interviews
After the Polls Close
by John Fortier
October 19, 2020
This interview with John Fortier, Director of Bipartisan Policy Center’s Democracy Project, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Why do we have an Electoral College?
Our election system is really much more of a states’ issue than people realize. We vote differently in different states, and the Electoral College really is the mechanism by which we vote through the states.
Who makes up the Electoral College? Who are our electors?
Sometimes people think of the Electoral College as a point system — if you win a state, you get some amount of points — but, really, when you vote, you are electing a slate of electors.
Slates of electors — one Republican, one Democrat — are nominated or elected by the parties in each state. On election day, the public votes for one of those slates.
The vote on November 3rd typically results in an Electoral College majority. There is a second election in December amongst electors, but it is not widely discussed or covered, mostly, because it doesn’t matter. Electors are loyal to their parties and typically vote as expected. The new Congress then votes to validate the Electoral College votes on January 6th, and by January 20th we reach inauguration. Usually, there are not any great hiccups in the process.
Does that change if it is a close election?
Even in a close election, we don’t think too much about the Electoral College. However, there are a few things that have happened in the past that could happen again.
First, there can be “faithless electors” — electors who vote against the popular vote of their state. Electors, for the most part, have the ability to act freely, and some people worry that they could tip a very close election if a few electors were to change their votes at the last minute — they could move the total for a candidate from 270 to 268, for example. However, in the past, faithless votes tend to be protest votes that do not really amount to anything.
Recently, a number of states have passed strict laws that bind their electors to the popular vote of their state. Previously, laws asked that electors be bound and, in some cases, imposed small fines on faithless electors, but there were no severe constraints. In the 15 States that now have this power, electors will be replaced if they vote the wrong way.
I wasn't sure if that was going to pass constitutional muster, but The Supreme Court upheld it this summer. The Supreme Court actually, in their footnote, hinted at the idea that the only case where this would cause additional hiccups is in the scenario that a candidate unexpectedly drops out, dies, or, for one reason or another, is not on the ticket. Which, of course, is something that has been in the conversation over the last couple of weeks with the president having Covid.
Another thing that can happen is the bargaining amongst the electors. In the 1968 election, George Wallace, a third-party candidate, won states and won electoral votes. Amongst the Nixon and the Humphrey electors, there was some discussion about coming together to exclude the Wallace electors. They didn’t want the election thrown into the House of Representatives, which is what happens if the Electoral College is tied.
But these are sort of odd situations, and these aren't the issues that keep me up at night.
What would you consider to be the more pressing concerns with the Electoral College during this election cycle?
I think the more realistic scenario that we could see is something like what started to happen in 2000 or what happened in 1876. In both cases, because the state race was so tight, there was a real question as to which slate of electors, the Republican slate or the Democratic slate, should be appointed.
In Florida 2000, if Al Gore were to pull ahead in the recount, would a second slate of electors need to be appointed? Eventually the Supreme Court stepped in and halted the recount in Florida, and the Republican slate of electors was appointed. But, imagine a scenario where the dispute is not resolved.
There are cases where two slates of electors may be appointed, and there is no set way to resolve that conflict.
Eventually, the dispute will end up in Congress’ hands, but it is not clear in The Constitution how Congress is supposed to decide. After 1876, when multiple slates of electors were actually sent in, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act to try to address how to approach that sort of scenario, but, I would say, it still is ambiguous.
It is also important to note that though we do have popular elections in every state, popular elections are not guaranteed by The Constitution.
Early on in our democracy, many state legislatures would directly appoint state electors. If you had a Republican legislature, you would appoint a Republican slate of electors. While this faded out after the Civil War, an argument — a controversial argument — was made by the Florida legislature in 2000. The Republican legislature felt that Democratic attorney generals were unfairly favoring the recount for Gore, so they wanted to step in and send the slate of electors to Washington themselves.
If I wanted to think of disaster scenarios — this is the sort of case that would be the disaster scenario. This is where there is the least amount of clarity in the election mechanisms after November 3rd. This is where parties could really seriously disagree, and this is where we have no third arbitrator to decide between the two of them. The parties would have to work it out on their own.
Are there deadlines that are important to know in the electoral process?
The president’s term ends on January 20th at noon.
Despite conversations about postponing the election, it would be incredibly hard to do. The deadline is in The Constitution.
If the election is not resolved by the inauguration, if it is still with the House of Representatives, then perhaps we have to go to the line of succession. But January the 20th at noon is when a new president has to take office.
There are two other dates that might matter. They're both in law, not in The Constitution, so theoretically they could be moved. There is the meeting of the electors, which is on December 14th this year. There is also the “safe harbor” deadline which is 6 days before the meeting of the electors, which is set by law to try and aid in the counting by ensuring no interference from Congress if the counting is complete by the set deadline. This date was highlighted by The Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore, and was one of the reasons they stopped the recount.
Recently, it seems there have been a lot of claims that the electoral process is undemocratic, and a push to move us towards a national popular vote. Do you think the Electoral College is still a democratic system?
The Electoral College has never been particularly popular in the modern era. Many people think that we should have a national popular vote — it is a more natural line of thought. And if we were to start from scratch now, maybe we would instill a national popular vote.
But is the Electoral College system undemocratic? I guess that I am not fully convinced of that.
We are a country of states. And though a few times there has been a difference between who wins the Electoral College and who wins the popular vote, it still is very unlikely to happen.
The proposal for a national vote, as it stands, is a halfway house, because it is really hard to amend The Constitution. States can appoint electors directly based on whatever criterion they want, and so the idea would be to appoint electors based on national popular, rather than the states' vote. But, there are some issues with that. What happens if the election is really close? You can’t really recount a national election, you can only recount the states. You would also have to make sure that all the states are uniform in their elections. And maybe that's a good thing, maybe people would like that. But maybe when we get down to the nitty-gritty and people will say, "Well, we really liked the way we vote in Alaska, it's good for us, or we like the way we vote in Oregon."
It is hard for a party to be on the losing end of this system twice within 16 years, and perhaps once more again, but I think there are reasons to be cautious about changing the system.
interviews
Strong Partisanship, Weak Parties
by Julia Azari
May 13, 2020
Julia Azari is an associate professor of political science at Marquette University, and author of “Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate.” This interview was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | America today is thought of as extremely partisan, has it always been this way?
No it hasn’t always been the case. In fact, there was this period, from about the 1950s through the 1980s, in American politics and party scholarship, where parties were regarded as weak and highly varied internally. The thinking was that parties were decentralized organizationally, weak nationally and strong at the state and local level. In the middle of the 20th century, the American Political Science Association came out with this report that said, the American political parties don't have clearly differentiated platforms. Even up to the 1970s and 1980s, people were predicting the end of partisanship and a rise in independent candidates.
Then, in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, the thinking quickly shifts to, “okay the end of partisanship doesn't seem to be happening anymore.” Because as it turns out, we are extremely partisan. Parties are actually quite well differentiated and national in their ideological scope. If you were to talk to a Republican in Maine and then to talk to a Republican in Oklahoma, there would be a lot of similarity – and the same thing goes for Democrats.
Party scholarship shifted from "American parties are weak and poorly differentiated and not ideological" to "American parties are very ideological and partisan divide is very stark." But that actually leaves a lot of questions open about parties as entities and organizations, which is where my research comes in.
Right, so how do parties fare in a partisan environment? Because one line of thought is – the more partisan a country, the stronger people’s ties are to their party – therefore the party itself is strong. But that doesn’t hold.
Yes exactly, and that is what a lot of my research is around at present.
The biggest part of my research is what I call the ambient societal conversation around political parties. Which basically asks, "What is it the people think political parties are, and why do people feel so skeptical and ambivalent about them, even as we're so deeply partisan?"
One thing I have found to be quite interesting while looking at public opinion polls, are the differences in opinion by gender and race within a party. For example, overall, men tend to rate their own party less favorably. Within the Democrats specifically, there is a large difference in favorability towards the party between white men and everyone else. We know that race and gender are hugely important in polarization between parties, but it seems that they have also driven some division within parties.
I’m also working, with another writer from Mischiefs of Faction, Seth Masket, on a piece of research that is asking what are the indicators of a weak party? What does it mean for a party to be weak?
That is so interesting. How does a party’s strength influence its ability to govern?
I wrote a piece for Mischief of Faction in 2017 about Republicans titled, The Party That Couldn't Coordinate in the Primary, Can't Coordinate to Govern.
In Congress, there's a lot of what political scientists call veto points – there's a lot of places where political change goes to die. So to deal with that and actually get things done, you have to build a coalition. With the amount of partisanship that we see today, doing that over party lines becomes near impossible. So instead, you have to have a very unified caucus.
What we saw with Republicans in 2017 was, even though they controlled the whole federal government, they couldn’t really get anything done. We saw a similar dynamic with Democrats in the summer of 2018 in regards to the way different factions within the party were talking about Abolish ICE. A lot of Democrats can agree broadly on where they stand on immigration. But then when it turns into actually making that into a policy, you need some kind of process to define your priorities and get everybody on the same page. Things break down very quickly when you go from a very broad position, like we don't like the Affordable Care Act or, we want to open up our policy toward immigration, to the actual details of a policy.
So that's kind of where party weakness comes in for me.
What do you think the 2020 nomination process so far has shown us about the strength of the Democratic party?
Meaning that while the Republican party can have a coordination failure, like with the nomination of Trump in 2016, they can then go on to coordinate a minimum coalition around their messaging and then win in the electoral college.
The Democratic coalition does not work like that. There's a lot of complexity in bringing all the different groups that make up the party together. We saw this in the 2016 election. In the case of the 2020 election, you've had a lot of candidates and a lot of discourse about other approaches that Biden doesn't seem like he's very interested in pursuing.
Bringing that whole coalition together is difficult. There are a lot of moving parts to the Democratic coalition. Democrats have historically been a party of process, and our system does not afford parties a good process.
What is a good process?
I think a good process would do a better job of aggregating different interests within political parties. It sounds weird to say, but I think it would actually do better if they had a more organized factions within the parties.
For example, having clear leaders that represent your geographic interest, demographic interests, ideological interests, who can come together and bargain. That happens to some degree at a convention, but not a lot. Will Sander’s people, for example, have serious influence over who Biden’s VP is? Probably not. The party is all about the nominee and once someone becomes a presumptive nominee, it's their party and it’s their convention. That may have some advantages. I'm pretty skeptical of it, because it doesn't leave a lot of room for considering the factions and the ideas of the candidates who did not win the nomination, but nevertheless make up the party.
And that's frustrating. I think parties need to bring back the representative nature of their internal democracy and improve it. But that does entail some delegation of power from voters to accountable party leaders, which people are very suspicious of right now. I don't have a lot of hope for that solution being viable, but thinking of the parties more as representative and less as direct democracies, would, I think, actually help more people's interests and values be better expressed.
That would be a return to how conventions used to work, right?
Old conventions were problematic in all sorts of ways, but I think there should be more robust representative relationships between people’s local delegates. There's local delegates from each congressional district. Even if you could write or call that delegate and explain things that were important to you, like healthcare, and encourage that it is part of the discussion. Primaries afford some of that, but I don't know they're the best intro instrument because they become so centered around a candidate.
It seems complicated to change – maybe not structurally, but in terms of getting public support, it seems really complicated. You wrote recently, “before we let in nostalgia for compromise go too far, we might consider that finding common ground politically has sometimes made things worse.” Could you talk about this idea of compromise and bipartisanship historically?
I think specifically what I was writing about in this instance was the ways in which bipartisanship and compromise have actually been harmful to discussions of race and immigration.
Bipartisanship has thrown African Americans under the bus repeatedly. Certainly until the passage of civil rights in the 60s, but generally a lot of the time. Highlighting the needs and concerns of African American citizens has been the last priority because it turns out it's fairly easy to build a coalition that doesn't address those needs or even a coalition that is outright oppressive.
The same thing with immigration. I was looking into some immigration bills in the late 19th century when a lot of really racist and restrictive things came out. Democrats and Republicans often disagreed about European immigrants, but there was bipartisan consensus that we should exclude people of Asian heritage and specifically, but not exclusively, people of Chinese heritage. And that's just really shitty.
Do you view the Coronavirus bill as bipartisan?
I wouldn't place that in the same category as some of the covertly racist issues that I was speaking about earlier. I think this another animal, the sort of clunky legislation that comes as a result of living in a big and complicated country. Because there have to be compromises, it doesn't go as far as it could.
People always speak about the psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s idea, the idea that after 9/11 there was great unity. You started to see this poke through in the discourse in the last couple of weeks after the Coronavirus crisis. It’s great for people to feel part of something larger and for that sentiment to be part of the crisis response, but that usually does have some exclusion and that exclusion is often racial.
After 9/11, we may have felt more unity, but we saw hate crimes and discrimination against people of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage sky-rocket at that time too. Often in these moments of unity, there is a target, and that is a concern for me.
I wouldn’t say the Coronavirus response legislation is dangerous in the way that the immigration and race compromises were, but as we think about bringing the nation together around this crisis, I would be concerned about ensuring that we are doing that in a way that's inclusive and not racist, and doesn't scapegoat or target people.
I keep hearing about Coronavirus as a great equalizer but I feel like it’s highlighting inequities not hiding them. And that again, seems to be missing from legislation.
Yeah. I think that's exactly right.
In terms of legislation that could address that, I think there could always be more and it could be more systemic.
I do want to note that where I was talking about bringing people together and not scapegoating, I have seen from left leaning people on social media, essentially, arguing that the exception to that would be directing the blame and punishment toward corporations, and the wrath towards the people who have powered this highly inequitable economic situation.
I'm not really sure what the right solution is as far as targeting or punishing those interests. This was a conversation after the financial crash as well. And the answer was pretty much like, we're going to veer away from any serious kind of populist ideology driving these decisions and anything that's truly punitive. Instead, we will prop up these major economic interests and try to give everybody else a little bit as well. The conversation now, in part because of that response, has changed a lot. I have an intrinsic dislike of blame politics, and scapegoat politics, and skepticism about populism, yet I think objectively it is very hard to deny that the economy is extremely unequal and extremely unfair. And that didn't just happen.
I think where we go from here very much remains to be seen. I was having a conversation about this with some of my colleagues, with a very wide range of political perspectives, yesterday. And some of us were trying to make the point that this situation really does highlight structural economic issues, and other people were saying, look, this is a crisis, and people are going to want to return to normalcy, not restructure the economy. And I just don't know.
It’s interesting to frame the conversation about what people want. Of course we all want to go back to normal. But should we? And, by the way, this might be our new normal, not abnormal, as things like this will continue to happen.
Andrew Yang was talking about UBI six weeks ago and maybe you could suspend your belief system and say, okay, yeah, I see how that would work, but that will never happen. Now, out of necessity, it is happening. Our capacity to imagine new things happening, politically, seems to have been cracked open somewhat.
That's a really interesting point. I think you are exactly right – imagination is very hard to get your head around in politics.
I guess the depressing addendum I have to that though, is that the thing you need to follow imagination up with is a process. And a process where the people with the ideas can envision a way in which they can manipulate those procedures that is simultaneously innovative and legitimate to build coalitions.
The weight of partisanship makes politics very stagnant and makes it very hard to reform things.