Contingencies

"Rely on planning, but never trust plans."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Plan A: For the time being, we should assume that the course will proceed as usual.  But on the off chance that the college must temporarily suspend in-person classes during the break, do bring your books and notes with you on break.


Plan B:  In the case of a temporary suspension of in-person classes, the preferred alternative is to use Zoom videoconferencing.  If you do not have Zoom on your tablet or smartphone, please download it ASAP. 

Plan C:  Many colleges and other organizations may opt for plan B, which means that Zoom could be subject to overloads or crashes.  In that case, I shall post lectures on the blog.  They will consist of short clips of me talking, along with relevant videos.  These posts will not be of professional quality, but they will do in a pinch.

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Other notes:

The syllabus calls for oral presentations on April 7 and 9.  If we are not having in-person sessions that week, we shall do them via Zoom.  If that does not work (see plan C), post your presentations on the blog.  You may use PowerPoint or videos.

Some of you may want to take part in the simulation (Mar 31, Apr 2).  See this page for contingency plans.

During this potentially-difficult time, I am very open to suggestions on how we can manage.

Nomination Process II

Super Tuesday:

History of Super Tuesday
Super Tuesday exit polls

The calendar

• Michigan
• Florida

Top Two -- only CA and Washington -- Most states do not have the initiative

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!

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

2020 California Results as of now

• AD 42: Independent Chad Mayes
• A strange House candidate ... did not make the top two. (local angle!)

Youth Vote

Ledyard King at USA Today:

Young voters cheer Bernie Sanders' anti-establishment message. They turn out in throngs at his rallies. And they form the core of his grassroots efforts to win the Democratic presidential nomination.

But their fiery passion did not translate into the robust turnout he needed on Super Tuesday to win a number of key states, notably in the South where a strong showing by Joe Biden has made the nomination contest a two-person race, especially now that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden.

Exit polls for several states Biden won, including Massachusetts, Texas and several southern states that helped catapult the former vice president into front-runner status, found that while more young voters went to the polls this election cycle, they did not show up at the rate they did in 2016.

A pattern:




 

Nomination Process I

Super Tuesday -- article coauthored by CMC alum Elise Viebeck

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."

Beware: Republican crossover voters are supporting Trump by double-crossing America.

“We're asking South Carolina Republicans to show their support for President Trump by crossing over and voting in the Democratic primary for Senator Bernie Sanders."pic.twitter.com/rRmTxtw1SJ

— Stephanie Kennedy (@WordswithSteph) February 27, 2020

Donna Brazile just told the RNC Chair to go to hell, and I am so here for it! pic.twitter.com/7oAzRLg9uX

— Amy Siskind 🏳️‍🌈 (@Amy_Siskind) March 3, 2020

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





The current process

What happens if you voted for a candidate who dropped out?  

Second Assignment, Spring 2020

Pick one:

• Pick a topic from table 1 of p. 122 in the Grossman article and write about the stances of the parties-in-government on this issue.  How the results in the table reflect that difference?  That is, how are voters responding to what officials actually propose or accomplish? (h/t Danny)
• Who will win the Democratic nomination in 2020?  In your answer, consider similarities and differences between the 2016 and 2020 contests.
• 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? 

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 13. Papers will drop one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.

WRITING AND RESEARCH

Party in the Electorate II

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  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" 
• Group identity
• Activists and donors -- Are Democrats moving?
• In Congress  CQ Magazine, (More later in the course)

Growing Ideological Consistency

Polarization and Issues

Press Freedom

Polarization and Facts

Different News Sources

Party and belief: climate change

Party and belief thinking Trump won the popular vote



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Aversive Partisanship

Thomas Edsall: "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."

More data:

Self-Segregation

Simulation