Nominations I

A student and her impact on nomination politics!

Simulation roles

Types of primaries

The blanket primary and California Democratic Party v. Jones. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia said:

In concluding that the burden Proposition 198 imposes on petitioners' rights of association is not severe, the Ninth Circuit cited testimony that the prospect of malicious crossover voting, or raiding, is slight, and that even though the numbers of "benevolent" crossover voters were significant, they would be determinative in only a small number of races. But a single election in which the party nominee is selected by nonparty members could be enough to destroy the party. In the 1860 presidential election, if opponents of the fledgling Republican Party had been able to cause its nomination of a pro-slavery candidate in place of Abraham Lincoln, the coalition of intraparty factions forming behind him likely would have disintegrated, endangering the party's survival and thwarting its effort to fill the vacuum left by the dissolution of the Whigs. Ordinarily, however, being saddled with an unwanted, and possibly antithetical, nominee would not destroy the party but severely transform it. "[R]egulating the identity of the parties' leaders," we have said, "may ... color the parties' message and interfere with the parties' decisions as to the best means to promote that message."

Runoff primaries

Fusion: eight states let candidates get the nomination of more than one political party: Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Mississippi, New York, Oregon, South Carolina and Vermont.




In Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party, SCOTUS upheld anti-fusion laws.

Election law and procedure at the state level

California party organization endorsements Democrats and Republicans



T

NRA loses support

https://nyti.ms/2F3pIA4

Polarization and Geography -- Some More Points

Polarization, Language, and Views of Higher Education


Doug Sosnik in Politico:

Really Bad Timing

With @EricGreitens, the people of Missouri have a leader in office focused on returning money to the pockets of taxpayers – not government. https://t.co/Zb9dFSzRXc

— The RGA (@The_RGA) February 22, 2018

NEW: Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens indicted by St. Louis grand jury on felony invasion of privacy charge. https://t.co/my6cTqzFc6 pic.twitter.com/BwfffPLNkE

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) February 22, 2018

Uptalk

Parties, Polarization, and Geography

The clustering of America:




Portlandia:



In the US, representation is geographical.  Other systems are possible, however.

Since 1842, the law has effectively banned at-large elections for states with more than one House member.

Red and Blue: The 2000 Election

Purple?  Cartograms of the 2016 Election


Hopkins Figure 2.4. Average state popular vote deviation in presidential elections, 1968–2016

Why did California go deep blue?

Hispanic share of the electorate was about 8% in 1988, 31% in 2016.

County results (%D)..........1988.........2016

Los Angeles........................51.9..........71.8
Orange................................31.1..........50.9
San Diego...........................38.3..........56.3


Seats with split House/presidential outcomes:

Second Assignment, Spring 2018

Pick one:

• Pick any super PAC in the 2016 campaign and appraise its performance .  What were its goals?  How well did it achieve these goals?  What accounts for its success or failure?
• Propose and defend one reform of federal campaign finance law.  Be specific about what goal you are trying to achieve.  What would opponents of the proposal say?  What practical and political obstacles stand in the way.  See: Congressional Research Service, "The State of Campaign Finance Policy," June 13, 2017.
• Propose and defend one reform of the presidential nomination process in either party. In your answer, spell out the goal of your reform.  Are you trying to make the process more open or transparent?  Or are you trying to encourage the nomination of a more electable candidate?  What would opponents of this proposal say?  What practical and political obstacles stand in the way?  Possible sources:
• Seth Masket, "How to Improve the Primary Process? Make It Less Democratic" Pacific Standard, August 11, 2017.
• Ronald Klain, "The Democratic Party's Nomination Process Isn't Democratic Enough," Washington Post, September 25, 2017.
• Josh Putnam, "Unity Reform Commission: Primaries Recommendations," Frontloading HQ, December 14, 2017.

Essays should reflect an understanding of class readings and discussions. Many resources, including CQ Weekly and Politics in America are at Honnold Library/Databases/CQ Library. You should check other sources as well. See:

• http://www1.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/JPitney/elect.htm 
• http://www1.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/JPitney/dempub.html

The specifications:

• Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and no more than four pages long. I will not read past the fourth page. Please submit papers as Word documents, not pdfs.
• Cite your sources. Please use endnotes in the format of Chicago Manual of Style. Endnotes do not count against the page limit. Please do not use footnotes, which take up too much page space. 
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. Return essays to the Sakai dropbox for this class by 11:59 PM, Friday, March 9. Papers will drop one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.

WRITING AND RESEARCH

The GOP and Guns

Anna Palmer, Jake Sherman, and Daniel Lippman at Politico:

MANY REPUBLICANS FEEL LIKE THEY GO HOME to their safely red district and interact with constituents who are gun-toting NRA members -- many of whom show up to barbecues, fundraisers and political events carrying a weapon. Multiple Republicans told us they have held events at high-end shooting ranges. Gabe Debenedetti: “AR-15 auction removed from McMorris Rodgers fundraiser” http://politi.co/2GwJiSp

FORGET THE MONEY that the NRA gives -- it’s relatively inconsequential compared to other industries, and it’s a lazy explanation for the position that many Republicans hold. But many GOP voters exist in a media environment where they read the NRA’s magazines, pay attention to their scorecards come election time and wonder if the long arm of the U.S. government will come get their guns.

MOST REPUBLICANS exist in a climate in which their only political fear is a primary challenger on the right. To these Republicans, national polls mean squat. Getting on the “wrong side” of the gun issue would be going soft on guns -- that’s the way to lose a primary election. Few of these Republicans believe they’ll lose an election by not supporting stringent gun regulations.

CONSIDER THIS: In the House -- the more conservative of the two bodies -- 36 lawmakers sit in seats that elect Republicans by an average of 20 points or more. If you start looking wobbly there on any core issue -- which lawmakers say is immigration, abortion and gun rights -- you could be looking for a new job.

THEN THERE’S THEIR ARGUMENT that new gun laws wouldn’t do much. Ban assault weapons? Well there are plenty on the streets now. And if you ban assault weapons and someone shoots up a school with a pistol, then what’s next? Will the government move to make pistols illegal. How about tightening background checks? Many Republicans will tell you the laws in place now aren’t being enforced as they should be. Why add new regulations?

THERE IS A CLEAR SPLIT AMONG TOP REPUBLICANS WE TALK TO.Many believe this shooting is a tipping point. Others say, “eh.” Remember, Republicans didn’t do anything after one of their own — House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) — was shot. And in 2011, they did nothing when Gabby Giffords -- then a member of the House -- was shot in the head meeting constituents outside a supermarket.

The Polarization Express

From Post-ABC poll conducted Feb. 15-18:

 

Party and belief:



============================================

Party and policy positions

Trends in ideology

An alternative way of classifying ideology (See Schier, p. 28):

=======================================
Partisan divides

Aversive Partisanship has grown since 1964 (see Schier, pp. 34-36):

Even marriage...



The Russians know.

From the indictment:

Defendant ORGANIZATION [the Internet Research Agency, aka the Russian troll factory] had a strategic goal to sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Defendants posted derogatory information about a number of candidates, and by early to mid-2016, Defendants'' operations included supporting the presidential campaign of the -candidate Donald J. Trump ("Trump Campaign") and disparaging Hillary Clinton. Defendants made various expenditures to carry out those activities, including buying political advertisements on social media in the names of U.S. persons and grassroots entities and U.S. persons, and without revealing their Russian identities and ORGANIZATION affiliation, solicited and compensated real U.S. persons to promote or disparage candidates. Some Defendants, posing as U.S persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities.

Michael Isikoff reports:

The Russians who worked for a notorious St. Petersburg “troll factory” that was part of Vladimir Putin’s campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election were required to watch the “House of Cards” television series to help them craft messages to “set up the Americans against their own government,” according to an interview broadcast Sunday (in Russian) with a former member of the troll factory’s elite English language department.

...

But more broadly, the instructions given to employees of the English language department were to stoke discontent about the U.S. government and the Obama administration in particular. “We had a goal to set up the Americans against their own government,” he says. “To cause unrest, cause discontent [and] lower [President] Obama’s rating.”

For example, @TEN_GOP

CBS REPORT ON THE RUSSIAN TROLL FACTORY

The clustering of America;





From 2014:

>

*RELEVANT* Thoughts, Prayers and NRA Funding.

Check out this article about Members of Congress and their relationship with the NRA.

Party in the Electorate, Opinion, Polarization, Asymmetry

The Intensity Gap on Gun Control

The Gun Gap in 2016

Gun Ownership by State:



Pew Research on Parties and Guns:

There is a partisan divide in gun ownership: More than four-in-ten Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are gun owners (44%), compared with 20% of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic.

There is also a partisan divide on views of gun policy, and these differences remain even after controlling for gun ownership. For example, Republican gun owners are much more resistant than Democratic gun owners to creating a database to track gun sales and banning assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines. On the flip side, Republicans are also more open to proposals that would expand gun rights. A prime example: 82% of Republican gun owners favor expanding concealed carry laws to more places, compared with 41% of their Democratic counterparts.

Republican gun owners are about twice as likely as Democratic gun owners to say owning a gun is essential to their freedom (91% vs. 43%), and there are also behavioral differences between these two groups. For example, Republican handgun owners are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to say they carry their gun with them, even if only some of the time (63% vs. 45%). Fully 55% of Democrats who own a handgun say they never carry. 

Climate Change, Party, and Education

Federal Agencies:  The latest from Pew:




Grossmann & Hopkins on asymmetry:

The Republican Party is best viewed as the agent of an ideological movement whose members are united by a common devotion to the principle of limited government.
Conservatives maintain an innate skepticism about—or opposition to—the use of government action to address social problems and tend to evaluate candidates
and policies on the basis of ideological congeniality.

One reason is the impact of books and magazines.  Lee Edwards (Dr. Spalding's dad) writes of a 1965 meeting with Reagan:

 While he and Nancy were in the kitchen, we sat in the library den. Opposite us were several large bookcases filled with books. I got up and began examining the titles.  They were, almost without exception, works of history, economics, and politics, including such conservative classics as F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Whittaker Chambers's Witness and Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson.  There was also a book I had never read: The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, a nineteenth-century free-market economist.  I was stunned. I had never read Bastiat.  I opened several books -- they wer dog-eared and underlined.

Peggy Noonan:

I started reading NR, and it sang to me. They saw it the way I was seeing it: America is essentially good, the war is being fought for serious and valid reasons, the answer to every social ill is not necessarily a social program, when you let a government get too big you threaten your own liberties—-—and God is real as a rock. I was moved, and more. It assuaged a kind of loneliness. Later I found that half the people in the Reagan administration had as their first conservative friend that little magazine.

Back to Grossman and Hopkins:

In contrast, the Democratic Party is properly understood as a coalition of social groups whose interests are served by various forms of government activity. Most Democrats are committed less to the abstract cause of liberalism than to specific policies designed to benefit particular groups. Democratic-aligned constituencies make concrete programmatic demands on their representatives and, if the alternative is inaction, are often willing to compromise in order to win partial achievement of their objectives. Unlike the Republican Party, Democrats lack a powerful internal movement designed to impose ideological discipline on elected officials, which gives Democratic officeholders more freedom to maneuver pragmatically but also denies the party a common philosophy to direct its actions and a common cause around which to mobilize its supporters

• "Specifically liberal and generally conservative"  -- signs of change?
• Group identity
• Activists and donors -- Are Democrats moving?
• In Congress

CQ Magazine, 

Party in the Electorate I

Party registration is not the same as party identification

These 21 states do not provide for party preferences in voter registration: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii,  Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Twenty-nine states and DC do register by party.

VAP/VEP and turnout

Turnout demographics

Party change over time: another look at the cinematic map

Trends in party affiliation:



Recent trends and demographics

The party bases:









Party identification and issues

Trumpification

Koch Brothers Pledge to Spend Upwards of 400 Million for This Year's Midterms

The Koch brothers, at their biannual donor conference, pledged to spend up to 400 millions dollars to protect Republican majorities during this years midterms. That's 60% more than what the Koch network spent in 2016 and the most the network has ever spent on a midterm. Much of the money will go toward an online and TV advertising blitz promoting the tax reform bill, which is expected to save Koch Industries more than 1 billion dollars a year. "We've made more progress in the past five years than i had in the last 50," the 82-year old Charles Koch told the assembled donors.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-kochs/fearing-democratic-wave-koch-network-to-spend-big-on-u-s-midterm-elections-idUSKBN1FI07H

POG

Research



Online sources on parties and elections
Online sources on demography, religion and public opinion




Before Bannon's excommunication:



GAI

Bannon (p. 156): "The modern economics of the newsroom don't support big investigative reporting staffs. You wouldn't get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We're working as a support function."

Wynton Hall (p. 157):  “We live and die by the media. Every time we're launching a book, I'll build a battle map that literally breaks down by category every headline we're going to place, every op-ed Peter's going to publish. ... Getting our message embedded in mainstream outlets is what gets us the biggest blast radius."

Breitbart

Breitbart is at the heart of the conservative online media system

Russia helps, too.

Hertel-Fernandez & Skocpol

Across much of America, conservatives can mount powerful state legislative campaigns through three well-funded networks that operate as complements to one another. Think tanks affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN) spew out studies and prepare op-eds and legislative testimony. Paid state directors and staffers installed by Americans for Prosperity (AFP)sponsor bus tours, convene rallies and public forums, run radio and television ads, send mailers, and spur activists to contact legislators. And inside the legislatures themselves, many representatives and senators, especially Republicans, are members of ALEC, which invites them to serve alongside business lobbyists and right-wing advocacy groups on national task forces that prepare “model” bills that the legislators can advance at the state and local level, with assistance from ALEC staffers.

Why it matters:  party control of state legislatures (resume later with PIG)

AND THE IRON LAW OF EMULATION CONTINUES...


Tom Steyer and The State Innovation Exchange 

Partisan Outside Groups and the Iron Law of Emulation

Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Iron Law of Emulation: "Organizations in conflict become like one another."




Outside Campaign Money

The evolution of outside spending groups

• Citizens United and SpeechNow
• McCutcheon v. FEC
• IRS approves 501(c)(4) status of Crossroads GPS
• Data on outside spending

Other parts of party networks

• Think Tanks (e..g, Heritage and CAP)
• Publications and websites
• Broadcast outlets
• Rush and Rachel
• Fox
• Legal groups:  Federalist Society and Constitutional Accountability Center

On the Left

• The Democracy Alliance  
• (the mission statement)

On the Right

• The Koch Network
• Bannon and the Mercer Network
• GAI
• Breitbart

Party Organization II

The National Committees

• RNC Videos
• DNC Videos

The Hill Committees

Republican... NRCC NRSC
Democratic.. DCCC* DSCC*

*Chair appointed by party leader

Other national committees

• CRNC
• NFRW

State Parties and  Joint Fundraising Committees

RGA

• Republican Governors Association is a 527 (about 527 groups here)
• It also has a Super PAC
• And a 501(c)(4)

DGA

• Democratic Governors Association is a 527
• It also has a Super PAC
• And a 501(c)(4)

And the state legislative committees:

• DLCC
• RLCC

But wait ... there's more!

• RSLC
• RAGA (Maplight story) and DAGA (fundraising)

Coordinated and independent expenditures

First Essay, Spring 2018

Pick one:

• Do issues drive party identification or does party identification drive voters' issue positions?  In your essay, take account of shift in public opinion during the Trump administration.
• Pick one voter group that has become significantly more Democratic or Republican over the past decade (see, esp. ch. 7 of Hershey).  Explain the shift.  Is this trend likely to continue?
• Propose and defend a specific proposal for a specific jurisdiction that would increase voter turnout (e.g., same-day registration in a state that does not already have it).  In your essay, take serious account of contrary views, and consider obstacles and challenges to implementation. Is your proposal politically and administratively feasible?
• Explain one technique of vote suppression. Carefully appraise the evidence for its effectiveness.  Are the examples of this technique changing election outcomes?
• Write on a topic of your own choosing, subject to my approval.

Essays should reflect an understanding of class readings and discussions. Many resources, including CQ Weekly and Politics in America are at Honnold Library/Databases/CQ Library. You should check other sources as well. See:

• http://www1.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/JPitney/elect.htm 
• http://www1.cmc.edu/pages/faculty/JPitney/dempub.html  

PLEASE EMAIL ME IF ANY LINKS ARE BROKEN!

The specifications:

• Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and no more than four pages long. I will not read past the fourth page. Please submit essays as Word documents, not pdfs.
• Cite your sources. Please use endnotes in the format of Chicago Manual of Style. Endnotes do not count against the page limit. Please do not use footnotes, which take up too much page space. 
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. Return essays to the Sakai dropbox for this class by 11: 59 PM, Friday, February 16. Papers will drop one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.

WRITING AND RESEARCH