I think we desperately need some center parties for this reason, ideally “state parties” that can challenge the fully polarized states. Just as the democrats have become non-viable in the heartland, a state party needs to replace the republicans in California so that the democrats there have to actually compete.
Meanwhile it’s sad that it’s come to this. Playing an entire generation of nasty polarization as the strategy to win has left us in this locked-in non-competitive situation, and because our system over represents rural areas, this works strongly against the democrats.
I 100% agree that small centrist parties would help -- the problem is that it's very hard to crack the duopoly in an environment where both parties are competitive. The only reason the Dems in Nebraska stood down is that they understood it's really become a one-party state. Similarly an independent could run in California against the Dems. (e.g. If Steve Poizner, an ex-Republican who served quite admirably as Insurance Commissioner, had wanted to run for state office again as an independent, he could probably would've been competitive.)
If we want to foster the growth of parties that hold unorthodox positions relative to the main left-right spectrum, we need to change to a proportional election system, so that a party can get a toehold in the legislature with a smaller share of the vote.
If this is something you care about, support the Center for Election Science!
I get that "PR solves polarization" is supposed to work in theory, but when I look at Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and (probably soon) Germany, I can't help but feel that theory and practice are pretty far apart in this case.
I would consider proportional representation over multi member districts. For example, instead of having 360 single member districts, you have 60 6-member districts or 30 12-member districts. Then, within each district, you have proportional representation, with the condition that voters can declare a back up party or two if their first choice doesn’t qualify for a seat.
There are proportional tabulation methods using Ranked, Rated, or Approval ballots. Personally I favor Approval ballots with Jefferson tabulation, because Approval ballots are cheaper to implement and easier to explain to the voters. (They strongly resemble existing ballots where you can "vote for up to 3" or whatever.)
Smaller parties are rarely if ever 'centrist', whatever that means. Smaller parties are virtually always more ideological in one way or another, with a smaller base of more committed, intense voters. The way to have centrist parties is to have bigger ones, which by definition means less of them
If the objective is to bring about 'centrism' or to depolarize, then going the opposite direction from more, smaller parties could be the way to go. If our polarization is driven by overenthusiastic participation in politics by those who care about ideology and parties, weirdly *care too much*, a solution may be in diluting the relevance of people who self-select for participation.
I've thought of a way to make the duopoly better, by learning to love it, embrace it, and proudly make it blander. Make the primaries for both Parties not only *open* simultaneously to all eligible voters, regardless of their particular Party registration or ID or lack of it, but make voting in the primaries for both *mandatory*, along with mandatory voting in the general election.
Parties won't be able to choose or predict their voters, and need to make more general, rather than narrow appeals.
In particular, fragmenting the party landscape would help defuse "negative polarization". Right now, people are motivated to vote for the Republican, specifically because they hate the Democrat and are afraid if they don't vote for the Republican the Democrat might win. And vice versa.
But as Dan Osborn is currently demonstrating, there are a lot of registered Republicans who really aren't all that attached to the label.
Not everyone has the charisma to run that kind of one-man show, though. Having a variety of parties like Andrew Yang's Forward would be useful. If you elected a state legislature using multi-member districts, six or ten people per district, parties like that could pick up a few seats. You also might see the odd Libertarian, Working Families, Green, etc.
>In particular, fragmenting the party landscape would help defuse "negative polarization"
But there are multiple countries throughout the world with a fragmented party landscape and also high polarization, which would seem to disprove your hypothesis
A centrist minor party was key in forming the coalition government in Denmark in 2022. (Somewhat amusingly, the party took their name from a Danish TV series about a centrist party coming to power.)
There was also once a 5'3'' NBA player, but I don't think anyone's arguing that in general NBA players are tall. 95% of the time smaller parties are more ideologically intense, and most of the time larger big tent parties are (almost by definition of the word) less ideological and more relaxed.
America's original sin is in mixing party primaries with its 2 parties, which has all of the downsides of proportional representation (politicians are accountable to a small, intensely ideological base of unrepresentative voters) without any of the upside
I would disagree about the party thing--aside from the difficulty of breaking the "duopoly" is the fact that moderate parties tend to fail badly because everyone's got a different flavor of "moderate"--what works best is a personality-based campaign. The only way for an Independent to win, realistically, is to have a candidate who has his or her own constituency, maybe someone who left a major party (they'll usually say that party left them) or someone whose celebrity comes from another field of endeavor.
"everyone's got a different flavor of "moderate" " - Good point. It is inherently a subjective 'order' off the 'a la carte menu', which idiosyncratic for most people*, and even when the public is polled on issue preferences, answers are highly sensitive to question wording, and can't be pinned down or confronted on logically inconsistent answers. And attempting to set an "objective" definition of 'moderate' as the median position between Republican and Democratic legislator (or supporting ideological group rating like ADA) is itself arbitrary, and just gives us a moving target, allowing endless moving of goalposts for tactical argumentative purposes.
"Ranked choice", at least if you mean "instant runoff", actually also favors duopoly, because of the "center squeeze" problem. Promoters tell you that you can safely vote your "true favorite" and then assign put your "lesser evil" second, but that's a lie -- if your true favorite _actually becomes competitive_, you can end up in a situation where you knock out your lesser evil... but throw the race to your greater evil.
Imagine a town with 100 voters. On election day, thus far, the votes look like:
31 True Favorite > Lesser Evil > Greater Evil
16 LE > TF > GE
16 LE > GE > TF
35 GE > LE > TF
That's 98 votes. If you run the IRV tabulation now, we see that Lesser Evil has 32 votes, to True Favorite's 31. So TF is knocked out. Those votes transfer to LE, who then wins, in a landslide, against GE.
OK, but that was only 98 votes. The last two voters show up. They vote with the True Favorite camp. Now True Favorite has 33, to Lesser Evil's 32. So LE is knocked out. The LE votes split evenly... and Greater Evil wins, 51-49, over TF.
Not only is this dumb because Lesser Evil would've won a huge landslide against either of the other contenders. It's _incredibly_ dumb because the last two voters _would have been happier if they had stayed home_.
And this is something that happens with Instant Runoff races _all the damn time_. The city of Burlington, VT adopted IRV, _immediately_ had a center squeeze in their mayoral race, and repealed it. There's a ballot measure in Alaska to repeal it this year, because of Mary Peltola. (The anti-Trump Republican, Nick Begich, got squeezed out between Peltola and Palin.) The folks who promote IRV sometimes dismiss this issue, with the statistic that it "only" happens in perhaps one in 250 elections. Which, like... do they not realize there are tens of thousands of seats being elected every year? And it's toxically unpopular when it does. It creates a movement to go back to First Past the Post, and poisons the well for election-method reform in general.
If you want to use Ranked ballots, you should do the "ranked robin" tabulation method.
But personally I favor Approval ballots because they're cheaper to print and tabulate, and easier to explain to voters. And the proportional tabulation method (which was invented by Thomas Jefferson) can be worked out on the back of an envelope.
Have any Democratic state parties gone bananas like the Republican California state party? They don't even care about being competitive anymore. They're just expressive MAGA. Has there been a similar leftward shift in any red state?
Depends what exactly you want to count. There are definitely some left-of-the-DSA nutcases who manage to get elected to be _delegates_ to the CA Democratic Party State Central Committee, but in general when you have a state that has a Dem supermajority, you'll have at worst a handful (like two or three) of state legislators who are really out-there. Mostly you end up with conflict across an Overton Window spanning from leftier folks advocating for social-democratic welfare-state stuff that would seem perfectly normal to folks in Germany or France or Scandinavia; and a more moderate / business-friendly wing, many of whom would've been Republicans in the bygone era when Republicans weren't MAGA crazies.
I'm thinking more the Democratic Party in a state like Mississippi abandoning all pretense of trying to win elections, and becoming a Bernie-aligned troll farm. Does that happen?
No. There's a funny meme I saw on twitter illustrating how red state Dems turn into milquetoast lite-Republicans while blue state Republicans turn into conspiracy brained Nazis
Huh. I haven't _heard_ of any cases of that -- Dems who are in the minority in red states seem to have mostly continued trying to do the work to build back towards being viable. (See: Andy Beshear, or John Bel Edwards.)
California does not use ranked choice in state-wide elections. We currently have a two-winner jungle primary, and then standard first-past-the-post in the general.
There are several _cities_ that use Instant Runoff (including San Francisco and Berkeley). Also the city of Albany, CA uses Single Transferable Vote for Proportional Representation, for both its Council and School Board.
Alaska uses a _four_ winner jungle primary, followed by an Instant Runoff general. This does seem to work significantly better than CA's system _except_ that IRV has now produced a highly-visible center squeeze (Nick Begich failing to win even though he obviously would've had majority support over Mary Peltola in a head-to-head race), and that's led to a movement to repeal the whole reform, which is polling too close to know whether it's going to pass.
"Ranked Robin" is at least significantly less-bad, but ranked ballots are pretty terrible just on the measure of being hard for the average voter to fill out. The most comprehensive study to-date on actual ballots in US ranked elections found that something like 5% of all ballots had some kind of mis-mark. Granted _some_ of those are things that most systems will correct for. (Like having no top-rank, only filling out ranks 2, 3, 4. Most systems will "slide up" the ranks.) And there are ways you _could_ correct for some other categories (like marking two candidates first -- you could just count that as a half a vote for each, and then a whole vote for one of them if the other gets eliminated). But in practice AFAIK everybody using RCV/IRV tosses a ballot that makes the "two 1st choices" mistake, and that's one of the more-common problems. And then there are other weirder things like indicating two different ranks for the same candidate that simply make no sense within the context of the system.
You could also get around this by going to something like touchscreen electronic machines that enforce casting a valid ballot, but keeping those machines in good condition, and replacing them as they wear out, would be _at least_ an order of magnitude more expensive, maybe two, compared to the kind of systems that can deal with casting Approval ballots.
Yes! My friends are all smart people, and I still have to explain to most of them how to fill out RCV sections of their ballot every time we vote. Even to me, it looks weird. And it makes the ballots huge. And of course, I don't want to fill out a touch screen. I want to vote at home with my friends so we can discuss our ballots together, and then mail them in at our convenience.
I have a huge pet peeve that of all systems besides FPTP, we've chosen the worst possible alternative.
RIGHT?! I wish I could go back in time and take some papers about electoral system to the Founding Fathers… Condorcet didn’t write his book until a decade later. If he’d written it before the Constitutional Convention, he’s totally the sort of author they would’ve read.
1. Every state has a sizeable number of bog standard Democrats that want bog standard Democratic policy. There will be a bit of a collective action problem to get all of them to vote for a less than preferred candidate instead of just staying home/leaving that race blank/voting for some other fringe candidate more ideologically aligned.
2. Ranked choice voting, of course, could help mute the spoiler factor here, something that's rising in several states now, and could make this strategy more viable.
3. Republicans still are liable to nominate clowns for races, and if they do, they can be exploited by actual Democrats.
4. The independent might not end up being favorable to hardly any Democratic policies once in power. Bernie Sanders and Angus King are nominally independents but are understood to support Democrats almost all the time, and turnabout could definitely happen.
5. Maybe this is finally the time it happens, but Democratic supporters have been too fatalistic on the Senatefor many years, when in this century they've lost the House more often.
6. This is even a greater collective action problem, but at some point Democratic supporters need to be comfortable living in a different state, particularly if they're trying to make it in a state with tight housing policy. Almost every state has a top 100 metro---I think Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas are the exception. Nebraska of course has Omaha.
Re: 1, I'm surprised that Nebraska Dems were able to prevent a Democrat from entering the race. If you look at Sanders' record he actually runs in & wins the Democratic primary every election in Vermont, then chooses to just not run as a Democrat. Seeing as Osborn obviously didn't do that, I'm surprised no idealistic leftist ran as well.
American parties are so weak I'd be mildly surprised if they were able to actually prevent a candidate from running under the label 'Democrat'
Could you explain number 6? Are you suggesting Dems need to move en masse from Blue strongholds to places like Omaha? I don't feel like that's a realistic path to winning back the senate, personally, or maybe I misunderstood.
On all of these other ones, it just boils down to "does an Independent with the right mix of policies have a better chance of winning than a D does". On #3, super-clowns that can lose to Dems in Alabama don't come around that often, and there's no chance of winning the Senate by waiting for enough of them to appear within a cycle or two.
But a half dozen weak GOP could appear in otherwise un-winnable Red states, and a successful Independent strategy could unseat more of them than the Dems would.
And sure, you don't get all the Dem policies you want, but you also block a bunch of bad GOP strategies and force them to run voters who are less extreme, or risk losing.
It seems like it's win-win-win all around, and the biggest winners of all are the median voters of each state, who are generally better than highly partisan voters on the political extremes anyway, imho.
On #6, I don't think en masse moving at a highly organized level is realistic either--it's more of a broad observation that if one really cares about advancing Democratic policy, then don't rule out living anywhere that's not dominated by Democratic policy.
And on #3, obviously extreme examples like Alabama are extreme for a reason, but places like Ohio or Georgia aren't, and it's a delicate balance to decide whether to hold or fold.
"On #6, I don't think en masse moving at a highly organized level is realistic either--it's more of a broad observation that if one really cares about advancing Democratic policy, then don't rule out living anywhere that's not dominated by Democratic policy."
---- On the one hand, it is not realistic. On the other hand it is not unprecedented. If you think modern political issues rank in importance, for example, with the spread of slavery in the country, that motivated people to choose to move to new and unfamiliar frontier places for political motives. In Kansas, it motivated antislavery free-soilers, and pro-slavery people on the other side. Of course slavery was different issue than we have today of Fascism and the particular basket of the welfare state, administrative state, personal freedoms, equal protection under law. Also, homesteading and individual family, family group, or community coordination to move to the capital asset of fertile land to establish self-sufficient farming operations and then other economic spin-offs was a thing then, and is not our economic model now, with every piece of land having a title holder.
On the other hand, how realistic are the alternatives to migration to fit the requirements of the Electoral College and the representative districts as drawn?
a) Persuade people to ticket split?
b) Convert people to opposite viewpoints through discussion?
c) mind-control lasers?
d) Pick enough visible fights with Democratic constituency groups and cultural liberals that people in red states and red districts find alienating, and win back those who have voted R on that, but have some dissatisfactions with the R's on one or more things the R's habitually. And then, tell and expect all the cultural and cosmopolitan liberals, groups, self-appointed minority representatives, to show up and vote for us with more vigor than ever, without expecting any left-leaning shedding/defecting or loss of interest in politics?
e) Arrest and reverse polarization of partisan brands along the cosmopolitanism/educational attainment axis through deliberate Party messaging and policy? Dems on the policy side and on the punditry side have not exactly ignore the concept, this prescription, or neglected effort to capture the populist magic of Joe Sixpack. Sometimes more or less. But the voters and rising generations have continually for the last fifty years frustrated all these attempts to stop the realignment along cosmo - anti-cosmo and educational lines. So have the interests and inclinations of people who self-motivate into participating in politics, and the structures of our media.
I remember reading some essentially fantasy stories a few years ago about how Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer should pay a few hundred thousand coastal Dems to move to Wyoming and the Dakotas.
We need to build a city and a university there. And a police department, to defend it from the Montana relatives of Kevin Costner's fictional family in Wyoming.
It depends on how much Democratic loyal, generally college educated 'jelly' there is to spread to cover the states that make up the 'slice of toast' we call America, ---- if there is enough jelly, and how precisely we spread that coating over states where we should bother. Excessive move-outs from those states mentioned would threaten hyper majorities, and beyond a certain point, threaten actual *majorities*, but that would have to be a degree of success that no one anticipates is possible. Hardly anyone thinks that shifting that changing demographic tides by politically motivated grassroots action is realistically capable of making a statistical difference, *at all*. But losing a 'hyper majority' is no tragedy. A hyper majority in the American single member, winner take all district system is an extremely wasteful allocation of your supporters and voters. What you want is a bare majority in as many jurisdictions as possible.
I think this reflects a misunderstanding of the electoral dynamics of the Senate versus the House. The House is much more competitive, because everyone is up every two years. The political mood actually makes a difference. There are safe D and R House seats, but there are a decent number that can swing either way.
By contrast, most states have a strong partisan lean now, so the political mood doesn't matter nearly as much. And there are more safe red states than blue. That's why the Senate is biased towards Republicans in the first place.
Democrats constantly whine about the Senate. They also then give hundreds of millions of dollars to joke Senate candidates like Jamie Harrison, Amy McGrath, and Beto O'Rourke. In 2006, 2008, and 2018 the Democratic Party showed they can win many center/center-right House districts, but then expect to lose them in two years.
Well, there you're talking about small donors with unrealistic expectations, rather than the DSCC, who knows what they're doing. And Democrats aren't hurting for cash.
The House is much more affected by the national mood. That's why it's swingier.
And Democrats had held the House for forty years prior to 95. You're talking about Newt Gingrich and the conservative revolution in the 90s.
I think you're misinterpreting the dynamics of each cycle. I pay a lot of attention to House races, and those are *fiercely* contested. Last cycle Dems probably should have had the stones to trust the polling, and they would have played more aggressively on marginal seats, rather than playing defense. But that wasn't for lack of caring.
Thanks for the deep dive on Osborn - I've been puzzling over it for weeks. I'm glad someone has taken the time to give it a bit more color.
Also, Ben, just gotta say: your Saturday pieces have been excellent! I've really enjoyed them, and as a rule they've been super high quality - sometimes I forget that it's a weekend and assume it's a Matt piece. Keep up the great work!
I'd be super excited for a third party -- regional, state, or national -- that said, "Our commitment is that we will absolutely not have a Presidential candidate until and unless we have at least 10 Senators in our party. In the mean time, we will pursue state legislature, House of Representatives, and maybe Senate seats."
If Gary Peters can't handle the pressure of being DSCC chair, then he shouldn't be the chair.
Also, for everyone who pines for more proportional elections and representation in America, the Osborn campaign provides glimpses of that reality. To form majority governing coalitions when there is no majority party means allying with people you don't like and who have policy views you don't like. Ask the German Green Party if they like being in coalition with FDP. But they wouldn't have a governing coalition without the FDP.
I mean I'd argue that American 'parties' are so broad tent that this is effectively the case already. Without adding in any independents Joe Manchin & Elizabeth Warren are in a weird sort of coalition today, for example. In the House the definition of a 'Democrat' includes both Cori Bush and Jared Golden, AOC and Henry Cuellar, etc. We already have a coalition government
Proportional representation would only make those coalitions more explicit. It would not provide some magic key that unlocks the ability for factions to get everything they want.
Isn't the point that Ben is making that it's better to get some of what you wanted then none of what you wanted. Being able to negotiate with some independents AND Republicans/Democrats would be better than just negotiating with Republicans/Democrats.
That being said, I think for this to work would require some structural changes in these states that will run contrary to what the dominant party will want - which means it will happen rarely if ever.
If the strategy ever succeeds, it seems likely that the GOP will ensure that there is always a Republican fake independent on the ballot to steal some of those votes. Wouldn’t a better strategy be to nurture a “Plains Independent Party” and a “Southern Independent Party” which could vote for a Dem Majority leader but maintain separation on issues toxic to voters in those areas?
Presumably this relies on people actually paying attention to the candidates' positions, since it's trying to attract people who aren't partisan Republicans. And any fake Independent who ran would have to leave the R party for that run, thereby hurting their political futures. It seems like a lot to ask of a sacrificial lamb.
Yeah, and if it's repeatably stealing enough votes, it quite clearly becomes the path for a serious political movement. Or if they do the fake-out and caucus with their "real" party, it discredits the attempt from that side.
Sure, although any such explanation should account for the fact that the Republican party brand became even less competitive in blue states at the same time (the malapportionment of the senate just means that senate votes matching presidential votes is extremely bad for dems).
It really is a branding problem. Every Democrat in those states tries to run on this dude's platform. It almost never works.
Like the Republican brand is tarnished in California. The majority of the state simply won't vote for a Republican, even in the rare cases where the Republican isn't a nut job. Anyone who can possibly run as a Democrat, will.
It's almost all polarization and the decline of ticket splitting. I'm not sure there's much Democrats could have done to maintain competitiveness in these places.
I think we can to countries where the Left has been doing well, like Denmark, and see that in exchange for moderating on immigration, they've been able to remain in power.
It might take moderating on a few issues to do that well in a place like Kansa, but if Machine can do it in West Virginia, it shows it's possible.
Running with Manchin’s issue positions as a new WV candidate in 2024 would result in you getting crushed. I don’t think “just be competitive in places that are 30 points more conservative than the national average” is the strategy used by leftists in Denmark either!
The decline in ticket splitting isn't just happenstance though, why would you split your ticket when all the candidates from Party A on your ballot have the same views, ditto all the candidates from Party B? On what issues did Cal Cunningham or Theresa Greenfield separate themselves from Biden on? It's crazy to run as a party line liberal democrat and expect to get a bunch of ticket splitters in conservative states. We know what candidates need to do to get people to split their tickets, see Manchin/Collins, Jon Bel Edwards and Phil Scott, tons of state legislative dems etc.
Great piece. Backing down in red states to make room for independent candidates is the only way for Dems to realistically contest these states.
And I think your analysis points to an even more sweeping conclusion than this. Given the geography of the Dem coalition and our association with the unpopular cultural vibes of the hated college-educated elite, we've bascially ceased to be a nationally viable party. This is currently most obvious in the Senate, but applies to some extent already in the Electoral College and the House. In light of Trump-era realignments, all you have to do is say "we're Republicans, we love guns and hate immigrants" and you automatically win the Senate and get a substantial leg up in the EC and House. The R bias of all three will probably get worse over time.
Having to run against the national party brand - as frontline Senate and House Dems/Independents increasingly need to do - means the national party brand sucks and needs to be drastically overhauled to be more appealing in these frontline states/districts. We need to get to a place where the *median* Dem (and not just the marginal Dem) is like Jared Golden and MGP. I'm talking about sincerely moderate views combined with aggressively posturing against the hated cultural elite. That's the only way we will be able to save our welfare state, women's rights, etc. - otherwise it will all be swept away.
Largely agreed, and if the trend of Blacks and Hispanics shifting to the GOP continues this becomes even more obvious. It also doesn't help Dems that migrants fleeing socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela are becoming a larger source of immigrants.
But as far as welfare and women's rights go, those are popular enough that the GOP can't move against them without engendering meaningful backlash. Even with the electoral winds at their sails, sweeping those away would be a majorly uphill battle.
That's historically been true. The 2006 and 2018 waves are good examples of what happens when the GOP takes a serious run at rolling back popular social programs.
That said, Trump and the conservative movement have been pretty explicit about how they intend to solve this problem - namely, authoritarian power consolidation. The political economy of Francoism makes a lot of sense for the GOP's hard-right policy goals, because a charismatic leader who suppresses electoral competition can keep social spending levels and personal freedoms below what they would be in a competitive democracy.
And supposing Trump acts quickly to crush the opposition and consolidate power - as he has promised! - I think that our terrible national brand as Dems helps give him an opening that he wouldn’t have if our party were broadly respected and competitive. The median voter in the median Senate seat/EC state/House district will be somewhere between indifferent and happy as Trump ships Adam Schiff off to prison and sics the military on blue-haired protesters in cities. The fact that college-educated liberals would be upset at all this only *increases* its political appeal among Trump's supporters. Viktor Orban had a similar opening against his scandal-plagued, electorally defeated opponents after 2010 and quickly obliterated them as a competitive force, and I think Dems have made ourselves vulnerable to a similar fate.
Here in Wyoming the Democrats have less than 10% of the legislature. The Republican Party, meanwhile is split roughly 50-50 between a hardline Freedom Caucus and more traditional Western Republicans. Is there a coming realignment where the Republican Party splits? Should Democrats in deep red states just disband and form a new party with center-right Republicans?
Maybe a background point here is that as society gets more polarized and politics gets more nationalized, the state parties get out of whack with state electorates. E.g., the California Republican Party really makes no attempt to compete by shifting left on social issues.
So a party which can figure out how to finesse this and actually run more appropriate candidates for each state has a big advantage.
These Independent runs could also give us some data on what strategy actually works in these states. This dude's strategy is the same strategy every Democrat in a red district tries. But it usually fails. If Independents can run on it, we'll know if it's a good strategy and it's just that the Democratic brand is toxic in those areas.
The senate map does indeed look bad for democrats but dismissing Maine is ridiculous (and presumably driven in part by a misunderstanding of IRV results, the number of points Susan Collins was away from losing is a good bit less than the gap in first preferences). She's probably the most likely republican senator to lose in that cycle and certainly much more likely than Joni Earst.
"But I think Gideon’s shockingly bad loss really hurt the Dem statewide brand."
I don't really think things like this matter much. Most ordinary voters probably don't even remember who Collins' opponent was that year or how much Collins won by.
Maine D2 was never concerned with the Democrat brand because it's so red, which might change as more liberal people move up there from out of state.
Maine D1 is very Blue, but the situation on the ground regarding local social issues like homeless encampments and taxes are, I think, starting to hurt them. Portlands mayor just got in a big fight with the council about needle exchanges, meanwhile my lawyer neighbor is moving his office out of the city because (apparently) the city is taxing items like furniture and equipment inside the business? I haven't read about it, but he got a letter from the city and he's pretty heated about it.
I think local Dems got over their skis with progressive policy mania during COVID and that's going to hurt the State party. I don't think any normal person cares about Gideon losing because Collins is simply a fixture in politics and it's obvious that she would stick around.
Yes, this is the changing nature of the State above Lewiston. It certainly looks like it will move more blue, but that can change. If Golden had a different biography, that might be different as well.
Collins could be susceptible to a normal democrat, because she's a republican running in a blue state. If she'd run ~4 points worse she would've lost (under reasonable assumptions about how second preferences would go), and if you were in the habit of betting on senators who kept their heads 4 points above water to keep on beating their state's partisanship, you would've lost a lot of money in recent years.
I think Susan Collins's chances in 2026 have a lot to do with who wins the presidency this year. If Harris wins, 2026 becomes a midterm with a Democratic incumbent and Collins is probably safe. But, if Trump wins, then the 2026 midterm is going to be 2018-style resistance to Trump all over again, and I can see Collins being in for a very tough race.
Dan Osborn is definitely selling himself as an economic “populist”, I read in Michelle Goldberg’s article yesterday that he learnt about extent of “corporate greed” from Matt Stroller’s book. He’s deemphasizing culture but other than reducing spending on military, what other reduction in spending does he support?
Basically there's a law from the 1830s that says you can't build a new building if it would obstruct someone's view they had for 20 years. This leads to bizarre outcomes like so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8fOJdmSbdU
I think we desperately need some center parties for this reason, ideally “state parties” that can challenge the fully polarized states. Just as the democrats have become non-viable in the heartland, a state party needs to replace the republicans in California so that the democrats there have to actually compete.
Meanwhile it’s sad that it’s come to this. Playing an entire generation of nasty polarization as the strategy to win has left us in this locked-in non-competitive situation, and because our system over represents rural areas, this works strongly against the democrats.
I 100% agree that small centrist parties would help -- the problem is that it's very hard to crack the duopoly in an environment where both parties are competitive. The only reason the Dems in Nebraska stood down is that they understood it's really become a one-party state. Similarly an independent could run in California against the Dems. (e.g. If Steve Poizner, an ex-Republican who served quite admirably as Insurance Commissioner, had wanted to run for state office again as an independent, he could probably would've been competitive.)
If we want to foster the growth of parties that hold unorthodox positions relative to the main left-right spectrum, we need to change to a proportional election system, so that a party can get a toehold in the legislature with a smaller share of the vote.
If this is something you care about, support the Center for Election Science!
https://electionscience.org/
I get that "PR solves polarization" is supposed to work in theory, but when I look at Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and (probably soon) Germany, I can't help but feel that theory and practice are pretty far apart in this case.
I would consider proportional representation over multi member districts. For example, instead of having 360 single member districts, you have 60 6-member districts or 30 12-member districts. Then, within each district, you have proportional representation, with the condition that voters can declare a back up party or two if their first choice doesn’t qualify for a seat.
There are proportional tabulation methods using Ranked, Rated, or Approval ballots. Personally I favor Approval ballots with Jefferson tabulation, because Approval ballots are cheaper to implement and easier to explain to the voters. (They strongly resemble existing ballots where you can "vote for up to 3" or whatever.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_proportional_approval_voting
Smaller parties are rarely if ever 'centrist', whatever that means. Smaller parties are virtually always more ideological in one way or another, with a smaller base of more committed, intense voters. The way to have centrist parties is to have bigger ones, which by definition means less of them
If the objective is to bring about 'centrism' or to depolarize, then going the opposite direction from more, smaller parties could be the way to go. If our polarization is driven by overenthusiastic participation in politics by those who care about ideology and parties, weirdly *care too much*, a solution may be in diluting the relevance of people who self-select for participation.
I've thought of a way to make the duopoly better, by learning to love it, embrace it, and proudly make it blander. Make the primaries for both Parties not only *open* simultaneously to all eligible voters, regardless of their particular Party registration or ID or lack of it, but make voting in the primaries for both *mandatory*, along with mandatory voting in the general election.
Parties won't be able to choose or predict their voters, and need to make more general, rather than narrow appeals.
In particular, fragmenting the party landscape would help defuse "negative polarization". Right now, people are motivated to vote for the Republican, specifically because they hate the Democrat and are afraid if they don't vote for the Republican the Democrat might win. And vice versa.
But as Dan Osborn is currently demonstrating, there are a lot of registered Republicans who really aren't all that attached to the label.
Not everyone has the charisma to run that kind of one-man show, though. Having a variety of parties like Andrew Yang's Forward would be useful. If you elected a state legislature using multi-member districts, six or ten people per district, parties like that could pick up a few seats. You also might see the odd Libertarian, Working Families, Green, etc.
>In particular, fragmenting the party landscape would help defuse "negative polarization"
But there are multiple countries throughout the world with a fragmented party landscape and also high polarization, which would seem to disprove your hypothesis
A centrist minor party was key in forming the coalition government in Denmark in 2022. (Somewhat amusingly, the party took their name from a Danish TV series about a centrist party coming to power.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderates_(Denmark)
There was also once a 5'3'' NBA player, but I don't think anyone's arguing that in general NBA players are tall. 95% of the time smaller parties are more ideologically intense, and most of the time larger big tent parties are (almost by definition of the word) less ideological and more relaxed.
America's original sin is in mixing party primaries with its 2 parties, which has all of the downsides of proportional representation (politicians are accountable to a small, intensely ideological base of unrepresentative voters) without any of the upside
I thought they took the name from the large Swedish center-right party
Nope, the founding party leader says he was inspired by Birgitte Nyborg’s party in Borgen.
I would disagree about the party thing--aside from the difficulty of breaking the "duopoly" is the fact that moderate parties tend to fail badly because everyone's got a different flavor of "moderate"--what works best is a personality-based campaign. The only way for an Independent to win, realistically, is to have a candidate who has his or her own constituency, maybe someone who left a major party (they'll usually say that party left them) or someone whose celebrity comes from another field of endeavor.
"everyone's got a different flavor of "moderate" " - Good point. It is inherently a subjective 'order' off the 'a la carte menu', which idiosyncratic for most people*, and even when the public is polled on issue preferences, answers are highly sensitive to question wording, and can't be pinned down or confronted on logically inconsistent answers. And attempting to set an "objective" definition of 'moderate' as the median position between Republican and Democratic legislator (or supporting ideological group rating like ADA) is itself arbitrary, and just gives us a moving target, allowing endless moving of goalposts for tactical argumentative purposes.
Just simply switching to rank choice, voting will also solve the problem.It will make certain party candidates viable
"Ranked choice", at least if you mean "instant runoff", actually also favors duopoly, because of the "center squeeze" problem. Promoters tell you that you can safely vote your "true favorite" and then assign put your "lesser evil" second, but that's a lie -- if your true favorite _actually becomes competitive_, you can end up in a situation where you knock out your lesser evil... but throw the race to your greater evil.
Imagine a town with 100 voters. On election day, thus far, the votes look like:
31 True Favorite > Lesser Evil > Greater Evil
16 LE > TF > GE
16 LE > GE > TF
35 GE > LE > TF
That's 98 votes. If you run the IRV tabulation now, we see that Lesser Evil has 32 votes, to True Favorite's 31. So TF is knocked out. Those votes transfer to LE, who then wins, in a landslide, against GE.
OK, but that was only 98 votes. The last two voters show up. They vote with the True Favorite camp. Now True Favorite has 33, to Lesser Evil's 32. So LE is knocked out. The LE votes split evenly... and Greater Evil wins, 51-49, over TF.
Not only is this dumb because Lesser Evil would've won a huge landslide against either of the other contenders. It's _incredibly_ dumb because the last two voters _would have been happier if they had stayed home_.
And this is something that happens with Instant Runoff races _all the damn time_. The city of Burlington, VT adopted IRV, _immediately_ had a center squeeze in their mayoral race, and repealed it. There's a ballot measure in Alaska to repeal it this year, because of Mary Peltola. (The anti-Trump Republican, Nick Begich, got squeezed out between Peltola and Palin.) The folks who promote IRV sometimes dismiss this issue, with the statistic that it "only" happens in perhaps one in 250 elections. Which, like... do they not realize there are tens of thousands of seats being elected every year? And it's toxically unpopular when it does. It creates a movement to go back to First Past the Post, and poisons the well for election-method reform in general.
If you want to use Ranked ballots, you should do the "ranked robin" tabulation method.
https://www.equal.vote/ranked_robin
But personally I favor Approval ballots because they're cheaper to print and tabulate, and easier to explain to voters. And the proportional tabulation method (which was invented by Thomas Jefferson) can be worked out on the back of an envelope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_proportional_approval_voting
Dems do complete in CA, thanks to ranked choice voting. We should be trying to roll this out everywhere.
Have any Democratic state parties gone bananas like the Republican California state party? They don't even care about being competitive anymore. They're just expressive MAGA. Has there been a similar leftward shift in any red state?
Depends what exactly you want to count. There are definitely some left-of-the-DSA nutcases who manage to get elected to be _delegates_ to the CA Democratic Party State Central Committee, but in general when you have a state that has a Dem supermajority, you'll have at worst a handful (like two or three) of state legislators who are really out-there. Mostly you end up with conflict across an Overton Window spanning from leftier folks advocating for social-democratic welfare-state stuff that would seem perfectly normal to folks in Germany or France or Scandinavia; and a more moderate / business-friendly wing, many of whom would've been Republicans in the bygone era when Republicans weren't MAGA crazies.
I'm thinking more the Democratic Party in a state like Mississippi abandoning all pretense of trying to win elections, and becoming a Bernie-aligned troll farm. Does that happen?
No. There's a funny meme I saw on twitter illustrating how red state Dems turn into milquetoast lite-Republicans while blue state Republicans turn into conspiracy brained Nazis
Huh. I haven't _heard_ of any cases of that -- Dems who are in the minority in red states seem to have mostly continued trying to do the work to build back towards being viable. (See: Andy Beshear, or John Bel Edwards.)
California does not use ranked choice in state-wide elections. We currently have a two-winner jungle primary, and then standard first-past-the-post in the general.
There are several _cities_ that use Instant Runoff (including San Francisco and Berkeley). Also the city of Albany, CA uses Single Transferable Vote for Proportional Representation, for both its Council and School Board.
Alaska uses a _four_ winner jungle primary, followed by an Instant Runoff general. This does seem to work significantly better than CA's system _except_ that IRV has now produced a highly-visible center squeeze (Nick Begich failing to win even though he obviously would've had majority support over Mary Peltola in a head-to-head race), and that's led to a movement to repeal the whole reform, which is polling too close to know whether it's going to pass.
RCV is an abomination. Approval or STAR+ are the way.
"Ranked Robin" is at least significantly less-bad, but ranked ballots are pretty terrible just on the measure of being hard for the average voter to fill out. The most comprehensive study to-date on actual ballots in US ranked elections found that something like 5% of all ballots had some kind of mis-mark. Granted _some_ of those are things that most systems will correct for. (Like having no top-rank, only filling out ranks 2, 3, 4. Most systems will "slide up" the ranks.) And there are ways you _could_ correct for some other categories (like marking two candidates first -- you could just count that as a half a vote for each, and then a whole vote for one of them if the other gets eliminated). But in practice AFAIK everybody using RCV/IRV tosses a ballot that makes the "two 1st choices" mistake, and that's one of the more-common problems. And then there are other weirder things like indicating two different ranks for the same candidate that simply make no sense within the context of the system.
You could also get around this by going to something like touchscreen electronic machines that enforce casting a valid ballot, but keeping those machines in good condition, and replacing them as they wear out, would be _at least_ an order of magnitude more expensive, maybe two, compared to the kind of systems that can deal with casting Approval ballots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdPIauxbTtI&t=898s
Yes! My friends are all smart people, and I still have to explain to most of them how to fill out RCV sections of their ballot every time we vote. Even to me, it looks weird. And it makes the ballots huge. And of course, I don't want to fill out a touch screen. I want to vote at home with my friends so we can discuss our ballots together, and then mail them in at our convenience.
I have a huge pet peeve that of all systems besides FPTP, we've chosen the worst possible alternative.
RIGHT?! I wish I could go back in time and take some papers about electoral system to the Founding Fathers… Condorcet didn’t write his book until a decade later. If he’d written it before the Constitutional Convention, he’s totally the sort of author they would’ve read.
If Larry Hogan didn’t have a R next to his name, he would easily be elected Senator
Thinking about some limitations to this strategy:
1. Every state has a sizeable number of bog standard Democrats that want bog standard Democratic policy. There will be a bit of a collective action problem to get all of them to vote for a less than preferred candidate instead of just staying home/leaving that race blank/voting for some other fringe candidate more ideologically aligned.
2. Ranked choice voting, of course, could help mute the spoiler factor here, something that's rising in several states now, and could make this strategy more viable.
3. Republicans still are liable to nominate clowns for races, and if they do, they can be exploited by actual Democrats.
4. The independent might not end up being favorable to hardly any Democratic policies once in power. Bernie Sanders and Angus King are nominally independents but are understood to support Democrats almost all the time, and turnabout could definitely happen.
5. Maybe this is finally the time it happens, but Democratic supporters have been too fatalistic on the Senatefor many years, when in this century they've lost the House more often.
6. This is even a greater collective action problem, but at some point Democratic supporters need to be comfortable living in a different state, particularly if they're trying to make it in a state with tight housing policy. Almost every state has a top 100 metro---I think Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas are the exception. Nebraska of course has Omaha.
Fair points.
Re: 1, I'm surprised that Nebraska Dems were able to prevent a Democrat from entering the race. If you look at Sanders' record he actually runs in & wins the Democratic primary every election in Vermont, then chooses to just not run as a Democrat. Seeing as Osborn obviously didn't do that, I'm surprised no idealistic leftist ran as well.
American parties are so weak I'd be mildly surprised if they were able to actually prevent a candidate from running under the label 'Democrat'
Could you explain number 6? Are you suggesting Dems need to move en masse from Blue strongholds to places like Omaha? I don't feel like that's a realistic path to winning back the senate, personally, or maybe I misunderstood.
On all of these other ones, it just boils down to "does an Independent with the right mix of policies have a better chance of winning than a D does". On #3, super-clowns that can lose to Dems in Alabama don't come around that often, and there's no chance of winning the Senate by waiting for enough of them to appear within a cycle or two.
But a half dozen weak GOP could appear in otherwise un-winnable Red states, and a successful Independent strategy could unseat more of them than the Dems would.
And sure, you don't get all the Dem policies you want, but you also block a bunch of bad GOP strategies and force them to run voters who are less extreme, or risk losing.
It seems like it's win-win-win all around, and the biggest winners of all are the median voters of each state, who are generally better than highly partisan voters on the political extremes anyway, imho.
On #6, I don't think en masse moving at a highly organized level is realistic either--it's more of a broad observation that if one really cares about advancing Democratic policy, then don't rule out living anywhere that's not dominated by Democratic policy.
And on #3, obviously extreme examples like Alabama are extreme for a reason, but places like Ohio or Georgia aren't, and it's a delicate balance to decide whether to hold or fold.
"On #6, I don't think en masse moving at a highly organized level is realistic either--it's more of a broad observation that if one really cares about advancing Democratic policy, then don't rule out living anywhere that's not dominated by Democratic policy."
---- On the one hand, it is not realistic. On the other hand it is not unprecedented. If you think modern political issues rank in importance, for example, with the spread of slavery in the country, that motivated people to choose to move to new and unfamiliar frontier places for political motives. In Kansas, it motivated antislavery free-soilers, and pro-slavery people on the other side. Of course slavery was different issue than we have today of Fascism and the particular basket of the welfare state, administrative state, personal freedoms, equal protection under law. Also, homesteading and individual family, family group, or community coordination to move to the capital asset of fertile land to establish self-sufficient farming operations and then other economic spin-offs was a thing then, and is not our economic model now, with every piece of land having a title holder.
On the other hand, how realistic are the alternatives to migration to fit the requirements of the Electoral College and the representative districts as drawn?
a) Persuade people to ticket split?
b) Convert people to opposite viewpoints through discussion?
c) mind-control lasers?
d) Pick enough visible fights with Democratic constituency groups and cultural liberals that people in red states and red districts find alienating, and win back those who have voted R on that, but have some dissatisfactions with the R's on one or more things the R's habitually. And then, tell and expect all the cultural and cosmopolitan liberals, groups, self-appointed minority representatives, to show up and vote for us with more vigor than ever, without expecting any left-leaning shedding/defecting or loss of interest in politics?
e) Arrest and reverse polarization of partisan brands along the cosmopolitanism/educational attainment axis through deliberate Party messaging and policy? Dems on the policy side and on the punditry side have not exactly ignore the concept, this prescription, or neglected effort to capture the populist magic of Joe Sixpack. Sometimes more or less. But the voters and rising generations have continually for the last fifty years frustrated all these attempts to stop the realignment along cosmo - anti-cosmo and educational lines. So have the interests and inclinations of people who self-motivate into participating in politics, and the structures of our media.
If coastal Democrats moved en masse to interior states, the hypermajorities they have in CA, NY, and MA would disappear.
From a Dem strategist perspective, that's a very worthwhile trade.
I don't think it ever realistically happens, though
I remember reading some essentially fantasy stories a few years ago about how Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer should pay a few hundred thousand coastal Dems to move to Wyoming and the Dakotas.
I'd be willing to live in Jackson Hole for a year or two.
Ask Bloomberg for a loan.
I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but the Dems should definitely start with Montana (smallest gap in absolute numbers).
https://www.slowboring.com/p/friday-thread-2fa/comment/64250644
We need to build a city and a university there. And a police department, to defend it from the Montana relatives of Kevin Costner's fictional family in Wyoming.
It depends on how much Democratic loyal, generally college educated 'jelly' there is to spread to cover the states that make up the 'slice of toast' we call America, ---- if there is enough jelly, and how precisely we spread that coating over states where we should bother. Excessive move-outs from those states mentioned would threaten hyper majorities, and beyond a certain point, threaten actual *majorities*, but that would have to be a degree of success that no one anticipates is possible. Hardly anyone thinks that shifting that changing demographic tides by politically motivated grassroots action is realistically capable of making a statistical difference, *at all*. But losing a 'hyper majority' is no tragedy. A hyper majority in the American single member, winner take all district system is an extremely wasteful allocation of your supporters and voters. What you want is a bare majority in as many jurisdictions as possible.
I think this reflects a misunderstanding of the electoral dynamics of the Senate versus the House. The House is much more competitive, because everyone is up every two years. The political mood actually makes a difference. There are safe D and R House seats, but there are a decent number that can swing either way.
By contrast, most states have a strong partisan lean now, so the political mood doesn't matter nearly as much. And there are more safe red states than blue. That's why the Senate is biased towards Republicans in the first place.
"Almost every state has a top 100 metro---I think Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas are the exception."
Idaho has a top 100 metro that outranks Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas?
Boise is 74th and rising fast!
Yeah, Democrats can't win the House, but for reasons I don't understand they don't really care.
?????
Democrats constantly whine about the Senate. They also then give hundreds of millions of dollars to joke Senate candidates like Jamie Harrison, Amy McGrath, and Beto O'Rourke. In 2006, 2008, and 2018 the Democratic Party showed they can win many center/center-right House districts, but then expect to lose them in two years.
Well, there you're talking about small donors with unrealistic expectations, rather than the DSCC, who knows what they're doing. And Democrats aren't hurting for cash.
The House is much more affected by the national mood. That's why it's swingier.
It isn't for Republicans. They held the House for 12 straight years (95-07) and 8 straight years (11-19).
And Democrats had held the House for forty years prior to 95. You're talking about Newt Gingrich and the conservative revolution in the 90s.
I think you're misinterpreting the dynamics of each cycle. I pay a lot of attention to House races, and those are *fiercely* contested. Last cycle Dems probably should have had the stones to trust the polling, and they would have played more aggressively on marginal seats, rather than playing defense. But that wasn't for lack of caring.
Thanks for the deep dive on Osborn - I've been puzzling over it for weeks. I'm glad someone has taken the time to give it a bit more color.
Also, Ben, just gotta say: your Saturday pieces have been excellent! I've really enjoyed them, and as a rule they've been super high quality - sometimes I forget that it's a weekend and assume it's a Matt piece. Keep up the great work!
Appreciate it!
I'd be super excited for a third party -- regional, state, or national -- that said, "Our commitment is that we will absolutely not have a Presidential candidate until and unless we have at least 10 Senators in our party. In the mean time, we will pursue state legislature, House of Representatives, and maybe Senate seats."
Why do that when you can stroke your ego with useless presidential runs instead?
If Gary Peters can't handle the pressure of being DSCC chair, then he shouldn't be the chair.
Also, for everyone who pines for more proportional elections and representation in America, the Osborn campaign provides glimpses of that reality. To form majority governing coalitions when there is no majority party means allying with people you don't like and who have policy views you don't like. Ask the German Green Party if they like being in coalition with FDP. But they wouldn't have a governing coalition without the FDP.
I mean I'd argue that American 'parties' are so broad tent that this is effectively the case already. Without adding in any independents Joe Manchin & Elizabeth Warren are in a weird sort of coalition today, for example. In the House the definition of a 'Democrat' includes both Cori Bush and Jared Golden, AOC and Henry Cuellar, etc. We already have a coalition government
Proportional representation would only make those coalitions more explicit. It would not provide some magic key that unlocks the ability for factions to get everything they want.
Absolutely.
The Democratic Party is that broad tent.
Is the Republican Party?
Isn't it more operationally exclusive and obedient?
Yeah a good deal is often one where nobody gets everything they want.
A good deal is where you get some things you want, and your negotiation partners get some things they want, even if you would rather them not.
Right.
It's a joke. He was talking about his motorcycle.
Isn't the point that Ben is making that it's better to get some of what you wanted then none of what you wanted. Being able to negotiate with some independents AND Republicans/Democrats would be better than just negotiating with Republicans/Democrats.
That being said, I think for this to work would require some structural changes in these states that will run contrary to what the dominant party will want - which means it will happen rarely if ever.
If the strategy ever succeeds, it seems likely that the GOP will ensure that there is always a Republican fake independent on the ballot to steal some of those votes. Wouldn’t a better strategy be to nurture a “Plains Independent Party” and a “Southern Independent Party” which could vote for a Dem Majority leader but maintain separation on issues toxic to voters in those areas?
Presumably this relies on people actually paying attention to the candidates' positions, since it's trying to attract people who aren't partisan Republicans. And any fake Independent who ran would have to leave the R party for that run, thereby hurting their political futures. It seems like a lot to ask of a sacrificial lamb.
Yeah, and if it's repeatably stealing enough votes, it quite clearly becomes the path for a serious political movement. Or if they do the fake-out and caucus with their "real" party, it discredits the attempt from that side.
>> but the reality is that no matter who is in the White House, there likely won’t be enough votes for action on any of these issues anytime soon
Biden got a LOT of shit done in recent years.
2021-2023, mostly
Great column, thank you for amplifying.
A related question with doubtless many answers is how the Democratic party brand became so uncompetitive in deep red states.
Sure, although any such explanation should account for the fact that the Republican party brand became even less competitive in blue states at the same time (the malapportionment of the senate just means that senate votes matching presidential votes is extremely bad for dems).
Yes. And a similar strategy (centrist independent) may be available for Republican party in blue states.
It really is a branding problem. Every Democrat in those states tries to run on this dude's platform. It almost never works.
Like the Republican brand is tarnished in California. The majority of the state simply won't vote for a Republican, even in the rare cases where the Republican isn't a nut job. Anyone who can possibly run as a Democrat, will.
It's almost all polarization and the decline of ticket splitting. I'm not sure there's much Democrats could have done to maintain competitiveness in these places.
They could have addressed issues that center conservatives cared about, and moderated on social issue messaging.
Impossible, I know, but I'm a starry-eyed idealist at heart.
I think we can to countries where the Left has been doing well, like Denmark, and see that in exchange for moderating on immigration, they've been able to remain in power.
It might take moderating on a few issues to do that well in a place like Kansa, but if Machine can do it in West Virginia, it shows it's possible.
Running with Manchin’s issue positions as a new WV candidate in 2024 would result in you getting crushed. I don’t think “just be competitive in places that are 30 points more conservative than the national average” is the strategy used by leftists in Denmark either!
The decline in ticket splitting isn't just happenstance though, why would you split your ticket when all the candidates from Party A on your ballot have the same views, ditto all the candidates from Party B? On what issues did Cal Cunningham or Theresa Greenfield separate themselves from Biden on? It's crazy to run as a party line liberal democrat and expect to get a bunch of ticket splitters in conservative states. We know what candidates need to do to get people to split their tickets, see Manchin/Collins, Jon Bel Edwards and Phil Scott, tons of state legislative dems etc.
Great piece. Backing down in red states to make room for independent candidates is the only way for Dems to realistically contest these states.
And I think your analysis points to an even more sweeping conclusion than this. Given the geography of the Dem coalition and our association with the unpopular cultural vibes of the hated college-educated elite, we've bascially ceased to be a nationally viable party. This is currently most obvious in the Senate, but applies to some extent already in the Electoral College and the House. In light of Trump-era realignments, all you have to do is say "we're Republicans, we love guns and hate immigrants" and you automatically win the Senate and get a substantial leg up in the EC and House. The R bias of all three will probably get worse over time.
Having to run against the national party brand - as frontline Senate and House Dems/Independents increasingly need to do - means the national party brand sucks and needs to be drastically overhauled to be more appealing in these frontline states/districts. We need to get to a place where the *median* Dem (and not just the marginal Dem) is like Jared Golden and MGP. I'm talking about sincerely moderate views combined with aggressively posturing against the hated cultural elite. That's the only way we will be able to save our welfare state, women's rights, etc. - otherwise it will all be swept away.
Largely agreed, and if the trend of Blacks and Hispanics shifting to the GOP continues this becomes even more obvious. It also doesn't help Dems that migrants fleeing socialist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela are becoming a larger source of immigrants.
But as far as welfare and women's rights go, those are popular enough that the GOP can't move against them without engendering meaningful backlash. Even with the electoral winds at their sails, sweeping those away would be a majorly uphill battle.
That's historically been true. The 2006 and 2018 waves are good examples of what happens when the GOP takes a serious run at rolling back popular social programs.
That said, Trump and the conservative movement have been pretty explicit about how they intend to solve this problem - namely, authoritarian power consolidation. The political economy of Francoism makes a lot of sense for the GOP's hard-right policy goals, because a charismatic leader who suppresses electoral competition can keep social spending levels and personal freedoms below what they would be in a competitive democracy.
And supposing Trump acts quickly to crush the opposition and consolidate power - as he has promised! - I think that our terrible national brand as Dems helps give him an opening that he wouldn’t have if our party were broadly respected and competitive. The median voter in the median Senate seat/EC state/House district will be somewhere between indifferent and happy as Trump ships Adam Schiff off to prison and sics the military on blue-haired protesters in cities. The fact that college-educated liberals would be upset at all this only *increases* its political appeal among Trump's supporters. Viktor Orban had a similar opening against his scandal-plagued, electorally defeated opponents after 2010 and quickly obliterated them as a competitive force, and I think Dems have made ourselves vulnerable to a similar fate.
Here in Wyoming the Democrats have less than 10% of the legislature. The Republican Party, meanwhile is split roughly 50-50 between a hardline Freedom Caucus and more traditional Western Republicans. Is there a coming realignment where the Republican Party splits? Should Democrats in deep red states just disband and form a new party with center-right Republicans?
The state senate Democrats can hold their caucus over a bar two-top!
Maybe a background point here is that as society gets more polarized and politics gets more nationalized, the state parties get out of whack with state electorates. E.g., the California Republican Party really makes no attempt to compete by shifting left on social issues.
So a party which can figure out how to finesse this and actually run more appropriate candidates for each state has a big advantage.
These Independent runs could also give us some data on what strategy actually works in these states. This dude's strategy is the same strategy every Democrat in a red district tries. But it usually fails. If Independents can run on it, we'll know if it's a good strategy and it's just that the Democratic brand is toxic in those areas.
The senate map does indeed look bad for democrats but dismissing Maine is ridiculous (and presumably driven in part by a misunderstanding of IRV results, the number of points Susan Collins was away from losing is a good bit less than the gap in first preferences). She's probably the most likely republican senator to lose in that cycle and certainly much more likely than Joni Earst.
I think Collins could be susceptible to a Osborn type candidate. But I think Gideon’s shockingly bad loss really hurt the Dem statewide brand.
I also worked as an organizer for her campaign!
"But I think Gideon’s shockingly bad loss really hurt the Dem statewide brand."
I don't really think things like this matter much. Most ordinary voters probably don't even remember who Collins' opponent was that year or how much Collins won by.
Maine D2 was never concerned with the Democrat brand because it's so red, which might change as more liberal people move up there from out of state.
Maine D1 is very Blue, but the situation on the ground regarding local social issues like homeless encampments and taxes are, I think, starting to hurt them. Portlands mayor just got in a big fight with the council about needle exchanges, meanwhile my lawyer neighbor is moving his office out of the city because (apparently) the city is taxing items like furniture and equipment inside the business? I haven't read about it, but he got a letter from the city and he's pretty heated about it.
I think local Dems got over their skis with progressive policy mania during COVID and that's going to hurt the State party. I don't think any normal person cares about Gideon losing because Collins is simply a fixture in politics and it's obvious that she would stick around.
>Maine D2 was never concerned with the Democrat brand because it's so red
Obama won it twice!
And a bunch of Democrats before that IIRC, but then it swung heavy to Trump.
A Democrat represents it in Congress.
Yes, this is the changing nature of the State above Lewiston. It certainly looks like it will move more blue, but that can change. If Golden had a different biography, that might be different as well.
Collins could be susceptible to a normal democrat, because she's a republican running in a blue state. If she'd run ~4 points worse she would've lost (under reasonable assumptions about how second preferences would go), and if you were in the habit of betting on senators who kept their heads 4 points above water to keep on beating their state's partisanship, you would've lost a lot of money in recent years.
Sara Gideon had enough campaign cash to give every Mainer a substantial bribe to vote for her, and Collins still got a majority of the vote.
Good chance she just retires!
I think Susan Collins's chances in 2026 have a lot to do with who wins the presidency this year. If Harris wins, 2026 becomes a midterm with a Democratic incumbent and Collins is probably safe. But, if Trump wins, then the 2026 midterm is going to be 2018-style resistance to Trump all over again, and I can see Collins being in for a very tough race.
Dan Osborn is definitely selling himself as an economic “populist”, I read in Michelle Goldberg’s article yesterday that he learnt about extent of “corporate greed” from Matt Stroller’s book. He’s deemphasizing culture but other than reducing spending on military, what other reduction in spending does he support?
Today in Great Examples of NIMBY Insanity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_kuZlKTOhs&lc=UgwXvTfO7XHtQipSG914AaABAg
Basically there's a law from the 1830s that says you can't build a new building if it would obstruct someone's view they had for 20 years. This leads to bizarre outcomes like so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8fOJdmSbdU
NIMBY Island indeed.
Gotta love the quaint British name for it though