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
The Black Candidate’s Burden
by Stacey Walker
September 15, 2020
This interview with Stacey Walker, Linn County Supervisor, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Stacey Walker | I was born and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I think that's important to my background because it is a predominantly white state.
I was born to a single teenage mom, she was not college-educated. We lived in low-income housing. We were on welfare.
My mother was a really, really sharp woman. She was an incredibly eclectic, dark-skinned, Black woman. She had a wicked sense of humor, and lit up a room - she was the life of the party everywhere she went. Looking back, one of the things that I really admire about her is that her interests were all over the place. I grew up watching MTV, when MTV still played music on TV. Although we lived in the hood of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, my mother loved the Red Hot Chili Peppers. To this day, my music interests are all over the place. I really credit her for allowing me to explore that sort of thing. In the African American community growing up, you weren't cool unless you exclusively listened to rap and hip hop music.
I started my exploration of Blackness and what it meant to be Black at a really young age and I credit my mother for that. My mother was murdered when I was four. It was an unsolved homicide. After that, I went to live with my maternal grandmother. My father was never in the picture.
My grandmother raised me and my younger sister. My grandmother was also a young mother. She was born and raised in rural Alabama in a time where Black people weren't valued as human beings. She made her way North toward the tail end of the second wave of minorities moving from the South to Northern cities. She landed in Chicago in the 60s, and then made it to Iowa in the late 70s. She was following her sister, my great aunt, who was one of the first African American students at Upper Iowa University. That's how my family got to Iowa.
My grandmother is the greatest inspiration in my life. She saw family members lynched in the deep South. Two of her brothers were chased out of Alabama by the Ku Klux Klan. She was in Chicago during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Her family was active in the Black Panthers. She was a good Christian woman. She set me on my path of justice. She was very fair. She was resolute in what was right and what was wrong.
Growing up, we always had at least a passive interest in politics. Although my grandmother didn't go to college until her fifties, she had a strong understanding of why the community was the way it was.
We were doing everything we were supposed to do, but opportunities never seemed to come to my family or other families that looked like mine. I think that's where I got the social justice bug, from my mom and my grandmother. And here I am today.
Photo via @swalker06
I grew up knowing I was going to pursue politics, but it happened a lot faster than I anticipated. The politicians I grew up admiring were all white, wealthy attorneys, and I thought that was what you needed to be in order to be successful. I thought I'd have to spend 20 years putting in the legwork of politics before I got a shot to run for office. But, 2015 was the hardest year of my life. My grandmother died, my best friend's congressional campaign went up in flames, and the girl I thought I was going to marry left me. It was the worst year of my life.
It also happened to be the year there were several youth gun violence incidents in my community. We had one where a 15-year-old shot and killed a 14-year-old. Our community just broke after that. I was asked by the city council to assemble a group of people and come up with recommendations as to how we might address the issue. Bringing community leaders who all had competing interests and agendas and reasons for being there, to the table, ended up being quite the exercise.
Unbeknownst to me, this work ended up kick-starting my political career.
I was invested in understanding the social dynamics of our community and understating what we could do to mitigate violence. My political career was born off of this report that I co-authored along with Dr. Mary Wilcynski.
frank | How has your community evolved since you initially wrote this report? And how did that affect the response to the latest wave of protest?
Right after I was elected, a police officer fired on a young African American man, Jerime Mitchell, three or four times at point-blank range. He was paralyzed.
This was a turning point in my political career. I hadn't even been in office for six months, yet it was clear that no other elected official was going to touch this case. The case was being prosecuted by a County Attorney who is a Democrat and still in office. Our sheriff is a Democrat and still in office. I mean, I live in a Democratic County and no elected official was going to speak out against this. I couldn’t believe it.
The video had been released - we were all seeing the same video. The man was unarmed. The police officer was clearly the aggressor. The man tried to escape, and the officer pulled out his weapon and fired on him.
I will go to my grave believing that the way they treated this man was one of the greatest aberrations of justice. A grand jury was convened, which meets in secret and the prosecutors get to decide who they call as witnesses. I think the prosecutor's only witness was the police officer.
The prosecutor told the story. The police officer told the story. The jury was sold one side of the story. So of course the jury found the police officer had acted within his rights to protect himself. Jerime Mitchell was saying, “One, I literally couldn’t speak. Two, I was laying in a hospital bed. Three, you guys did this in a matter of days.”
So I spoke out and I just got blasted by the Democratic establishment. Up until that point, I was kind of climbing this ladder of the model Negro politician. I could relate to white folks. There were a lot of comparisons to Obama.
But after that it was like, holy shit, that's Malcolm X because he dared to challenge the criminal justice establishment. So I said, fuck it. I was done with being the guy obsessed with doing all the right things, and virtue signaling, and putting out tepid statements that didn't mean anything. I figured if my career ended after this first term, I was young enough I could find something else to do.
So I led the charge for justice for Jerime Mitchell, and I've been leading similar fights since I've been elected. I've started the law enforcement round table. I published the safe, equitable thriving communities task force report. I've convened a number of community conversations. I’ve successfully implemented changes to body camera policies. I don't want to sit here and throw out credentials, but for a while, it really felt like a one-man show. During this recent reemergence of the Black liberation movement, I think these efforts primed our community to have the conversation. There is a tragic lack of understanding on the part of white leadership as to what the Black liberation movement is and what it stands for.
I'm going to count it as a small win that at least people are willing to engage with the topic. Five years ago, they weren't even willing to do that. It was a subject you did not talk about. You certainly didn't talk about it if you were a politician. You certainly, certainly didn't talk about it if you were a politician who wanted to advance. You certainly, certainly, certainly didn't talk about it if you were a politician and person of color who wanted to advance.
We recently interviewed Jecorey Arthur, he said, how are you supposed to govern a group of people if you don’t know them? Do you think like we’re seeing a reflection of lived experience in elected office?
There is a browning of politics happening in America right now. People of color are winning seats at the local level and the federal level at a rate that we've never seen before. That's incredibly helpful, especially in places like Iowa where politicians have long been exclusively white people and mostly white men.
On the flip side, candidates of color in predominantly white communities have to do this dance that I call the Black candidate’s burden. On one hand, we feel an obligation to represent minority voices and those who look like us, because we know other folks aren't going to do it. But we also know if we venture too far into that space, we will lose credibility with the majority population. You know you will be type-cast as the politician who cares about Black people's issues, and only Black people's issues.
I’ve had to sit down and have serious conversations with a lot of journalists in this community about coming to me on issues outside of those that deal with race. I'm a pretty smart man and I've lived an interesting life. I have a lot of different experiences outside of being a Black person. But, again, on the other side of it, if I don't take up this mantle, no one else will.
How do you acknowledge both the reality of racism and the reality of poverty –especially in a predominantly white state?
Delicately and gingerly, is the short answer.
The more thoughtful answer is that good politicians are skilled communicators. The challenge is helping poor white people understand that they have more in common with poor Black people than they do with Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or any of these other wealthy, Ivy-league educated Republicans. They preach to poor white people and tell them that the only reason they are in the position that they are in is because of some boogeyman - people from South of the border, or the Black people in your neighborhood leeching off the welfare system.
All that from the party of “personal responsibility.”
Right? Yeah, it's riddled with hypocrisy. Uniting those two thoughts becomes a challenge because America is still a very segregated place. We are tribal by nature, and it's easy to develop an us-versus-them mentality, particularly when you don't have anything. I think Bernie Sanders found a way to talk to these two seemingly disparate groups of people in a way that helped them to understand that their economic destinies were intrinsically tied.
But it gets really, really tricky to explain to white people that they can still have something called privilege.
I can understand how that group of people can't reconcile these concepts. Republicans have figured out how to capitalize on that divisive political wedge. They say, “when they say Black lives matter, that means they don't care about you. They keep talking about privilege, but what kind of privilege do you have?” And it works.
Democrats don't know how to respond because they’re maneuvering for votes and are consumed with figuring out centrists. The genius of the Republican party is that they are not divided on this, and it's not really a political issue, it's emotional.
I agree with your assessment that Democrats writ large, aren't good at that conversation. I don't want to say anything that's going to harm Democrats' chances in the fall, because I am a team player, and we need to win. But, the general criticism that I have of the corporatist, establishment Democrats is that we spend way too much time worrying about how we are going to appeal to disaffected Republicans and to those right of center. We end up losing sight of what it is we actually believe in.
Is it because, at the heart of it, that's not what the corporatist, establishment Democrats, actually believe in?
That was my next point. I think we spend too much time trying to figure out where the electorate might be and allow that to inform our policy positions. In my view, that is totally backwards.
If the electorate isn't there, then your next job becomes is to persuade and to win the hearts and minds of the electorate. Your job is not to figure out where they are. It is not your job to lick your finger and put it in the air and say, “Well, I think they're over here, so this is where we're going to go.”
If we keep believing that the key to electoral success is winning over disaffected voters to the right of center, we are going to continue to pull the Democratic Party to the right. We're seeing that right now, and the right is not where the policies are that will help people.
There can only be so many elections where we feel as if we are in a hostage situation — that if we don't just go along with this platform then something really, really bad awaits us. There's only so many elections left where I think that the activist class is going to feel like they're getting an unfair shake. I am afraid for the moment where the Democratic party, which is already splintered, fractures completely. I hope we don't get there. I hope progressives win. I hope the leadership structure starts to change. But the threat of fracture is a real and present danger for this party.
How do you think about this coming election with the reality you just outlined above? How do you talk to other people about voting for Joe Biden? And how do you talk to yourself about it?
This particular election is all of the things politicians have warned us about during all of the other elections. This is actually real. I think Donald Trump absolutely represents an existential threat to democracy. I think it's a very real threat that we may continue to slide into authoritarianism, and into a place that we may not be able to recover with another four years of Donald Trump.
But you asked two questions: How do I talk to other people about it? And how do I talk to myself?
Somebody from team Bernie said to me, when it was apparent that he was going to drop out of the primary, we just need to win. That's how we solve a lot of these issues — we need more progressive wins. We need a progressive nominee for president. Until then, we need to stay in this fight and pull our party to a more progressive position. And that makes sense to me. I've played competitive sports for a large part of my life, and one of the things you learn to do is how to lose. We lost. We didn't have enough people who showed up for us in the primary, especially in the Southern States. That is how it works sometimes. As a practitioner of electoral politics, I'm able to leave it at that and know that a lot can change in two-year election cycles.
But how do I talk to other people about this? I mean, you have to have that conversation with them too.
It is helpful that I am able to point to people like Cori Bush, members of the squad, and other progressive folks that are coming up through the ranks. I can point to them and say, that could be us. I do believe with each generation, we are becoming more liberal and more progressive. I do believe that one day we will have a progressive leader of this party who will give people something to believe in.
It's tough because for millions of Americans, the system has just never worked for them. Most Americans aren't really living, they're just doing their best to survive. It's hard to go to these folks and say vote for this person because they are going to be less dangerous than the other person, as opposed to vote for this person and you will get free healthcare. We are going to alleviate your medical debt. You are going to be able to send your kids to college for free. We are going to legalize marijuana. We are going to expunge the criminal records of individuals who have been arrested for marijuana crimes. We are going to reinvest in communities that have been devastated by the war on drugs. We are going to implement a Green New Deal. We are going to build a good society. It's easier to motivate people when you bring that.
Why doesn't the party acknowledge that?
It is a party problem. I think the folks who have an outsized influence in the party are afflicted by any number of problematic political diseases, if you will.
Some politicians are outright calculating. Some believe that the path to victory means being closer to the middle than closer to the left.
It's much easier for them to say, “I support the police, I support all lives matter, and all people, all lives, have value.” They don’t have to explain or move the electorate or build a coalition.
For some people, its political calculus, but other folks just have differing opinions. I think Joe Biden falls into that category, and I actually have a lot of respect for politicians like him. He says what he actually believes in. It's okay to have people in our party who have differing beliefs about the issues or different approaches to different issues. I have a great amount of respect for other politicians in the Democratic party who don't share my beliefs but have arrived at their policy positions through shared experience or their own work on the topic.
Then there are politicians in this party and in the other party who base their political beliefs not on intellectual curiosity or studies or any sort of enlightenment, but solely upon where they believe the electorate is. These are the people I struggle with because that approach is harmful.
The status quo, as history has demonstrated, is not always right. We fought a civil war because the status quo thought that people who look like me ought to be treated like chattel property. The status quo in the sixties was that Black people like me were second class citizens. We know the status quo is not always right, but we have politicians in both parties operating under the belief that we can never go against the status quo.
Joe Biden and I disagree on marijuana. Joe Biden and I disagree on healthcare policy. Joe Biden and I disagree on environmental policy. But he's got a record of showing how he's arrived at his beliefs, and he's remained steadfast in his beliefs. On some level, I have respect for that.
There are these other politicians who have to wait before the coast is clear before they say that Black lives matter. They have to make sure that other politicians are going to give them cover. They have to make sure that everybody's going to be on the same page. That's disgusting to me because people are dying in the streets. People don't have healthcare. People are being crippled by medical debt and student loan debt. I am 32 years old and I'm still financially impacted by my student loan debt.
I struggle with that.
It's depressing.
This stuff is depressing now only because we don't have ambitious plans to address these issues. It could be exciting to imagine what our country, and what our world could be like with a bold vision, but perhaps that will come in another cycle. Our top priority this time around is defeating Donald Trump.
So much of this is based in an American obsession with an individualistic pursuit of success.
Yes. Rugged individualism isn't all bad. I think there is merit in people doing everything they can to make sure they're self-sustaining in order to help their family. I get that. But there's a difference between rugged individualism and crippling poverty and institutional racism that doesn't even allow the individual to start on that path.
When you reach a certain financial point you can hire accountants to help you find every loophole in our tax code, you can donate to politicians who promise to lower your taxes and support your financial interests. That's how you get the scenario that we are in today. We are in the worst economic crisis since 2008, the billionaires are getting wealthier, wages are continuing to drop, and we lost the battle on Medicare for All, politically, even with 70% of Americans supporting it.
These monied interests are really, really hard to beat. They have captured the leaders of both parties, and they have a stranglehold on our politics. That's a whole other conversation about how we get out of this morass, but it's hard to beat.