Sonny's Corner: Campaigns, Election Laws and Governing
"Sonny's Corner" is a regular column in Prairie Fire, featuring commentary on civil rights and justice issues. Our friend and Omaha colleague, Joseph P. "Sonny" Foster, died suddenly at age 54 in August 2005. He left an uncompleted agenda, as did many of our civil rights and justice mentors and heroes. We shall attempt to move forward on that unfinished agenda through this column.
The United States is veering ever closer to a financial calamity that would lead inevitably to the Great Decline. The lack of will in Washington to exercise fiscal responsibility has caused the rating agency Standard and Poor’s to downgrade U.S. Treasury debt, once considered the world’s most secure investment.
Yet those in Congress continue to behave as hot-rodders playing chicken. All it takes—it could happen quickly—is the spooking of the bond markets, pushed by malicious short-sellers or by a panic, and we will find ourselves out over the cliff in uncharted fiscal free fall. This is the nation’s number one security threat.
The U.S. Senate last January demonstrated that it could not reform itself procedurally to deal with the nation’s fiscal challenges. Sen. Tom Udall’s filibuster reforms, based on the Constitution itself, were buried by a bipartisan majority long since grown comfortable with what now occupies its real attention: fundraising for the next elections and ideological combat in a media-soaked political culture.
But consider: isn’t this the kind of behavior we encourage through our election laws? Serious candidates need to raise funds, hire election consultants, charge up their bases and get media attention in order to succeed in our winner-take-all, plurality election systems. Because we reward those behaviors in our candidates with election victories, we should not be surprised when they continue them once in office.
It is long past time to consider election laws that do not put a premium on fundraising, playing to a base, negative campaigning and excessive partisanship. Such model election procedures are more common outside the U.S. than within it (Australia is a good example), but that could be changing.
Last year Oakland, Calif., adopted ranked-choice, instant-runoff elections in which voters rank their choices instead of voting for only one candidate. The winner must get a majority of votes, not just a plurality. If no one gets a majority of first-place votes, voters’ second choices are taken into account systematically to get a candidate to majority.
In Oakland’s first mayoral race under its new system, one candidate played by the old rules, raising and spending more than the others in the traditional way. He received the most first-place votes but fell short of a majority. Another candidate raised fewer funds but campaigned hard to be the number two choice among supporters of other candidates. By avoiding negative campaigning and taking time to listen to others’ bases, she wound up the majority winner in the instant runoff.
More jurisdictions, including states as a whole, should be experimenting with election systems that reward the kind of behaviors in campaigns that we would like to see in our elected officials when they are in office. Ranked choice is only one of several options that can change election dynamics and candidate behavior.
Here is a hypothetical memo that might someday be written to an incumbent U.S. senator in a state that has adopted election reforms:
To: Senator
From: Campaign Manager
Re: Your Re-election
Senator, I believe you will win again in the upcoming election, but to do so you will have to revise your old campaign strategies because of the new election reforms in our state. Here’s why:
- The new election system will require you to get a majority rather than a plurality, in order to preclude a winner most people voted against. Voters who like the Green, Libertarian or Independent Party candidates will turn out; they will understand that their votes will not be wasted, as they can also make you or the other major party candidate their number two choice and thereby affect the election.
- Consequently, that extra margin you have always enjoyed by employing opposition research techniques (what the press calls negative campaigning) may be counterproductive. To win, you will almost certainly need to be the second choice of many voters, regardless of their ideological base or their first choice candidate.
- Your fundraising prowess will help, but money will not be decisive. You cannot count on a low-turnout name recognition contest or count on the press anointing you early. Our state adopted election reforms in part because of concerns over campaign finance; your opponents will be trying to win office by being other than just the best funded, and with the new system, they have a chance. Also, voters may be better informed because they will have to know more about the candidates in order to rank them. Big media buys from a campaign war chest may be less effective than the adept use of social media.
- Senator, the best thing you can do right now toward your re-election is to tend to your job. Recognize good arguments regardless of the ideological base they come from; work to compromise across the aisle; drop the temptation to go negative; cut back on the time you spend fundraising and use it instead to reconnect with a broad base of voters. Solve the nation’s problems.
The state in the memo above is hypothetical, but Nebraska with its reformist tradition could be such a state. Nebraska’s election laws are the province of the nonpartisan Nebraska unicameral, itself a 1934 election product of the great reformer George Norris. The Populist Party convention in 1892 in Omaha, a center of the progressive movement, gave an important boost to secret ballot voting. More recently Nebraska has led the way (with Maine) in showing how to align more closely, without a constitutional amendment, the presidential popular vote with the Electoral College vote.
Nebraska would be a good place to demonstrate election reforms that would seek to reverse the rewards for congressional behaviors that now put our nation at peril.
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