2. READ: Lost Children Archive. A novel by by Valeria Luiselli.
4. READ: There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. A book by Ali Noorani.
5. READ: What the first 24 hours on U.S. soil looks like for detained immigrants.
6.LOOK: Our 2018 photo essay in the midst of a rally outside the gates of Tornillo, Texas.
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
States Are the Laboratories of Democracy
by Michael Miller
December 9, 2020
This interview with Michael Miller, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard and author of Subsidizing Democracy: How Public Funding Changes Elections and How It Can Work in the Future, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | A big takeaway from this election cycle is the record low levels of trust in the election system. Do you think that the way campaigns are financed plays into that sense?
Michael | Trust is really the crucial variable here. I recently participated in a webinar for the New York Chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and one of the things we were talking about was exit poll data. The AP Fox pre-election poll asked the question, "how confident are you that votes will be counted correctly?"
Among the people who said that they're very confident that votes are counted correctly, only 32% of them voted for Trump. We have similar findings when we ask people about how confident they are that people who are eligible will be allowed to vote? Out of the people who believe that voter suppression is a serious problem, 74% of them voted for Biden.
There is a huge lack of trust, and you can't point to any one reason.
Ultimately that is going to have severe implications for democracy, and I don't know how you fix it. I don't think that reforming campaign finance systems alone can restore trust. In fact, a long time ago, I wrote a paper looking at the effects of public campaign funding. We asked: once public funding was put in place, did voters have greater efficacy or trust in government? We found that there was no change. For the most part, nerds like me overestimate the potential efficacy of policy changes. It turns out that very few people actually know very much about these laws, and unless you are a donor, which fewer than 3% of Americans are, you really have no reason to know what the rules are. I don't think there's any theoretical reason to believe that campaign finance reform is going to trickle down into greater trust in the system.
I do think you're right to seize on it. Almost any of the other problems we are facing right now can be traced back to this trust gap. For instance, one of the questions right now is why the polls were wrong in 2016 and 2020. If you dig down into it, you actually find in 2020, anyway, most of the polls got Biden right, but they got Trump wrong. I think the most compelling explanation as to why is because the political right in the United States has lower levels of social trust. That fuels non-response. They just don't participate in exit pools or pre-election polls, which explains why we see Trump's number understated. It's not that the polls are wrong, it's that these trust deficits have created different buckets of Americans who are participating and engaging with various aspects of our democracy in completely different ways.
You mentioned most people don't have a strong understanding of the current laws that govern campaign finance. What do you find are the most widespread misconceptions that the public has around campaign finance? Is there a disparity between party affiliation?
The disparities between parties aren't really that great. I think the largest misunderstanding that people have about federal campaign finance law is that people don't know that corporations can not donate directly to political candidates. After the Citizens United ruling, the headline was that corporate money was infiltrating American politics. And people absorbed that, but didn't understand the more esoteric nature of that case, which was, corporations can spend money in elections, but they can’t donate to candidates. In a 2014 book, my coauthor and I found that a solid majority of people incorrectly believe that corporations can give money directly to candidates.
Do you think the changes in the composition of the type of money going into candidates and campaigns after Citizens United warrants the amount of concern around it, or do you think it's become an outsized talking point?
We wrote a book about that very question. When we set off to write that book, I had the pitchforks out. I looked at that decision as among the most egregious examples of judicial activism in the history of the Supreme Court. I still believe that. I expected to find that that decision eroded democracy, but the data tell a completely different story. There is more money coming into the election system, that is true, but it's not affecting elections in any different way than any other money in American politics.
When you get down to it, they behave the way that most other political committees have behaved for a long time.
The Supreme Court's position on campaign finance often boils down to, "all we're doing is ensuring that there's more speech in the American political system." In our book, we were left with that as a conclusion. We really came to see that as sort of a neutral outcome. There is money coming in on both sides, and ultimately these elite actors, the super PAC heads, or even just normal political action committees, are taking the temperature of the electorate in a given district and putting money with people who they think are going to win. super PAC, or any PAC money, is really about an investment in trying to get access. PACs want to pick winners so that when it comes time to get access to a legislator for that 10-minute meeting, they have their card in their back pocket, because they gave $10,000.
Well is that where the idea of corruption coming from money comes from? Paying to play, essentially?
Corruption is a hard word. If I'm a member of Congress and you're a donor, and I'm totally anti-gun and you're a pro-gun organization, and you gave me $10,000 one night, and I suddenly changed my vote, that is corruption. That would be a vote purchase, and it's been very difficult to find any evidence of this. We should expect that it is difficult to find because illegal acts are covered up, but, generally, what we find is that these organizations are not trying to change people's minds. They're finding people who already agree with them and who are well-positioned to run for office in order to protect their friendly members in the majority. I don't think that's corrupt. The Supreme Court would definitely say that that's quintessential political speech. It is supporting candidates who agree with you. I think we have to be careful about what we brand corrupt.
I certainly understand that the average person looks at these sums of money and says, how could that not be corrupting? If you're concerned about corruption, judicial elections at the state level is really the arena to focus on. The Supreme Court has agreed. In the Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co. case, the Supreme Court decided that a $3 million contribution to a judge was probably corrupting. So there is a threshold somewhere, but it hasn't been defined.
When I've done work with state legislators, one of the questions that I always ask them, just to see what they're going to say is, can I buy your vote? What does it cost to buy your vote? And the answer that I often get is, "Well, my vote is not for sale, but some other people might be interested." So there is a belief even among legislators that some of this stuff is going on, but especially at the state level.
You've done a lot of work studying state reforms. I am curious about the effects that reforms like matching systems or clean election programs have. How does it change the decisions campaigns make? Does it change how people feel about their elected officials?
There are really two kinds of major public funding reforms at the state level.
Arizona, Connecticut, and Maine, for example, have “Clean Elections” systems. If I'm running for the Arizona House of Representatives, they give me something like $35,000, which is about what it costs to run for that seat, and I can't raise any more money.
You asked, how do campaigns change? One of the findings in a book I wrote about Clean Elections is that the campaigns take the time they were spending raising money, and reinvest in public interaction. They spend more time going out and meeting voters, they knock on more doors, meet with more interest groups. Nobody runs for office so they can sit in a conference room and call donors. They want to be in the parades and kiss the babies and shake the hands. With Clean Elections, they are freed from the responsibilities of raising money and are able to do that.
And on the other side of the coin, there is more interaction taking place between candidates and voters, so more people vote.
If I knock on your door, when you go to vote and see a name there, you can put a face to it. You remember that conversation you had back in October when that person knocked on your door and asked what you care about. Maybe that conversation made you vote for them, or maybe you hated them, but either way, you are more inclined to express an opinion because you have context.
But, the Supreme Court has really kneecapped those systems. The future of state-level public funding is small-dollar matching programs like the one New York City pioneered. Mike Malbin, the director of the Campaign Finance Institute, has a paper that looks at how candidates become more democratic in their efforts to fundraise due to these reforms. The donor map expands because the incentive for candidates to interact with small donors changes with the matching program. I don't think we've done nearly enough work to figure out what the downstream implications of all this are. I would be amazed if there wasn't more civic participation to come from that. I mean you are literally investing in a campaign, that has got to pull you into other things like voting and volunteering.
The conversation around campaign finance oftentimes revolves around federal reform, and specifically around Citizens United, should we shift our focus to local and state reforms?
There’s a saying that states are the laboratories of democracy. When it comes to campaign finance, I think that's totally true. There is such wide variation in campaign finance policies across the states. I was glad to see the state of New York adopt the New York City model, even if the courts have stalled that effort. If New York or other states are able to implement these programs, we'll be able to trace how it changes state elections, and so I would expect that other states are paying attention.
Campaigns cost money. There's no way to have a democratic election these days without spending sums of money. I think most people recognize that and are okay with that. The question then becomes, who owns this infrastructure? Should it be million-dollar contributors, or should it be the people?