There’s Been a Massive Change in Where American Policy Gets Made

Since 2021, Democrats have controlled the House, the Senate and the presidency, and they’ve used that power to pass consequential legislation, from the American Rescue Plan to the Inflation Reduction Act. That state of affairs was exceptional: In the 50 years between 1970 and 2020, the U. S. House, Senate and presidency were only under unified party control for 14 years. Divided government has become the norm in American politics. And since Republicans won back the House in November, it is about to become the reality once again. But that doesn’t mean policymaking is going to stop — far from it. As America’s national politics have become more and more gridlocked in recent decades, many consequential policy decisions have been increasingly pushed down to the state level. The ability to receive a legal abortion or use recreational marijuana; how easy it is to join a union, purchase a firearm or vote in elections; the tax rates we pay and the kind of health insurance we have access to: These decisions are being determined at the state level to an extent not seen since before the civil rights revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Jake Grumbach is a political scientist at the University of Washington and the author of the book “Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics.” In it, Grumbach tracks this shift in policymaking to the states and explores its implications for American politics. Our national mythologies present state government as less polarizing, more accountable to voters and a hedge against anti-democratic forces amassing too much power. But, as Grumbach shows, in an era of national political media, parties and identities, the truth is a lot more complicated. So this conversation is a guide to the level of government that we tend to pay the least attention to, even as it shapes our lives more than any other. Mentioned: Dynamic Democracy by Devin Caughey and Christopher Warshaw “Does money have a conservative bias? Estimating the causal impact of Citizens United on state legislative preferences” by Anna Harvey and Taylor Mattia State Capture by Alex Hertel-Fernandez “From the Bargaining Table to the Ballot Box” by James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Vanessa Williamson Paths Out of Dixie by Robert Mickey “Old Money: Campaign Finance and Gerontocracy in the United States” by Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach Book Recommendations: Fragmented Democracy by Jamila Michener Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson Dilla Time by Dan Charnas Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. (And if you’re reaching out to recommend a guest, please write “Guest Suggestion” in the subject line.) You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Jeff Geld. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:24Ezra Klein?

  So a lot of political junkies, myself very much included, spend a lot of our time focused on national politics. The president and the House and the Senate and the Supreme Court, these are the main characters of politics. These are the agents through which the grand battles play out. National politics is what most political reporting is about. And so it gets most of our attention, a huge amount of our attention, probably too much. Because as America's national politics become more and more gridlocked, maybe in part because we pay so much attention to it, more policy power and decision making has been pushed down to the state level. The taxes we pay, whether you can get an abortion, whether you can get Medicaid, how easy it is to purchase a gun, which drugs you

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  can use, how easy it is to join a union, what kind of education your children get, how hard it is to vote. This is all being determined wholly or very substantially at the state level. And states are going in much more different directions than they have really since the days of civil rights. At least, that's the argument of my guest today. Jake Grumbach is a political scientist at the University of Washington and author of the book Laboratories Against Democracy. And he both argues that you're seeing this big shift to policy happening in the states, and that we should not feel great about that. Our national mythologies, sure, they imagine the states as more accountable to voters. We think of them as laboratories of

• 1:51Ezra Klein?

  democracy and bullworks against federal tyranny. But the reality is muddier. State politics are far more captured by interest groups. They often make the culture war worse, turning up the temperature, not turning it down. They're much harder for voters to track, particularly as so much state and local media has collapsed in recent years. So they're harder to keep accountable. And many states, particularly many red states, have become primary vehicles now for democratic backsliding. So this question of what it means that states are so much more central now in the policymaking process and that we have fewer venues and mechanisms by which to track what they are doing deserves a lot more consideration than we tend to give it.

• 2:30Ezra Klein?

  As always, my email is [email protected]. Jake Grumbach, welcome to the show.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Ezra.

• 2:42Ezra Klein?

  So tell me about what you call the state policy resurgence.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  So the state policy resurgence is that over the past generation, the state level has really become the main policymaker and the central battleground in American public policymaking, in contrast to the national level.

• 3:00Ezra Klein?

  Flesh that out a bit for me. Central battleground will be surprising, I think, to a lot of people who follow politics and they understand the battles as Trump versus Biden, Trump versus Clinton, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Affordable Care Act, the Trump tax cuts. So central battleground for what?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you went through a few of the key pieces of national legislation over the last generation. We've had big national policies like the Affordable Care Act, or S-Chip, or even Supreme Court rulings like in Obergefell, the legalization of gay marriage nationally. And some of these national policies make states more similar. So a national policy sets standards across the states, like the Voting Rights Act did, said Jim Crow voting laws in some states are no longer allowed. States are going to become more similar. But then you have some other of those policies like the Affordable Care Act actually increased the role of the states through the Supreme Court ruling in NFIB v. Sabalius

• 4:00Speaker 01

  by allowing states to decide whether to expand Medicaid or not. And that was sort of the flagship change done by the Affordable Care Act. So ironically, even the Affordable Care Act made the states more important for public policy and people's health outcomes due to Medicaid expansion differences across states. But in general, those national policies that have standardized policy across the states have increasingly become the exception rather than the rule. So since the 1970s, and then even more so in the 1990s and 2000s, we saw Congress really polarize and become more gridlocked and increasing rates of divided government where the presidency and Congress are held by different parties.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  All of that has created policy gridlock and slowed down the production of national policymaking. And that's in stark contrast to the sort of 1930s through 1970s, the New Deal period and the civil rights period, where super important policies like Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare itself in 1965, those really did make states much more similar. The poorer southern states started catching up economically to the northern states. Civil rights law was standardized across states. So if you lived in a northern and southern state, in the 20th century, your life became much more similar.

• 5:22Ezra Klein?

  So there are certain policies that are similar state to state. I get Social Security no matter where I am. What are the policies that differ the most state to state? What is the most different between living in California and Wyoming or Texas or Louisiana?

• 5:38Speaker 01

  It's hard to compare across policy areas, but it's true that we've really seen differences in tax policy between red and blue states over the past generation with coastal, more liberal states raising taxes on high-income earners, where in some of those states, the sort of percentage of taxes you pay overall, a much higher proportion is going to state tax. Then has been really true since the initiation of national level taxation in the US. And then environmental policy, right? You had fuel efficiency standards and cap and trade policies in sort of more liberal states. And environmental deregulation in more conservative and fossil fuel productive states.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Minimum wages have diverged dramatically. The national government has not raised the minimum wage in over a decade, but the states really have. So in some states, you're getting $15 minimum wages and in other states, it's still the low baseline federal minimum wage. So these economic areas are really diverging. And then especially after the Dobbs decision in the Supreme Court that allowed states to fully ban abortion if they wish. By overturning Roe v. Wade, we're now seeing some states with much more progressive accessible abortion policies. And other states moving to fully ban abortions and remove all abortion providers in the states.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Those are really dramatic differences between states that we haven't seen since the sort of pre-civil rights period.

• 7:06Ezra Klein?

  I want to pick up on that allusion to history here because it isn't new for life to differ kind of wildly state to state. And in some ways, that was closer to how the country has been for most of its existence and arguably to how it was intended to be. Where state governments would have a lot of power and people could live in the state that best suited them. So so talk a bit about the difference between kind of pre and post mid 20th century federalism.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  So in so many sort of areas of inquiry and history and the social sciences. Everybody's increasingly seeing that the mid 20th century sort of long New Deal and civil rights coalition. Was really the exception in so many ways. That was an era of the Warren Court in the Supreme Court, a sort of pro civil rights. Court for the most part, that's the exception rather than the rule. For the most part, the Supreme Court. Has been more against civil rights and a more hollow hope as sort of judicial scholars would say. Same thing with the production of these big national policies, whether it's social. Security, Medicare, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, the Clean Air Act in the 1970s. Those are the exception rather than the rule.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  And the differences between states now, between state like Alabama and a state like where I am, Washington State, that is very substantial and meaningful, but it's nothing compared to the differences prior to the end of Jim Crow, where there was full disenfranchisement of black Americans in the South, but not the North. And similarly, in the era of slavery, like this shouldn't even need to be said, but this is entirely different universe. And I don't even know how much it's worth comparing, but the difference between being a black American in a free versus a slave state, or prior to the 19th Amendment legalizing the franchise for women throughout the country, states differed, some states legalized voting for women and some states didn't. That's a massive, massive difference.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  But I would say that now, these differences are expanding and they're very meaningful.

• 9:06Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned a few minutes ago that some of what is pushing policymaking to the state level is federal gridlock, is that it's just gotten harder to pass really anything through Congress. I think it's useful to keep in mind here that between 1970 and 2014, you only had unified party control of the House, Senate and presidency about 27% of the time, whereas the average state has been under unified control about 50% of the time. Flesh that story out for me a bit. Why does gridlock push policymaking down and what does it mean for it to do that?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  So this is really crucial. So American federalism is a system as a whole, right? So part of what I'm doing in the book and in general in my career is there's been this big literature that's hugely important and innovative in state politics. And it's tended to look at the states as sort of like, oh, we can increase our sample size to 50 and we're looking at these 50 different states that have their own political systems. But American federalism is a system with multiple levels. So what the national level does affects the state level and vice versa politically. And what ironically we've seen is national groups, whether it's anti-abortion groups and the evangelical right, whether it's environmentalist activist groups, whether it's the NRA and sort of

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Gun rights groups, whether it's big corporations and the Chamber of Commerce, whether it's rogue billionaires, like the modern version of Peter Thiel, or before that, the Koch Brothers, or Soros among liberals. All of these forces were interested in changing the direction of the country nationally. They got involved in national politics and that contributed along with other forces, like the racial realignment of the South in polarizing national politics and generating more gridlock. It became more costly, if you're some sort of activist or interest group, to try to get your policy passed at the national level as a result of your investments in national politics.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  So then what you do is you realize, okay, like that sort of cliche of we're failing globally, let's turn to act locally. And a lot of these groups really shifted their political investments and attention to the state and local level where they could make more progress. And that really interacts with party control of government, where because states tend to be either more liberal or conservative, whereas the national government is sort of a mix of everybody, you get more advantages to pass conservative policies in Republican-dominated states or liberal policies in democratically controlled states.

• 11:37Ezra Klein?

  This is a place where I always think the metaphor of gridlock is actually more telling than people mean it to be. So I think people use gridlock to say nothing is getting done. But I live in California and I spend a lot of time in actual gridlock. And what happens during actual gridlock is people take side streets, right? Like, everything around the freeway often gets very congested, too, because people are going places in a weirder, more indirect way. And I always think that's actually a good way to think about what happens during gridlock federally. More policymaking goes to the courts. They make decisions and say, well, look, Congress can revisit it, but Congress actually can't. So whatever the court does remains, or it goes down to the state level, or it goes to executive actions.

• 12:19Ezra Klein?

  But I think this is a place where a kind of obvious objection to the affect of this conversation will occur to the listener, which is, isn't this good? Isn't this how it's supposed to be? I mean, states are closer to the people that they represent than the federal government is. The founders thought our primary political attachments would be to states. The federal government is supposed to devolve all powers. It's not explicitly given over to the states. What's actually The problem here, if gridlock is pushing more down to state level, why shouldn't that be celebrated?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Damn Ezra, that gridlock metaphor was A++.

• 12:55Ezra Klein?

  I appreciate it.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  That is incredible, man.

• 12:57Ezra Klein?

  I'm a professional.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  That's a really nice way of putting it. So a theory going back many generations is that federalism serves as a sort of safety valve. If something can't get done nationally, it can devolve to the state level and be sorted out there, potentially because people in states do differ. This is a large diverse country and that was some of the original sort of federalist papers, James Madison based appeals for federalism as a constitutional design was even at that point when only mostly property owning white male Christians could vote, like there were differences between them across those colonies based on which various Protestant sect they came from in the British Isles, for example. Enough diversity could mean this hopeful story of that policymaking at the state level

• 13:43Speaker 01

  can really keep this country together in harmony, even with a diverse set of interests in the country. So this is true, like in the early 2000s, there was a huge argument that if we allow sort of gay rights to be dealt with in the states, then everybody can live under their preferred regime and everybody will be less polarized nationally. They'll be less sort of negative affect across the parties nationally because everybody's living harmoniously under the laws they want to live under. And more than that, they can vote with their feet as 20th century sort of political economists argued. If you don't like what's going on in your state, you can leave and move someplace else. But what my book really argues is that the resurgence of the state level, it's not just

• 14:28Speaker 01

  that gridlock metaphor where you take the same cars, so to speak, or the same politics and you sort of transport it down a level to the state level and it like, you know, some sort of fraction of national politics. It actually fundamentally changes politics and advantages, some interests and disadvantages others.

• 14:47Ezra Klein?

  Well, before we get into that, I think there's an interesting way in which your book is arguing this in two directions. So we'll, we'll talk about the way in which it changes who's advantaged. But you're also making the argument that state politics has nationalized to a degree that wasn't true at other points in in American history, including some of these sort of pre mid 20th century periods we're talking about, when the politics of an individual state probably differed really quite radically from the politics of the country and what the states were worried about was often a quite different agenda. The kind of media they had was very different. I mean, what you're reading in the South and in New York and in the Midwest in 1910 were just quite different papers and information

• 15:31Ezra Klein?

  sources. And one thing you argue is that state politics has nationalized in a way that has probably not been good either for national or for state politics. So could you draw that out a bit?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So a major frame of my book is the collision between highly nationalized political parties, especially national teams of Democrats and Republicans are colliding with the super sub nationally important institutions, the decentralized institutions of American federalism that give wide leeway and latitude constitutionally to the states. And what I mean by the parties nationalizing is, in part, you see this reflected in political media, where now attention in political media through cable news, social media, even newspapers and broadcast TV networks, to the extent they still exist, are highly focused on national

• 16:24Speaker 01

  tug of wars over sort of cultural and other forms of conflict in American politics. You see fundraising nationalized, where increasingly individual donors are donating across districts and states, as well as especially interest groups. And then also, just in general, the voting blocs have nationalized as the South became Republican over the long sort of end of the 20th century and 21st century. So all of that means is that our attention is focused on national politics, our investments politically, whether that's in learning about who to vote for, whether that's in donating money, tend to be focused on national politics. But because the national level is so gridlocked,

• 17:06Speaker 01

  The state level is the resurgent and important policymaker. So one important thing when national parties collide with subnational institutions, a lot of those sort of optimistic theories of how federalism will increase national harmony or make democracy more responsive to ordinary people and constituents. All of those sort of beneficial theories about federalism really fall away when you have highly nationalized political parties. And that's because politicians, when you're running for local dog catcher all the way up to president, all of them are part of sort of national teams. And voters are paying much more attention to national politics and have much less

• 17:48Speaker 01

  information about what's going on at the state and local level, in part due to the nationalization of media.

• 17:55Ezra Klein?

  So I want to key in to that mismatch of attention because this seems to me to be one of the really frustrating, dangerous dimensions of this, where you're having a devolution of power to the state level. You're having much more radical or at least more extreme policies passed in both directions in different states. And yet, the ability for people to know what is going on in their state has degraded quite a bit. You've lost a lot of state level papers. I think about myself in this respect. I think that if I, when I was, you know, 15, growing up in Orange County, California, the main news I got was from the LA Times, which we subscribe to.

• 18:38Ezra Klein?

  I think now, if I was that same kind of politically junky teenager, I'd probably like listen to Pod Save America, you know, my family would have an online subscription to the New York Times, like we're a very national paper, but it's not like we have a gigantic Sacramento bureau. And so I grew up, you know, in my teens with a really strong identity around California politics. Like what I wanted to do was work in politics and probably in California politics. And obviously, my life took a somewhat different path. But I wonder if I would have had that identity today. I wonder how much my identity would be national, but at the same time, a ton of stuff is happening. California. I mean, I did a piece on Gavin Newsom during the recall.

• 19:19Ezra Klein?

  And as somebody who reads California papers like continuously right now, who pays unusual attention to California politics, who makes a point of writing constant columns about California politics, so much that I did not know had happened, had happened. So what becomes permitted at the state level? What changes at the state political level when you have this sort of mix of more power, more pressure to do politics, but also less public attention? Because the people who are interested in politics just aren't that attached to organs that are covering the state house.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  There's a number of effects. One is sort of decreasing accountability for state legislatures who vote for policies that are out of step with their constituents. Political scientists like Steve Rogers have really tracked this statistically with important state legislative votes. But with the decline of media on state and local government, like you've said, it's really hard to know how to vote in a state legislative primary without the endorsements from national groups. So like, I'm a professor of political science. I have a PhD in poli sci and I have a hard time voting in state legislative primaries without knowing what national groups with respect to, you know, issues I care about on labor or criminal justice or the environment or something like that. They have to tell me how to vote.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Whereas at the presidential level, like you can be damn sure I know who to vote for in a presidential primary. And that's partially a function of sort of media attention. But I think we can see this sort of nationalization of attention and how national conflict is really driving action at the state and local level in a number of ways. So even an area that's really regulated by the states and counties like education. When we think about the issue of sort of the backlash to critical race theory, this backlash didn't happen in a pattern that was like, oh, here is a local influx of critical race theory and a backlash to that local influx. It's much more about the national tug of war over the direction of the country. And that's part of the national culture war.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Same thing with Ron DeSantis and Disney World was not really about Ron DeSantis and Disney. World and Florida specifically, it's about a national culture war over, you know, trans rights and things like that. So really it's national cleavages are sort of bubbling down. That's a terrible metaphor to the state and local level. Another example of that I think of is in all sorts of ways, economic outcomes at the local level and other outcomes like we might expect how COVID is doing in your state or locality, or how the economy is doing is really driving voter behavior and accountability through what we call retrospective voting. And that's all really declined over the last generation. It's really hard to trace sort of

• 22:06Speaker 01

  incumbents at the state or local level are doing better on some metric like crime or the economy or preventing COVID or something like that and doing better in elections. It seems much more driven by the national culture war. Lastly, the New York Times has done like a lot of great focus groups and interviews with voters and maybe, you know, around after 2016, there are a few too many of these. We're going to the Exurban Ohio diner to talk to Republican voters. But if you talk to them, like you really do get something where you ask, what is driving your vote choice in this election? And it's not, you know, what's going on in Exurban, Wisconsin is not driving what voters are doing. They're saying, my country is slipping away. This is about a national tug of war over the country. And

• 22:51Speaker 01

  statistically, I find states that are engaged in big changes over their democratic institutions, it's not really related to demographic changes within states, but rather an overall sort of sense of which direction they want the country to go to.

• 23:05Ezra Klein?

  So I think that a prediction, just like you would pull out of this theory, is that if you have a lot more policymaking happening at state level, you have, I think it's fair to say, more extreme groups and more extreme legislators who are operating at state level, just because of how people come up in politics now and where they focus their energy. And you have less press attention, press accountability, public knowledge of what is happening at the state level. You should be getting state policies that are way out of whack with their voters. But, you know, if you look at, say, polling, polling finds typically that, you know, fewer than 30% of Americans trust the federal government. Confidence in Congress was under 10% at times in 2022, which is just great work, everybody.

• 23:49Ezra Klein?

  But you, in the book, you mentioned a 2018 Gallup survey, which found that 63% of Americans trusted their state government. That's the exact same percentage who trusted it back in 1973. So that implies to me one of two things. Either people don't hate the outcomes they're getting at the state level, or whether or not they would hate them, they're not so visible to them that they're changing their feelings about state politics. That kind of robustness of public trust in the state, isn't that a hitch in criticisms of how this is going down?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  So two scholars that have, I think, really innovated and revolutionized the study of public opinion and policy responsiveness in the states is Devin Coe and Chris Warshaw in their new book, Dynamic Democracy. And I do some of this in my book as well. And in some ways, the correlation between liberal opinion and liberal policies, or vice versa, conservative opinion and conservative policies, in some ways seems to be stronger now than a generation ago in the States, where most conservative states do have the most conservative policies now. And that could be a success story. On the other hand, public opinion has been really stable over the past generation on key issues that states are really doing

• 25:01Speaker 01

  big policies on. So for example, abortion opinion, you know, in the States and nationally has really stayed pretty static over the past generation, really since Roe v. Wade. But we've had massive changes in abortion policy in the States, which suggests maybe that public opinion isn't driving these sort of big policy changes as much as important activists, donors, and other groups. But in general, I think the love your member of Congress but hate Congress itself and, you know, loving your state government, I think those are Functions of having a system with so many different elected offices. The US has so damn many elections.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  It is incredible compared to all other democracies around the world, essentially. It's up there with the highest number of elections, many of which are sort of odd year elections at the state and local level. You're voting for all sorts of county comptroller. You're voting for judges in many states. You're voting for secretaries of states, state attorneys general. It's extremely difficult to understand who is improving your life circumstances or worsening them. And contrast this to like, you know, the recent issue with the Tories and Liz Truss in the UK, for example. That was a pretty straightforward story of accountability. You pass a bad budget, cut taxes too much on the wealthy and firms.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  You know, the economy and markets start punishing you. And then your approval goes down and in elections, it looks like your party is going to suffer some harm in elections. Whereas in the US, with a crisis like COVID or economic problems or inflation, it's really, really hard to know what level of government to blame. And it is true also that in general, state governments serve as sort of insurance for when you're out of national power. So if you are in a red state now, your state can pass policies against those passed by the Democratic Congress and Joe Biden, just like blue states did under Donald Trump. And that is an effective argument for the presence of states.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  But in the era of national parties, there are all these other trade offs of having that insurance at the state level. So I would say we can't really see that approval of state government as a massive endorsement of the entire federalist system that involves the states.

• 27:27Ezra Klein?

  Well, let's get to some of those trade offs and in particular the shifts in power because imagine the listener right now is actually kind of convinced that maybe this is good. People trust states more. You just mentioned there's path breaking research showing that there is a fairly reasonable alignment between the political opinions of a state and what they're getting. I take your point that a lot of issues are static, but maybe, you know, we're moving more into alignment with where people have been for a long time. People, I think, in general, have an intuition that government, again, closer to the people is better. So what worries you here? Talk me out of being not just complacent, but maybe even pleased to hear that we're in a more federalist era.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  One just nice initial example is that democratic backsliding in the states over the past especially 10 years through setting records in terms of partisan gerrymandering, suppressing the vote, restricting who's eligible to vote, but especially gerrymandering, has really affected which state policies get passed and responsiveness to public opinion. So I actually think in some areas like abortion policy, the Dobbs decision moved authority down to the state level, increased the width and breadth of state authority. He said, states, if you really want to ban abortion, you can go for it. And what we're seeing now is that actually that's moving state abortion policy on average away from state public

• 28:52Speaker 01

  opinion, mostly because of gerrymandering. So you can get states like Wisconsin, which less than 40% support an abortion ban, but the state legislature is voted in by essentially a more conservative set of voters who are a minority of the electorate that can set the majority of the state legislature through gerrymandering. But then more broadly, there are these more general theories I'm pushing about the trade offs of moving more policymaking to the state level. One is political inequality is greater at the state level than at the national level. So what I mean by that is state legislative candidates, like you said, is going to say like, I'm closer to the people. I'm unlike those distant fat cats in DC.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  You know, who don't have your interests at heart. I'm your state candidate and the state capital is much closer. And ironically, that's just does not appear to be the case. So, for example, voting in state level elections, particularly off cycle elections that don't have presidential or US senate or US house candidates in them. Political inequality in participating in those elections is sky high. Young people, voters of color, non homeowners, people with less wealth and education are much less likely to vote in those lower level elections. In terms of donating money, I show in my book and I'm doing some initial additional research on this. The state level donors are whiter, wealthier, older,

• 30:22Speaker 01

  more likely to be homeowners than donors in national politics. In addition, there's these informational advantages. We've talked about the decline of state and local journalism and how hard it is to hold your state government accountable compared to you. You kind of know when the president or Congress does something you don't want. And at the state level, you know, who does still have tremendous information? Firms and national activist groups that have staff lawyers and firms who have lobbying arms that can read the fine print of state level policy. So there's this big informational advantage. And finally, in this technological era of national and really globalized financial markets, you can move money around through donations

• 31:06Speaker 01

  or setting up AstroTurf interest groups across the country. If you're wealthy and your main political voice is through money, you have a huge advantage in moving that money around to find advantageous places and times to pass your preferred policy in a state that you don't live in. But if you're an ordinary voter or you're a worker in a labor union or you're some young person in some social movement for, you know, LGBT rights or climate change or something like that, you can't just pack up and move your protest or move your vote to another state that has a political opportunity. So this is providing huge, huge advantages to groups that use money as their main form of political voice rather than their sort of one person, one vote personhood.

• 31:52Ezra Klein?

  I want to dig into a couple of pieces of this, but before I do, I want to try a frame out on you, which I thought about reading the book, which is states are, I think, compared to local and national politics, almost uniquely harder for a voter to keep track of. Locally, you can kind of see what's happening around you. People might just tell you what's happening around you, right? There's a lot of just information moving through local networks of human beings. And I'm not saying we know everything that is happening in our locality, but I do think people tend to have a reasonable idea of what is happening in their city, particularly if something big is happening in their city. Nationally, there's a ton of media coverage. There's endless amounts of ways that people try to inform you about what is happening nationally. At the state level, you're kind of in a

• 32:36Ezra Klein?

  no man's land. It's a little too far to know about it through just daily conversations with your neighbors or looking around you, but it doesn't have the kind of coverage that would keep you continuously informed. But on the flip side of that, and in some ways for that exact reason, states are really, really good targets for interest groups. Locally, there's just way too many localities. It's very hard to be an interest group operating in any kind of coordinated way across all the cities and municipalities and counties and so on. Nationally, obviously, interest groups do a lot of work there, but you're pushing a really big boulder. So many other players are pushing. There's so much information. There's so many voters. There's so much money sloshing in the system that having an effect

• 33:18Ezra Klein?

  as one group is really quite hard. But at the state level, there's not that much oversight. The legislators, the senators, the governors, they really need your money. It's harder for them to fundraise than it is for a member of the National Senate or House to fundraise. They also need your expertise, is something you mentioned a minute ago, but, or alluded to at least, but state legislators, they have very, very little in the way of policy staff, in the way of resources for writing bills, for getting informed about issues. So if you come in and you're able to functionally act as an informational arm for them, that is something that they'll often let you do and actually need you to do in a way that nationally Senate offices do sometimes, have lobbyists come in and write their bills,

• 34:00Ezra Klein?

  or at least help write their bills, but they have a lot more of their ability, of an ability to do it themselves than state legislators do. And so this, to me, is what kind of came through reading the book, that the state level is very hard for voters to keep track of and very easy for groups to influence. And like, that's kind of the fundamental asymmetry of it. Does that seem fair to you?

• 34:21Speaker 01

  So first, really crucial point about the need for legislative subsidies, they're called, in political science and political economy. And that's through lobbying and providing of information. So that is a reasonably crucial function in politics to provide information to write bills. But you're right, at the state level, legislatures are really, you know, this is not supposed to be a diss, but they're less professional and professionalized. They have low salaries. So often, in many state legislatures, state legislators go into office for only a few weeks out of the year and keep their main careers because they are paid very little money. I totally empathize with the populist opposition to paying politicians more. It sounds terrible.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Why are you paying these politicians more? But ironically, paying politicians more gives them more ability to actually think about, an incentive to think about what the people want rather than what lobbyists may want. But I'll have to push back a little bit about your optimistic take about local politics, especially in the age of COVID and in general in this age of sort of technology. Our social networks are not, not very robust locally anymore. We're not able to have local affinity in organizational groups or sort of volunteer associations where people get together and talk about the potholes in their neighborhood or what's actually happening with crime. I think we have less of a sense than before when you actually would know, like, a sense

• 35:48Speaker 01

  of like, how likely is it I'm going to be robbed today? You would have a sense by, how many people have I known in my area that have been robbed in recent times? That would be heuristic, whereas now it's national media. So at the same time, I think you make a nice point about the state level being kind of uniquely positioned for interest groups and lobbyists in this way.

• 36:32Ezra Klein?

  To pick up on something you said a couple of minutes ago, I think it's interesting, the evidence around money at the state level and money at the federal level. I think it is fair to say that the judgment out of political science is that people overestimate how far money goes to influence national politics or national policy, which isn't to say it doesn't have any influence. But my sense is that the evidence that money really matters in state elections and in influencing state policy is somewhat stronger. Can you run through a bit of that?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So I think the intellectual history of money in politics, research in poli sci is so fascinating because it's really ebbed and flowed and fluctuated with the overall takes and conventional wisdom. But then there were a number of really important studies at all levels of government that money really buys access to politicians. And that's something you sort of alluded to in your questions, Ezra, is that money in politics can buy access and time to be able to lobby politicians. And that seems to be especially important at the state and local levels, but especially the state level. So buying access gives you the ability to lobby. You're probably not buying votes, but you're setting the agenda. What issues is a politician going to focus on? And then money just travels

• 37:47Speaker 01

  further at the state and local levels in addition, because there's not just this overwhelming torrent of national money, some of which just comes from, you know, ordinary individuals that are donating 20 bucks to their, you know, some competitive partisan, like the Georgia special senate election is going to be a classic one, super expensive race. There's so much money from that type of fundraising that it's hard at the margin to be a corporation and squeeze a lot more influence out with an additional set of thousands of dollars. But the other thing is Citizens United really did transform state politics. So Anna Harvey and Taylor Mattia have one of the great papers on Citizens United in the States. And what they show, among other papers,

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Is that Citizens United overturned state level restrictions on the amount you can donate if you're a corporation or a wealthy individual? And by restricting those restrictions, Citizens United really did increase Republican vote shares and Republican state legislative holding and made those Republicans much more conservative.

• 38:52Ezra Klein?

  Let's say I'm a strong Republican or a strong Democrat and I'm going to donate you know, $500 in the next cycle. Should I be giving that to national campaigns of any sort, House, Senate, President? If I want to have an effect? Or should I be giving that to somehow state legislators or governors or through some fund that identifies those races? I mean, how much further does my money go in terms of trying to win over a state house? If it does go further than trying to win over Congress?

• 39:26Speaker 01

  So one irony in my line of arguments in my book is that I do think it would be better for the American political system and democracy to shift more policymaking to the national level rather than the state level. But you also got to use the institutional power you have and play the advantages you have. And what that means is I would highly recommend donating at the state level rather than the national level if you're interested in sort of the direction of the country. And that's in part for all the reasons we've said, money travels a bit further, but also increasingly state governments uniquely, this is unique in American federalism compared to other federal systems like Mexico, Germany, Canada, India, Switzerland.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  The US puts democratic institutions themselves, like districting and voting rights at the state level. And now also electoral subversion potential, the idea that states could just give Electoral College votes to whatever presidential candidate they feel like regardless of how the election goes. So vote counting, all of those things are controlled by the states. So something as weird as a Secretary of State race in a state or a state judicial election or elections certainly. For state legislature, all of this matters really, really hugely. And beyond those sort of main democratic institutions like voting and districting and things like that.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  The states in the 2010s really fundamentally reshaped power differentials in American politics. For example, by reducing the power of labor unions, especially in midwestern states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. So that's really crucial and there's a potential opportunities to change those trends.

• 41:11Ezra Klein?

  Let me hold you on that because I think that's an important point. We talked earlier about the way power devolves down from the federal level to state level, right? Sometimes because of gridlock, sometimes because of a law or some court decision. How things at the federal level can make the state level more powerful. But you're pointing out something that I think is really quite important here, which is how actions and activity at the state level, particularly in coordination with a larger partisan structure, can change power at the national level. And you were talking about some of what happened, you know, around 2010 and in the 2010s around unions. We should talk probably about gerrymandering. The balance of power for some time, I think, really, really shifted because of things that happened in state legislatures

• 41:56Ezra Klein?

  right around that era. So can you give a couple of examples of how what happens in a state house ends up changing? Who holds, wields, or how they hold and wield power nationally?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  So I like to think on issues of especially sort of which groups are able to organize and be powerful in politics really matters. And in the 2010s, the restrictions on labor unions, especially in key midwestern swing states, absolutely had a profound effect on elections at all levels of government. So right to work laws and sort of public sector right to work laws like in Wisconsin. Those were not the product of some sort of sea change in public opinion. As Alex Hertel Fernandez in his book State Capture really shows. This is about a really brilliant strategy to invest in state level politics by networks of interest groups, especially the

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Network and Americans for Prosperity, as well as the American Legislative Exchange Council, which sends model bills across states and provides one of those legislative subsidies for unprofessional legislatures like we talked about. But a great paper by James Feigenbaum, an economist and two political scientists, Alex Hertel Fernandez and Vanessa Williamson, shows that right-to-work laws statistically are one of the most powerful policy changes that have increased Republican vote shares in recent memory. So that really did shift, for example, the 2016 election, absent those right-to-work laws, would have been different. Then you move on to gerrymandering in some of these record-setting states like Wisconsin and North Carolina. And you see that gerrymandering

• 43:34Speaker 01

  changes the number of US House seats overall. And right now, redistricting in the Supreme Court of New York, it's not called the Supreme Court there, but they're tossing out of the sort of pro-Democratic Party gerrymandered map for a map that's more neutral or leans maybe slightly Republican, actually may determine this US House majority for the Republican Party. So districting has really mattered for all levels of government. And again, it's very unique for the US to put all this authority over democracy at all levels in the hands of states.

• 44:11Ezra Klein?

  There's a weird thing happening where Democratic states are, in many cases, I would say, unilaterally disarming on gerrymandering. In California, we have independent gerrymandering, which I support. But when you have a situation where red states are gerrymandering as hard as they can in favor of Republican Party control, and blue states begin moving towards independent gerrymandering, or New York, because of the court, they moved in that direction, you can get an imbalance of power. It's not 100% clear to me how much one is going to matter this year, because my sense of where the analysis is going is that Republicans are not getting something dramatically different than their vote share in the House. Maybe they're even underplaying their vote share a little bit.

• 44:54Ezra Klein?

  But if Democrats had gerrymandered the way Republicans had gerrymandered, it seems very likely to me they would have kept the House in this election, which I don't think is the way ultimately it's all going to go. And so, I don't know. That just seems like a place where... The fact that the Democratic coalition nationally has turned against gerrymandering and so is trying to get rid of it, and they can do that in blue states, but they can't do it nationally, and the Republican coalition has not turned against gerrymandering and they're trying to do it as hard as they can, is actually really having an effect on American politics.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  It's a huge deal, and you're right about this asymmetry with respect for norms in American politics. One issue here is that it's just very clear that elites in the Democratic Party have not pushed their advantage quite as much as Republicans have. And what Republicans have done so far has been ruled by the courts to be mostly legal. Some court rulings meant that now this new redistricting cycle in the 2020s is looking nationally much more even than the 2010s was, which was setting real mathematical records of partisan gerrymandering. But one irony here is that Congress could step in and essentially ban partisan gerrymandering and say, all states have to do independent, nonpartisan redistricting, and if a map is

• 46:12Speaker 01

  too skewed towards one party or the other, it has to be redrawn to be fair to both parties. That seems like it's good for everybody. It's fair standards for everybody. But the Republican Party in Congress has not gone for that. But they moved slightly towards supporting a gerrymandering ban before the New York Democratic gerrymander was thrown out. So basically, norm erosion often happens because there's not sort of equal punishment for norm erosion across parties. So really crucially, I actually think for the health of democracy, it's better to have two norm eroters than only one norm eroter, because then there's no sanction for norm erosion on either side.

• 46:52Ezra Klein?

  That reminds me of an argument, and I apologize, whoever's made this argument to me, because I forgot, but that in game theory, it's often proven, at least in certain conditions, that the optimal strategy in a lot of hostile negotiations is tit for tat, that you should react however the other player reacted until they change strategy, and then you react in the way where they change too, which would get at your point that it can be healthier to have. Everybody doing norm erosion, it feels very counterintuitive certainly to me and is not typically what I try to recommend. But my understanding is that at least in the the hot house world of game theory, it's actually a fairly uncontroversial point.

• 47:33Ezra Klein?

  That at least in certain kinds of hostile negotiations, having a strategy where you match what the other side is doing will get you to a better outcome. Then somebody trying to hold to a more a more when they go low, we go high approach.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. There's some really important legal scholarship that's suggesting a way out of this sort of norm erosion is that. To excuse norm erosion if it's in service of passing new rules to establish rules around those norms. So that was a little confusing. The point being is the US Constitution gives just a huge amount of leeway to the states. It's a pretty vague constitution and like throughout history, there's a pattern of the Supreme Court kind of gives states wide leeway to. Backslide on democracy. So it's really up to Congress to decide to step in or not.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  And one way to incentivize Congress to do that is to punish norm erosion on either side or give both sides an incentive to prefer. A rule that binds both of their hands rather than not. And law professors are calling this constitutional hardball as anti-hardball. So essentially doing hardball in pursuit of rules to ban constitutional hardball.

• 48:46Ezra Klein?

  So this would be something like getting rid of the filibuster to pass a bill that ends partisan gerrymandering.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  That's a perfect example or something around, you know, the debt ceiling issues and other things that the debt ceiling is a classic example of norm erosion. Where you're using a tool, this is totally legal to extract concessions from the other side by threatening to burn the whole thing down.

• 49:09Ezra Klein?

  I think this is a good place to pivot a bit to something you alluded to earlier, which is the democracy index you created and have used to look at a bunch of different states and where they've moved in recent years. Tell me a bit about that index, what it is constructed out of and then what it is found.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I have slightly different indices in the book of sort of broader index and then a different index in this new American Political Science Review paper that I think is going to be open access. So that's just a free PDF you can download. But in the paper, what I do is I use 51 different variables or indicators, which range from like, what's the average wait time to vote in a state if you're voting in person? Does a state have automatic voter registration or same day voter registration? What percent of felons or the population does it disenfranchise through felon disenfranchisement? So sort of voting policies like that. I have responsiveness to public opinion in there. I have, especially

• 50:06Speaker 01

  importantly, measures of the partisan bias and gerrymandering in a state. And finally, I have measures of sort of electoral integrity, sort of procedures around post-election audits and fair election certification and security. All of those I put into a statistical model and the model generates sort of scores for how well or poorly states are doing on that sort of overall electoral democracy measure. What I'm finding with this measure is that over the past couple of decades, the average state hasn't changed too much in terms of its democracy. But as we know from thinking about federalism, the average doesn't really matter that much. Just like in Jim Crow, it would be kind of lame to say like, well,

• 50:48Speaker 01

  the average state isn't too segregated. So I guess the civil rights movement, not very necessary, would be a little weird. So similarly now, it's about looking at trends within states and you see that many states are making their democracy more expansive in some ways by opening access to voting and providing fair districting and so forth. And some other states are experiencing really quite profound democratic backsliding, especially since the 2010s.

• 51:15Ezra Klein?

  And just to draw out, I think, what is maybe a little bit obvious, that's a red-blue divide. I mean, what is happening in the past couple of decades is that the states are polarizing around the question of democracy in a way they hadn't been in 2000. It just wasn't the case that things like vote by mail or early voting were always understood as something only blue states did. That's a more recent development. So now you have a lot of blue states becoming much more easily democratic and a lot of red states becoming much more restrictive.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So North Carolina is my favorite case because Rob Mickey's book, Pathways Out of Dixie, really shows that was one of the last sort of anti-democracy Jim Crow regimes to break down. Takes till the 1970s. But by the 1990s and early 2000s, North Carolina is this success story. Voter registration is skyrocketing through the Motor Voter Act, which finally gives voter registration and DMVs. You know, it's becoming much more competitive across the parties with politicians competing for black and white votes. It's a pretty good success story. But after the 2010s and the Republican Party's unified control of North Carolina, it really falls off a cliff, generating one

• 52:26Speaker 01

  of the most gerrymandered maps in US history, especially after the Shelby County Supreme Court case reduces the power of the Voting Rights Act. They pass further voter suppression policies. So this is a very concerning trend.

• 52:40Ezra Klein?

  This gets to something that I think is pretty deep. So the question of democracy and democracy policy has polarized between the parties, and that polarization is playing out across the states. I think that's true for really most major issues you could think of. I mean, climate policy, there's a sort of laboratory of climate policy in blue states, and then the laboratory of fossil fuel policy in red states. And when you think back to the founders and what they imagined to be happening, they thought state by state, you would have these very different politics. And to the extent there'd be alliances, it'd be like, small states would have similar interests and big states would have similar interests. But that isn't really how it plays out. So this idea that we would have

• 53:21Ezra Klein?

  these laboratories of democracy, and there'd be 50 of them, isn't really the case. There are laboratories, but it's a red state set of laboratories and a blue state set of laboratories. And the people in the laboratories are getting the same Xerox copies of bills from national groups that are working across states and responding to the same kinds of incentives on nationalized media. So this idea that we would have this constant exchange of states with radically different policy regimes, learning from one another.

• 53:56Ezra Klein?

  Which does occasionally happen. I mean, like Massachusetts, under Mitt Romney, passes a healthcare bill that becomes a model for national legislation. But it just seems to me, and I'm curious if your research shows this, that the boundaries on what the laboratories are doing and which laboratories will learn from each other have become much more narrow. And so that maybe always idealized, but at least potential role states played in trying out very different things that then they all could learn from. There's been a kind of, even as states have become more powerful, again, a homogenization and a bifurcation of the two sides, such that there's probably less actual innovation happening.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. So Louis Brandeis, the 1930s era Supreme Court Justice, sort of coined the term laboratories of democracy about policy experimentation and learning from different policy experiments across states. And, you know, wouldn't it be a shame if there was just one national policy laboratory, rather than 50, to do all these experiments and learn from each other? But what I observe is that policy learning and emulation used to be really regional and also based sometimes on similar characteristics. Like you said, small states and big states might have similar interests, or states with similar sort of budgetary conditions might learn economic policy from each other. But what we're seeing now is it's all learning across the same party.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  So that's because national groups that provide these legislative subsidies to these less professional state legislatures, so national expert groups, or national sets of lawyers that write bills, or a national interest group like the National Rifle Association with respect to gun control and gun rights policy, or environmental groups, the National Resource Defense Council, or Sierra Club, or any of these groups. All of these groups are much more national and attached to, much more aligned with one party or the other. So an example is, after the financial crisis, Minnesota did pretty well economically, rehiring its furloughed public sector workers and changing tax policy to make sure they didn't have a huge budget shortfall.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  And then Wisconsin is next door and is a very similar state demographically and regionally, you know? Yeah, like, Wisconsin has its culture, and Minnesota is where, you know, Prince is from the shores of Lake Minnetonka. Like, there's some differences, but they're not that big. But red- Wisconsin was not looking to blue Minnesota to learn from and vice versa. And that's very different from the potentially optimistic times. We don't have great data on those past sort of forms of policy learning, but it's clear that it was much more robust within regions and across parties.

• 56:37Ezra Klein?

  Let me bring in a defense of federalism and devolution of states that comes out of this observation. If American politics is becoming more polarized, if we are becoming more split, if the parties are more different and so the stakes of their collisions are higher, then doesn't it turn the temperature down on politics for more decisions to devolve down to the state level? This is an argument you'll hear from people like the conservative commentator David French, but it's a pretty popular one, that this is something we should want because in a world where we can't agree nationally, maybe it's better for states to go their own way and not put so much pressure on the national political institutions to solve problems that there isn't a consensus for solving.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Right. There's just a huge contingent of arguments about devolving more authority to the state level and doing more decentralized policymaking will reduce this affective polarization that you Ezra in your book know so much about. You know about the psychology of people not wanting their children to marry somebody from the out party and this sort of affective polarization and people being super mean to each other on social media nationally and so forth. And the theory there goes, if we could take something contentious like abortion rights or trans rights, do it at the state level, we'll all chill out a bit, you know, and live under the regimes we want. But that's just clearly not the case qualitatively when we see a key case like the Dobbs decision,

• 58:08Speaker 01

  which shifts more authority over reproductive rights to the state level. That has certainly not turned down the temperature of polarization nationally. Same thing with issues of trans rights, right? We've seen new state and local restrictions on trans rights and, you know, sort of informally, we've heard more discourse in support or against trans individuals and trans rights from governors in different states, right? That is not turning down the temperature of polarization nationally on this issue. And that's again, because of the national media context we're in now. Like, I wish it were the case that we could Put the cat back in the bag or like pick up the spilled beans or milk or whatever

• 58:51Speaker 01

  the metaphors are. I just think now we're in a particular moment where you can't roll back the investments of national interest groups and you can't roll back the technological changes that allowed for national media and national fundraising to really do that.

• 59:05Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I want to pull out that point because I think it's important and underappreciated. You mentioned a couple of minutes ago how often you will see San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York City or just something that happens in a random school or liberal arts university somewhere on Fox News. And similarly, the most extreme abortion bills that are going through red states are all over MSNBC. They're all over liberal media. And I think this is a place where people haven't quite caught up to, they imagine federalism looking like it did before nationalized media, but, but the reality is that when the states become places where you can pass much more extreme bills than you could ever get done

• 59:50Ezra Klein?

  nationally. And then those bills get brought up into national media as the thing that everybody needs to be, on their side at least, afraid of. From the other side, taking power or that they're already doing somewhere else. Then like very far from turning the temperature down, it turns it up because object lessons of what the other side would do to you if they had a chance, that couldn't have gone anywhere nationally, they can happen in Texas for Democrats or they can happen in California for Republicans. And they then become the center of the narrative about what the other side really wants. And by the way, that's not even false.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:00:29Ezra Klein?

  It's not even a lie. I mean, oftentimes it is what the other side really wants, but it just doesn't turn down the temperature. Like when I look at a lot of national politics, the hottest fights are not really things that pass nationally. The hottest fights are coming from, and the most heat is coming from things that people either want to do nationally, but they can't actually do, or it is coming from things that they actually can do or did do at the state or local. Or even just university or school level.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Right. So this gets to what caused the nationalization of American politics. And that can inform sort of what are the potential ways out of the challenges of highly nationalized politics in the US constitutional system. So in some of my back and forths with some of those that have really supported a reemphasis of decentralization and state policymaking, the argument from them causally is that actually interest groups and voters sort of started turning their and candidates started turning their focus nationally and then media in its profit-seeking capacity then started focusing on national issues. But I actually think the technological moment that we're in is so important here that it

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  actually is a function of, you know, again, Ezra, you kind of get on this in your book. Like, it's very hard to look away when we are exposed to members of the outgroup that are particularly extreme in that way. So I don't think, I think this technological moment is not one where you can sort of in any way create an exercise, mental exercise regimen to move focus back down to the state or local level in politics. And it's also the case that you're exactly right. When you do pass a state-level policy, you're signaling because now the parties are so nationalized, you actually are sending a very strong signal about what your party wants nationally. So there was all this debate about would a Republican Congress want to ban abortion nationally, right?

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  And you can learn a lot from that based on what states are doing, what red states do.

• 1:02:33Ezra Klein?

  There's something related to this that has been on my mind for a couple of years, which is the way that the politicians who can compete nationally might be structurally changing because of how tight and partisan state politics is becoming.

• 1:02:50Ezra Klein?

  I think you often want for a national politician to find somebody who is like very good at firing up their side and actually pretty good at either appealing to, or at least diffusing some of the anger or fear on the other side. You might think of a Bill Clinton here. There are certain ways in which I think Barack Obama had this quality just because of his need to win over a quite white electorate as a black man with a middle name Hussein. But as you get very red and very blue states, talented Democratic politicians who might have come up at another point in Indiana, or Missouri, or as Bill Clinton did in Arkansas, like, they can't get anywhere anymore. I was sort of telling that the politician

• 1:03:32Ezra Klein?

  who sort of tried to run this way in 2020 and got the closest to it was Pete Buttigieg, but he had never been able to win statewide in Indiana. He had only been able to win South Bend, like a small mayorship. And, you know, same on the Republican side. I think it's become, it's not impossible. I mean, you do see Larry Hogan here or there. And you did have a Democratic governor of Montana who ran in 2020. But in terms of how many of them there are, and what happens to a lot of those politicians who might have been really talented and have been able to win over a state that had a partisan leaning against them, you know, 20 years ago, they're going nowhere. And so they don't have the resume to run. And so what you get is politicians at the national stage who are just much better

• 1:04:16Ezra Klein?

  at knowing how to appeal to their own side than how to, you know, appeal to their own side while winning over people who are a little bit more skeptical. And like, if you think of that as a structural shift in what kind of political talent we reward, it's also going to be a structural shift in our politics and how polarized things feel and how much people like hate the politicians on the other side of them because of what kind of politicians they are. I've never seen this measured, but it seems to me to be true.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  That's absolutely the case qualitatively. Now, to raise to national prominence, get national fundraising for a party, it's really important as a state-level politician to be really antagonistic to the out-party president. We saw this with first Jerry Brown, then Gavin Newsom under Trump, Jay Inslee on climate, and then DeSantis and Biden is another great example of this. That was always true, but it's true much more today. And we've always seen the pivot between the presidential general elections, or US Senate, or US House, or presidential primary elections, where you play to your partisan base and you shift to the center in the general elections. But that's becoming much rarer. The Joe Mansions, the Larry Hogans, like you mentioned,

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  that sort of often do vote with the out-party or don't support the main piece of their party's agenda. Those are becoming rarer. And all of this does have a really profound effect. The other reason for this that we haven't mentioned through nationalized politics is, what do you do after office as a politician in the US now? Politicians in the US forever since Tocqueville have always been very elite lawyers and they tend to go make some more money after office. But now you're much more likely to be some sort of part of the partisan network after you retire from office in some form. Presidents are a bit different, but for most politicians,

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  you become part of your media networks, sort of progressive foundation world, lobbying groups. You start a big NGO for a cause that has much more of partisan valence to it now. Becoming a Fox News personality after office is now a very big deal in a way it was not before.

• 1:06:25Ezra Klein?

  Let me offer one other defense of this kind of federalism, and then I want to move on to some more current issues within it. This is something you mentioned earlier, which is, as you get more polarized or polarizing national politicians, that it's good to have bulwarks. So many Democrats are very happy to have federalism and federal protections during Donald Trump's presidency. You certainly saw the same with Republicans for Barack Obama, and now for Joe Biden. That particularly in an era when we think structurally, the swings of federal power are going to be sharper. Having more power in a red state to resist a blue period, or a blue state to resist a red period is actually a good thing.

• 1:07:09Ezra Klein?

  Nobody loves federalism when they're the ones in power nationally and they want to put down their agenda. But this is a case where it's better to think as a member of the potential minority than as a member of a current majority.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, that's a key function of federalism and one of its main advantages. But there are some serious trade offs to that. So I like to think of this in terms of not just insurance for being out of power when the other party might pass a national policy on taxes that you don't like. But I think, like to think there's, the more extreme version is with respect to democracy. So after 2016, we just had a torrent of scholars and punditry, like, thank God for federalism. We have this would be autocrat in national power. And then same thing in sort of the insurrectionist moment of 2021. Like, it's great that we have 50 state election administrations, right? Many of which are controlled by the other party and would never fall to this sort of would be authoritarian, right? And there's something to that.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  When a would be autocrat is in national power, you do not want to centralize a ton of authority under their purview, especially over the ability to count and certify votes. But what I've been arguing, and I think in a lot of this interview, we've been talking about is the distortions from having federalism, from having all of these different levels of government, from the political inequality and democratic backsliding as a result at the state level that affects representation and electoral politics at all levels. Those increase the likelihood that you're going to get a distorted sort of national power in place in the first place. So in a narrow sense, when there's a would be autocrat nationally, you don't want to

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  centralize power under their jurisdiction. But over the long term, having decentralized authority in the states can really distort representation enough that you get a would be autocrat at the national level in the first place. So that's a trade off we really need to contend with. We've heard a lot about the first part, but not a lot about how the distortions of federalism can produce malgovernance nationally in the first place.

• 1:09:16Ezra Klein?

  So we've talked a lot about The high level of American political structure here, and I think a fair takeaway for people is that you should put more attention, put more of your, if you do this kind of work, volunteering or advocacy organizing time, maybe your political donations into the state level. But we just had a big election. There were governorships that changed hands. There were legislatures at the state level that changed hands. When you think about the really big policy fights or questions that will play out at the state levels over the next two years, or that will be decided by the last election, what are they?

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so abortion is going to continue to be at the forefront, and that matters even when state governments don't change party hands. Like, it's still really crucial to watch what's going to happen with potential abortion bans and those being implemented now. But I think some of the key stories are, if you care about American democracy, I think there's some positive and some negative trends. So the North Carolina Supreme Court now has a Republican majority, and it looks poised to rule in favor of much more gerrymandered maps than the previous court did. So in the late 2010s, there were some important court cases that sort of reduced the extremism of North Carolina's gerrymander, but now

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  it may be, once again, becoming more gerrymandered going forward. I think Florida becoming a solid red state is very crucial, thinking about the politics of Florida and the local politics of Miami-Dade and so much more. And then I think I'm really interested in the unified blue government of Michigan now, which has been a long time since it's been democratically controlled in a unified sense. So that's an example of one area where the Democratic Party now could potentially push its political advantage. So by comparison, the unified Democratic government of Virginia did pass some policies with respect to democracy, like same-day voter registration, which Charlotte Hill and I have shown statistically

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  really does increase turnout of young voters. But they didn't press their advantage, for example, by repealing the state's right-to-work law prior to the young

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Election that gave the Republicans the governorship. And in Michigan, they look poised to repeal right to work, which would have pretty profound effects on overall elections going forward and potentially downstream on sort of democracy itself. That has the potential to be part of this overall new wave of sort of labor action in the COVID era with respect to Amazon and Starbucks and all types of firms and the new rail worker demands at the national level. And my research with Paul Freimer shows statistically that labor unions and the decline or really the destruction of labor unions, psychologically and attitudinally, has really opened up the door for culture war politics and increased racial resentment in politics

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  and reduced racial solidarity, especially for non-college age men across racial groups. So I think if we're worried about culture war politics that has no real policy content, has no real capacity for bargaining, has no content related to public policy and people's material lives, the labor movement is a really key factor there. So Michigan repealing right to work could be hugely consequential going forward.

• 1:13:01Ezra Klein?

  So what I'm about to do may not be best podcast host practice. We've been having like a good cohesive conversation about more or less one topic. But you've got a working paper on something I'm a little bit obsessed with, and I'm just going to take a hard right turn before we end here and ask you about it.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Sweet.

• 1:13:17Ezra Klein?

  So gerontocracy. American politics has just become insanely old. Joe Biden is 80. Donald Trump is almost 80. Mitch McConnell is around 80. Nancy Pelosi is around 80. The sort of youngest major leader right now, at least until maybe Kevin McCarthy steps up, is John Roberts. And I'm always asking people, why? Why do they think we've entered into this period of gerontocracy? But you have a paper that you're working on with Adam Bonica that actually does try to think through this. So, so give me a little bit on, on how you understand our gerontocracy as having happened? And what you see to be the causes or the forces sustaining it?

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So, you know, I'm working on this paper with Adam Bonica. It's available free on the internet right now.

• 1:14:01Ezra Klein?

  You don't have to pay Elon Musk any money or anything?

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. You can, you can tweet about it all you want to. So what we do is we use new ways of linking records between campaign donation records and voter files of registered voters to try to find the ages of all campaign donors in politics. So the first thing we find is that American politicians in Congress, Congress is the oldest set of legislators around the world of every country except Cambodia right now. And that's a huge deal, you know, going back to Soviet studies and studies of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Politburo was like, part of it was gerontocracy, where the members of the Politburo were becoming older and older in a way that really matches the US Congress. It's kind of eerie.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  So the US politicians, highly old. And we think a lot of that is because of age inequality and political participation in the US.

• 1:14:58Ezra Klein?

  Can I just note something before you go to this?

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure thing.

• 1:15:00Ezra Klein?

  I didn't know this until you, you said in the paper. But you may think people want this, but they don't. Not only does the public support younger politicians, but this struck me that over 70% of the public supports maximum age limits for office holding.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  It's really bizarre. So you see like, you know, there's some extremely old politicians that remain in office. And occasionally when like a Supreme Court justice, there's a debate about whether they retire. Some people go like, no, no, respect this heroic individual and let them become on their deathbed in the Supreme Court and things like that. But really, when you actually survey Americans, they want younger politicians. All else equal, you show them a hypothetical politician, all else equal, they want the younger one. And then a super majority supports age limits in Congress. So this is not something the American public wants. And yet Chuck Grassley just won reelection at 89. Exactly. It's wild. Yeah, it's really amazing. So there's sort of a collective action problem there where we can all say that.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  But then when there's no viable alternative and for example, a primary election or you worry, oh, if this incumbent is removed by a primary challenger, maybe they'll lose the seat or something like that. Because there are these incumbency advantages of holding office. You have this name recognition, right? But what Adam Bonica and I are arguing is that participants in US politics, that's voters, and especially campaign donors are way older than you'd expect. So the average non-voter is about 43 years old, or the median non-voter is 39 years old. But the median general election voter is 52, right? That's a big jump. That's older than the average American eligible voter, or average American adult or adult citizen.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  But then you go to primary voters, voters who are voting in primary elections, which have much less information, right? The average or median age of a primary voter is 59 years old. And then the average candidate is about 57 or median 58 years old as well, right? Substantially older than the average American. That's candidates, including losing candidates. The median member of Congress is 59 right now. But get this, the median dollar in American politics comes from a 66-year-old, a very solid retiree, baby boomer. And that's a huge deal. We just saw it in this midterm election, which was actually a pretty good year for youth turnout.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  And our best uncertain estimates right now, they're not perfect estimates, but we think about 27% of young people ended up voting. And that's on a pretty decent midterm year, right? So voters are old, donors especially old. An individual in their 70s is 300 times or more well-represented money in politics than somebody who's a Gen Z-er. Gen Z people don't even show up on figures on who's donating money in politics. Millennials like myself show up only a little bit. So this is a huge factor in reproducing gerontocracy in the US. And again, like we talked about before, debates about does money in politics really matter?

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  But it's clear that it matters for why American politicians are so old. Beyond just the old age of donors, right? So even young candidates, like even a millennial candidate like AOC, has to spend a lot of her time fundraising from older donors because older people have more of the money and are more likely to donate. That means even younger candidates are spending a lot of their time, you know, with people who are much older, who have different concerns than young people. And, you know, this reproduces gerontocracy and also helps explain why the US, compared to other wealthy countries, invest so little in children and young adults and so much

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  of the US welfare state is in support of older retirees, especially homeowners through the tax code. Lastly is that older candidates tend to be wealthier themselves, so they spend a lot more of their own money in their campaigns and they're able to tap older, wealthier people in the early stages of fundraising. So before Ezra, you said, oh, there are these examples of in primary elections where the candidate with more money might lose spectacularly in a primary like Michael Bloomberg or something did. Yeah, Jeb Bush in 2016. Absolutely. But the thing about it is, on average, early money in the first sort of 30 days after filing your candidacy, if you're running for office in a new office, you're not an

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  incumbent, is hugely important. And Adam Bonica's other work shows that those candidates that come from elite law schools are able to tap their Yale and Harvard Law wealthy classmates for that early seed fundraising. What we're finding in this paper beyond all those other inequalities is that older donors are able to tap their own bank accounts and their social networks for that early seed funding, becoming a viable candidate. Whereas younger candidates have a harder time getting off the ground in the first place.

• 1:20:04Ezra Klein?

  And you're able to take a final step in the paper, which mathematically I can't follow, so I'm not fully endorsing it. But it's at least an open question to me whether or not a 66 year old would prefer an older or younger candidate. But you guys find you do within district and within donor analyses and find from that math that donors value candidates who are closer to their age, they donate more often and more money to candidates closer to their age. So if you do have a tilt in donors towards older donors, you're going to have those donors disproportionately supporting older candidates. So tell me a bit about that calculation, because that does, that does draw that final link that the money is older and the older money prefers older candidates, right?

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  So that's related to, I've done some other papers with co-authors like Alexander Sahn on race and money in politics. So money in politics is overwhelmingly white. When candidates of color run, they raise more money from donors of color, right? Those sorts of questions, it seems like donors do care about members of Congress from their same racial group and things. But we find a pretty powerful effect, me and Adam Bonica, in this paper. And it's important, so that those statistical models you sort of described are pretty important here because donors are very different in general, right? It might just be the, the particular set of candidates that arose in some given election or some donors just like donating a lot in different ways. Or they might be in a geographic location that has more competitive elections.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  So they're more likely to donate even though they don't really care about age, right? But we do a bunch of statistical procedures to try to say like, no, let's really isolate the effect of age here of how close a donor is to a candidate's age. And you're exactly right, we find that an individual potential donor is more likely to donate to and donates more money the closer they are in age to a candidate. Which means older donors, when there are older candidates running, donate more. Younger donors, when there are younger candidates running, donate more. So that means like, We find this more for the Democratic Party where donors vary in age a lot more. The Republican base is just way, way older despite the internet personalities on the right

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  that are younger, but in general, the Republican base is much older. So among Democrats, one implication is that the Democratic Party could diversify money in politics by supporting younger candidates running. Another implication is that maybe we'd get younger candidates in office if we did some campaign finance reform. So again, money in politics really matters, in this case for gerontocracy. So limiting, for example, the aggregate amount of money that an individual could give across all candidates in a year, which was struck down by the Supreme Court in McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014, a policy like that would make money in politics younger and be more supportive, therefore, of younger candidates.

• 1:22:57Ezra Klein?

  I think that is a good place to end. Always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so first, I got to shout out Fragmented Democracy by Jamila Michener, political scientist at Cornell. And Jamila Michener is a mostly qualitative political scientist, but she studies Medicaid administration in the states at the state level with respect to racial and class inequality and makes a really profound argument about the role of Medicaid and democracy that really inspired me and a number of other people who are interested in political inequality, issues of public policy. So got to shout that out. Second would be Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson. I think that's a really useful, accessible book about how we consider democracy in all of our lives except for the workplace.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  And when we think about issues of, for example, all this debate around free speech and cancel culture and so forth, we don't think about the coercive capacity of employers. Employers are the main restrictors on free speech and that in other countries, other systems of employment that don't have, for example, at-will employment are actually probably a bit better for free speech. So if you care about issues of sort of civil liberties and speech and democracy, not just thinking about them in Electoral politics, but also at the workplace. And then lastly would be Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla by Dan Charnas. And that's a newish book about the greatest hip hop producer of all time, James Yancey,

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  J Dilla from Detroit, who produced for a wide variety of rap, you know, from Tribe Called Quest to Common to many others. And he had a group Slum Village. And I think he died of lupus in the 2000s when I was really coming of age musically. And that new book looks outstanding. I'm just starting in now.

• 1:24:51Ezra Klein?

  Jake Rumbuck, your book is Laboratories Against Democracy. Thank you very much.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  Thanks Ezra.

• 1:25:08Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Emma Fagau, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Brigitte Karma, and Kristen Lynn. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Jeff Geld, and audience strategy by Shannon Busta.