interviews
The Nationalization of U.S. Elections
by Dan Hopkins
December 31, 2020
This interview with Dan Hopkins, Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
What were the original assumptions in the Constitution about state-level loyalty versus national government loyalty?
It's a good question. The Constitution is now far enough back in our collective memories that I think it's really valuable to start by having some sense of what the U.S. was like at the time. There were some scholars who argued that the Constitution is well understood as a peace treaty between sovereign states about how they were going to govern their affairs.
In 1776 and even in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, the U.S. was a collection of 13 quite different colonies. It took the Georgia delegation six weeks to travel to Philadelphia in order to participate in the Constitutional Convention. Different colonies had very different economies and different religious heritages. This was a quite diverse country and, thus, the Constitution was designed to protect substantial levels of state-level autonomy. I think it is really important to recognize that at the time, many of the people thought of themselves as Americans, but also to a certain extent, as New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians.
When do you start to see a shift towards politics in the U.S. becoming more nationalized?
To some degree, it's an ongoing process that has unfolded in fits and starts over our 200-plus year history. I do think that the Civil War is a critical turning point. In the run-up to the Civil War, you see many more implications of state-level identities. I'm a Georgian, I'm a Virginian. And obviously, the Civil War pitted state against state.
It's generally been the case that the Republican party has been more likely to invoke federalism. Of course, the exemplary issue is the issue of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in more recent times, the Republican party has advocated for there being less of a role in the federal government asserting itself to protect the rights of African-Americans, especially, but not only in the South. I think it's fair to say that if you've heard a state rights argument in the last 50 years, it's more likely to be coming from the Republican party.
There's also an element in which as power shifts, we see changes. When the Republicans control the federal office, sometimes it's Democrats who say, "Hey, it's important to let California write its own laws with respect to clean energy or car emissions standards." At the same time, the extent to which we see Republican states moving to block sanctuary cities, for instance, is surprising.
If you're a principled federalist, then presumably cities shouldn't be punished for diverging.
In general, I see very few principled federalists in American politics. I think that all too often in contemporary American politics, federalism is just the clothing we use to dress up certain arguments instead of being a principled approach to a range of policy problems.
What factors contribute to a nationalized political landscape?
I actually think there's a relationship between the transformation of campaign finance, the transformation of voting, and the transformation of what's getting covered in our newspapers. There's a unifying element to all of this.
Let's look at campaign finance first. In many of the most competitive 2020 Senate races, large majorities of money came from out-of-state donations. What does that do to the candidates, and how does that affect the way constituents perceive elections?
I think that the nationalization of the campaign finance structure is an example of our nationalized set of divisions. What we're trying to do is refract these highly nationalized divisions through our federalist system. And the result often distorts representation in critical ways. One of the key facts about campaign finance has been that as late as 1992, two-thirds of all donations to federal candidates, to members of Congress, were coming from within the state that they represent. 20 years later in 2012, only one-third of all dollars were coming from the states that people represented.
The danger is that the representatives and senators increasingly have one constituency where they get their votes, but a separate constituency from where they get their money.
That is not how our system was designed to work. It was not designed for members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money from people who are not their constituents.
And simultaneously, there has been a collapse of local media. I wonder how the decline of local news plays into this landscape?
When the internet first became a sizable presence, there was a hope that it might actually lead to a proliferation of local news. With the internet there are very, very low production costs, so, theoretically, I could put up a newsletter about my neighborhood. But in fact, as you said, the rise of the internet and the rise of cable television led to this dramatic concentration of our attention on a very, very small number of nationalized news sources. Partly that's because the news media would target us based on where we lived. The Philadelphia Inquirer targeted a set of people who wanted to know about life in and around Philadelphia.
But more recently we instead see that the business model for many media companies is to compete based on who voters are and who readers are and who consumers are, rather than where they live.
Rather than providing me with information specific to Philadelphia, they will identify me as someone who likes the National Football League or cares about politics.
That has led to the fragmentation of our media environment. One of the real losers in this has been people's attention to state and local politics. State and local politics have never been on the top of people's priority lists. It used to be that if I were reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, as a by-product of learning what the Eagle's score was, I also learn a little bit about who my mayor was or who my governor was. And nowadays, since I can go right to ESPN or I can go right to Fox News, I can skip over all that state and local information.
In a world where state and local politicians want to be well-known, they're much more likely to attach themselves to a lightning rod federal issue than they are to actually dive into the challenging, complex issues that face their local community.
Which really allows issues to be manipulated. When we focused on immigration, something I found interesting was how much immigration was used as a campaign tool in Ohio or Maine. It’s easy to make a border terrifying when you don’t live near one. Do you feel like campaigning has changed based on the ability to take issues that don't have anything to do with your constituents, but are made to look like they have everything to do with constituents?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the real challenges with a nationalized political environment is that it encourages attention to issues that are evocative and emotionally charged and often have to do with specific groups of people, but ultimately do not have clear policy effects. I think one prominent example of this is not long after President Trump was elected he attacked football players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. I think it's a very instructive case because he wasn't proposing any policy. This was purely about symbols.
I worry that in the nationalized political environment, it's very hard to put together a political coalition that speaks to auto workers and nurses in the suburbs of Detroit, and retirees in Maricopa County. This is a very diverse country. One of the easier ways to knit together a political coalition is to reach for these divisive, identity-oriented issues, even if that's not actually what's going to motivate the policies that you're proposing.
I do think that there's been a real connection between the way in which our politics has nationalized and the way in which our politics has become more identity oriented.
It's these kinds of identity charged issues that can have an intuitive meaning to people in places from Montana to North Carolina.
Has your work clarified your opinion about how national politics should work? What do you advocate for moving forward in terms of policy and campaigning?
I certainly think that voters do better when they have the information that they need, and I think that we are missing an opportunity to really use our federalist system, because there are so many different kinds of issues that face the different communities in our country.
If we are trying to force all of those issues onto a single divide between Democrats and Republicans, we're going to miss a lot of critical issues.
I think some of the disaffection with contemporary politics stems from the fact that many of us deal with problems in our day-to-day lives that are not represented by the Republican-Democrat divide.
I do want to be wary of nostalgia — or suggesting that some earlier period of history was markedly better. Yes. I worry a lot that today's voters just don't know much about state and local politics, but state and local politics wasn't always vibrant and democratic in previous generations, right? As a social scientist, I think part of my job is to lay out trends. I do think that nationalization is something that we should forecast as being a major part of our politics moving forward.
I also think that there are some policy changes on the edges that I would advocate for that I think would help reinforce the connections between places and voters, and to make better use of our current federalist system. For instance, I think campaign finance matching, so that every dollar you get locally is amplified, is a great idea. I think that could encourage politicians to lay down roots in the specific communities they represent and to spend less time trying to raise money from Manhattan or Dallas.
I think we should also do everything in our regulatory capacity to help promote, protect, and foster high-quality, non-partisan coverage of states and localities.
As a country that is hemorrhaging reporters who cover states and localities I do think that given how many important decisions are made at the state and local level, as a society, we have a real stake in the quality of local news media. There are fewer statehouse reporters, there are fewer city hall reporters, and there are fewer people who are tracking state and local politics to hold our politicians accountable. I think that has been underappreciated, and one of the real dangers in contemporary American democracy.
interviews
Success Only Comes After Failure
by Charles Kamasaki
May 21, 2020
This interview with Charles Kamasaki, author of the new book, Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Would you introduce yourself and your work?
Charles Kamasaki | I’m Charles Kamasaki. I have a somewhat meaningless title of Senior Cabinet Advisor. "Cabinet" is the term that's used here at UnidosUS for our senior management team. I've been in Washington and at UnidosUS since 1982 – I first came from South Texas to work on public policy. Immigration fell into my lap. For many years I oversaw our public policy division, the early 1990s through the 2000s. I became Executive Vice President in 2005 until 2014, when I transitioned into my current role while writing my book, Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die.
What has your work been like in the last six to eight weeks, compared to the decades past?
Well, it's definitely shifted. Given how deeply the crisis is affecting the Latino community which we are representing and serving, it wouldn't have been possible for the work not to have changed. Let me articulate a couple of places where there has been a real convergence of the pandemic and immigration policy.
There is one set of issues around the so-called essential workers who continue to work during the pandemic, which has largely been within the food supply system. Literally from when the crops and livestock are harvested, all the way through to when it's either delivered to us from a restaurant or picked up at a store, Latino immigrants are heavily overrepresented. They continue to be, however, pretty much excluded from a lot of the remedies and responses that Congress has passed so far in response to this crisis.
And then there is another set of issues. There has been enormous job loss. Latinos are, again, overrepresented in becoming unemployed, having hours and wages cut, and losing businesses. And there are long term questions.
Or how does it work when any transactions that used to be done in person now have to be done online, like banking? A lot of our work has been focused on that.
That being said, there are things that are going to happen regardless of the arc of the pandemic recovery. There is going to be an election in November. Traditionally we have been very focused on voter registration and GOTV. There is legislation going to happen, apart from the CARE Act, which we've got to continue to devote resources towards. A lot of our focus has shifted towards the pandemic and it's immediate consequences, but we're trying as best we can to keep an eye on the longer term.
Do you see this as an opportunity to carry the visibility of the Latino community into a policy moment for immigration reform?
I think so, and I think that we may see some of those policy changes may come sooner rather than later. The Heroes Act that is going to pass the House probably today [5/15], has a couple of areas that are kind of interesting.
There are proposed stimulus checks for so-called mixed status families. Depending on how it is defined, there as many as 6 million people lawfully here, including US citizens in households that include at least one undocumented person. All of those households were excluded from the first stimulus checks, because, according to the way the bill was drafted, everybody in the household had to have a work-authorized social security number. There is a provision in the Heroes Act to fix that.
The provision that hasn't gotten a lot of attention so far, although I suspect it will, is giving so-called essential workers an opportunity to earn legal status.
I think there could very well be, in the immediate term, some policy action that deals with intersection of immigration policy and the pandemic.
I also think we are going to have a really interesting conversation about legal immigration. You may have noticed that President Trump issued an executive order to end or suspend all legal immigration. That was widely received as one would have expected based on traditional partisan leanings. I think that conversation probably changes 10 or 12 months out. If, as some economists say, it is going to take us a couple of years to come back economically, and we permit about a million legal immigrants into the country every year, I just can't imagine that we wouldn't have a debate around should we really continue to allow a million people to enter lawfully if a significant number of Americans are still unemployed.
I'm curious about this new debate on legal immigration you mentioned. Could you walk me through a little bit of each side of that debate and how you see that coming out in both upcoming 2020 presidential campaigns?
I think the restrictionist case is pretty simple: There are millions of Americans unemployed who are competing for a scarce number of jobs. It doesn't make any sense to allow a million people a year to enter the country, some of whom may be potential competitors for those jobs. The alternative case would be that these jobs are and will continue to be really tough, difficult jobs. Think about agriculture. Think about food processing where you're on a factory floor slaughtering and processing animals all day. Think about nursing homes. How many of the people who are currently unemployed would be willing to take those jobs? The answer from pro immigrant activists would be, not many.
Right. That makes sense and seems fairly standard. What does policy look like to you in like an ideal scenario?
I don't end my book actually with a policy prescription, although I did have several that I played around with then ultimately rejected. The reason is I think it's less about what I think, and more about what's doable. The best policy possible would include three buckets.
The first is longterm undocumented people who have not been convicted of serious crimes and who don't pose a threat to their communities ought to have an opportunity to legalize their status.
I also think we have to articulate that we are going to be generous with respect to the undocumented people who are here, then we're also going to be pretty firm in terms of enforcement in the future. This may get me in trouble with my more progressive colleagues, but as I write in my book, every nation, by definition, has a sovereign right to control its borders. Of course there are principles, most of which are codified in international law, around how we deal with asylum seekers and how we enforce the laws, which looks very different than what is going on right now. But, the conversation can't be binary.
Further, in respect to the question of legal immigration, I don't think it makes sense for Congress to write a law with a black and white plan on what immigration ought to look like. We are in the midst of a pandemic right now, and the future of work and the nature of the global economy is changing all the time. I don't think it is possible to write a law that specifies exactly how many people are going to be allowed to enter that is going to be relevant and consistent with the national interest five years from now or 10 years from now. I do think there is room for a body of experts to periodically adjust, based on data and economic forecasts and social needs, the number of immigrants who should be let in and in what sectors. If we had a nationwide childcare shortage, which we do, it's frankly a lot cheaper to allow a parent or another relative of a U.S. Citizen to enter in order to take care of their kids than it would be to spend the money to create another and regulate another childcare slot. So I would argue for some sort of independent commission to set levels on legal immigration in a way that responds to economic and social conditions.
Reforms are really hard. And the kind of progressive reforms that I have articulated, are not just once in a generation, they are more like once in a lifetime kind of events.
This has been true of the recent attempts of reform and was true of the last set of reforms that were successful. As you said, much of the debate is so stale, that it requires actors contravening conventional wisdom to succeed, and that's difficult for anyone.