Oh, I have so many things to say to add to and amplify James’ post. It is hard to know where to start. Let me state from the top that I agree with his basic thesis: yes, it is fair to make a judgment about the morality of supporting Trump and his co-partisans, but the most important variable to explain the government we get out of our elections is structure, not the voters. As long as we pretend the main issue is just “the voters” and not the structures in which we vote, we will continue to have dumb micro-level arguments about messaging and candidate quality alone.
Yes, candidate quality matters. And sure, campaigns matter. Neither matters anywhere near as much as people think (more on that in a future post).
Let me be clear: I am not absolving individual voters for their moral choices. But if the goal is to find where the core problems are, blaming “the voters” or “Americans” requires a fair assessment of whether or not the system is measuring what “the voters” want.
It doesn’t.
The reason for this is simple: our structures do not purely translate voter preference into government formation. Instead, our structures filter voter preference through a Rube Goldberg machine of state boundaries, single-seat districts, primaries, and the Electoral College, to name just the basics.
We do not live in a system that does a good job of translating votes into government. We have a system that privileges some voters over others, and sidelines many.
By the way, this does not matter due to some intellectual exercise, or the personal academic hobby horse that I have been riding for many years now. It all boils down to how to fix the obvious problems we face.
Let me note something that I think gets lost at times: better structures guarantee nothing. I think sometimes readers think when I argue for better democratic feedback loops that I am promising better politicians and superior policy outcomes. This is not what I, and others in the pro-reform community, are offering.
I am offering the notion that voters would have real choices that better reflected the actual preferences and interests that they have. I am offering the notion that each voter would actually count equally to others. I am offering the notion that all elections would be competitive in ways they simply are not now. I want a system that does, in fact, reflect sentiment and so that then, yes, we can blame the voters far more clearly for their choices.
I want a system that:
- Treats voters as equals.
- That has actual competition for votes.
- That provides voters with more than two real choices at the polls each election.
- That has a means of containing its extremes into smaller, less dangerous parties
- Wherein it is clearer which party to blame or reward.
- That allows majorities to rule, not minorities.
We have none of these things in the US in any universally meaningful way.
If we look globally, we can find systems that do this a lot better. Nothing is perfect, but we continue to insist that our giant phone-in-a-bag is just as good as the latest iPhone. Indeed, we refuse to even look at the new iPhone because of giant phone-in-a-bag exceptionalism.
Look, if a majority of a country really wants fascism, no rules are going to stop a fascist takeover (or insert your extreme ideology of choice). Our problem is not that a majority of the population actually wants MAGA. Our problem is that it is possible for MAGA to control one of two parties.
And yes, in a perfect world MAGA should be enough to get people to flee the GOP en masse. We can ignore the social science of partisanship all we like, but it doesn’t change empirically observable mass behavior. It is hard to get people to change the party they vote for. This is science, like it or not. We can also ignore the fact that most voters don’t pay that much attention to the news and therefore fall back on partisan identification. That, too, is science, like it or not.
Dare I say it?
Trust the science.
And even on a personal level, most readers know this is all true. Most of the people reading this who are mad at people who will vote for Paxton (or pick your lesser poison) would have voted for Platner in Maine if the choice were he or Collins, for the same basic logic as many Texas GOPers will deploy for bubbling in the oval by Paxton’s name.
Here’s the core question: Will the actual will of “the voters” or “Americans” be demonstrated by the outcome of November’s elections?
The bottom-line answer is no. The filters in place will dilute the actual majority sentiment about our government at the moment.
That there is a chance that Dems could control both chambers is a reflection of how deep anti-Trump/anti-Republican sentiment is. But if we had truly competitive elections that really reflected public preferences, we would not be worried about the outcome; it would be clearly pro-Dem and anti-Rep.
And yet, it is within the realm of the possible that Ds will not get control of the Senate despite the obvious public dissatisfaction with the Rs.
So, if the Democrats fail to control the Senate, this will not be because majority sentiment in the country wants that outcome. It will be because of the way we have structured Senate elections. I get it: you can blame the Republican voters in those states for the outcome. That’s fair; but you cannot blame “the voters” writ large, nor can you blame “America.”
Put another way: sure, blame people for voting for Rs for doing so, but blame the system for the overall outcomes that we get.
As James noted in his post, how many voters in the US this November have zero real influence in the outcome? Put another way, to what degree will the coming November election be an actual assessment of what “the voters” or “Americans” want? We are sliced and diced in such a way that we are not going to get that kind of assessment.
Now, does that take people who vote Republican off the hook morally? No. But it also does not change the fact that the outcome is more determined by structure than by a real test of national preferences.
Heck, two-thirds of the Senate aren’t even up for election.
The core of all of this is what I have been arguing for years: we do not get, in any election cycle, a true representation of “the voters” or of “Americans.” I wish we did, and then we could make broader and clearer assertions of blame.
This is not to say that a better system guarantees a better government, but it does increase the odds.
We need deep and significant reform so that we can, in fact, find out what the voters want in a way that treats all voters equally.
And all of this dovetails with my Liberal Currents piece, which talks about clear flaws in our checks-and-balances system and the ongoing problem of multiple sources of democratic legitimacy with a system of separated powers (made worse by the differences between House and Senate terms, and the fact that only one-third of the Senate is elected in a given cycle).
To conclude: again, I am not saying that individual voters don’t have moral culpability for their votes. But I am simply noting that by no metric does 50%+1 of the public actually want what we’ve got, and yet we have it. If that is a true statement, and I am prepared to defend it, then where is the real blame? Is it “the voters” or is it the structure of the system?
The answer to the question leads us to where we need to go to fix things. If it is just “the voters,” then we can spend our time trying to fix messaging, campaigns, and candidates. If it is the structure, then pro-democracy politicians and citizens better be working on a serious set of reforms.
Final note: if Democrats do really well next month, that does not prove that everything is fixed or that Talarico (or name your example) is The Answer for Democrats going forward.
