I want to make a couple simple points today about my views of what is wrong with the current U.S. election laws and then try to convince you that both of the, pardon me, what's wrong with government in this country today?
and I'll point out two effective...
Now, Richard, we only have one hour.
Okay, okay.
I'll focus on two problems and try to convince you that they have caused by the same two policies.
And so I'm not going to engage in a rant on government, but you're right, Mark.
I probably could go on for at least an hour and ten minutes on that topic and I won't do that.
Basically what I believe is that under our current election laws,
we all know that third party candidates and their supporters are effectively disenfranchised.
They're disenfranchised because of ballot access laws, they're disenfranchised because of debate access laws, or maybe they aren't laws, policies, is that what we should say, John?
Probably, yeah.
Okay, and also by the winner-take-all type of elections that we have in this country.
Now, it's not just that third parties voters are disenfranchised. What I would like to argue is essentially all voters are disenfranchised.
And so it's more serious than those in the Libertarian Party might believe.
A second observation that I make, and I can't support this with data, but it's the observation that politics between the two major parties is more polarized than it has been in my memory.
And I think the consequence of this is to make me thoroughly disgusted with the political process.
Process. I look at the people who are supposed to represent us and they don't resemble anyone
who I know or who I want to know. And so, at one point, I think people said cynically
that they would like to be governed by a random sample of the population, which for those
for those of us who are in the public education system is slightly frightening, but when I look at our governing officials, it couldn't be any worse in my opinion, okay.
Now, first of all, let me talk about some evidence when I say that almost everyone in this country is effectively disenfranchised.
I could go back to the argument, well, with any large number of voters, the idea of any
vote being a decisive vote is extremely small, and so in that sense, if we vote in large
numbers, there's no way to expect every voter to end up being decisive in every election
or ever being decisive, and I know no way around that except to be governed by very small political
All 80 of them stayed with the party who held them initially.
There were 20 state senate seats and all 20 of them stayed with the same party that had
them originally.
There were 53 house seats and all 53 of them stayed with the party that had them initially.
And so what I would suggest is that in California if I wanted to, I could predict the winner
Now, is that disturbing to you that the same party wins the same districts every time?
I guess some people might say, well, that's what the public wants.
Democrats, I'll show you that I think this is the result of some contrived things.
Second example, from the 2000 races in the state of Massachusetts.
There were 10 incumbent Democrats running for reelection.
Of the ten, five of them ran unopposed, and three of the other five ran by opponents who
had never entered any political race before.
Now, I'm not suggesting that the best credentials that a candidate can have is having run for
were held prior to political office, but I do think that we know that people who jump
into elections at a fairly high level either are there trying to make a name for themselves
so that they can maybe win another race later on, or they might be third party candidates
who want to avail themselves of an opportunity to express their views.
But certainly we do not have novices unless they are famous individuals running against
incumbents and expecting to have a close race.
So you know we might say that there were only two of ten congressional races where there
There was the pretense of having a contest. I don't have the results, but I suspect that
neither of those outcomes were very close.
In the last three U.S. congressional elections, over 75% of the races were won by what is
is generally considered a landslide margin of 60 to 40 or more.
90% were won by 10 percentage points or more.
And 10 percentage points is a pretty substantial margin.
40% of the state legislative races, the incumbent ran unopposed.
In the 2002 U.S. Congressional elections, eight incumbents were defeated.
In 2004 elections, seven incumbents were defeated.
And we know that more than eight and seven in those two years had engaged in shameless acts since their prior election.
In this country, 90% of the voters go to polls where there is no election where the underdog has any chance of winning.
90% of the voters go to polls and they vote in elections where the underdog has no chance of winning.
That's right.
Now, if that is true, it's hard to argue that anyone is franchised in a meaningful way.
Yes, I understand that a lot of people think that voting is a response, a civic duty.
I think a lot of people think that voting is fun, and those are certainly good reasons to vote,
but they aren't reasons to convince ourselves that voters are franchised.
So the consequence is that the outcome is determined by who the incumbent is or by who wins the party primary and it's not determined by the voters.
Okay, so I hope that I've made a fairly convincing case that almost all voters are effectively disenfranchised.
Now the second point that I promised to make is that elections today have resulted in congresses and legislative bodies
and other bodies which are more polarized than they ever have been to my memory.
And one piece of evidence is that today I'm told that if you know information about the income, the age, the race, the occupation, the religion, the education of a voter,
that you know what party he's going to vote in with a high degree of precision and so if we have voters who are die-hard Democrats and voters who are die-hard Republicans as opposed to a large number of voters who flip-flop and again I'm ignoring third parties just for the sake of simplifying the discussion but if we don't have any movement of voters between
and the two parties, that in and of itself will tend to make the parties polarized.
Second success of polarization, well I watch the news and I sometimes watch Fox and I realize
I realized that Fox executives are smart enough to know that we have a very polarized group
of citizens, many of them whom are presumably voters, who have their minds made up on everything,
and so now what we have is both sides get their own version of the truth.
I'm not sure that Fox is any more guilty of this than the other networks, although they
are more open about it. I mean, where else do you hear someone say every 30 seconds fair
and balanced? And, you know, that absolutely, absolutely drives me crazy, okay? Or let's
Let's think about this. We have, allegedly, two parties fighting for the middle. In what
way can we think of DeLay and Pelosi as being similar? I can't imagine the two of them having
a civil conversation, much less, say, having an affair, unless she has some type of peculiar
I've never seen two individuals who are so different, and if we think of them as being two of the party leaders, I would say that in and of itself is fairly strong evidence of polarization.
But, you know, we look at the maps. They're red and blue.
And we have two excruciatingly close presidential elections consecutively.
And it's clear in a very real sense that the country is very evenly divided.
But it's not because we have two candidates fighting for the middle and most of the voters just can't decide which of the two to vote for.
It seems like we have polarized the public, or at least for some reason the candidates are so polarized that we split the electorate,
but in very different ways and it for better or for worse certainly affects the legislative process.
You know, we look at things like the Shavo case, we look at the things like appointment of federal
judges and it's increasingly an ugly process. It may be that I'm just getting old and cynical but
I can remember times, I may even have the time periods juxtaposed, so this may not have been exactly the same time, but I can think of leaders like Everett Dirksen for the Republicans from Illinois, and maybe Hubert Humphrey from Minnesota. And while they both had their foibles, I can imagine the two of them sitting down and discuss things that
things civilly, and I could imagine sitting down and feeling comfortable spending an evening
with either one of them or both at the same time. If I had to think contemplate spending
an hour with Tom Delay, I'm not going there. I just won't do that.
Well, apparently he was a fun guy earlier in his career because his nickname was Hot Tub Tom.
Well, that's a side of him I've never seen.
I'd say you were missed if I didn't say. I knew you when you were young and cynical.
Well, okay.
Okay, well, I've done the easy part. I know that I have, in general, a cynical crowd here and so I've described the sorry state that we are in and now I'd like to provide my explanation.
When I say my explanation, let me give credit where credit is due. Much of what I'm saying today comes from what I think is, in general, a fine book.
It's a book titled Fixing Elections, The Failure of America's Winner-Take-All Politics by Stephen Hill.
And Stephen Hill is very liberal, and his examples here all show that bias.
But I think he makes some excellent points, and I've seen things in a completely different way since I read the book.
And so that's my idea about a good book.
Also, it was interesting to me because this was copyrighted in 2001 and he spent a lot of time talking about the 2000 presidential election and he says very clearly in here that he is quite confident that we will have a replay in 2004.
And again, it's because of the polarization. What he's suggesting is that of the people who voted for Republican in 2000, how many of them will vote Republican in 2004, and the answer is almost all of them, and the same for the Democratic Party.
And so the only way we can change things is import or export voters from one side or the other.
We just aren't going to change any minds any longer.
Or I'm not sure if it's minds that were voting patterns is what we're not going to change.
People have made up their mind.
I teach at Auburn University, which is by and large a joy, but I am astounded teaching in the business school having primarily comfortable students from conservative backgrounds who know that everything that George Bush says is true and everyone, everything that any Democratic says is false.
And, you know, we have a generation of people who have made up their minds.
Now, how did they make up their minds?
I guess maybe it was by watching fair and balanced reports on Fox News.
But they are really made up.
And they would have loved this book if a conservative had done the same thing.
They hated the book because he didn't.
I had one very bright student who's going to Duke to law school and get a masters in
economics next year, and she said she had never read anything that made her madder than
this book.
And I said, well, wait till you listen to your law professors at Duke and you'll find
something that makes you even madder than that.
Okay, now let's talk about an alternative to what I call winner-take-all, or it's first
candidate past the post. We know that some places we require runoffs, but very often
whichever candidate gets the most votes in each district is the winner. And so if we're
talking about congressional races, and we have a state with ten congressional districts,
We have ten independent elections and ten winners.
And the election laws are going to vary about whether you need a majority and whether you
have to have a runoff or not.
But in essence, if you do not have the largest number of votes in any of those districts,
what you get is zero representation.
And so we could imagine a situation where we have, let's just avoid the issue of run-offs,
let's suppose that we have 55% Democrats, no matter what the others do, the Democrats,
unless you can get more than the next strongest party, you win no seats.
Now that seems natural to most Americans and they seem to think, well, could it be done
Well, I should point out that it is done in other ways.
We have proportional representation in France, in Ireland, in Australia, sort of in the United Kingdom,
but we also have it in the United States.
I mean, where do we have proportional representation?
I'm sorry?
No? On what election? Well, what about the presidential primaries?
I believe it's the case that in all the democratic states, if there are ten...
What are the... I'm trying to think of the word for the people who go to the...
Electors.
Electors, yeah. Or, in the case of the primary, it's not electors, but ten delegates. If there are ten delegates at stake and you get 20% of the vote, you get two of them.
And so, for the Democratic Party, there's no state where they give the one who gets the most votes all the delegates from that state.
Has that ever struck you as being undemocratic? No. And I believe that in the Republican Party,
about a third of the states do it this way, and there are a lot more that are winner-take-take-all.
You might say, well, gee, but how would it work if we did it for, let's say, a congressional
Delegation. Well, let's go back to an example where a state hypothetically has ten delegates
for the U.S. Congress or ten representatives, ten seats. Now the way we do it today is we
divide the state up into ten districts and we have ten individual fights and the one
who gets the most votes in each of the districts ends up controlling the race.
What we could do is we could have a statewide election where you in essence vote for parties
rather than candidates and what that would mean is that if you got 50% of the votes then
you would get 50% of the winners and if you got 30% you would get 30% and if you got 10%
you would get 10% which means that in large states like California a third party that
could get someone in the US Congress by having just a little bit more than 2% of the total vote.
And so I am convinced that under proportional representation,
what we would find is third, fourth, fifth and sixth parties would thrive.
Now, I'm sure that there are a lot of people who would say, well, that's a bad thing.
I think that you could talk to a governor or any other elected official in this state and they would think about it and decide this sounds like some type of a communist idea or something like that but I don't think that it is and I don't think that this is really a revolutionary way of doing things but what I would like to try to convince you is the outcome I think would be very different
There are two very healthy ways. One is that third parties would be a viable alternative, and not just third, but third, fourth and fifth parties.
Now, a second thing we need to think about. If you vote for a party, what the party does is if there are 10 seats at stake, is they list their candidates in order.
And, if they get all the vote, then all ten of their candidates are selected. If they get 20 percent, the first two are.
Now, if the party were deciding in which order, I know it gives the parties more power, but if you were in charge of the Democratic Party here in Alabama,
How would you decide which person to put number one, which person to put number two, which person to put number three?
How well they did in the partner.
About this is, okay, I'm not sure whether we have...
I mean, I'm sure it would have to be party laws, party rules that would decide this.
But if the party were trying to decide what strategy should we use in figuring out how to rank our candidates?
I'm going to take a poll, but what I would suggest, let's suppose that, you know, it's
pretty even, okay, that the Democratic Party is sure of getting four, they'll probably
get five, they may get six, okay.
What I would suggest is that there would be a very strong argument for listing at least
centrist types of candidates for those marginal slots because at least thinking voters, if
there are such a thing, would realize that in an evenly split state each party is going
to get their first three or four and it's the, you know, what we're doing is we're
Do we want our sixth choice or do we want their fourth choice?
And so I think that it would be incumbent upon both parties to have, let's say, less divisive individuals than Tom DeLay on the marginal slots.
And so I think that overall, it would end up with the parties being less polarized than they are today.
So summing up then, I would say that if we leave the winner takes all, the third parties become very viable.
The parties list more centrist candidates first.
The second thing, I've omitted this up to now,
if it's the case that we can predict the winner
by knowing which party he is from in most congressional races,
where does the election really get determined?
If I know that the Democratic candidate is going to win this race in Massachusetts, where is the race decided in the Democratic primary?
Now what do we know if we have almost all the seats divided up this way?
We have the party primaries deciding who the candidates are, and if we could make some generalization,
The polarization, what type of voters tend to vote in the party primaries?
The polarized ones.
So I would suggest that the selection process is one that
under the current rules we select much more polarized
candidates because all they're concerned about is
they win the primary. They might be a right wing nut or
they might be a left wing nut, but it doesn't make any difference
Okay, let me go on to what might be a little bit more important.
Second explanation is redistricting.
And it's not that redistricting is new.
It's just that redistricting is new.
It's not that redistricting is new.
It's just that it's practiced a whole lot more often and with a greater vengeance than it ever was before.
By law, the federal government is required. I should be careful.
John Soff, please, is in attendance.
And when I start talking about what the Constitution requires,
well, most of the time when you're dealing with an American audience, you can say anything and they'll believe you.
and John sits over there and he won't, but it is the case, but we are required to conduct a census every 10 years and as a result of the census then the congressional seats are reallocated among the states.
And so if a state gets more delegates or representatives, more seats or fewer seats, then they are forced to redistrict, but that doesn't affect very many states.
Now, we have the same type of thing occurring within a state, is that if a state is growing in overall population,
and Human Action, Man Economy and State, The Theory of Money and Credit
The interpretation of one man, one vote principles by the federal courts, the states know that if they do not redistrict frequently, there will be challenges and they will be forced to do so, and so what we find is that almost every state redistricts every ten years, and even after that started, well there was sort of a gentleman's agreement, we'll redistrict and then we'll live with that,
In 2002, the Republicans in Colorado gained control, and they decided we'll do a better job of redistricting, and that was followed by the fiasco in Texas in 2003 and 2004, where the Republicans got control and the Democrats fled the state.
Texas in 2003 and 2004, where the Republicans got control and the Democrats fled the state to avoid a vote coming up and they were trying to decide whether the Texas, what is the police group there that, Texas Rangers, whether they were authorized to go to New Mexico to make arrests or not.
and bring these people back and so we've had this occurring annually in certain states.
Now there's one other thing that has happened, partly because of the polarization of voters.
Voters are more predictable than they were in the past and also because of a great deal
and more demographic information that's being made available it's possible to
discern on very narrow neighborhoods what the proportion of various types of
voters are and so what has happened is is software has developed whereby you
can tell it you know cut the state up into ten districts make sure that the
The population in each district is equal within a fraction of one percent, and other than that, anything goes.
Okay, now let's think about this. I was going to do an overhead, but it was so simple I was embarrassed to put it up.
Let's suppose that this window right here is the outline of a state. Let's think of it as being square, okay?
And let's also think of the population as being perfectly evenly distributed so that the number of voters is directly in proportion to the area.
And what that means by law is that we have to cut up the state into 10 exactly equal congressional districts.
Now for simplicity, let's suppose that we know that everyone in the southern part of the state is a Democrat
and everyone in the northern part of the state is a Republican.
Well, one thing we could do is we could draw the districts horizontally
and there would be five evenly sized ones in the bottom that would be a hundred percent
democrat and five evenly sized ones in the top that would be a hundred percent republican.
The state would be split fifty-fifty and we would have no competitive elections whatsoever.
Now we could take the same state and split it up on ten vertical divisions and each one
One would be 50% Republican and 50% Democrat and we would have 10 very competitive elections
and I guess on average we would have the same outcomes, 5 Republicans and 5 Democrats, although
I would argue that the candidates that we would select in races like that would be different
than the ones that we would select in the prior races.
If we have 100% Republican districts, the winning candidates would very likely be the Tom delays of the world.
Now, what is gerrymandering? Well, it comes from Elbridge Gary, who was the governor of Massachusetts in 1812.
John, am I correct? I knew that you would be there to correct me on this one, so I checked that up.
I think his name is L. Bridge, Gary, not L. Dridge, is that correct?
Okay, I saw that somewhere and I hadn't noticed that before, but I thought I would catch you on this.
But it's either a typo in the last book that I read or his name was L. Bridge.
But he was the first one who was given credit for redistricting with a strategic purpose.
And let's take a simple example here.
If I were, if the Republicans got control of this state,
one thing that would occur to me is, well, why don't we take
the original District 1 down there and keep it that way?
And maybe keep the original District 2 down there
and keep it that way. Maybe even take the original District 3 that way and leave
it that way. And so what we have done, we would have
30 percent of the states, 30 percent of the voters crammed into three districts
of Money and Credit, The Theory of Money and Credit, The Theory of Money and Credit, The
We don't put the necessary redundant voters into the Democratic districts where once they get 50%, putting additional voters in there doesn't do them any good.
And so we waste their votes in that district and take them away in the other.
Now, having seen that, the Republicans might get even more ambitious and they might say,
Well, hell, why don't we give them only two? And so if you do two down there, and eight vertical ones, then that sounds good, but now you have five-eighths of each one Republican and three-eighths Democrat, and so you're running a slight risk of losing one of those races, and if you push too hard, and you say, let's only give them one, so you're losing one of those races, and if you push too hard, and you say, let's only give them one,
You give them one and you cut it up nine ways and then it's five to four and then you run a risk of losing some of these races.
You give them one sure race and you have nine somewhat competitive races.
Now that is essentially the game that is being played.
It's not as simple as all this because population isn't evenly distributed
And we don't have areas that are 100% Republican or 100% Democrat, but you can see with the correct software packages, if you're in control of deciding the, it's sort of like you choose your voters, the voters don't choose the candidates, and that's the game that is essentially played here, okay.
Now, I have a few more minutes, I think, so let me describe this. There's a terminology
So here I think I have straight, it's called, maybe I have it written down here, it's called
slamming, gee I should remember this, oh well. One thing you can do is cram all of one party's
And another thing that you can do is you can, quote unquote, kidnap candidates. And the way that you kidnap candidates is if a candidate lives close to another congressional district, then particularly if you might have a democratic city that has, that's all in one district and it's a democratic district, then you might have a
in the Democratic area and you have two congressmen who live relatively close together, well what you can do by playing with the lawns a little bit, you can put two Democratic incumbents up against each other and there you get the predicted result.
We know that Democratic incumbents always win Democratic districts and when you have two incumbents running in a Democratic district, they always win, the Democrat always wins that one as well.
Given the advantages of incumbents, the worst thing you can do is kidnap them and put them into a race against someone in the same party.
Now bear with me a little bit. What I want to do is to read a couple of excerpts from an article that appeared in the New Yorker pertaining to this.
It's dated December 2003. With his western twang, loping swagger and ever-present cowboy boots, Charlie Stenholm doesn't have much, doesn't much look like or sound like anybody's idea of a victim.
Since 1979, he has been the congressman for a sprawling district west of Dallas, and his votes have reflected the conservative values of the cattle, cotton and oil country back home.
He opposes abortion, fights for balanced budgets, and voted for the impeachment of President Clinton, that's extremely important.
His website features photographs of him carrying or firing guns.
Through it all, though, Stenholm has remained a member of the Democratic Party, and for that offense, he appears likely to lose his job after the next election.
Well, he did lose his job.
Stenholm was a principal target of one of the more bizarre political dramas of recent years.
The Texas redistricting struggle of 2003, following the 2000 census, all states were obligated to
redraw their boundaries, etc., etc. In 2001, that process reduced the standoff in Texas
with the Republican Senate and the Democratic House unable to reach an agreement.
As a result, a panel of federal judges formulated a compromise plan, which more or less replicated the current partisan balance of the states.
But then when the Republicans took control in 2002, they decided that they would do this all over again, and they did.
And a law professor from Texas said this was a fundamental change in the rules of the game.
The Rules of the Game, the rules were fight it out once a decade and let it lie for 10 years and now the rules have apparently changed.
Every time you get the power, you are obliged to use it.
One other example, this is from Pennsylvania, I grew up in West Virginia, but this was Western Pennsylvania nearby.
After the 2000 census, Pennsylvania lost two seats in Congress and its legislature had to establish new district lines.
The Republican leaders engaged in no subterfuge. They candidly admitted that they intended to draw the lines to favor the party as much as possible.
In midst of the battle over Pennsylvania Plan delay, and Dennis Hastert sent a letter to the Pennsylvania legislators saying,
We wish to encourage you in these efforts as they play a crucial role in maintaining a Republican majority in the United States House of Representatives.
And of course, when the House is very evenly divided, the stakes are really high.
And so you can, by redistricting appropriately, you can decide who controls the House of Representatives.
Oh, here's what I was looking for.
The Republicans in Harrisburg use venerable techniques in redistricting like packing, cracking and kidnapping.
That has a good ring to it. That's why I was looking at packing, cracking and kidnapping.
Packing concentrates one group of voters into as few as possible districts. That's what
I talked about down here. Cracking divides a group's voters into other districts where
they will be ineffective. Kidnapping places two incumbents from the same party in the
Frank Mascara was kidnapped. Goes on to talk about his very unusual character. He's lived in the same house that his family has had for a hundred years. He has a value of about $35,000. He is really a very modest background. He seems to represent the poor people from his district fairly well.
by way, and then a long country road, both sides of a street, and then it went around
his house, but not his garage, and ended there, okay? And so he was essentially a hundred
miles away from the nearest voter, running against an incumbent.
Well, I should end the suspense, but I'll let you read your history and figure out what
happened to Frank Mascara.
Okay, so in summary, I think that we have a strange occurrence where at the same time
that the technology was available, past patterns of civility have disappeared and what we're
going to do from this point on is the politicos are going to decide, they're going to choose
of Candidates Voters, and how much power will those voters have? None whatsoever, particularly
if they are as polarized as they are. And, you know, if I can explain it, there's also
a lot of tit for tat. I mean, you know, 20 years from now, we'll go back and the Republicans
said it, well, we did it last year because you did it the year before, and they'll say,
but you did it two years earlier, and there'll be a huge argument about who caused this mess.
But it is a mess and the only good I can see coming out of it is it will bring government into further disrepute, okay. That's all I have to say.
We have a new occurrence here at the Brown Bag seminar. We actually have a write-in question.
This came earlier in the talk and you've addressed this to some extent, but it says,
Professor Alt says that the outcome of elections is determined by incumbency.
While incumbency may be an accurate predictor of outcomes, elections are truly determined in a causal sense by voter preferences.
Voter preference can explain the continual election of incumbency because most voters are rather dogmatic about their political views and don't change them between elections.
Though I'm no Democrat, I don't think we are disenfranchised.
As I said, you partially address that.
Okay, well, one could argue that whether it's incumbency or, let's say this, if it's a safe congressional district,
It's impossible to determine whether the candidate won because he was an incumbent or because he was a Democrat.
But the point I was really making there is that incumbents don't lose elections in this country.
And I think the best explanation for the fact that they don't lose elections is that we have drawn up in the districts in such a way
that it's damned hard for a member of that party to lose the election so we could we could argue about what the ultimate cause of this is but yes I think it's we probably would be better I would be better off to say that the party more than the the whether he's an incumbent or not is is the determining factor but obviously from a Democratic district we're not going to have Republican incumbent
Well, one man, one vote is unconstitutional. If you take Article 1, Section 2, and then Article 2, Section 1, and its logical progression for presidential election, you're hitting the nail right on the head, in my opinion, with the redistricting problem.
And I actually went and, you know, browsed down to Lee County Courthouse the last time they did redistricting, and of course they were thrilled immediately.
Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution says that you're supposed to have one representative for each state, and then one for every 30,000 around, right?
So no matter what your population is, you're going to at least have one, and then up to 59,999 you still have one.
60,000 you can get through and just keep that iteration, etc.
In 1929, in the House of Representatives, they got together on their own and limited their own body to 435.
As population increases, your real representation decreases.
To me, that's the most important precursor of your thesis with respect to gerrymandering.
Right now, we have one representative for every 700,000.
So your real representation has dried up, and now gerrymandering becomes a big deal, right?
If you had one for every 30,000, you'd know who your congressman is.
You could go egg his house. When he's walking out and he does something stupid,
you could sit there with a megaphone and yell at him, right?
It'd be his worst nightmare.
So, you know, when Hillary Clinton and George Bush and the rest of them around come out
and say they want democracy and all that other sort of stuff, it's their worst nightmare.
When you have the representative government, then the things that you start talking about fall into place.
Now, the other question that I have deals with, you're talking about that scenario of how you were going to enumerate people who would take those top four, the top six ones.
I don't know the history, perhaps you read it in the Hill Book, but that's how we used to have our senators prior to the 17th Amendment, right?
Well, I understand that and I did make it clear that this would give the parties more power than they had.
and I have very mixed feelings about that.
On the other hand, I don't have mixed feelings about the current situation,
so I think it's so deplorable that we barely have the pretense of democracy right now.
And so I would feel better off allowing someone to pick our candidates for us if the outcome is one where our votes have the potential to matter.
At least the basic information.
And I don't know, John, I hadn't thought too much about this, but would the parties, would the people who win Democratic parties be the ones, the primaries be the ones that the party would tend to select?
I don't know. I mean, I think that it would introduce an element. Well, if parties became too isolated from the voters, I think they would ultimately pay the price.
and so there would be some element of competition.
How frightened does the Democratic Party in Massachusetts feel about the Republicans right now?
And the answer is, not at all.
Which used to be a radical Republican state, but we had to go through that polarized flip-flop to be the radical Democrats.
You mentioned the polarization of the two parties as one of the causes for all this.
Now, would it be the case that state parties that already decide their candidates based on the primary method,
would it be the case that by moving to a convention method that would actually augment the polarization between the two parties
Do you have any party that's making a decision?
Does that have any impact?
Well, let's suppose that we have a party that puts 10 very, very extreme left candidates on their ballot.
And they do that habitually. I mean, one would think that the other party could exploit that by putting some very centrist types of candidates at the top of their list and even elect three or four Republicans in Massachusetts by doing so.
You talked about the media, but do you ascribe to the media a causal role in all of this polarization, or are they just taking advantage?
Are we blaming CNN and Fox here, or do you congratulate them for taking advantage of our woes?
I mean, obviously they saw a market niche and took advantage of it, and I guess I'm probably placed the blame on Americans who don't appear to want to learn very much, they just want to be reassured that what they already know is true and all they need to know.
And Fox makes our life very easy.
We know who the good guys are and we know who the bad guys are.
And we also, if we like that stuff, we know that we are the good guys.
And so they're providing, I guess, a very popular service.
But I keep thinking, why do we have Tom Delay?
Delay. And why do we have a debate whether it's ethical to conduct an ethics investigation of
delay? That's very, very troubling to me.