Outside the Beltway

Assessing Republican strategic positioning (and the incentives in our system).

More voice, more votes, more representation.

With an appearance by Caitlyn Jenner’s choice of party.

A recent report shows 78 of 435 seats in the US House are truly competitive.

National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson advocates for less democracy in America.

How well do single-seat districts lead to representation? (And of what?)

A truly silly characterization from Senator Mike Lee.

The lack of common understandings and shared assumptions makes political conversations challenging.

Empowering authoritarians.

Our insistence on relying on an 18th Century understanding of electoral systems is our ongoing bane (if one values representative government).

Yes, partisanship is real. And it influences more than just voting behavior.

It is not a tool to foster compromise. It is tool of obstruction, plain and simple.

Voting ourselves out of this mess is not so easy

Let me point you to a reform proposal.

Will there be in-fighting? Yes. A break-up? No.

That’s unpossible!

Some Republicans are doing their jobs.

But, still very bad.

Gridlock doesn’t mean government stops. It just shifts who is governing.

How the EC affects our thinking.

What meanings might the Founders have had? How should we understand the term?

If we embrace the Founders to justify the present, let’s think about what we are doing.

I couldn’t help myself.

Having the topic of political reform start to seep into pop culture is a good thing.

Definitions are fun, right?

It is about finding ways to combat minority rule.

Thinking about wildfires and electoral politics.

A game wherein one team has to score more points to win than does the other.

A discussion of what #NeverTrump means, on Sanders v. Trump, and some about the philosophy of voting.

Ultimately, it isn’t a very good one.

Current attempts to take power away from the state executive branch illustrates a lot of what I have been writing about for years.

Forget the “republic v. a democracy” abstraction. The numbers show some serious flaws in translating popular will into government.

A reference point for the future.

Negotiations over government formation is not a crisis.

In which I use a lot of words to say hello.

Dare I say: hate the game, not the players?

Looking into uncontested and partially contest House districts from the 2014 cycle.

In the first entry in this series we looked at a basic question of democratic theory. In this one, we look at whether the EC ever worked as the Framers intended.