Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Summing Up



More on the AIP

Rural voters


I wondered what issue could tie together the threads of this course.

The answer came two years ago.

Parties are networks that exist on 4 levels.

  • PIE -- party in the electorate
  • PO -- party organization
  • PIG -- party in government
  • POG -- partisan outside groups
Abortion and party in government


Alito
  • From 1981 to 1985,  Assistant to U.S. Solicitor General Rex E. Lee -- father of Sen. Mike Lee.
  • From 1985-1987, Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Charles J. Cooper in the Office of Legal Counsel during the tenure of Attorney General Edwin Meese.  SEE HIS JOB APPLICATION
  • From 1987 to 1990, United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey.
Abortion and partisan outside groups
  • All five have been members of the Federalist Society.
  • Amici
Abortion and party organization

 Former Rep. Tony Hall (D-OH): "Take care of your district first or you can't do world hunger."



Monday, May 2, 2022

Summing Up I

No reflection emails this week.

PLEASE COMPLETE COURSE EVALUATIONS.

POGs and the Think Tank Sector

National party organizations are weak in certain ways but PIE partisanship is strong.


Hershey (p. 370):  "Why should partisanship help citizens who have so many other sources of information about candidates and issues?  Perhaps it is because they are exposed to so much information."

In all bodies, those who will lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition, of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very rarely appears in the world, and for that reason cannot enter into calculation, will prevent the men of talent disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects!


Trends in PIE 

Youth






Monday, April 25, 2022

Picking the Opponent

 


In the 2012 Missouri  Senate race, incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill ran ads during the GOP primary campaign saying that Todd Akin was "too conservative."  The idea of the "attack ad" was to drive GOP voters to Akin, her weakest potential foe.  It worked.  



Others have since copied the tactic.  From 2020:

James Arkin at Politico:
A mysterious new super PAC with links to Democrats released a TV ad on Wednesday meddling in next month's Kansas Republican Senate primary.
The super PAC, Sunflower State, formed on Monday and two days later launched its first TV ad, focused on Kris Kobach and Rep. Roger Marshall, two of the Republicans running in the Aug. 4 primary. National Republicans have expressed concern that Kobach — the former secretary of state who lost the 2018 governor's race to Democrat Laura Kelly — would put the seat in jeopardy if he becomes the nominee, while Marshall has attempted to consolidate support from the establishment in the primary.
The ad is engineered to drive conservative voters toward Kobach. A narrator in the ad calls Kobach "too conservative" because he "won't compromise" on building President Donald Trump's border wall or on taking a harsher stance on relations with China. By contrast, the ad labels Marshall as a "phony politician" who is "soft on Trump."
...
Sunflower State has apparent ties to Democrats. The media buyer used to place the ad, Old Town Media, was also used to place more than $11 million in ads from Unite the Country, the pro-Joe Biden super PAC that spent heavily in the Democratic presidential primary. Sunflower State also holds its account at Amalgamated Bank, which is used by Senate Majority PAC, a top Democratic outside group, among other prominent Democratic groups, including Biden's campaign, according to the filing with the Federal Election Commission.
  

Solutions III

 For Wednesday, read   Elaine Kamarck, “The Urgent Need for Peer Review in the Presidential Nominating Process,” Brookings, October 29, 2019, https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/bigideas/the-urgent-need-for-peer-review-in-the-presidential-nominating-process/


Possible only because of Utah's convention system.

Top two in 2016:  Meh!  See exit poll results


Top two in 2018:  59 percent of Republicans voted for the more liberal candidate!

In 2020:




Multiparty system for America: pro and con


Social Media and Polarization



Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Solutions II

For Monday, read Drutman, ch. 10-11.

In your writeups, please let me know what else you would like to read or discuss in the last couple of weeks.

Drutman speaks!

Continuing with Minor Parties...

Types of Third-Party Movements

Reasons for Third Party Bursts
  • Major party deterioration and issue responsiveness
  • Economic decline
  • Unacceptable major party candidates
Reasons for the brevity of the bursts
  • Major parties coopt the third party agenda: Wilson coopts TR on Progressive reform, FDR coopts Socialists on social programs, Nixon coopts G. Wallace on law & order, Clinton coopts Perot on deficit control.
  • Perception of spoiler effect:  Nader in 2000, Stein in 2016

Ranked-Choice Voting



Top Two:  A professional team v. a pickup team
The advocacy coalition framework (ACF): The difference between the “long coalition” of a political party (see Bawn et al. 2006, 4) and the coalition of the ACF is that the larger coalition must, by necessity, have a wider variety of deep core beliefs; it must somehow address the true multidimensionality of politics. When we conceptualise individuals as participants in nested (and overlapping) policy coalitions, it becomes easier to imagine how severely competition for office within the same party might disrupt or rearrange coalitional opportunities as well within the type of policy-making coalition imagined in the ACF. The new requirements for getting elected to office can reshape the ACF-type coalition’s (in one domain, so conceptualised as one dimension) deep core beliefs because some camel got its nose under the party tent to win the election (in a multidimensional space).
 The dimensions do not have to be partisan:
. Our model gives California’s AD47 in 2012 a 50% chance of having a copartisan election – and it did. Two Democrats entered and fought it out with two nearly irrelevant Republican spectators (Alvarez and Sinclair 2015). This district also featured a Black woman against a Latino man as Democratic copartisans in a Latino majority district. This race’s outcome suggests how that process might work, with each building on separate pathways to power, but the driver of the high probability here is just the extremity of the vote share difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. AD47 would have a copartisan election again in 2014 and again in 2016, with Cheryl Brown eventually falling to Eloise Reyes. One potential explanatory factor here is the district’s low 2016 Trump support relative to its 2012 Romney vote – an opposition lacking in rancorous spirit appears to reduce the chance of credible entry.
Evidence for impact on the legislature?

2012 nightmare scenario for Democrats: United States Representative District 31 

Gary G. Miller*, REP 16,708.... 26.7%
Bob Dutton, REP 15,557 ...........24.8%
Pete Aguilar, DEM 14,181 ........22.6%
Justin Kim, DEM 8,487 .............13.5%
Renea Wickman, DEM 4,188 .....6.7%
Rita Ramirez-Dean, DEM 3,546 .5.7%

Top two in 2016:  Meh!  See exit poll results

Top two in 2018:  59 percent of Republicans voted for the more liberal candidate!

2020 California Results as of now



Monday, April 18, 2022

Solutions I

 Just a reminder: If we had ranked-choice voting for president, nobody would be complaining about @justinamash being a potential spoiler.


For Wednesday, read the Sinclair-O'Grady article.

In your writeups this week, tell me what topics you would like to raise or revisit in the next two weeks.

The fruits of polarization:





As of the 2020 census, there are 760,367 people per House seat .


Consequences



Anomalies of allocating seats by state:

In CA, each state senate district will have 988,455 people -- about the same as the entire state of Delaware.


Examples of multiparty systems: 
 CanadaBritainIsrael

Review Causes of the two-party system:

Types of Third-Party Movements
Reasons for Third Party Bursts
  • Major party deterioration and issue responsiveness
  • Economic decline
  • Unacceptable major party candidates
Reasons for the brevity of the bursts
  • Major parties coopt the third party agenda: Wilson coopts TR on Progressive reform, FDR coopts Socialists on social programs, Nixon coopts G. Wallace on law & order, Clinton coopts Perot on deficit control.
  • Perception of spoiler effect:  Nader in 2000, Stein in 2016

Last Paper, Spring 2022

 Pick one:

  • If we had the six-party system that Drutman describes here, which party would have the most seats in the House today?  What coalition of parties would control the House?
  • Pick one of these propositions from Drutman.  Explain the arguments for and against it.  Which side has the better case?
    • Multiparty democracy will make it easier to reform campaign finance and lobbying (p. 203).
    • A multiparty Congress would be stronger and would rein in the presidency (p. 232).
  • For responsible party government to happen, writes Hershey (p. 338), "all the elected branches of government would have to be controlled by the same party at a particular time." [Emphasis in the original.]  This situation existed in 2017 and 2018, and it has existed since 2021.  So did we have responsible party government in 2017-2018?  Do we have it today?  Explain with reference to class readings, discussions, and outside research.
  • This article suggests a parliamentary system for the United States:   https://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-needs-parliament-17220.  Agree or disagree?  Explain.
  • Pick a relevant topic of your choice, subject to my approval.  If you have a passion that bears a plausible connection to American political parties, write about it.
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 Turabian format. 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. Graduating seniors should return essays to the Sakai dropbox for this class by 11:59 PM, Wednesday May 4.  All others should return essays by 11:59 PM, Friday, May 6.

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Polarization and the Road to January 6

For Monday, read Drutman ch. 8 and the Sinclair-O'Grady article on Sakai.



Party in the Electorate

Thomas Edsall, NYT 3/13/2019:

A recent survey asked Republicans and Democrats whether they agreed with the statement that members of the opposition party “are not just worse for politics — they are downright evil.”

The answers, published in January in a paper, “Lethal Mass Partisanship,” were startling, but maybe they shouldn’t have been.
Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil.
The mass partisanship paper was written by Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, political scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of Maryland
Kalmoe and Mason, taking the exploration of partisan animosity a step farther, found that nearly one out of five Republicans and Democrats agree with the statement that their political adversaries “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.”
Their line of questioning did not stop there.
How about: “Do you ever think: ‘we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died’?”
Some 20 percent of Democrats (that translates to 12.6 million voters) and 16 percent of Republicans (or 7.9 million voters) do think on occasion that the country would be better off if large numbers of the opposition died.
We’re not finished: “What if the opposing party wins the 2020 presidential election. How much do you feel violence would be justified then?” 18.3 percent of Democrats and 13.8 percent of Republicans said violence would be justified on a scale ranging from “a little” to “a lot.

Survey Center on American Life 9/30/2020

Both Democrats and Republicans have become more certain that the opposing party’s vision for the country represents a clear and present danger. Three-quarters (75 percent) of Republicans say the Democratic policies pose a threat, while nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Democrats say the same about the GOP’s agenda. Only 30 percent of Democrats say Republican policies are misguided or wrong but not dangerous, while 19 percent of Republicans say the same of Democratic policies.

Civiqs Analytics (Sept 2020):

Do you believe that the QAnon theory about a conspiracy among deep state elites is true?

                                          Total  Dem  Rep Ind 

Yes, mostly true................16%..05%..33%..04% 

Yes, some parts are true....16%..04%..23%..21% 

No, not true at all..............43%..72%..13%..39% 

Never heard of QAnon......14%..09%..19%..14% 

Unsure...............................11%..10%..12%..10% 

Party in Government and the "Stolen Election" Myth

State legislators

Trump lost 61 of 62 lawsuits.  BUT in state courts, Trump did have substantial support from GOP-affiliated judges:

 Judicial votes in 2020 presidential election cases, by judges’ perceived party affiliation

Republican affiliationDemocratic affiliationNot knownTotal
For Trump26 (35%)1 (2%)0 (0%)27 (18%)
Against Trump49 (65%)51 (98%)23 (100%)123 (82%)
Total755223150

The "Save America" Rally

A pro-Trump nonprofit organization called Women for America First hosted the “Save America Rally” on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse, a federally owned patch of land near the White House. But an attachment to the permit, granted by the National Park Service, lists more than half a dozen people in staff positions who just weeks earlier had been paid thousands of dollars by Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. Other staff scheduled to be “on site” during the protest have close ties to the White House.

Conservative GroupsThe Republican Attorneys General Association, Turning Point Action, Tea Party Patriots, Council for National Policy.

 Churches

Far-Outside Groups





 Here is a useful thread that put this all in context: (I’ve unrolled it.)

STEP 1: John Eastman concocts a “legal blueprint” whereby VP Pence elides the requirements of the Electoral Vote Act based on 7 states submitting dual slates of electors, allowing Pence to either count the alternate slate or not count those states at all https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf…

STEP 2: GOP operatives/officials in those 7 states in fact create a false slate of electors and submit them as official, so they can be used in the scenario above

STEP 3: DOJ, meanwhile, submits letters to each state, indicating (falsely) that they have reason to believe that there has been election fraud. This creates perception that results are actually in question, bolstering VP’s ability to discount their votes.

[She later tweeted: Jeffrey Clark’s letter references the alternate slate of electors “which have already been submitted”… his DOJ scheme was part and parcel of the same Eastman/forged slate scheme (also creating appearance the the “alternate slate” is OK as a matter of law)”]

Image

STEP 4: The Big Lie is repeated in rallies and social media, saturating information space to rile up base and give momentum to “Stop the Steal” movement

STEP 5: Plan for all of these angry and agitated individuals to come to D.C. on January 6, the day that Eastman’s plan will be put into effect. The protesters are sent to march on the Capitol, to further put pressure on VP Pence and lawmakers, as stated in Oath Keeper indictment.

Image

STEP 6: Since mob attack is intended to keep up pressure on Pence/lawmakers, they must be able to remain in Capitol as long as possible.

So: 6a) Purge top DOD and replace with loyalists; and 6b) delay LE/National Guard response as long as possible.

STEP 7: ??? I’m not sure what was supposed to happen at this point. Presumably, Pence would somehow declare Trump the winner, or if not, the Capitol would remain occupied until they found a way to make him do it. Seems like they planned to continue the siege.

Image

The point is that there are a lot of moving parts and evidence surfacing in a lot of different areas but they are all connected to one overarching goal: Keep Trump in power by subverting the counting of the electoral votes and preventing the transfer of power to Biden /END





Monday, April 11, 2022

Who Gets What? Who Are We?

For Wednesday, read the chapter from Jonathan Karl ("Karl" in the Sakai Resources page for this course).

Non-Hispanic Whites

Census reports decline in raw numbers; "The White population remained the largest race or ethnicity group in the United States, with 204.3 million people identifying as White alone. Overall, 235.4 million people reported White alone or in combination with another group. However, the White alone population decreased by 8.6% since 2010."


Presentations April 11

Zach:


 


Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Executive Politics and the Courts

 Tenatative list for next week:  you may trade times, but tell me.


Monday
  • Daphne Achilles
  • Cary Dornier
  • Sascha Douglass
  • Kirby Kimball
  • William Parker
  • Nick Teresi
  • Alec Vercruysse
  • Luke Williams
  • Melinda Ximen
Wednesday
  • Camille Doherty
  • Nichole Jonassen
  • Michaela Jones
  • Madison Lewis
  • Ria Passi
  • Zachary Torrey
  • Rachel Wander
  • Nathan Worley
  • Andy Xu


GOVERNORS AND EXEC OFFICIALS
Red states with Democratic governors:
  • Kansas (Laura Kelly)
  • Kentucky (Andy Beshear)
  • Louisiana (John Bel Edwards)
Blue states with Republican governors:
  • Maryland (Larry Hogan)
  • Massachusetts (Charlie Baker)
  • Vermont (Phil Scott)
SCOTUS and Party Politics

Flashback to our February 6 class:


Nixon 1968 (at about 19:30)


SCOTUS politics was pretty partisan in the 19th century.  Lincoln's 1858 "House Divided" speech included ... conspiracy theory

We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different potions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen,- Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance-and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortieses exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few-not omitting even scaffolding-or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in-in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.


Clarence Thomas
Note who presided over his confirmation hearing: