Sobering polling as detailed by Ariel Edwards-Levy.
Category Archives: political polarization
“Josh Hawley and the Republican Populists, at War With Their Party”
The lone Republican vote in the Senate last month to protect consumers from bank overdraft fees came from an unlikely Democratic ally: Senator Josh Hawley, the archconservative from Missouri best known for calling out “wokeness” in all sectors of society, and for raising his fist to offer solidarity with supporters of President Trump hours before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
And yet the overdraft vote was hardly the first time Mr. Hawley had stood apart from his Republican colleagues. In 2023 he introduced a bill to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $25 per month, which died in committee for lack of Republican support. He has broken from his party by refusing to vote for cuts to Medicaid as part of the budget reconciliation process.
In March he joined a Democrat, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, to offer a bill that would speed up the contracting process for new unions. A G.O.P. senator, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, signed on as a cosponsor, but otherwise, Mr. Hawley said in a recent phone interview, “not a single Republican would touch it.”
Since his arrival to the Senate in 2019 at the age of 39 as its youngest member, Mr. Hawley has charted two seemingly parallel courses: as a full-throttle champion of socially conservative causes and, somewhat less noisily, as a populist who aligns himself with Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, on many populist issues.
“His ultimate goal is to break the alliance the social conservatives have had with the corporate world since the Reagan era,” said Matt Stoller, a former Senate aide to Mr. Sanders.
The term “populist” conjures two raw-knuckled protagonists of the agrarian South, Andrew Jackson and Huey Long, with whom the whippetlike Mr. Hawley, a Missouri banker’s son who attended Stanford and Yale Law School, would seem to have little in common. But prioritizing working-class Americans over elites has been a key rhetorical theme in Mr. Trump’s political ascendancy, and Mr. Hawley has embraced it….
“Who Really Runs America?”
Jerusalem Demsas interviews Steve Teles for the Atlantic:
Something has gone wrong in American democracy. Though our diagnoses differ, the entire political spectrum chafes at the widespread dysfunction. Our traditional modes for understanding democratic decline—tyranny of the majority, corruption, erosion of trust, polarization—all of these shed some light onto our current circumstances, but they fail to explain how policies with broad public support don’t materialize.
While reporting on the democratic terrain in state and local government, I’ve become preoccupied with how easily minority interests are able to hijack broadly beneficial policy goals—often through mechanisms we view as democratically legitimate. Tools developed to push against a potential “tyranny of the majority” have allowed majorities to be subjugated to the will of minority interests time and again. Whether it’s by professional associations, police unions, homeowner associations, or wealthy individuals, majority rule has repeatedly been hijacked.
Steve Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has a similar diagnosis. In a new essay titled “Minoritarianism Is Everywhere,” he argues that America’s democratic deficits require a serious rethinking of liberal governance and values.
Watch Archived Video of Safeguarding Democracy Program on Partisan Primaries, Polarization and the Risk of Extremism (with Azari, Foley, Masket, and Pildes)
“Assessing Alaska’s Top-4 Primary and Ranked Choice Voting Electoral Reform: More Moderate Winners, More Moderate Policy”
Glenn Wright, Ben Reilly and David Lublin have published this article in the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy. Here is the abstract:
In recent years, ranked choice voting (RCV) has emerged as a leading electoral reform, often in combination with moves to open up primaries in order to increase voter choice and select more widely-supported representatives. Both nonpartisan primaries and RCV general elections have attracted advocacy from those seeking solutions to democratic malaise and polarization, and been introduced in different forms in several states. Despite this, only one legislature across the country has ever been elected under this model: the 2022 Alaskan State legislature, which combined a Top-4 nonpartisan primary with an RCV election. We assess the impact of this reform via ‘before and after’ case studies of individual electoral (re)matches, a survey of candidate ideological and policy positions, and examination of legislative coalitions. This research design allows us to isolate the impact of Top 4/RCV compared to the former model of closed party primaries and plurality general elections. We show that Alaska’s new electoral system provided more choice for voters and appears to have driven changes in both electoral outcomes and public policy. Despite more extremists standing for election post-reform, winning candidates were more likely to be centrists willing to work across the aisle and espouse moderate policy positions than prior to the reform.
April 10 Safeguarding Democracy Project Webinar: “Partisan Primaries, Polarization, and the Risks of Extremism”
Join us for the final SDP webinar of the spring semester, April 10 at 12:15 pm PT (free registration required):
| Thursday, April 10 |
| Partisan Primaries, Polarization, and the Risks of Extremism |
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| Register for the webinar here. Thursday, April 10, 12:15pm-1:15pm PT, Webinar Julia Azari, Marquette University, Ned Foley, The University of Ohio, Moritz College of Law, Seth Masket, Denver University, and Rick Pildes, NYU Law School Richard L. Hasen, moderator (Director, Safeguarding Democracy Project, UCLA |
Election Litigation Hits Record, Increasing More than 14 Percent in the 2024 Election Cycle Compared to the 2020 Election Cycle, Despite End of Covid Pandemic
As described in my forthcoming Essay, the results of updating my data on the rates of election litigation to include 2023 and 2024:
The voting wars also brought a significant increase in litigation. The rate of election administration has tripled since Bush v. Gore compared to before it and remains consistently high, including through the 2023-2024 election season.
Figure 1. Sample of Election Litigation Cases Per Year, Before and After Bush v. Gore
The 2020 election, conducted in the midst of the Covid pandemic and with Donald Trump (unsuccessfully) challenging his presidential loss to Joe Biden in multiple lawsuits, led to a record amount of election litigation in a single year (2020), but the 2023-2024 election season overall saw a 14.3 percent increase over the 2019-2020 election season overall: There were 661 cases in the 2019 and 2020 election years in my sample (which does not cover all election litigation brought in those years), compared to 756 cases in the 2023 and 2024 election years. See Figure 2. It is remarkable that election litigation is even higher in the election after the pandemic than in the period before. My suspicion is that ongoing conflict surrounding the 2020 election created political incentives for Trump and his allies to file suits alleging the potential for fraud an irregularities in connection to the 2024 elections.
Figure 2. Sample of Election Litigation Cases Per Two-Year Presidential Election Cycle, 2000 Election Season-2024 Election Season
Source: Hasen Election Litigation Database, 1996-2024, https://electionlawblog.org/wp-content/uploads/Hasen-Election-Litigation-1996-2024.xlsx
“The Death of Competition in American Elections”
NYT:
President Trump’s return to Washington has tested the bounds of presidential power and set off alarms among Democrats, historians and legal scholars who are warning that the country’s democratic order is under threat.
But a close review of the 2024 election shows just how undemocratic the country’s legislative bodies already are.
After decades of gerrymandering and political polarization, a vast majority of members of Congress and state legislatures did not face competitive general elections last year.
Instead, they were effectively elected through low-turnout or otherwise meaningless primary contests. Vanishingly few voters cast a ballot in those races, according to a New York Times analysis of more than 9,000 congressional and state legislative primary elections held last year. On average, just 57,000 people voted for politicians in U.S. House primaries who went on to win the general election — a small fraction of the more than 700,000 Americans each of those winners now represents.
Increasingly, members of Congress are not even facing primary challenges. About a third of the current members of the House ran unopposed in their primary. All but 12 of those districts were “safe” seats, meaning 124 House members essentially faced no challenge to their election.
The absence of primaries is even more striking in state legislatures. More than three-quarters of those primary races in 2024 were uncontested, according to voting data from The Associated Press.
Lawmakers who do face primaries are often left beholden to a small number of ideologically aligned, fiercely partisan voters — a group all too willing to drag elected representatives to the fringes and to punish them for compromise with the other side.
New Review of Diamond, Foley, and Pildes Book on Election Reform to Counter Extremism and Polarization
“The 118th Congress passed the fewest laws in decades”
If measured by the number of bills signed into law, the 118th Congress was by far the most unproductive since at least the 1980s, according to data from public affairs firm Quorum.
Why it matters: That is not the only metric of success, but the stunning stat is a marker of how difficult the chaos of the last two years made actual legislating.
- Every fiscal deadline led to brinksmanship between the Republican House and the Democratic Senate and White House.
- House Republicans were also beset by infighting and palace intrigue, most notably the ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
- Throughout the disarray, trust between House Democrats and Republicans reached a low ebb— making bipartisan compromise rare.
Governing Likely to Be in Short Supply Come January
The 119th Congress is highly unlikely to be able to deliver effective government. Politico Playbook projects, “House Republicans are facing roughly two months with a 217-215 split — a one-seat majority.”
“The math … If the current leads hold, the final 2024 House tally would be 220-215 in favor of Republicans — a net gain of two seats for Democrats. But the GOP will immediately start the 119th Congress down a seat due to MATT GAETZ’s resignation, with Reps. ELISE STEFANIK (R-N.Y.) and MICHAEL WALTZ (R-Fla.) expected to step down later in January.”
“Will Trump’s high-turnout win make Republicans rethink opposition to voting access?”
Miles Park for NPR:
When John Merrill was secretary of state of Alabama, he felt like it was his job as the state’s top voting official to encourage voter registration.
“One of the things I was known for as a secretary was trying to get everybody in the state that was eligible,” said Merrill, a Republican.
But he remembered that for many in his party, that stance was controversial.
“I had people when I would speak to some Republican groups, they’d tell me, ‘I don’t like that, I don’t think it’s a good thing,'” Merrill said. “And I’m like, ‘Why would you say that?’ And they’re like, ‘Because you’re going to get more Blacks and you’re going to get more Democrats.'”
It’s not usually said out loud that explicitly. But for decades, the GOP has generally sought limits on voting access. Just this year, Republicans sued numerous times to try to rein in mail voting, and sued the Biden administration over an executive order meant to encourage voter registration.
Such moves — along with restrictive voting legislation — have usually been done in the name of enhancing election security. But politics plays a role, too.
For years, conventional political wisdom has held that higher-turnout elections — as well as policies aimed at increasing voter access — would favor Democrats, and lower-turnout elections — and more restrictive policies — would favor Republicans.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump even expressed concern that higher levels of voting would mean “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
But this year’s election results are a major blow to that theory. Republicans won a trifecta at the federal level in a high-turnout environment.
And now the question is, how will the party respond?
“High turnout doesn’t hurt Republicans, and it can in fact help them,” said Guy-Uriel Charles, an election law expert at Harvard University. “Now we will see whether the lesson that they learn here is, OK, let’s not fight access … or we will see whether we return back to regularly scheduled programming.”…
“Replacing JD Vance in the U.S. Senate sets off scramble in Ohio”
An interesting article from CBS News on the intraparty negotiations in Ohio, where Governor Mike DeWine will be filling JD Vance’s seat until the required special election. DeWine’s goal apparently is to avoid picking a weak candidate that might lead to a comeback for Sherrod Brown in 2026.
“Liberals Are Left Out in the Cold as Social Media Veers Right”
Sheera Frenkel for the NYT:
After Donald J. Trump won the election this month, his supporters gravitated to a panoply of online destinations to celebrate.
Hundreds of thousands of posts lauding Mr. Trump’s victory filled Truth Social, the social platform that the president-elect owns. Speculation about what the new administration would accomplish ran rampant on X, which is owned by Elon Musk. Gab, Parler and other right-wing social media sites were flooded with thousands of memes glorifying Mr. Trump.
No similar spaces existed for the left. Meta’s Instagram, Threads and Facebook had publicly de-emphasized politics leading up to the election. Mr. Musk had transformed Twitter into X and shifted it to the right. And no other tech platform had gained momentum as a public square for liberals.
“It has become starkly evident that the left, the Democrats, do not have the same social media platforms to push their agenda,” said Phillip Walzak, a political consultant based in New York. “It has left Democrats in a huge deficit.”
If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was how far social media platforms had moved to the right. While Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other sites continue to be popular gathering places for entertainment and meme-making, political discourse online has increasingly shifted to an array of mostly right-wing sites that have built up their audiences and stoked largely partisan conversations.
The change was an unintended consequence of a series of decisions made by some of the biggest social platforms nearly four years ago….