America's Political Instability

0:00:07.3 Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.3 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:10.9 Aaron Powell: Our guest today is Andy Craig. He’s staff writer at the Cato Institute, and a frequent contributor to lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. Today we’re talking about a fascinating essay he recently published with us on the causes and dangers of minority rule. Welcome to the show, Andy.

0:00:24.1 Andy Craig: Hey, good to be with you.

0:00:27.3 Aaron Powell: Can you give us a sense of how bad partisan polarization has gotten?

0:00:34.2 Andy Craig: Sure. There’s a lot of different ways of measuring it. One that you see a lot is, ’cause it’s easy to quantify is, in Congress you’ll see a chart that shows how often they vote with each other and how much crossover there is in the middle on votes, and that’s famously hollowed out, but I think more than that, there’s just a broad sense of how deeply embedded it’s become culturally, that it didn’t use to be as all consuming as it is now, and that it’s become kind of more central to people’s identities in a way that it didn’t use to be. And that religion and what region you live in and all those sorts of things have been subsumed into red-​blue tribalism.

0:01:28.5 Trevor Burrus: It seems sometimes that the… There’s like two types of takes on this and then a gamut between, because we all talk about this a lot, especially over the last decade, five years. Some people want to say this isn’t as bad as it’s ever been or it’s been worse pre-​Civil War. There’s been a lot of discord in American politics at different times, obviously the Civil War being the worst, but even in the years after that, it was pretty… It was pretty discordant even in the first decade of the country, with how much the Federalists and anti-​Federalists hated each other. So are you more on the side that this is just sort of a pattern of America, including the urban versus rural aspect of that, or do you think that this is going in a different and worse direction?

0:02:15.0 Andy Craig: I think it’s not worse today, but it’s different today in ways that previously… I mean, obviously it’s true, we were a more divided nation when we were shooting at each other on the field of Gettysburg. But what has happened is that it used to be, there was a kind of… It was more… There was a mixture and a diversity in American politics from different regional angles, different religious groups, and so these things formed themselves into two big camps, which usually not, though not entirely, aligned with the two major parties, and those then, that would often become very heated and contentious.

0:03:03.0 Andy Craig: But it wasn’t this total sorting into basically two very homogenous kinds of identities, where rural Republican and urban Democrat is the same thing wherever you go in the country. They vote the same, they care about the same things, they consume the same media, and that is new and different, and that came about partly from the age of mass communications, which had a tendency to nationalize debates, and you saw it first with radio and then television, and now on kind of steroids with the internet.

0:03:45.1 Andy Craig: And so I think it’s certainly important to keep the perspective that we are not on the verge of a civil war, we are not seeing the kind of the large-​scale political violence that we have seen in this country at some times in the past, and so you don’t want to get too apocalyptic about equating it to those things, but there is the dynamics that are fueling it and the kind of runaway, spiral escalation of it are things that are new and different and have to be grappled with and addressed in different ways than how we handled some of those past divisions.

0:04:22.2 Aaron Powell: What are some of the reasons that typically get given for this newest wave of increasing polarization? In your essay, you mention a handful that all sound rather grim. I mean, political sectarianism doesn’t sound super scary, but two-​party doom-​loop and partisan death spiral, those sound bad.

0:04:41.7 Andy Craig: There’s a lot of theories. One that you see that I find unconvincing, and I think most of us at Cato would not be convinced by, is that it’s campaign finance. It’s money in politics. So that’s one that you see that I don’t think is terribly convincing, ’cause it doesn’t make much sense why money in politics would drive polarization. I get why it should drive corruption is the theory. But it doesn’t make much sense that it would drive polarization. One thing you see asserted, particularly on the left among Democrats, is that it’s voter suppression, that Republicans are making it harder to vote, etcetera, and I touch in the piece on some of the reasons why that’s going on, but at the same time, when you look at the actual marginal effect of tinkering with voter ID laws and early voting and that sort of thing, it does not make a huge difference.

0:05:40.3 Andy Craig: The other really common one you see, and as I just mentioned, I think it has something more to do with it, is change in communications technology, the rise of the internet and social media, which has allowed kind of a… There’s no more gate keepers, it’s kind of a disintermediated blob that does not have the hierarchy that it used to have, and so that in particular is one of the things that just subsumed regional differences, which used to be kind of the big check on this.

0:06:15.8 Andy Craig: America has always had a two-​party system, but the reason it used to be very loose, big coalition big… The two major parties. They were united around little more than supporting the same presidential candidate, and you had liberal Northeastern Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats, and some of the most liberal senators were elected from places like Idaho and South Dakota, and Reagan was governor of California, and because of the way the density divide has played out and the parties have realigned so almost entirely around rural versus urban with suburban somewhere in the middle, that that’s something that… It just becomes all-​consuming because it applies everywhere. And so I think that’s part of what is it happening.

0:07:16.3 Andy Craig: But yeah, there’s no shortage of… People say, “Well, it’s war and foreign policy, that is the… ” Any issue you could name that somebody cares about, there’s somebody out there arguing that because we’re getting that issue wrong, that’s what’s tearing us apart. And I think you really have to zoom out a little bit further than that. You can’t harp in on any one policy area and really see the big picture of what’s driving this.

0:07:48.5 Trevor Burrus: Your essay… It talks about polarization, but the thesis of your essay is a little bit different of how this is working today. The title is Minority Rule is a Threat to Liberty. So what do you mean by minority rule in this context?

0:08:03.9 Andy Craig: In American politics, we have a rather unusual situation compared to what we would think of as the other major liberal democracies, Western Europe, East Asia, places like that, in that most, not all, but most of our high offices are elected under an electoral system that is not a 50-50 tipping point between the two major parties because of geography and the way the rules of our elections play out. You see this most famously in the Electoral College, and that’s the one that gets a lot of attention, where in 2000 and 2016, you saw a Republican who lost the national popular vote, won the Electoral College, and there’s a systematic skew there that, depending on how you calculate it, it runs something like 46 to 47% Republican to 53 to 54% Democratic is where the actual tipping point of flipping an election outcome is at.

0:09:12.2 Andy Craig: But it’s not just the Electoral College. Obviously the Senate kinda by deliberate design is not democratically representative, because there are more smaller, wider, more conservative Republican states, they get more senators, and so you see a similar thing there. But even in the places that are supposed to be democratic, popular representative branches, the House of Representatives and the state legislatures, you get a very… The numbers are actually very similar, in some cases they’re worse. There’s states right now where the Republicans can lose the cumulative vote for state legislature by it’s pushing 10 points and still hold more seats.

0:10:00.5 Andy Craig: And because of that, our electoral system is, it produces an equilibrium, and that equilibrium is where all the rest of the relative size of the two parties and so much of how they think about political dynamics and cultural dynamics, and so you end up with a system where the Republicans and the Democrats both still end up in power about half the time, because that’s where the equilibrium balance is, but you have a smaller Republican coalition and a larger Democratic coalition, and that fuels all kinds of weird illiberal thought processes on both sides when they’re… We’re constantly facing this reality that it doesn’t feel like a fair contest. And one side feels like they need these rules in order to preserve themselves and the other side say, “Hey, this is unfair. We got more votes, we didn’t win.” And so it just has a lot of downstream consequences, the fact that our electoral system has that skewed tipping point.

0:11:17.8 Aaron Powell: How much of this is a temporary thing, though, in the sense that Democrats are concentrating among the cities and the cities’ populations are growing, people are at a steady clip leaving small-​town America and moving to the cities because they are dynamic and economically, they’re the engines of the country, and that’s where the jobs are, and that’s where the culture is happening and so on. Younger people tend to skew Democratic, and they’re the ones who are more likely to be moving to these places, and so it does seem like no matter what structural advantages the rural party might have, there’s got to be a floor, right, like they’re not going to win with 30% of the vote. And so is this something where we’re going through a period where they seem, the rural party, which is in this case the GOP, seems to have a structural advantage, but another five, 10 years of both demographic change and shifting population geographically is going to just mean… It’s going to kind of moot that advantage.

0:12:37.9 Andy Craig: Well, that’s one of the things… I mean, both Republicans and Democrats kind of fear or celebrate that possibility that, and it’s true, we are still urbanizing, people are moving out of rural areas into the cities, but part of the point of this piece is that even, no matter, you will still always have the relatively more rural 47%. Now, where that dividing line is might shift, it might shift from towns of 50,000 to towns of 100,000 as these things move, but you will still… I don’t think it’s just a passing thing, and it could actually make it worse, because one of the things that can happen is that you end up with a larger… You end up with a larger urban population that is then even more under-​represented, because you get… I mean, yes, you will…

0:13:41.4 Andy Craig: Every 10 years, redistricting comes, and there will be a reallocation of seats and things will shift and partisan coalitions will shift, but part of the reason the system of single-​member districts that we use for Congress and most state legislatures produces this, is because Democrats are inefficiently distributed for such a system, they are packed and cracked, which is what they call it in redistricting circles, and that’s something you do deliberately for gerrymandering, but it’s also just inherent.

0:14:15.6 Andy Craig: And the way that works is that you have these 90% blue districts that are urban areas that are just deep, deep, deep blue with very few Republicans in them, and you have these relatively more rural districts that still have a third to a quarter of voters are Democrats, it’s still a minority, they’re still safe red seats, but there’s more Democrats in those districts than there are vice versa. And so because of that inefficient distribution, you end up with this system where you get more Republican legislators out of fewer Republican votes.

0:14:56.9 Andy Craig: And I think it’s potential that the accelerating urbanization could just make that worse, and it also fuels the insecurity on the Republican side, the feeling that we couldn’t win elections, that we couldn’t wield political power, except for this counter-​majoritarian system, and that we’re going to be overwhelmed by the masses in the cities, and that’s a large part of what fuels the insecurity, which fuels a kind of “we’ve got to use it while we’ve got it” attitude towards political power.

0:15:33.3 Trevor Burrus: So, as I alluded to before, I’ve said at different times, that if I were just a pure academic, some historian in some university, I would spend a decade writing a history of the United States as a history of urban versus rural conflicts. It was true at the time of the Constitutional Convention, that most of them were deeply skeptical of the East Coast elites, and of course, their East Coast was the difference between Amherst and Boston. So it’s been a long time issue, and they knew about it at the framing of the Constitution, and one of the reasons, although the Electoral College is strange and they actually didn’t think about it as much as maybe they should have, but there was a thought that it would help give that and the Senate, when you combine it with the Senate, would help give more representation, more voice to the rural areas which have concerns that are not just like the same as population.

0:16:28.5 Trevor Burrus: It’d be like large areas of farmland that are the bread basket of America have concerns that are not just about population, so do we really want to go out to the Electoral College if it’s doing this job, to some extent, of making sure that presidential candidates don’t… Go to Iowa, and they’ll always make that stop in Iowa and endorse corn. But we want the concerns of Iowans and the concerns of people who live in LA, but how much time would a presidential candidate spend in LA if we didn’t have LA, New York and the big cities if we didn’t have the Electoral College.

0:17:04.3 Andy Craig: Well, that’s certainly one of the common defenses of the Electoral College, and one of the points I make in this piece is that, for one thing, the Electoral College isn’t going anywhere. So if we’re looking at feasible reforms, I don’t even really, I don’t see much there. But one of the key things to understand is that it’s not just the Electoral College, it is also the House, it’s also the state legislatures, and so it may well be reasonable and desirable to have a degree of counterweight there in that system to weight a little bit for some offices in some ways, towards that side of the aisle, but when it becomes everything, then you’re not getting the Madisonian intent of the House within that scheme, which is supposed to be the popular representative branch based on pure population, because that does still matter and has to be one of the inputs in the system.

0:18:07.2 Andy Craig: So, when we think about the framers, you alluded to how much they really considered the Electoral College, there’s a lot of post-​hoc rationalization of the Electoral College that was not really anything they consciously intended. And so when we look at what the framers did, they did very, very well with what they knew at the time, and developing a kind of proto-​public choice incentive-​based structure, what we think of Madisonian checks and balances, but there’s things they didn’t perceive. They did not well understand the nature of parties, they thought they were going to somehow get rid of parties, which we now know is neither possible nor desirable, that any functioning democratic system is going to have political parties, and so you have to harness and build around that.

0:19:00.8 Andy Craig: And the other thing, and our colleague Gene Healy has written a lot about this, is the presidency has just become so all-​consuming. The entire political system, our parties, everything revolves around the presidency. And so something that would matter less if we had a more constrained presidency, if Congress was taking more of the lead as was intended, then the fact that the Electoral College has this little skew in it might not matter as much, it would not be as contentious, it wouldn’t be the thing that drives where political coalitions form to the degree that it does.

0:19:44.5 Andy Craig: And so… When I’m looking at reform, I really think the place to start is from the bottom up. The Electoral College is not going anywhere, the Senate is certainly not going anywhere. Even the system we use for the House is pretty deeply entrenched. It’s theoretically changeable in some ways without a constitutional amendment, but I think it really has to go to the state level and kind of boil up from below, and that’s why I think there’s a lot of good stuff happening with possible electoral reforms, more proportional, more multi-​party systems, things that allow geographic minorities to still be represented, which is a thing our system really lacks. If you are a Republican in the city or if you are a Democrat out in the farmland, you basically don’t get any elected representatives in high office.

0:20:41.0 Andy Craig: The one thing and the one interesting exception from a lot of these trends is actually state governors, and you see that in how state governors are less polarized, you see more cross-​ticket voting for governors, you see more moderate governors, you see more governors who win, Democrats in red states and vice versa. So I think that’s… But if you’re talking about legislators, which I think is where the primary emphasis on representation is supposed to be, there’s a lot lacking there.

0:21:17.8 Aaron Powell: Something that occurred to me as we’ve been having this conversation, especially this last bit of it, is as libertarians, we are fans of methodological individualism, treating individuals as individuals as opposed to collectives, but so much of this very conversation and these arguments, I feel like they assume a high degree of collectivism, that there is something… There is something unique about a person from Iowa and they… A person from Iowa, by nature being from Iowa, is fundamentally different from a person from Massachusetts, and we need to make sure that Iowa, which is defined as within this border, has its interests represented as opposed to the individuals who may have…

0:22:08.8 Aaron Powell: Not all Iowans agree and not all Republican Iowans agree on a whole range of things, or when we’re talking about that, the Republican in the deep blue district not having his interests, that’s just kind of the nature of elections is like if you lose, you don’t get your candidate, and it seems odd to tie that to, we need to make sure that these collectives called the parties are represented equally or have some degree of proportional representation or that different geographical areas, because really it feels like this should be about individuals and individuals are trying to advance their interests, trying to get what they want, and tying it all into this geography seems to confuse things.

0:22:54.7 Aaron Powell: And part of it is tied into why I’ve always found it a little bit baffling when libertarians defend, say, the… That we need to give extra weight to the people in rural states, so that their interests are represented, because that kind of assumes that there’s something in this collective called this state, whereas maybe I’m wrong, but the best protection against the interests of these smaller states is federalism, is that you can elect whoever you want to the federal government, but then they can’t, they can’t interfere in, they’re limited in how they can interfere in the affairs of the given states, and then the states can be these engines of democracy or whatever, and so it just… This whole conversation seems to be assuming collectivism, when what we should be assuming is individualism. Does that make any sense at all?

0:23:48.3 Andy Craig: Sure. And one of the things about the American electoral system that is different from a lot of other places is our emphasis on geography. Your House district is geographically defined, obviously your state is geographically defined, and that’s not necessarily the most natural grouping of common interests that people have. But because we only allow elections to be conducted through these geographic electoral units, it forces more emphasis on geography than might otherwise be the case. So if you look at, for example, proportional representation, one of the things you get there is that you can have a geographic minority which… And still be represented, which is… That is something different from winner-​take-​all elections.

0:24:55.4 Andy Craig: And so you can get… It produced not just more moderation, but kind of more of a sense of buy-​in and having a seat at the table, which matters if you’re trying to defend a constitutional system from collapse from lack of public support, and then the worst things that could come from that. But speaking about libertarians in particular, I think there are very strong reasons to be skeptical of the premise that more heavy weighting of rural votes produces smaller government.

0:25:33.7 Andy Craig: You know, it’s rural voters who want farm subsidies, rural voters who tend to be more supportive of military spending, it’s rural voters who are more socially conservative typically, and want to do things like ban gay marriage or are more supportive of drug prohibition, and even if you just look narrowly at spending, I don’t think there’s a very strong case, that this… That we as libertarians should prefer because it produces better policy outcomes a system that just straight up weights white conservative rural voters more. And that is something that is hard to justify as a normative matter.

0:26:29.5 Andy Craig: And so one of the things this system forces, setting libertarians aside, but it forces Republicans and conservatives to do, is to come up with rationalizations for why this minority is more entitled to govern. And that can lead to some very dark places. Once you’re getting into the business of the populist poison of “These are the true people, this is the real America,” and… But it drives people down that path because otherwise, how do you justify this sort of system?

0:27:06.6 Andy Craig: But no, I agree, there’s definitely… Libertarians should be a little bit more skeptical about the idea that these things proves more libertarian outcomes, and you’re absolutely right about federalism is the more… Subsidiarity, local self rule, local autonomy, that protects rural minorities, rural political minorities much more effectively than just weighting their votes in favor of determining control of a very centralized national system.

0:27:44.6 Trevor Burrus: Aside from the way that libertarians should look at who is voting and what they’re voting for, if you’re a good libertarian, you should be allergic to the partisanism that dominates the conversation. You might have a lot of other biases in your head, but like hopefully you’re not subject to those partisan ones. And a lot of things libertarians say sometimes is, oh, gridlock, gridlock is good. We don’t want either party to be dominating. So in a general sense, why should libertarians actually care that much about this minority rule thing you’re describing?

0:28:18.9 Andy Craig: I think it’s worth caring about, because it produces some very toxic outcomes that can undermine a lot of things libertarians do care about. We care about individual rights, we care about limited government, we care about the Constitution, we care about having good political incentives that don’t undermine liberty, that reinforce liberty instead of undermining it. And so when you have this sort of hyper-​polarization, it becomes such a toxic all-​consuming thing that you don’t get broad buy-​in to not necessarily radical libertarianism, we’re pretty content with the fact that’s a small minority view, but what we might call liberalism more broadly, or liberal constitutionalism, liberal democracy.

0:29:14.5 Andy Craig: And that when you have, on the one hand, a party that thinks, that has to justify why it should rule without a democratic mandate, and on the other hand, you have a party that says the Constitution is awful and rigged against us, you can very quickly end up in a place where neither support it, and all constraint goes out the window. The most extreme example, I’ve been coming back to a lot historically, is actually Spain.

0:29:49.2 Andy Craig: So in the latter half of the 19th century, early 20th century, Spain had this thing called turnismo, which was basically there was an official liberal party and an official conservative party, and through informal mechanisms and frankly rigging elections sometimes, but basically they had a power sharing agreement where they would alternate back and forth. And this seemed to work fine until it kind of spiraled out of control, and you had the breakdown of liberal democratic norms, and things escalated through a few military coups, and by the 1930s, you had fascists and communists slaughtering each other.

0:30:35.6 Andy Craig: And that’s a place certainly no American would want or no libertarian would want America to go. So I think that’s why polarization matters, and is a concern to liberty and to the degree to which minority rule fuels that and accelerates trends towards authoritarianism. I think that’s a libertarian concern.

0:31:01.6 Trevor Burrus: I agree that the concern here, you mentioned the Spanish system, what… There’s an underlying concern for the functioning of any liberal democracy is this, the viewing the other side as illegitimate and also victories, electoral victories as illegitimate, which has been ramping up from both sides for quite a while. I felt like that was a lot of what the campaign finance discussions post Citizens United were kind of verging on that because they were saying, well, the Democrats were saying, well, the Republicans only win because of Citizens United, and now you have Republicans saying that there’s electoral fraud and it all can get pretty scary, I think, quicker than most people think can happen.

0:31:42.8 Trevor Burrus: But do you think that that sense of illegitimacy that the other side’s victory is illegitimate is sort of endogenous to this minority rule thing, that it came out of it or it preceded it, it preceded the population shifts that had happened?

0:32:00.3 Andy Craig: I think it pretty well directly does come from… Because you have not… You have seen, and there are other broader reasons fueling this kind of the rise of populism, you’ve seen the rise of far left and far right parties in other major democracies, but you have not seen that degree of illegitimization of the other side and of election outcomes. If you look at British politics, which might be the one most Americans are… To the degree Americans know about foreign politics at all, the one they’re more familiar with, you don’t see this kind of just screaming rage that the other side didn’t really win.

0:32:56.0 Andy Craig: We saw on January 6th, libertarians are rightly skeptical of “majority rule sanctifies everything, all we need is more democracy, and 50% plus 1 rule.” But at the same time, we need to understand the ways in which electoral democracy channel conflicts that otherwise could and would play out violently, much more violently than the violence inherent in the system. And it’s fragile. January 6th really did underscore… To be honest, if Trump had not backed down the way that he did after he kinda got scared into it and sort of backed down after January 6th, if he had urged on, I think we very easily could have seen large scale political violence in the United States.

0:33:55.9 Andy Craig: And that’s something we’ve gotten maybe a bit too comfortable in assuming isn’t a possibility, and then that our system is so stable, our Constitution is so secure, it couldn’t happen here. But when you see a breakdown of electoral democracy, it goes there very quickly. When people feel that elections are stolen, they will get violent about it.

0:34:20.2 Aaron Powell: How much of this stolen election narrative is the result of the geographic sorting that we’re seeing, and the media landscape sorting that we’re seeing, so that you can have someone who lives in a place where they… We all live in or around Washington DC, and the district has… I think Biden won in the ’90s? It is… You could live in DC and never meet a Republican, and never talk with one, and so you get like everybody is supporting Biden, or you can live in these rural small towns and everybody… And that we have… I mean, it’s kind of insane that we sort geographically and politically, and the political opinions map to where you happen to live on this plot of dirt, it conceptually doesn’t make a lot of sense.

0:35:29.2 Aaron Powell: But… That you just kind of… It’s easy to talk yourself into thinking there was fraud because you don’t know anyone who voted for the other guy, and you can turn on the TV and hear all these people telling you this. And so is this something where this is happening because of the structural things in the way our political system is arranged, our electoral system, or is it just that we’ve kind of sorted ourselves and now we are closed off to anyone who thinks different from us, and so we kind of assume that our side is maybe bigger or more powerful than it actually is?

0:36:10.3 Andy Craig: Yeah, that’s certainly a part of it. Even going back to the ’70s, there was a famous quip by, I forget what his name was, he wrote for the New Yorker or The Atlantic or something like that, and he said, “How could Nixon have won? I don’t know anybody who voted for him.” And that’s absolutely the case. And it goes in both directions. You’re right about DC, but it’s absolutely the case if you live in rural small-​town Arkansas, like where I came from, you might occasionally encounter a Democratic voter, but even they will be conservative Democrats.

0:36:48.1 Andy Craig: And so it is very easy to become immersed in this narrative where you look around and everybody you know in your whole world is on one side of this political divide, so how could it have legitimately played out any differently when you see the numbers come in and it turns out you actually did lose? And, I think part of that is that we also have the paucity of voices, that we don’t have the rural liberals and the urban conservatives like we used to, not just in elected office, but in the political media and culture.

0:37:34.7 Andy Craig: It has become so strongly sorted that you don’t see the countervailing, the opposite bucking the trend sort of voices, and those can be key to bridging that gap. And it’s not… I mean, this is… And you see… [chuckle] I think there’s actually a demand for this, so one of the things you see is that coastal liberals love, love, love, to latch on to any time they can find a rural conservative, particularly a religious figure or a clergyman who will side with them on immigration or abortion or whatever the issue is.

0:38:17.7 Andy Craig: And on the flip side, Republicans, you know… [chuckle] Look who their last president was, he was not from rural Iowa, he was the class trader who was the billionaire from Queens, but who turned on the elites. Or if you look at Tucker Carlson, who is a silver-​spooned kind of New York elite media figure or JD Vance, who worked for Peter Thiel and all these sorts of things. People like to latch on to that as a kind of own the other side thing, but partly it’s because I think people realize it’s oddly underrepresented and it upsets the sort of dichotomy narrative.

0:39:04.8 Andy Craig: And I think it would be healthier if we had more of that, and if we had a system that encouraged that sort of diversity and mixing a little bit more.

0:39:16.4 Trevor Burrus: In terms of addressing possible solutions, especially when it comes to electoral laws themself, anything that would influence a electorate, everything… And we’ve been fighting these fights for… I’ve been involved with many of them at the Supreme Court for a decade, and even moving a polling station can cause people to just lose their minds because it’s now 10, five blocks further, and so maybe that will affect Democrat votes more than Republican votes or something. Obviously, things like voter ID and gerrymandering makes people go crazy. But they’re going crazy in a very… What they perceive is their immediate short-​term interest for the next election.

0:39:58.2 Trevor Burrus: I feel like that’s usually their biggest concern that they have. And this makes it all very difficult, and it makes me honestly pretty pessimistic because it’s very hard to write the rules of the game while the game is being played. You can do something before the game starts and say, Do we all agree that there should be voter ID, in almost like a Rawlsian original position. We… Neither of us know, neither party knows who this will affect negatively or positively, but do we generally agree on this rule? I see that to be very difficult to do and just increasingly difficult to change any electoral law, so it makes me pessimistic, I don’t know where you come in on that.

0:40:36.7 Andy Craig: No, it’s certainly the case that it is very difficult to find things that can get cross-​party support. And even relatively little things, like I said earlier, tinkering with early voting hours or voter ID rules and that sort of thing, that wouldn’t even touch most of the stuff I’m talking about here, but you’re right, it just drives people crazy. And certainly, there’s a big role here for the classic libertarian critique, which is that if government wasn’t doing so much we could fight about it less, and that is certainly a big important part of it, and also decentralizing so that it’s not all at the national level.

0:41:21.6 Andy Craig: I do think there are some good prospects for reform that are starting to bubble up. One of them is ranked-​choice voting, which is probably the one that has gotten the most traction. It was adopted in Maine, and it was adopted in Alaska in a slightly different version, and it’s been adopted at the local level in a bunch of places.

0:41:43.1 Aaron Powell: For listeners who don’t know what that is, can you just quickly sketch how that works?

0:41:46.9 Andy Craig: Sure. Ranked-​choice voting is also known as instant runoff, and it’s when instead of picking one candidate on your ballot, and the one with the most votes just wins, you rank them, and then it goes through this process where the last, the lowest performing candidates are eliminated, their votes are reallocated according to their voters’ second preference, and so what you end up with is a system where nobody gets elected until they clear a fifth… The majority threshold through this process, as opposed to what you have now, where you have a three-​way race, somebody can win with 40%, 38%, something like that.

0:42:30.3 Andy Craig: And so one of the things, it encourages less negative campaigning, because you have to appeal to be the second choice or the third choice, or as the case may be, of the other candidates in the race. It’s a little bit… Not radically, but it’s a little bit more conducive to have a multi-​party… Participate… More than two parties participating in an election, it gets rid of the spoiler effect. And so to narrow in just on a case, one particular example of how this passed or how it was adopted.

0:43:08.9 Andy Craig: In Maine, they had a governor, Paul LePage, who was elected, I think it was under 40%, at least one of the times, but twice in a row, he was elected on a very, very short majority, and it was because there was an independent or a Green, left-​leaning third party candidate, who did very well and was a spoiler. And so then they did… It went back and forth through the legislature and the court and stuff a lot of time, but ultimately what cemented it was being able to do it through the initiative process.

0:43:40.4 Andy Craig: And that’s something in the states that have it, I think that’s where a lot of the prospects for adopting various reforms is, is going to be through the initiative process, because that by design lets you bypass the incumbent legislators. And there’s a lot of things that are popular, but are not in the interest of the majority party in a given state. So I think that’s the case with a lot of electoral reform.

0:44:11.4 Andy Craig: One of the other ideas is non-​partisan elections, which is overwhelmingly popular. If you ask people about it, they love the idea of non-​partisan elections. But only one state right now, Nebraska, for historical reasons, currently has a non-​partisan state legislature. So that’s the kind of thing that could be adopted. You could have potentially a state decide to use a more, a proportional representation system, which is where you vote for a party list and they get… The seats get allocated according to the total number of votes that each won, which is a very common and popular system overseas, but has been pretty foreign to American politics. So that’s a potential something that could be done at the state level, potentially bypassing incumbent office holders.

0:45:02.4 Andy Craig: So I think, one of the things I mention in the article, there’s a lot of pros and cons to these different reform possibilities, and even all the way up to the… There’s the national popular vote interstate compact some are trying to push through for the Electoral College, which I’m pretty iffy on constitutionally and merits-​wise. But I think it’s important that there just needs to be experimentation, there needs to be… American states have a lot of structural constitutional autonomy to decide how they run their own elections, including their elections for federal office, but particularly for all their state offices. And to a large degree, it’s kind of been a blind carbon copy of the federal system of… But it doesn’t have to be. So I think we’re starting to see the prospects for state-​level reform and experimentation come through, and if there is a way out, if there’s a reason to not be so pessimistic, I think that’s where it’s going to come from.

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0:46:21.1 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.