the history of fruit?
open primary system
I hate the concept of open primaries. Hate hate hate hate.
I'll vote for the Raving Loony party before I'll vote Republican
That's logically impossible.
people seem to be ashamed to be concerned about their quality of life. Caring that you live a pleasant life is insufficiently rugged and individual, or something.
It does seem like the Republican popular ideology works through this complicated sadomasochism. I remember during the Wisconsin union fights there were person-on-the-street interviews where people were saying things like, "why should teachers get decent treatment at work / reasonable pensions? I don't get decent treatment at work! I don't have a pension! And I'm proud of it!" It really makes you despair, what kind of appeal works when peoples' response to exploitation is all "thank you sir, may I have another"?
Because you aren't actually looking for centrist candidates that reflect the median voter? Because you hold strong positions and would like your representative to hold them too? For the same reasons that "bipartisan" is kinda bullshit? (not being sarcastic, really asking)
The thing is, here in California, we usually need one or two fucking Republican votes to pass a budget with revenues. Our Republican reps are accurately sure that they'll be un-elected if they vote for that budget. Anything that gives them a different motivation has got to be better than what we've got now. And the state is more Democratic than our Legislature, so I'm willing to see what open primaries do.
"Hate hate hate hate" s/b "Hate hate hate HATE"
I'm still unclear on apo's feelings about open primaries.
The best end-run I've seen around that attitude is that making life pleasant and secure promotes small-business startups, because people aren't afraid to quit their jobs. But it is weird that the attitude exists.
85: Because people who aren't members of a political party shouldn't have any role deciding that party's nominees. The solution to California's self-inflicted gunshot wound is to repeal the dumbassed referenda that put them in this position, not to give Republican voters additional influence over the Democratic nominating process.
In city races open primaries have sometimes resulted in two Democrats advancing through the primary and then, of those, the Democrat more acceptable to Republican voters winning the general election. If you had party primaries than the more liberal of the candidates would have won the Democratic primary.
Aesthetically I dislike open primaries, primarily because it seems like it reduces information available to the voters and encourages all the candidates to make bland, indistinguishable, centrist statements, but I also don't like the idea of districts where the party primary is, de facto, more important than the general election, and I don't know what would be the best fix for that.
91: Right, but if you say that first paragraph again, with Republicans instead, we might have some Republican legislators who aren't fucking crazy. We're desperate for those. Most times, we only need one.
That said, I agree with Apo's 90.
And yes, obviously I would far rather have majority rule, and get rid of this supermajority bullshit.
If you want to have some effect on the Republican nomination process in California, you apparently need to be rich, conservative and connected to the candidate selection process (note, I do not mean here the nomination process). People can vote all they want - well, uh, just once - for any candidate on the ballot, but that doesn't give them any say in who shows up on the ballot before they see it.
I think Ca should seriously consider a constitutional convention. I don't think there's much danger of having civil liberties seriously peeled back, and you wouldn't have the supermajority requirements in the convention, nor, I assume, in ratification.
And you could increase the Assembly to 400, and the Senate to 200. (Although you'd need an Assembly of like 3,000 to have the neighborhood representation/TV money doesn't matter kind of thing that we have). Dilutes the whackjobs.
Just to answer your (perhaps rhetorical) question at the end. I ran roughly a more-progressive-than-Democrats campaign for city council in Bloomington IN (a very Democrat town). I was challenging an incumbent who is running as a scion (his family is established and well-connected in the district). He is running as a Dem based on inertia, rather than any personal commitment to any progressive ideals. I challenged him because his ignorant posture-over-substance transportation policies risk destroying our (exceedingly liberal) urban core in exchange for a (perceived as financially vital) suburban population (which is not as liberal). The frustrating part is that he doesn't even know he's doing this, he's just too short-sighted an opportunist to recognize the long-term effect of these policies. I think it is fair to challenge him solely on transportation policy because there is literally nothing consequential that the city council has any real discretion over other than transportation policy.
So basically, to answer your question, I think that a local progressive campaign looks a lot like a single-issue campaign, and often fails for that reason. Anyone that is local that is not going to run a single-issue campaign is most likely running for ego, not progressive principles. That may be the path to finding a great leader but it certainly poses recruiting challenges.
CA was considering a Constitutional Convention and I was entirely enthralled. But the big proposal that came forward explicitly excluded any state workers from participating, so I decided the whole concept was bullshit. Incremental change it is!
Good for you (although your tenses are confusing me. It sounds like the primary's happened already and you lost, but you don't say.) And a single-issue bicyclist campaign is certainly going to read generally left-wing in the same way that a creationism-driven schoolboard campaign reads right-wing.
(Running for office in Bloomington on a bicyclist-centered campaign seems as if you should have found some way to bring Breaking Away into it.)
97 -- When we had our convention in 1972, the PTB were shocked when the Supreme Court ruled that legislators couldn't be delegates. Nor local officials, iirc. The resulting convention was more liberal, and more female, that originally imagined.
96: And (under the assumption that you lost) keep trying. This is the kind of thing we need.
Yeah, full props to you for running for office. That's impressive. And you answered the question in the post! Twice awesome.
I thought there was something like a supermajority requirement even to call a convention in California. So it won't happen.
You need a majority of the supers.
I don't understand the requirement of a convention in California, but if you do it, you should try for a unicameral legislature. That will give your state something to make it nearly unique and appear in politics tests.
102 -- Supermajority of each house to submit the question to voters, simple majority of voters to get a convention. I guess you need an initiative first to change the supermajority requirement, which would only need a majority.
To return to the tricky question (for voters) of who to vote for in small local elections -- raised by the OP and by BG in comment 1, and Greg Alexander just upthread -- it's worth noting that with increasing media consolidation, local news reporting and analysis is becoming pretty darn scarce. For the 2010 elections here, I found myself relying more on the local public radio station for explanation of the issues at stake than on the city's paper of record.
This makes it really exceedingly difficult -- particularly for Independents -- to make voting decisions in any informed manner. The left could do itself some favors on a local level by beefing up its information dissemination resources.
Plus, with a unicameral legislature, you'll have a giant extra room in the capitol.
106 -- I can wait til the candidates come to my house, and then cross-examine them. In a larger polity, though, I think there really isn't any substitute for participating in clubs/party factions of various kinds. Candidates will go pretty much anywhere they can in search of money or votes. Band together so you look like a probable source of one or the other, and they'll come talk to you.
California got rid of the 2/3 requirement for a budget in the last election, one of the few good uses of the initiative. There's still a 2/3 requirement for new taxes, though, which is awful. Plus there's the fact that 80% of the budget is pre-allocated due to various initiatives that the Legislature has no power to amend or repeal, so even with majority rule the discretion of the Legislature is limited.
A constitutional convention had some energy last year but ultimately petered out and couldn't get enough signatures to appear on the ballot (they would have used the method described by Carp in 105).
I'm personally doing a lot of work related to a seekrit plan to try and change some of these things. But it's seekrit!
Candidates will go pretty much anywhere they can in search of money or votes.
Heh. During a tight mayoral campaign (between three good candidates!) I used to joke they'd go anywhere with five people in the room. Since I am a bad person, I also wondered whether I could get any of them to dance for my vote. Seemed likely.
The orange hoodie is not the typical politician campaign photo getup. I like it.
We had calling a convention on the ballot in 2010; it appears automatically every 20 years. And we beat it back. Republicans wanted to water down our constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment. Sorry.
Yeah, I lost the primary back in May. I got about a third of the vote, which is pretty good considering I had no name recognition but pretty bad considering I wanted to kick him out of office. :)
parsimon - yes I agree that media coverage is the defining difficulty for local campaigns. Charley is of course right that for really local elections you can go door-to-door, and I think I got a lot of my votes from what canvassing I did. But I want to give props to Howard Dean's "Democracy For America". Their local chapter (Democracy For Monroe County) hosted two local Democratic primary debates that were probably my best opportunities to reach a large audience. And much like the national scene, there are a lot of informal media channels that you can fight dirty to manipulate...in this case I'm talking about neighborhood association mailing lists.
Hey guys, this is a little embarrassing, but I put a raisin in my nose and now I can't get it back out! I tried using mom's hemostats, but I think I may have pushed it up into a sinus cavity. What should I do? Is a raisin tree going to grow in my head? I'M SCARED.
Current Illinois rep Aaron Schock won a write-in campaign for the school board at 19.
115.2: Good to know about Democracy for America's local chapters -- thanks. I think I should probably harass the City and County papers here for more coverage of local races, nonetheless; and not coverage that merely amounts to parroting the presentation of the candidates themselves! (i.e. "Candidate X is a long-standing member of community Y who shares a home in town Z with a lovely wife and two beautiful children .... Said candidate maintains a commitment to the strength of our community, blah blah blah. His friends have always found him a dedicated and concerned member of the community, blah. blah")
As an election judge, I have to say that I would hate to have to administer a closed primary.
A. It would be a waste of time. Even here in High Voter Tunoutia, many of the people who currently vote in the primary would not bother if they had to fool around with one more bureaucratic hassle in order to register their party affiliation.
B. If you are someone who tries to vote third party when possible, it significantly decreases your ability to have your voice heard.
C. There's just something creepy about having, as a private citizen, to publicly register your political affiliation.
I always vote under a false name anyway.
120: "Open primary" in this context is not about whether you have to be registered: the new California system is that you first have a single "primary" in which everyone runs and everyone votes, then the top two vote-getters move to the general. I don't think "primary" is a good word for it anymore, hence my scare quotes.
bureaucratic hassle in order to register their party affiliation
It's just a single checkbox/line on the voter registration form, which you already have to fill out if you want to vote. It really isn't any more hassle than that.
someone who tries to vote third party when possible
If you're going to vote third party anyway, then what does it matter that you can't vote on the main parties' nominees?
publicly register your political affiliation
This I have some sympathy for. But not enough to overcome the suspicion that the main effect of open primaries (at least down here) would be to pull Democratic candidates even further to the right than they already are.
See, my hope is that the main effect of open primaries would be to pull Republican candidates even just slightly away from absolutely unwilling to deal.
Just one of them! Just for a budget vote that raises taxes! The rest we can do with a regular majority.
If you're going to vote third party anyway, then what does it matter that you can't vote on the main parties' nominees?
It means that you can't join a 3rd party and still have a meaninful vote in areas where the primary is the only election that is contested. I have mixed feelings on 3rd parties, but I don't see how open primaries are uniformly bad.
I voted Republican in the 2010 primaries.
You can join a major party and still vote third party -- I'm a registered Democrat so that I can vote in primaries, but I consistently vote Working Families party (which mostly runs the Dem candidates, so not all that much of a difference).
I'm going to reregister as Republican to vote in the Republican primaries. To vote against Bachmann, or (if I'm feeling nihilistic) to vote for Bachmann.
but I consistently vote Working Families party (which mostly runs the Dem candidates, so not all that much of a difference).
This is that fancy NY voting that got outlawed everywhere else, though. Not that that negates your point.
Working Families party (which mostly runs the Dem candidates
I did not know that fusion voting is only legal in eight states. Weird.
It's the only easy way for a third party to bootstrap itself to relevance, which means that the major parties have an incentive to ban it.
128: Then the 3rd party is pretty much going to stay a 3rd party under Pennsylvania laws. You need 15% of the registered voters to get around the onerous signature gathering laws to get a candidate on the ballot outside the major parties (it takes 50,000 signatures or so to get on a state wide ballot). The Dems and Reps have cooperated to make it nearly impossible to mount a 3rd party challenge. This has its pluses (goodbye Mr. Nader) and minuses (The PA Democratic and Republican parties).
Variously pwned, but I was googling PA election laws.
I did not know that fusion voting is only legal in eight states. Weird.
More important, once you scale up, it probably would require more energy input than you'd see as usable output.
So Pittsburgh is a great model of what LB is talking about: thoroughly D town, which simply means that we have 9 Council members, all D, who range from center-right to, left-center-left (that is, one guy who'd be very comfortable here politically, but who would be scorned by the lefties among us). It's mostly name recognition and patronage*, not ideology. BUT. Over the past 10 years or so, one guy in particular has built up his brand as being the progressive voice in the City, and he does it through all the cultural cues that you'd expect - biking, gay rights, pro-urban policies (which seems obvious for an elected official in a city, but isn't), and generally seeming like One Of Us.
What's interesting is that, while he certainly votes reliably liberally, he's not on Council to be a liberal bomb-thrower. Rather, he uses this signaling to establish his base (which is the educated, affluent liberals of the city's university neighborhoods), which ensures that he can keep getting elected without selling out to developers or public safety unions.
The other interesting thing is that there's another Council member who basically got elected using the same formula (although his district is more mixed), but in practice doesn't seem to be especially liberal. I mean, in the US House he'd be probably left of the center of the Dem caucus, but not by a lot. But, as I said, he got himself elected (as a total nobody with no institutional support) by portraying himself as a cultural liberal running against some entrenched hack. But the fact that he's not especially a liberal voice on Council (in fact, I think in some ways he fancies himself an Obama-like Grownup between the liberal and establishment Dem factions) indicates that cultural cues are pretty inexact for liberal Dems.
* although, from my vantage point, there's a fraction of the patronage that people blandly assume
although, from my vantage point, there's a fraction of the patronage that people blandly assume
You're not five months and a completely pointless election away from being represented by a 20-something whose only qualification is his last name.
I suppose it is possible he won't suck any worse than the guy before.
I'm having a hard time even wrapping my head around your question, b/c I live in Berkeley, and I'm not sure what a non hard-left run for City Council would look like. Being willing to let a chain store in town??
Only sorta kidding.
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Regarding #4, glowingquadammage, I will make my usual, hopeless appeal (knowing that I will be jumped on by language prescriptionists and people generally dismissive of any request to avoid offensive language based on religious grounds) that the word 'juggernaut' be retired from usage. It's badly derived from "Jaganath" and what I, at least, view as a willfully corrupt and colonialist misunderstanding of the sense and nature of the annual Festival of Chariots in Jaganath Puri, Orissa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggernaut
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratha_Yatra . When I was 8 years old someone gave me an illustrated dictionary, and this word was one of the examples in the front section that they used to show you how the pieces of a dictionary entry worked, including the etymology and complete with an illustration of one of our fabled chariots. I had just built a miniature such chariot for my own Jaganath Deities, and was extremely upset to discover that most English-speakers associate the Jaganath, because of this word, with cruelty and a lack of mercy. The whole point of the festival is that Jaganath is being happily taken out of His Temple by the force of the love of His devotees. It is an extremely joyous and affectionate festival. Unfortunately, it's so popular, it could get kind of dangerous, but nobody wants anybody to get crushed under the wheels. Instead of taking the time to understand our theology, the British just seized upon another example they could use to paint us as murderous human-sacrificing savages requiring their careful guidance. It is my small, hopeless dream that my grandchildren will never have to encounter the same twinge-inducing usage. I'm not going to argue it, I'm just going to make my plea. Thanks!
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133: Ah. NYS is different -- IIRC, there's no percentage of registered voters that does anything for a third party, it's the percentage of votes in the last gubernatorial election that gets you on the ballot.
137: Legacies are a different category than patronage. They usually benefit from it to an extent (patronage hires stay bought), but mostly it's name recognition + old people who may or may not understand that Bob O'Connor remains dead, and that the young, dark haired guy is his son, not his post-resurrection self.
And actually, in the big picture, the guy before doesn't suck, at least not by local standards: he's intelligent, liberal, and more than willing to oppose our Boy Mayor. If we avoid fracking in city limits, it will be largely thanks to him. He's dull and uninspiring, but he's probably in the top 25% of council members we've had in the past 12 years.
139: That had never crossed my radar as a slur (that is, it's obviously a slur, but it had never occurred to me that it was connected to a still-extant religious practice). And now I know something I didn't before, and can remember not to use it.
Question: Are there any actually existing Bulgarians unhappy about the UK English use of 'bugger'? As I understand it, that's an unambiguous historical reference to Bulgarians.
141.2: Believe you me, trying to adjust to grudging respect for him has been very difficult for me.
Yeah, it's very esoteric knowledge that the word "juggernaut" is even related to India; it's been thoroughly Anglicized both in spelling and in associations, like "thug" and "punch".
Oh, I even knew it was India-related, "Juggernaut" shows up in Around The World In Eighty Days. It just never actually clicked that it might be a recognizable version of something real.
144, 145: I assumed it was German. I knew "thug" was related to India (because of the work of an archeologist named Dr. Jones), but not "punch."
139: Can we carve out just the one exception?
A hallucinatory juggernaut shows up in Shelley's Masque of Anarchy. Like LB, I hadn't realized that it was linked to a contemporary religious practice.
146: I had a desperately nerdy classmate of Oudemia's and HelpyChalk's try to impress me on a visit to Dr. Oops at St. Johns by explaining the etymology of 'punch'. Can't remember the guy's name, but I will always know that 'punch' means 'five'.
And shish means 'six'. If you only got panj kabab, you were ripped off.
I thought something like a juggernaut shows up in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The modern edition I read may have used that word; I don't know what it would have looked like in the original.
150 flew right over my head until just now.
150: And you need a 'chariot' because all four of your limbs have wasted away from leprosy. True fact...
" what would a hard-left run for City Council look like?"
From Wikipedia, on the London Council during the 1980s:
"Livingstone's high-spend socialist policies put the GLC into direct conflict with Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. Livingstone soon became a thorn in the side of the sitting Conservative government. He deliberately antagonised Thatcher through a series of actions (including posting a billboard of London's rising unemployment figures on the side of County Hall, directly opposite Parliament); a Fares Fair policy of reducing Tube and bus fares using government subsidies; meeting Sinn Féin MP Gerry Adams at a time when Adams was banned from entering Britain due to his links with the Provisional IRA; and endorsing a statue of Nelson Mandela while Thatcher regarded the future South African president as a terrorist. After what was regarded as a punitive funding cut by the Thatcher government, which had the effect of cutting school lunch subsidies for London schoolchildren, the GLC hung a banner with the words "Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher" from the County Hall."
I sort of want the D.C. council to try this approach, though Congress has a lot more practical power to screw up the city than vice versa.
"Are there any actually existing Bulgarians unhappy about the UK English use of 'bugger'? As I understand it, that's an unambiguous historical reference to Bulgarians." Whoa. I had no idea. I always assumed it referred to insects. Somehow. Not sure how.
147: Um, I don't think I can bear to click.
150: I was so confused b/c to me choy is six.
Punch="Panch" from five ingredients. Originally, IIRC, arak, water, jaggery, lemons and spices. " "Spices" as a single ingredient is cheating in my view, unless there was a standard mixture that was always used.
re: 155
Yes, and it's interesting to note that as soon as London again had a single-tier of government, Livingstone got re-elected. Twice.
And in that case, and in the case of, say, the excellent Dennis Canavan,* too, were both instances of a candidate running against the official party candidate** from the left, and winning.
* my former MP and a good man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Canavan#Scottish_Parliament
** in the 2000 Mayoral election that was Dobson, not himself necessarily a bad guy, either.