An election change that could break the fascist fever
And even incentivize passing popular laws
Welcome to a big Sunday edition of Progress Report.
It’s been yet another grim week in a United States that feels sapped of whatever optimism and hope it once projected.
The end of Roe v. Wade and the full-on assault on abortion rights. The growing attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. The state-sanctioned harassment of children and families. The endless mass shootings — nearly 200 already this year) — that are so often targeted at people of color, including the massacre carried out yesterday by a white nationalist in Buffalo.
They all trace back to the same daunting reality: The United States is under siege by a mendacious sect of righteous barbarians, who represent a fringe slice of Americans but have all but seized the levers of power through financial muscle and the quirks of a hopelessly archaic system of government.
Thankfully, I don’t think we’ve yet reached the point of no return in our slide into a theocratic, corporate-fascist state. Democracy can still work. But as the failure of voting rights legislation in the Senate indicates, there is no one silver bullet solution on its way. Instead, it’ll happen at the state and local level, through grassroots efforts and smart investments in voter empowerment.
Tonight, we’ll look at some of those important efforts to create a more functional and representative democracy, which is the only way to break this doom loop.
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A new poll released on Sunday found that 53% of voters in Texas are opposed to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, though you wouldn’t know it based on the dangerous anti-abortion laws passed in the state or rhetoric used by its leaders. That includes Gov. Greg Abbott, who both signed SB 8, Texas’s bounty hunter anti-abortion law, and continues to maintain a slim lead in the polls.
In Missouri, where a recent poll found that a plurality of voters believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, Republicans have proposed an even more draconian anti-abortion trigger law. The legislation would all abortions, even in cases of incest or rape, with only the rare exception for immediate medical emergencies. Already, 54% of registered voters in the state believe that ban goes too far.
Missourians are used to lawmakers that defy popular opinion. While 53% of voters approved Medicaid expansion in 2020, it took a State Supreme Court order and nearly two years of public pressure to force the GOP legislature to fund health care for 250,000 additional people.
How does this happen? Why is popular opinion seemingly so irrelevant, both at the state level and in national policymaking? The corrupting influence of corporate money is central to the collapse of democracy, but on a functional level, much of it has to do with the rise of extreme gerrymanders, voter suppression, and the incentivizing of hardline extremism.
When parties draw their own twisted districts and choose their own constituents, primary elections become freak shows, with candidates competing to prove their radical bonafides. In Congressional elections in gerrymandered districts, primaries are often determinative, and the same goes for statewide contests in states with a clear partisan lean. The incentives to be a lunatic are too big for almost any Republican to forgo, which is how you get politicians like GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, who once tried to appear moderate, going all-in on filth like the “Great Replacement” theory and calling anyone they don’t like a pedophile.
Absent national legislation, the answer right now is a mixture of state voting rights reforms and, in some places, the implementation of an entirely new election system.
Ranked Choice Voting meets its moment
It wasn’t all that long ago that Missouri was a relatively purple state that regularly elected Democrats to higher office — in 2012, voters there re-elected both Gov. Jay Nixon and Sen. Claire McCaskill. But the state has moved to the right in recent years and now has a Republican supermajority that includes all kinds of paranoid horse dewormer freaks.
Right now, disgraced former Gov. Eric Greitens, who had to resign over very credible sexual assault allegations made by his one-time mistress, is leading in the Republican Senate primary fur to his batshit reputation and violent ads cut with Donald Trump, Jr. If Greitens wins the primary, he will immediately become the frontrunner in the general election thanks to the state’s Republicans lean.
It’s going to take years to restore Democrats to a regularly competitive force in Missouri’s politics, but there’s a much more immediate chance to neutralize the far-right faction that now dominates the state.
In November, Missourians will likely be asked to vote on a constitutional amendment to institute a new election system called Ranked Choice Voting. The measure, if successful, would replace partisan primaries with one single primary with all eligible candidates. Voters would choose their four favorite candidates, and the top four would advance to a general election.
During the general election, instead of voting for just one candidate, voters would rank each of them in descending order. The ballots would be processed and candidates would be eliminated one by one until one candidate earns the top spot on a majority of ballots. If voters approve the amendment, it’d first go into effect in 2024.
A version of the proposal is also under consideration for local elections in Kansas City, which take place in 2023. The editorial board of the Kansas City Star endorsed both the statewide and city proposals, writing recently that ranked-choice voting has been proven to “increase interest and turnout, attract more quality candidates, and reduce the impact of negative campaigns.” The board also touted RCV’s potential to break the “extremist partisan fever” that has gripped the state.
Ranked-choice would allow voters from across the political spectrum to have a voice in elections even in solidly red (or blue) states. Greitens’ election this fall won’t happen under RCV, but let’s create a hypothetical scenario in which some sicko named, I dunno, Derek Cretin is running for office in 2024:
Under the current system, a Cretin primary victory would mean that Republican voters would have to back either him or a Democrat in the general election. For many more moderate Republican voters, neither option is particularly palatable, but they’re mathematically more likely to stick with their party’s nominee despite their reservations.
If the state had ranked-choice voting in place, those dissatisfied could rank a more moderate choice above Cretin. If enough Democrats ranked that moderate candidate as their second choice, Cretin’s popularity with the extremist plurality of the GOP would not be enough to hand him the victory.
As a result, a more moderate candidate would be more likely to win the election.
Over time, this would incentivize candidates to not pander to the most racist fringe elements of their party.
Understandably, Republican leadership has come out against the proposal, and until last week, was seeking to change state law to require a supermajority to pass any amendment or initiative. Democrats literally played games of charades on the state Senate floor in a long filibuster that essentially killed that proposal.
It’s important to note that at least in Missouri, the ranked-choice vote amendment is being largely bankrolled by a PAC linked to a billionaire who began building his fortune at Enron. But John Arnold and his wife Laura have been putting money behind progressive political initiatives, including prescription drug reform and clean election laws, for years now, and they helped pass ranked-choice vote in Alaska and Maine, so they don’t seem to have any nefarious agenda. A billionaire interested in rebalancing power is OK with me.
There is also an effort underway to qualify ranked-choice voting for the fall ballot in Nevada, though the reaction from Democrats and their allies has been a bit less enthusiastic. The system would be largely the same as Missouri’s, but feature five candidates instead of four.
There are some other wrinkles, including situations in which a ballot might get voided, but the real catch is that it would create open primaries in a state where 30% of voters are registered as independents. In strong Democratic years, it could lead to more moderate candidates than partisans would like, but save for late-career Harry Reid, there has hardly been a swell of progressive politicians to emerge from Nevada.
In fact, the battle over the state party apparatus means that it’s more likely to see attacks on progressives, which RCV could help mitigate.
Ranked Choice Is Working
Right now, Maine is the only state that uses ranked-choice voting, where moderate Democratic Gov. Janet Mills will square off against former Republican governor Paul LePage. The latter is a wealthy blowhard extremist who took office several years before Donald Trump, and as much as Mills has been a disappointment, she could benefit from third-party voters who rank her higher than LePage. Polls right now suggest that such a scenario may well be in the offing.
Alaska, meanwhile, will start using ranked-choice voting this fall, which should be a boon to GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski. While I make it a rule to never support Republicans, she’s certainly saner than the Republicans running in Alaska’s special Congressional election — a race currently being led by one Sarah Palin.
There’s no world in which I think moderate Republicans should be elected with any regularity, but they’re at least more useful than moderate Democrats — in large part because “moderate” Democrats are generally actually just fiscal conservatives and social cowards. I continue to believe that progressive populism is a political no-brainer, and think that a candidate waging righteous class war would actually prove very popular in many ranked-choice elections in more Republican-leaning jurisdictions. With RCV, Democrats could rank the candidate they admire most at the top without worrying about so-called “electability.”
One of the leading arguments against RCV is that it would confuse voters, but about 10 million people in 55 cities and two states already engage with this voting system every single year. We use it now for primaries in New York City, and it wasn’t difficult at all — between college sports and listicles, there are few things that Americans are more familiar with than ranking things.
The goal should be electing politicians that have to appeal to a broad swath of voters and generally vote for policies that are solidly supported by a strong majority of Americans. Our system right now sticks us with extremists on one side that have no interest or incentive to compromise, and lobbyist-owned cowards that more often than not win their primaries by claiming that their uninspiring politics is “electable.”
We have no choice but to demand better.
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