255. Ten Ideas to Make Politics Less Rotten

We Americans may love our democracy -- at least in theory -- but at the moment our feelings toward the federal government lie somewhere between disdain and hatred. Which electoral and political ideas should be killed off to make way for a saner system?

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

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:29Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:14Speaker 01

  You know, I had been fighting to try to bring up issues that I thought were important to address, and basically the Senate had been shut down.

• 2:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Olympia Snow from Maine.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yes, I served in the state legislature, in both the state House and the state Senate, prior to my 34 years in the US House and the US Senate, where I served 16 years in the US House of Representatives and 18 years in the United States Senate.

• 2:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Over that time, the tenor of Congress changed a great deal.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  In fact, the last Congress I served in, in 2012, it was the least productive Congress in modern history.

• 2:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Snow was a moderate Republican, a coalition builder, happy to work across the aisle. In fact, her support for some Democratic positions, on reproductive rights, on ending "don't ask, don't tell," her votes for Democratic judicial nominees, this all came to anger her Republican colleagues, especially the new breed of hardliners. Over time, Snow saw her brand of centrism essentially disappear.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  And in fact, three political scientists conducted a study and said that we experienced the worst polarization since the end of Reconstruction, 1879. If you think about it, that is, you know, pretty serious. An analysis up through 2013 that showed, in 1982, there were 58 senators that came between the most conservative Democrats and the most liberal Republicans. Today, at least up to 2013, and I doubt that that has changed, for the fourth time in a row, fifth time ever, zero senators come into that category. In the House of Representatives, in 1982, there were 344 members of the House of Representatives that came between the most conservative Democrats and the most liberal Republicans.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Today, there are only four in that category. So it tells you, you know, there is no Democrat who is more conservative than a Republican, and there's no Republicans more liberal than a Democrat.

• 4:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  This polarization became spectacularly manifest during the debt crises of 2011 and 2013, when Congress threatened to shut down the federal government and actually did so in 2013.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  I mean, I was stunned that we would be at a point in the United States Congress that we were prepared to take the country to the financial and political brink to make a political point.

• 4:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Snow had been planning to run for reelection to the Senate. Everything was in place. She was just 65 years old. She had the money and the organization. In her previous election, she'd won nearly 75% of the vote. But she decided that she didn't fit in this Congress anymore.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  And so they abandoned legislating and policymaking and just devolved into a series of, you know, gotcha votes, my way or the highway, and the all or nothing proposition that was really the road to nowhere.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Certainly been a monumental day in Maine politics.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  One of the most prominent women in the United States Senate is leaving, Olympia Snow of Maine.

• 5:30Speaker 04

  The principled voice of reason in some of the most contentious debates in Washington.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  What does it say about the state of our government and politics when serious people conclude that serving in the United States Senate is no longer worth their time and effort?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  And I decided that I would take my fight on the outside because I realized that the change was not going to occur from within.

• 5:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Snow joined the Bipartisan Policy Center, which addresses, as she calls it, congressional dysfunction and political paralysis. She wrote a book called Fighting for Common Ground: How We Can Fix the Stalemate in Congress. Many of her solutions have to do with recreating a bipartisan Congress, less filibustering and grandstanding, more regular meetings between majority and minority leadership, more regular meetings between Congress and the president, because that's how it was in Snow's early years in Washington. But over time, moderates were purged from both parties and partisan battles became more intense, more destructive.

• 6:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what's to be done about that? And since it's election season, we might as well ask a bigger question. What's to be done about all the other rotten things in American politics? Today, on Freakonomics Radio, we ask politicians and scholars, donkeys and elephants, and everyone in between, what's the one political or electoral practice that deserves to die?

• 7:07Speaker 06

  The idea that I would like to die unmourned, buried as quickly as possible, no funeral.

• 7:12Speaker 07

  The idea that we ought to abolish- If I could do a single thing in American politics, it would be to get rid of-

• 7:17Speaker 08

  Doing away with- The idea I want to kill, whose time is coming. Simply around the idea of blowing up the existing system.

• 7:38Speaker 09

  From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 7:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  We Americans may love our democracy, at least in theory, but at the moment, our feelings toward the federal government lie somewhere between disdain and hatred. Consider these numbers. In 1958, the American National Elections Study found that 73% of Americans said they trusted the government either most of the time or just about always. So 73% in 1958. As of last year, that number was 19%. Congressional approval ratings have plummeted. They now range from roughly 10% to 20%. So it's probably no coincidence that the US has one of the very lowest voter turnout rates in national elections among OECD countries, at just over 50%.

• 8:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  The conventional wisdom is to wonder why so few Americans vote. But given the way we feel about government, a better question might be, why so many bother? That said, we keep having elections, relatively orderly ones at that. This year's presidential election has already proven somewhat less orderly than usual and may well get even weirder. So we thought we might do our civic duty here at Freakonomics Radio by taking a level-headed look at the American electoral system. Some time back, we put out an episode called "This Idea Must Die", where we asked scientists to nominate a scientific idea that had outlived its usefulness. Today, with apologies and thanks to Edge.org,

• 9:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  from whom we stole that idea, we present "This Idea Must Die: Election Edition."

• 9:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  You will recall that Olympia Snow, the former Republican senator from Maine, was so appalled by the partisanship in Congress that she quit to try to reform the system from the outside. Among her proposed solutions, getting rid of gerrymandering through independent, nonpartisan districting, limiting the power of political action committees, and requiring a five-day work week in Congress, which would, as she writes, "provide additional time to address the critical issues while also fostering more opportunities for senators and representatives to interact socially with each other in Washington." But if there's one idea that Snow would personally like to kill off, it would be-

• 10:21Speaker 01

  A closed primary.

• 10:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Meaning, a nominating contest that is closed to voters who aren't registered with a particular party.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Today, there are very few, what you would call centrists, moderate candidates on either side of the political aisle. And that's the problem. You no longer have the middle in politics. There is the middle in America, but they're not producing the candidates because the primaries are so closed that it gets locked down. And so it's only those who are the hardline activists that are ultimately voting in the primaries and therefore voting those who are more aligned to their views that are not predisposed to building compromise or consensus that are nominated. And therefore, that is the choice for many in the general election.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  And the bigger fear today among elected officials is facing a primary. Because that's where you get the more hardline ideologues who are going to be participating, as well as the outside groups that weigh in with millions of dollars and that will work to defeat these candidates. So that is the problem.

• 11:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Open primaries already exist in 11 states, while a few more, including California, have what's called a top-two primary. That lets voters choose any candidate they want in a single open primary, and then the two top vote-getters advance to the general election, even if they're both from the same party. So far, political scientists are split on whether open primaries really help. Some research shows that moderate candidates don't do any better in an open primary. Others argue the change in California has already led to more competitive elections and a more functional state legislature.

• 12:11Speaker 07

  We need to change the way we currently vote.

• 12:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Howard Dean.

• 12:14Speaker 07

  My title is former, former governor, former chairman of the DNC, former presidential candidate.

• 12:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  The DNC, for those who don't know, is the Democratic National Committee.

• 12:23Speaker 07

  If I could do a single thing in American politics, it would be to get rid of the single vote for your favorite candidate.

• 12:34Speaker 07

  Right now, we vote for one person and that person either wins or doesn't win. That is, if there's 10 candidates in a race, you get one vote. There's a system called ranked choice voting where you don't get just your vote for the top choice that you have, you also get to vote on all the other choices and you get to rank them. So that if your candidate doesn't win, your second choice vote counts. What that does is create, as the winner, the person who is best respected and best liked overall in the electorate. It's just a good system. The other thing about it is that it makes people behave themselves better. San Francisco put in ranked choice voting a few years ago and they had the most polite mayor's campaign that you ever saw.

• 13:17Speaker 07

  Because if you're hoping to get somebody's second or third choice vote, if you know they're not going to get their first, you're not going to say anything bad about them in the campaign because you drive those voters away and those are the voters that eventually get you elected. So ranked choice voting simply means that you get multiple choices, you can weight your choices, and the candidate that the most people like, and usually the one that's the most reasonable, becomes the next mayor, the next president, the next senator. And I think that makes voters happy, it makes politicians behave better, and it's something that's coming slowly to the United States and where we have it, it works well.

• 13:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  A lot of the people we talked to for this episode had similar-ish ideas about modernizing, or at least adding some nuance to our current electoral habits. Rob Ritchie, for instance, of the electoral reform group called Fair Vote.

• 14:11Speaker 10

  I'd like to get rid of winner-take-all elections to elect congress, state legislatures, and city councils. So whoever gets 51% of the vote represents 100% of people. If you get 60% of the vote, you not only represent 100% of people, but no one even cares about the election because you're going to win easily. And we're left with elections that leave most people stuck in sort of lopsided, one-party districts. The proposal that we put out there, there's something called the Fair Representation Act as a draft, and we have some members of Congress who do want to put it in. What it does is a statutory change that within states, they would take congressional elections, go from having only one person per area to bigger areas with more than one person.

• 14:55Speaker 10

  So a state like Massachusetts might go from nine one-winner districts to three, three-member districts, and then in each district, it would take about a third of the vote to win a seat. That degree of opening up the system does some really interesting things. One, it makes the general election matter, and it very methodically and reliably represents the left, center, and right of every district.

• 15:15Speaker 11

  If there's one thing that I could do differently in our democracy, it would be doing away with straight-ticket voting.

• 15:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that is Joaquin Castro, a Democratic congressman from Texas.

• 15:27Speaker 11

  Straight-ticket voting means that you can go into a ballot booth and, without looking at any of the individual candidates or races on the ballot, at the top of the ballot, you can simply mark that you want to vote for all the Democrats or all the Republicans. And what it's done is, it's allowed a lot of people to go into the ballot booth, really on autopilot, without considering the specific candidates in a particular race. So if I could retire straight-ticket voting, I would.

• 15:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Norman Ornstein is resident scholar at a conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute. He, too, is troubled by the overt partisanship in politics.

• 16:05Speaker 12

  So I've become a big proponent of the Australian system of mandatory attendance at the polls. In Australia, and this is a system that they've used for eight decades or so now, you don't have to vote, but you do have to show up at the polls or write a plausible excuse. If you don't show up, and if you don't write the excuse, you're subject to a small fine. In my various trips to Australia and my discussions with politicians of all political stripes there, they will tell you that when you know... That your base is going to be turning out to the polls.

• 16:47Speaker 12

  And when the other side's base, you know, is going to be turning out to the polls. Your focus turns to the persuadable voters in the middle. And it changes the way you talk about politics. You don't talk in the most strident and extreme terms in ways that are designed to gin up your base or to scare them to death. You don't work on wedge issues, things like abortion or transgender bathroom issues. Instead, you talk about the issues that matter most to the broad range of voters and especially those persuadable ones, the big-ticket items. And you're forced into talking in ways that look at the issues so that you can persuade people.

• 17:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  I think you'd agree, we've already heard some pretty interesting ideas, but none of them is particularly radical. Okay? So how about this one? It's an idea called quadratic voting.

• 17:44Speaker 13

  My name is Eric Posner, and I'm a professor of law at the University of Chicago.

• 17:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what's the idea Professor Posner would like to kill?

• 17:53Speaker 13

  And I want to kill the idea of one person, one vote. So in place of our current system, what I'd like to see is a system in which people would have lots of votes. Imagine, for example, that you're given a kind of a currency, let's say 100 credits. And every time there's an election, you could allocate those credits among different candidates and different races.

• 18:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, you could use credits to buy votes.

• 18:21Speaker 13

  So for example, if you really cared about somebody, you could buy lots of votes for that person. And if you cared only a little bit about another person, you could buy just a few votes for that person. And then there's a final element in this scheme, which is a little more complicated but also important, which is that when you use your currency to buy votes, you pay the square of the number of votes that you cast for a particular person.

• 18:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  The square of the number, meaning you multiply it by itself to square from the Latin quadrum, which is why this idea is called quadratic voting.

• 18:57Speaker 13

  So I could, for example, in the presidential election, buy two votes for Hillary Clinton by paying four credits. And then I would have, you know, other credits that I could use for other candidates I care about. So for example, in the mayoral race, I might care a lot and pay 25 credits to buy five votes, or 81 credits to buy nine votes, until I have no credits left. So now I have a way of registering how intensely I feel about a candidate. Now, here's why this could matter. As people have known for thousands of years, democracy is prone to various problems, like tyranny of the majority.

• 19:41Speaker 13

  And one interpretation of tyranny of the majority is that a majority of people who don't really care about a particular outcome, or a particular candidate, let's say, but nonetheless favors that candidate, could outvote a large minority of people who passionately care. And most people think that that's not a good outcome, that we want people who passionately care about an outcome to have more influence on it. Of course, they could be outvoted if the majority is huge. But you do want to give them the chance to register the intensity of their preferences.

• 20:18Speaker 14

  If quadratic voting isn't radical enough for you, consider this idea. The idea I want to kill is that we're spending too much money in politics. Pardon me? You mean, we're not spending too much money in politics? Each year, automobile companies spend roughly $25 billion on advertising. In contrast, four years ago, all candidates for the House, Senate, and the presidency spent $7 billion, roughly 30% of what auto companies spend each year. That's Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor. The problem isn't that candidates are spending too much money letting us know where they stand. It's that the rich are dominating the conversation.

• 21:03Speaker 14

  During the president's election season, big donors who give more than $2,000 have given 30% of all the money. And donors who have given more than $500 have given half of all the money. Even the rest of the money... Small donations are not being given by ordinary people. To change this picture, the citizens of Seattle have come up with a fundamental reform. At a referendum last year, they endorsed a program that will provide each registered voter with a democracy voucher to spend in support of whoever they favor for candidates for municipal office. One person, one vote, one voucher.

• 21:47Speaker 14

  This is the formula for reclaiming democracy in the United States. Suppose, for example, that we took the Seattle idea national. Under my proposal, federal legislation would provide every registered voter a special credit card account containing 50 democracy dollars during presidential years and lesser amounts during off-year elections, funded by tax revenue. Account holders could send their democracy dollars to a government website that would credit the money to their favored candidates and political organizations. About 130 million Americans went to the polls in 2012. If they all spent their democracy dollars, they would have injected about $6.5 billion

• 22:30Speaker 14

  into the campaign, dramatically changing the balance of economic power in politics.

• 22:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ackerman has written a book about this idea with his Yale Law colleague Ian Ayers. It's called "Voting with Dollars."

• 22:44Speaker 14

  Only one point needs emphasizing here. The voucher program is perfectly constitutional under current Supreme Court doctrine. There is no need to wait for a constitutional amendment or a dramatic change from the Roberts Court. All we need is a serious political movement to push the Seattle idea forward. In fact, democracy dollar initiatives are on the ballot this fall in the states of Washington and South Dakota. This is a reform whose time is coming.

• 23:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  So the democracy dollar idea wouldn't need constitutional amendment. But what if it did? What happens when a good, modern idea is stymied by an antique document?

• 23:37Speaker 15

  I think that one of the significant weaknesses in American democracy is the difficulty of amending the US Constitution.

• 23:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Sandy Levinson teaches constitutional law at the University of Texas at Austin.

• 23:52Speaker 15

  In fact, the United States Constitution is, among world constitutions, probably the single one that's most difficult to amend.

• 24:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Our constitution is also generally thought of as the longest surviving operational national constitution in the world, which may be something to be proud of, but, as Levinson suggests, it may lead to a lack of flexibility.

• 24:18Speaker 15

  My proposal is actually to learn from a number of the state constitutions, including, very importantly, the New York Constitution. The most interesting and important election that will be held next year, that is, in 2017, will be in New York, where the New York electorate will have the opportunity, required by the New York Constitution, to vote every 20 years on whether or not there should be a new state constitutional convention in order to assess the degree to which the

• 25:00Speaker 15

  current New York Constitution is working well and the extent to which it needs to be amended. New York, in fact, has had five constitutions over its history, and of course, there have been a number of amendments, many of them coming through previous conventions.

• 25:21Speaker 15

  I believe that the United States Constitution would be a far better constitution if, in fact, the national electorate had the same opportunity, and I think it is a serious blemish on our democracy, that we venerate the Constitution, we celebrate it, but often very thoughtlessly, and we prefer to attack each other and to attack the deficiencies of certain alleged leaders or political parties, rather than confront the possibility that it's the 1787 Constitution itself, in its surprisingly unamended form,

• 26:02Speaker 15

  that is afflicting our politics in the year 2016.

• 26:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  What would happen if the US held a national referendum on constitutional reform? There's only one way to find out, although we should know that if you actually call a national referendum and the citizenry of your country passes it, well, it's not necessarily all sunshine and rainbows.

• 26:29Speaker 16

  Brexit means Brexit. The decision taken to leave the EU.

• 26:34Speaker 17

  I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination.

• 26:41Speaker 18

  Very disappointed about the result.

• 26:43Speaker 17

  Shocked that we actually have voted to leave. I didn't think that was going to happen.

• 26:45Speaker 18

  Even though I voted to leave, this morning I woke up and I just, the reality did actually hit me.

• 26:51Speaker 17

  I thought we were just going to remain.

• 26:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, how to make presidential debates less dramatic.

• 27:02Speaker 19

  I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.

• 27:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  And Karl Rove looks at today's political landscape through the lens of history.

• 27:16Speaker 08

  I'm just saying, if you think it's bad today, it was worse before.

• 27:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Granola. You know that moment when a meeting ends and someone says, let's circle back on this next week and everyone nods, but no one writes it down? Then next week rolls around and it's radio silence? That's why Granola exists. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. And the best part? Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots. It's just your normal meeting with superpowers. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free.

• 28:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just head to granola.ai/freakonomics. That's granola.ai/freakonomics to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai/freakonomics. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern New Hampshire University. There's no hiding how convenient Southern New Hampshire University makes college. They offer over 80 career-focused graduate programs online. Classes have no set meeting times, so you can balance life and learning, and online tuition rates are some of the lowest in the country, making it all a little more manageable. A school this willing to work with you is worth the investment.

• 28:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 29:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. Today, we're playing a game we like to call "This Idea Must Die." The topic: American Electoral Politics.

• 29:56Speaker 06

  The idea that I would like to die unmourned, buried as quickly as possible, no funeral, is the notion that we have to have a live, cheering, jeering audience at presidential debates.

• 30:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Kathleen Hall Jamison directs the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

• 30:13Speaker 06

  The reason I want to get rid of that idea and I want to get rid of that concept as quickly as possible is that we know that the audience response in the auditorium to the debate content affects the audience at home, and as a result, can bias not only what people learn, but their evaluation of the candidates.

• 30:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  For instance, one of the Ronald Reagan-Walter Mondale debates in 1984.

• 30:34Speaker 06

  When the audience applauded and laughed at the Reagan exchange between Reagan and Mondale on Reagan's age.

• 30:41Speaker 20

  You already are the oldest president in history. I recall yet that President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuba Missile Crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?

• 30:54Speaker 19

  Not at all, Mr. Truitt. And I want you to know that also, I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.

• 31:12Speaker 06

  We can show experimentally that benefited Reagan substantially. What does that say? The audience in that auditorium shaped perceptions of those viewing the debate at home. We can show the same thing with the disadvantage to Dan Quayle out of the audience that was disapproving of his answer to Benson.

• 31:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  That debate was in 1988, with the Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Benson up against Republican VP candidate Dan Quayle.

• 31:38Speaker 19

  I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.

• 31:45Speaker 21

  Senator Benson?

• 31:48Speaker 22

  Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.

• 32:03Speaker 06

  That's highly problematic. That audience can include partisans whose jeering and cheering is choreographed. There's no reason to think that audience is representative. Has a whole lot of donors in it, among other things, and that's problematic because we shouldn't have donors as the primary in-studio audience for a presidential debate. And also, it's problematic because when you have a jeering and cheering audience, the candidates have to respond by increasing their volume in response to each other, and when you edit those responses by the candidates into soundbites, they can sound unhinged. That's not fair to the candidates. So unfair to the audience, unfair to the candidates, unfair to the process.

• 32:37Speaker 08

  I'm just saying, if you think it's bad today, it was worse before. That's Karl Rove. I write a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal, am a Fox News contributor, and helped found the super PAC American Crossroads. I was previously senior advisor to President Bush and deputy White House Chief of Staff.

• 33:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's start briefly with your most recent book, The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters. So tell us why the election of 1896 does matter.

• 33:15Speaker 08

  Well, for two reasons. One is, the politics of the era look like today only worse. I didn't set out to write a book drawing parallels. I set out to write a durable history of the 1896 election. The election of 1896, while acknowledged by political scientists to be one of the five great realignment elections in American history, we spend more time talking about the guy who lost the election, William Jennings Bryan.

• 33:40Speaker 23

  You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

• 33:45Speaker 08

  And the guy who follows McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt.

• 33:48Speaker 24

  I am not leading this fight as a matter of aesthetic pleasure.

• 33:51Speaker 08

  Then we talk about the guy who actually brought about this election victory and whose subsequent administration ushered in a 36-year period of Republican dominance. So the first reason I wrote it was, I wanted to have a durable history of a very interesting race, but the more I got into it, the more, back then, looks like now, only worse. Broken political system, political gridlock, the two parties locked in a death struggle with each other, both of them facing serious challenges, a rapidly changing demography of America, economic anxiety brought about by a generation of disruptive innovation and change and globalization.

• 34:30Speaker 08

  And some really interesting characters. So who could argue with that?

• 34:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  So as with many things in life, the good old days, including the political system and the electoral system, were not so good, you're saying. For those who look at our current political and electoral systems and say, you know, ugh, get me to Canada, get me to Bhutan, get me anywhere, it's horrible, the American political system is crap. For the people who feel that way, and there seem to be quite a few, talk to me about the ways in which it was different or worse.

• 35:01Speaker 08

  Well, we had five presidential elections in a row, in which no one received 50% of the vote. Every one of those elections was settled with the winner taking a plurality, a minority of the vote. Two of those elections involved somebody who won the Electoral College and lost the popular vote, came in second. One of those elections involved a five-month-long dispute about the outcome in Florida. A third president won the Electoral College and won a plurality of the popular vote nationwide by 7,000 votes. The two parties were at each other's throats. They not only hated each other because they had deeply different ideologies, but they were still fighting the Civil War.

• 35:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  From what you've written, I gather that you are not a big Donald Trump fan, although that may be evolving. You've called him graceless and divisive. You've called him a petty man consumed by resentment and bitterness. You've said that he's denigrating the party he seeks to lead. This was all written, I should say, before he was your party's nominee. But you also wrote this, "A longtime Republican who has toiled in the vineyards can expect loyalty for having given it. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has donated generously to Democrats and backed Senator John Kerry in 2004. He's also savaged past Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush." So, Mr. Rove, my question is this, other than the fact that Mr. Trump has, quote, "savage" the president that you worked for, among others,

• 36:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  why is party loyalty such a good or important thing? Because to me, it represents the kind of tribalism that creates political problems, not solves them.

• 36:35Speaker 08

  Well, you assume that political tribalism doesn't exist outside of a two-party system. There's even more tribalism outside of a two-party system, and it is of a more destructive nature, because it is oftentimes based upon one simple issue or one personality. And that's one of the great things about our two-party system. Both parties tend to move away from their extremes in order to win elections, and sometimes they tend to share a great commonality when it comes to the public agenda. They differ in big ways, no doubt about it. But imagine a system in which everybody could organize around personalities, single

• 37:14Speaker 08

  issues, and highly developed and very narrow ideologies. You know, we'd get something like Italy. It's had 41 prime ministers and over 60 governments since World War II. Now, maybe it's good that Italy topples its governments with great regularity, but I think it fundamentally undermines the confidence of the people in the system of government, and in the system of democracy, and in the system of the economy as well.

• 37:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so considering the fact that a lot of Americans don't like politics very much, either the governance end or the electoral end, when there's an election, especially like this one going on, something, it would seem, needs to change. So, in keeping with the theme of this episode, what, in your view, is one idea, whether in politics or in governance, that needs to be spiked, and why?

• 38:02Speaker 08

  Well, mine's a preventive measure, not something that will improve the system and will keep it from getting worse. And that is the idea that we ought to abolish the Electoral College. That needs to die.

• 38:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just to be clear, Rove thinks the idea that must die is the idea that the Electoral College should die. In other words, he thinks the Electoral College should live on.

• 38:23Speaker 08

  The Electoral College pushes us towards a two-party system. And that thereby promotes stability by providing a barrier against multi-candidate races and the kind of disasters that we see in democracies in Western Europe and elsewhere, where the electorate is fragmented by a multi-party system with a wide range of parties, some of them based around personalities, some of them based around regional interests, some of them based around ideological constructs, others of them based around a single issue, some of them based simply around the idea of blowing up the existing system.

• 38:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, disagrees with Rove.

• 39:01Speaker 07

  The Electoral College is an anachronism that was created around the founding of the nation because it was very hard to travel from one place to another. There was no telegraph, there was no telegram. And so, in order to elect the president, somehow you had to get the vote totals to a place that they could be counted. And the way that founding fathers devised it was that each state would have a number of electors that was proportional, both to their senate class, which was equal by state, and to their population, which was the number of congressmen. You add the number of senators and the number of congressmen together, and that is the number of each state electors.

• 39:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, by the way, is still the case, although each state's number of electors rises or falls over time as the state's population rises or falls relative to other states.

• 39:52Speaker 07

  And so those people would gather several months after the presidential election, and they would elect the president. Now, that is not necessary anymore. Today, we have vote counts that are almost instantaneous, within 24 hours. With the exception of Bush versus Gore, we knew who the next president of the United States was. So you don't really need electors to all go and cast their votes. In fact, there's some danger in it. Roy Neal, who was my third campaign manager, and Al Gore, very close to Al Gore, just wrote a wonderful book called The Electors. It's a fantasy book about what happens when electors do what they damn well please. And there actually is no law that prevents them from doing that. So you could actually have a group of 535 electors meeting, and 15 of

• 40:35Speaker 07

  them could decide they weren't going to vote the way the state told them to vote. So I just think it's a 235-year institution that needs to be gotten rid of because it's doing more harm than good.

• 40:45Speaker 08

  I think the abolition of it would make these problems that we have of confidence and a sense of personal efficacy worse.

• 40:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Karl Rove again.

• 40:53Speaker 08

  The Electoral College prevents, for example, presidents with a deeply minority vote. It keeps us from engaging in runoffs like we've seen recently in Austria and Italy and France that further scramble and weaken the two parties. It provides the winner a sense of a national mandate that helps the new president govern. It forces both parties also to campaign in diverse states. Big states like Florida and Ohio, medium states like Colorado and Virginia, and small states like New Hampshire and Iowa, not just sort of big cities, big concentrations.

• 41:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  But it's interesting to me, in your support for continuing a two-party system and continuing to support the Electoral College, you've elsewhere been advocating for new and nimble businesses and technologies, for decentralization, things that give consumers a larger choice set, things that give people more ability to express heterogeneous preferences, right? So why is that good for consumers or for veterans who need medical care, but bad for voters?

• 41:55Speaker 08

  Well, because they're two different things. In one, we're trying to have something that garners the support of the country. In the other, we're trying to satisfy the individual desires of consumers. You don't need to sell a good phone, you don't need to get a 50% plus one of the market share. If you want to win the presidency, you have to, in order to govern effectively. Parties are intensely different than our individual consumer choices. You may like your double macchiato with Madagascar cinnamon, I like a cup of decaf coffee. I mean, it's...

• 42:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  How'd you know? How'd you know that's what I like?

• 42:29Speaker 08

  Well, you know, I've read the file on you, man. I've read the file. The National Security Agency, they can... It's amazing the amount of information they collect on you.

• 42:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  It sure is. Now, let me ask you this. How much is your current view of the Electoral College and the value thereof influenced by the fact that you were the architect of President George W. Bush's presidential campaigns, including the contested 2000 election, after which a lot of people changed their thinking about the Electoral College? How much did it change yours?

• 42:58Speaker 08

  It didn't. It did create the number two thing that I would have on my list of practices that we ought to stop, and that is exit polls in which the data is collected and made available to the media before the polls close across the country. If you take a look, and remember 2000, there were erroneous exit polls that suggested that Al Gore was going to sweep the election and that he was going to carry Florida by a wide margin. And this colored all the coverage.

• 43:26Speaker 21

  A big call to make. CNN announces that we call Florida in the Al Gore column.

• 43:33Speaker 25

  An important win for Vice President Al Gore. NBC News projects that he wins the 25 electoral votes in the state of Florida.

• 43:41Speaker 08

  So you'll remember, the networks all declared Florida relatively early. In fact, they declared Florida in Gore's column while Florida was still voting, because Florida is split between two time zones. And the heavily Republican panhandle, which is in the central time zone, was still voting when they declared that Florida was going to be won by Al Gore. That Florida call was shortly rescinded.

• 44:05Speaker 26

  The networks were wrong when they projected that Florida would go to Al Gore. All the networks pulled it back.

• 44:09Speaker 08

  Now, why did this matter? Draw a line across the country. To the east of that line are the states whose polling had closed when the media announced that the election was now, in effect, over, that Al Gore had won Florida. And to the west of it are the states where the election is, where voting is still going on. And you'll notice something. The turnout in the states to the east of that line, whose polling had closed before the networks made their erroneous call, turnout in those states increases generally compared to 1996. Take a look at the states to the west of that line. Those states, turnout generally,

• 44:49Speaker 08

  almost in every instance, does not increase from 1996, but drops. And why? I remember sitting in the headquarters here in Austin, Texas, and we got a call from our California chairman. And he said, "I don't know what to do." He said, "I'm getting phone calls. Everybody's watching the television on our phone banks, and they've seen the networks call it for Gore." And they're getting out of the phone banks and going home. People are getting out of the voting lines because they've heard Bush has lost Florida and the election's over. What do I do? So my second idea to abolish would be to say, you can do these exit polls, but the exit poll data cannot be collected and aggregated until the country's polls have been closed. Use it to explain what happened in the election. Don't use it to color the coverage.

• 45:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's our show today. Thanks for listening. Maybe it's given you a few new things to think about during this very long and very trying election season. For what it's worth, if you feel an urge to quit paying attention already to the presidential election, you are not alone. A recent Pew survey found that with four months still to go until the election, six in 10 Americans were already, quote, "worn out" by so much coverage. I hope this episode hasn't worn you out even further. Whatever the case, let us know what you think about this or any episode. We're on Twitter and Facebook. You can leave comments at Freakonomics.com or on the Freakonomics Radio page on iTunes, where you can also subscribe to this podcast.

• 46:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  You can write to us at [email protected]. And be sure to listen to Freakonomics Radio on public radio stations across the country. If your station doesn't carry it yet, well, there is a cause worthy of your political activism. Make it happen.

• 46:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes Irvan Gunja, Jay Cowett, Merritt Jacob, Christopher Wirth, Caitlin Pierce, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, and Jolenta Greenberg. Our intern is Harry Huggins.

• 47:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mic drop.

• 47:24Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 48:08Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 48:51Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 49:05Speaker 27

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