Below is my post in today’s Politico | Arena. The question is “Will Citizens United alter American campaigns and if so, how?”
Water finds it way downhill; corporate money finds it way into campaigns. McCain-Feingold was not an effective bulwark against corporate money. It was simply the election lawyer full employment act.
One of my favorite examples of the ridiculousness of McCain-Feingold had to do with the prohibition on coordination between candidate campaigns and independent expenditures. I worked for firms that were doing consulting work for both the candidate and the IE in the same election. But, the lawyers told us, that was OK as long as a “firewall” existed in the office that kept information from being shared between the two sides. In other words, the law said, as long as you give the appearance of your right hand not coordinating with your left hand, you’re fine.
In my mind, the impact of Citizens United will be less about the maximization of institutional money in campaigns and more about its overtness. Before, the money made its way downhill through subterranean chambers. Now, it’s going to be like a dam broke above ground. The question to me is whether the public will be so outraged by the houses and trees being washed away that the Congress is forced to pass new legislation. I worry that the public will survey the damage with abject resignation and say, “Well, at least now it’s out in the open.”
In 2004, Senator Reid got a majority of the white vote (58 percent) against a weak opponent (Richard Ziser). Senator Kerry, on the other hand, only got 43 percent of the white vote in Nevada. Given that whites were 77 percent of the 2004 electorate, Reid won (61 percent to 35 percent) and Kerry lost (48 - 51).
By improving performance and turnout among black and Latino voters, Barack Obama was able to overcome the fact that he, like Kerry, lost the white vote in Nevada (45 - 53). African-Americans were 10 percent of the Nevada electorate in 2008 compared to 7 percent in 2004, and Obama got 94 percent of the African-American vote compared to 86 percent for Kerry. Latinos went from 10 percent to 15 percent of the electorate and Obama received 76 percent of the Latino vote. My September 2008 polling for the Obama campaign showed that registered Latinos who had never voted before were his strongest supporters. The post-election poll I did for the Annenberg Public Policy Center drove home that the campaign delivered those voters.
A Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll conducted late last summer highlights Senator Reid’s challenge. Against Sue Lowden, Reid was only getting 34 percent of the white vote - barely half the percentage of the white vote he got in 2004 and 9 points lower than Kerry got in his losing cause. The Kos poll also had Reid getting 58 percent of the black vote, 28 points lower than Kerry. Nate Silver correctly observes that “as someone whose best-case scenario probably involved cobbling together 51-53 percent of the electorate, turning off even a small fraction of black voters could be highly injurious.” Finally, the Kos poll had Reid getting 58 percent of the Latino vote - 2 points less than Kerry and 18 less than Obama.
Getting back to the high fifties with white voters is extremely unlikely; it will take the Reid campaign a lot of work to get to the 45 percent that Obama earned. Black voters may again be around 10 percent of the electorate but Reid wasn’t going to get in the nineties with African-American voters even prior to the release of his unfortunate comments about the president. To get enough voters to win, Reid needs to get back to the polls the many Latinos for whom November 2008 was the first election in which they had ever voted.
A key part of the Republican strategy to hold the governor’s office and the state house in Texas is to keep African-American and Hispanic turnout at manageable levels. For example, Republicans think that the fact that Barack Obama is not on the ballot in HD 133 will help them defeat Kristi Thibaut. But it’s not just hope that gets voters to the polls. It’s also anger. Hispanic turnout and performance nationwide didn’t increase in 2006 because Latinos were excited about the Democrats on the ballot. Instead, they were mad the about nasty immigration debate and the way Republicans were making United States citizens of Hispanic descent feel like something less than real Americans.
By appealing to the tea baggers he needs to win his primary, Governor Rick Perry (helped out by Attorney General Greg Abbott) may find himself incurring the wrath of African-American and Hispanic voters alike. Back in April, Perry hinted at secession and endorsed a non-binding resolution in support of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment. Cowed neither by the law nor the fact that Texas has more uninsureds than any other state, Abbott jumped on board — ostensibly to block health care reform but really to score points with the extreme elements of the party.
Problem is, the 10th Amendment is more than just the refuge of today’s tea baggers. Throughout our country’s history, it has also been the preferred constitutional strategy of those who had no interest in letting non-whites sit at the table. In his book, The Tenth Amendment and State Sovereignty, University of Arkansas Law Professor Mark Killenbeck writes:
Alone of the 10 amendments that, by some reckonings, the Bill of Rights comprises, the Tenth Amendment has a sordid past. In the mid-nineteenth century, it served to shield the institution of slavery, and on the eve of secession Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi rested his defense of the rights of slave states on the Tenth Amendment. When, in the aftermath of the Civil War, Congress sought to safeguard the liberties of the freedmen, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as “repugnant to the Tenth Amendment.” By these holdings, as Jesse Choper has pointed out, the Court “largely thwarted the political branches’ efforts to insure racial freedom and to advance the civil liberties of the politically underprivileged. These causes, as a consequence, were blocked for nearly seventy-five years.”
In more recent times, the Tenth Amendment became the mainstay of racists seeking to preserve Jim Crow. A Texas Democrat charged that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s World War II edict on fair employment practice violated the Tenth Amendment, and the Mississippi governor, Fielding Wright, who was Strom Thurmond’s running mate on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948 grounded his opposition to Harry Truman’s civil rights program on the Tenth Amendment. In 1960, the president of the Southern States Industrial Council, calling attention to “its opposition to the encroachment of the Federal Government into the area of authority reserved to the States by the Tenth Amendment,” single out the attempt “now being made to enact a so-called ‘Civil Rights’ bill” as “the culminating effort to denude the States of all power.” During the mobilization of Freedom Summer in 1964, southern white students, led by six Delta State College undergraduates, formed the Association of Tenth Amendment Conservatives to defend “the time-honored and history-proven custom” of racial segregation against the “impending invasion” of Mississippi by northern college students. In like manner a year later, Congressman John Bell Williams of Mississippi, a white supremacist firebrand, told a Natchez constituent that he favored legislation “reaffirming the limitation of powers imposed on the federal government by the Tenth Amendment.”
With the immigration debate, Republicans counted on Hispanics not holding their rhetoric against them. That Obama got two-thirds of the Hispanic vote shows how well that worked. In Texas, Republicans are betting that the history of the Tenth Amendment doesn’t get held against them. Given that Texas recently became a majority-minority state, that may not be a very good bet.
Whoever said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result was probably thinking about the California initiative process. We keep on putting initiatives on the ballot thinking it will solve all our problems and we keep getting the same results: either the initiatives don’t pass or the problems get worse.
Initiatives Tend to Lose Earlier this year, Governor Schwarzenegger spoke of a day of reckoning and California voters reckoned they would reject 5 of the 6 budget-related ballot measures in the May special election. The fact that voters defeated all four of his government reform ballot measures in 2005 didn’t keep the governor from trying again. It’s a state of mind shared by many who would wield power in California: more than 50 ballot initiatives have qualified for the ballot this decade. Yet less than 30 percent passed.
Loss of Trust Just because these initiatives didn’t pass doesn’t mean that Schwarzenegger was wrong about the critical condition in which California state government finds itself. What was wrong was his treatment program: insiders gathering in smoke-filled rooms (or tents), deciding what they think is best for the people of California, putting it on the ballot and then waging million dollar media campaigns against the insiders who were never invited in the tent in the first place or who were there and didn’t like what came out. Voters have completely lost any trust in the incestuous politico-corporate complex that plays an endless game of self-enriching tug-of-war in Sacramento. If insiders are proposing it, consulting real people only when the deals are cut and the initiative is on the ballot, then the voters are against it.
But the insiders are at it again. A whole new set of initiatives is being proposed by California Forward and Repair California. Others have written intelligently about the merits of their proposals. I’m just here to say that I’d be willing to wager that none of their initiatives will pass. Both organizations have polls that say I’m wrong. But a Field Poll last February showed that voters supported all 6 of the measures in the May special, too. To quote a dear friend and top-notch strategist, California voters are “incredibly pessimistic but, rather than angry, numb and therefore risk averse, rather than open to bold new initiatives.” I couldn’t agree more. And the revolution didn’t start with numb voters.
The convention met for 127 days, deliberating as 30 separate standing committees, and created a document that consisted of 22 articles. Then, after a spirited campaign that saw “constitution” and “anti- constitution” clubs spring up all over the state, the pro-ratification forces prevailed by a popular vote of 77,959 to 67,134—a margin of more than 7 percent.
Historians generally agree that the 1879 Constitution left much to be desired. As Pepperdine University professor Gordon Lloyd observes, “the 1879 Constitution is an excellent example of what a constitution should not look like. [It] constitutionalized the politics of class and race and was less inclusive and liberal than the first.”
Is It Real if Prop 13 and Supermajorities Are Off the Table? I think a spirited campaign would be the best possible spin anyone can put on the upcoming campaign to get a constitutional convention on the ballot. So much of what ails California relates to how we finance our government. To truly address the question, there needs to be an honest discussion of Proposition 13 (the cap on property taxes passed in 1978) and supermajorities (passing a budget in the legislature or raising taxes requires a two-thirds vote). Yet some observers have pointed out that “[a]s written, neither of the major reform packages aimed at the 2010 ballot leave much room for changing Prop. 13.”
Supermajorities, apparently (and appropriately) are open for discussion. Yet even that discussion, in the context of an initiative campaign, will make 1879 look like a gentleman’s debate. A recent poll by the Unruh Institute of Politics showed that a majority of voters (53 percent) supported keeping the supermajority even when told that “[some] people say that this gives too much power to the minority, creating gridlock and allowing a small number of legislators to vote down the will of the majority.” Only 35 percent of voters wanted to change to a straight majority. The poll was taken just a few months after the state was required to issue more than a billion dollars in i.o.u.’s because the Republican minority had blocked any tax increases for months.
The poll respondents are the same voters who are going to be asked to pass initiatives to fix these problems, including two that will relate to a constitutional convention. I think voters will do what California voters did when asked to vote on a convention in 1898, 1914, 1928, and 1930. They will vote no.
Treating Californians Like Adults Instead of the same old program — insiders dictate an initiative and spend millions of dollars to dumb it down on TV — I believe that changes as sweeping as California government requires a different approach. Instead of insulting the intelligence of voters with the usual 30 second spots, I think that the well-intentioned proponents of change would benefit from treating Californians like adults.
What if reform advocates went a year without putting something on the ballot and instead had a conversation with Californians about California state government and how it works? The second that something is on the ballot, voters are rightly concerned that somebody is trying to sell them something they don’t want. But if nothing is on the ballot, then maybe voters will lose some of their numbness. Some may passively listen. Some may actively process. And some may even fully engage.
Where Does the Money Go? USC professor John Matsusaka wrote an op-ed in 2008 asking “where does it all go? California is spending 40 percent more than four years ago, but on what exactly?” What, if for the first time ever, we spent a year talking about on what exactly? Matusaka writes:
One possibility is that we simply do not notice all of the valuable services we receive. A national 2007 survey by William G. Howell at the University of Chicago and Martin R. West at Brown University found that respondents underestimated spending in their school district by 60%; on average, they believed spending was $4,231 per student when in fact it was $10,377. They also found that Americans underestimated teacher salaries by 30%. How many Californians know that public school teachers in the state earn an average of $59,000 a year, essentially tied with Connecticut for the highest average pay in the country? Likewise, perhaps we don’t notice the repaired roads or new buses and trains that take us to work.
On the other hand, maybe these billions of dollars just do not translate into services that are valuable to us.
Public Education First, Initiative Later Have we as a state ever had a discussion about these matters without it being tarnished by partisan politics or initiative ideology? We all would learn so much from a public education effort that started with TV commercials, websites and social networking all devoted to the task of explaining where it all goes. How much goes to education? How much to transportation? How much to health care? How much to state parks? How much to prisons?
Some voters will gain a newfound appreciation for how their taxpayer money is being spent. Some will be horrified. Some will be bored. But the discussions that ensue will be more about policy than politics. Around water coolers and kitchen tables would be many more discussions about our government than there are today, many beginning with exclamations of insight, like “Did you know that…” The goal here would be to lay a foundation. Voters can’t be expected to be a partner in building a new state government if they don’t understand the one they have.
The next step in the program will be an actual exchange between the public and the parties with a specific interest in reforming state government. The constitutional convention advocates deserve credit for holding town halls, but I believe that more voters can be harvested if the field is plowed first. After 6 months of multimedia education about state government, voters would feel like they knew enough to express an opinion on how to make government work better.
Feinstein vs. Schwarzenegger Imagine, once voters are warmed up, town hall meetings that were not centered on a ballot initiative but rather on the whole range of ideas that could make California work. Imagine that we brought out all of California’s most compelling personalities to increase interest in the town hall meetings. Since the town halls would not be for or against anything on the ballot, participation wouldn’t mean anybody was taking sides yet; it would just mean they were being part of the statewide discussion. Imagine a series of town hall meetings featuring a discussing between Dianne Feinstein and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They could have a “debate” on all the tough issues but they wouldn’t be playing gotcha the way campaign opponents do; instead, they would simply be drawing on their vast experience and their place on opposite sides of the aisle to explain the spectrum of proposals on everything from Prop 13 to term limits.
Of course, some would say we can’t wait that long before we fix California. To which I would bet them we’re going to have to wait that long or longer anyway: I don’t believe the reform initiatives will pass. And then where will we be?
Getting Voter Buy-In Fixing California will require the buy-in of voters. Today’s frustrated, numb voters are in no mood for bold new initiatives. Getting them in the mood will require educating them on what California state government does and how it might do those things better without the demagoguery inherent in political advertising. The foundations funding California Forward and the corporations bankrolling Repair California would do better to invest in a multimedia public education program drawing on the wealth of star power (political and otherwise) that would be willing to talk about the issues outside of the context of a vote. The public would truly work with policymakers to decide what should be on the ballot. That’s the only way the kind of ballot initiative we desperately need (whether a constitutional convention or something else) can pass in today’s political climate.
Foundations and corporations spending millions of dollars on another government reform initiative (or three) in 2010 is very risky if not insane. Spending it on public education first would not only be a gift and an end in itself, but it may also prove a strategic model for improving local and state government around the country.
To the extent that the immigration debate gets any coverage in the media these days, it seems to be about the way the proponents of human rights are shouting past the xenophobes and vice versa. Meanwhile, Europe and Japan both are giving serious consideration to what it will do for their economies as the number of residents older than 65 rises relative to the working age population.
The U.S. Census recently released projections for the U.S. population in 2050. The projections included what the population would be if the U.S. experiences a lot of immigration between now and then (”High Immigration”) and if the U.S. experiences no immigration. I took those numbers and calculated the number of working age (18-65) residents divided by the total population (including children and seniors). The number is intended to be a rough approximation of how many people each taxpayer’s contribution to the system needs to support.
Last year, there were 1.59 people in the U.S. for each working age adult. In 2050, if we allow many immigrants, that number will jump to 1.76. Even higher, however, is the number if we allow no net immigrants: 1.81. In the “No Immigration” scenario, the percentage of Americans 65 and older will double between now and 2050.
If we don’t pass sensible immigration reform soon, who will do the work in 2050? And how much more will they be paying in taxes?
Update [12/30/2009]: My good friend Eddie Aldrete makes the same point and more with great eloquence in Latino Magazine. Here’s a highlight:
The U.S. has a demand for 500,000 to 600,000 low-skilled workers each year, yet the federal government only issues 5,000 visas for that category. The arbitrary visa cap and the byzantine immigration process are the encouragement to enter illegally. California farmers are moving some of their operations to Mexico to overcome the shortages of farm workers. Our strict limits on high-skilled workers are driving U.S. companies to locate or relocate in Canada. During a recession, why are we exporting low-skilled jobs to Mexico and high-skilled jobs to Canada?
Today, Politico asked, “What does Obama gain by calling bankers ‘fat cats?’” Here was my response:
When I was Deputy Corporations Commissioner for the State of California, I learned that if there was one thing that our licensees wanted from their financial regulator, it was consistency. The number of players and moving parts in the financial game is nearly infinite, the companies were saying, so all we ask from you is to resist the temptation to keep changing the rules.
By calling bankers “fat cats,” President Obama is of course scoring political points. A recent Democracy Corps poll showed that nearly half of the less than perfect voters that Democrats will need to prevent a midterm bloodbath are upset about “Big banks and Wall Street getting handouts while nothing is done for working Americans.” The president is demonstrating he feels their pain.
But I hope that he is also doing something more. One doesn’t have to view the big banks as evil to understand why they support the status quo - they were built to function under the existing regulatory structure (e.g., the primacy of the Federal Reserve). As political adversaries, the big banks are formidable, able to drop big bucks into the campaign coffers of nervous legislators. Using rhetoric like “fat cats” is the right thing to do if the goal is to overcome the banks’ natural resistance and set up a regulatory structure that responsibly addresses all the tough issues, from banks too big to fail to the conflict of interest inherent in credit agencies.
Big financial institutions will adapt to whatever becomes law. The best way to make this a win for everybody is to pass comprehensive, effective reform that will stand the test of time. The financial institutions will operate with the confidence that the regulatory scheme won’t shift beneath their feet; consumers will know that someone is minding the store. If sound bites like “fat cat” help motivate voters to push their representatives towards real reform, then President Obama is making productive use of his bully pulpit.
As complicated as the issue is (or maybe because of it), this could be a case where good politics and good policy converge.
Politico has an on-line debate called “The Arena,” a place where they ask political professionals about the day’s news. Today, they asked me and others about the meaning Obama’s declining approval ratings (chart above). Here was my response:
The predictive value of Obama’s declining job performance numbers is not deep. All the numbers say is that if the Dems don’t deliver on the issues that matter most to voters, like the economy and the war in Afghanistan, Dems will suffer serious losses in 2010. What the numbers can’t predict at all is whether credit will come unstuck or Afghanistan’s army will rise to the occasion. Next year’s tallies of jobs created at home or American lives lost in Afpak are the numbers that will truly predict the midterms, not Obama’s approval today.
Others had a much different view. Check out “The Arena” if you want to see more.
The LA Times has a story on the dramatic changes new Disney chairman Rich Ross is bringing to the old way of doing business:
In meetings with producers, filmmakers and agents, Ross attacked the industry custom of spending $40 million on a TV advertising blitz two weeks before a film’s opening, rather than enlisting more targeted campaigns that harness social networks and the broader Web.
I loved the book Moneyball. Not just because it was funny and not just because it was about major league baseball. It also forcefully made an argument that makes a whole lot of sense to a pollster like me, namely that data matters. It’s not enough any more for a crusty old baseball scout to watch a high school kid work out for a couple of hours and then say to himself “I know what a player looks like and that’s a player.” Today, you have to use data far more complex than batting average and ERA to assess exactly what a player contributes to the likelihood of your team winning a baseball game. I’m not sure the 35 year old general manager of the Boston Red Sox even so much as played baseball at Yale but he sure knows his sabermetrics. In other words, he has so much more data than did his predecessors even 10 years ago.
I also love the concept of Wikipedia. Know something about something? Write about it on Wikipedia. The whole world is free to jump in and edit until something with more than a passing resemblance to the truth results. And the whole world is free to benefit from the result. An open source encyclopedia.
Today, thanks to a Facebook friend of mine I haven’t seen since 1981, I came across an organization that aspires to use open source data to create “a standard of universal global sustainability.” I think of it as “cap and trade on steroids.” The basic idea behind cap and trade is that a company’s pollution is being valued. If the company goes above a certain standard, it has to pay. If it meets its government-imposed standard, it neither pays nor gets paid. If it releases less pollution than its standard, it gets paid in credits that it can save, trade or sell.
Ursula, it seems, is saying that we can apply more or less the same principle to every action by any individual or company or government if we use an open source method of valuing everything we do (instead of just air pollution) on a sustainability scale. Leaving aside the politics of creating such a scale, it’s fun to imagine a world in which it existed. Top to bottom incentives for living sustainable lives.
They have videos and more on their website: http://www.ursulaproject.org. Apparently it was started by some renewable energy traders. It’s an interesting idea.
The U.S. has a demand for 500,000 to 600,000 low-skilled workers each year, yet the federal government only issues 5,000 visas for that category. The arbitrary visa cap and the byzantine immigration process are the encouragement to enter illegally. California farmers are moving some of their operations to Mexico to overcome the shortages of farm workers. Our strict limits on high-skilled workers are driving U.S. companies to locate or relocate in Canada. During a recession, why are we exporting low-skilled jobs to Mexico and high-skilled jobs to Canada?
