Don’t Redistrict with Texas

Following the 2010 Census, Texas’ representation in the House increased from thirty-two to thirty-six seats, thanks to population growth driven almost entirely by racial minorities. Faced with an influx of (mostly) Democratic voters, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature proposed a redistricting plan which aimed at reducing their influence. That map was recently struck down by a federal court, and the Supreme Court has forced the Lone Star State to use an interim, judge-drawn congressional map in this year’s election (downloadable from here). The fight over where and how to draw the four new districts illustrates the advantages, as well as the shortcomings, of the Voting Rights Act.

Like most southern states, Texas must have its statewide redistricting plans precleared with either the Justice Department or the federal district court in the District of Columbia. In 1992 and 2002, Republican Attorneys-General were able to shape state maps to their liking; this year, the Democrats are able to block attempts at diluting the voting strength of their supporters. In a state in which racial minorities now form thirty-nine percent of the population, the Texas map, which retained only ten majority-minority districts from last decade and created no new ones, was never likely to be approved. Echoing the language of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion in the landmark 1992 redistricting case of Shaw v. Reno, the court determined that the shape and composition of Texas’ districts could not be explained without reference to race, and that the map violated the Voting Rights Act.

Passed in 1965, the VRA was intended to end the disenfranchisement and under-registration of African-American voters in the South. Over the decades, federal courts have interpreted it as granting a geographically compact minority population the right to have a district drawn for them. The result has been the packing of African-Americans and Latinos into safe urban Democratic seats, leaving the suburban and rural South covered with safe Republican ones, and allowing the GOP to paint minority office-holders as beneficiaries of the electoral equivalent of affirmative action. The increase in minority office-holding that has resulted has been balanced by a ‘bleaching’ of most districts, so that most white politicians no longer need to appeal to a significant share of minority voters.

The Texas controversy demonstrates the ways in which state legislatures would dilute the votes of minorities if left to their own devices. As noted by Robert Draper in the Atlantic, the new map preserved the five-way split of Fort Worth, in which heavily-growing minority communities are ‘cracked’ into parts of Anglo-majority districts, until the judge-drawn plan granted the city a sixth, majority-minority, seat. Elsewhere in the state, Democratic-leaning groups such as liberal whites in Austin and Mexican-Americans in the state’s rural south are split over multiple districts. Without the constraints imposed by the VRA, Texas Republicans would have been able to gerrymander the state without limits in order to stave off the partisan effects of the state’s changing demographics.

On the other hand, the shortcomings of the VRA are numerous. While electoral reformers in the rest of the world try to move away from single-member districts and first-past-the-post, both features are seen by American litigants as the best way to protect minorities from vote dilution. By equating minority office-holding with racial progress, the VRA channelled the energies of the civil rights movement into re-electing minority members of Congress. By limiting its provisions to racial and linguistic minorities, it fails to protect other types of minority (such as San Francisco’s gay population, who were undoubtedly victims of hostile gerrymandering in the 1970s and 1980s). Worst of all, the focus on racially-gerrymandered districts has diverted attention from the more widespread phenomenon of less-race-conscious partisan gerrymandering.

It’s time to recognise that no system of single-member districts can make the House live up to John Adams’ wish that it would be “in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large” by adequately reflecting America’s ideological and demographic diversity. Larger, multi-member seats choosing members of Congress by open-list proportional representation or by the Single Transferable Vote would better achieve the goals of the VRA without leaving voters at the mercy of computer-assisted legislative gerrymandering. It would also allow any minority, whether racial or otherwise and whether geographically compact or dispersed, the chance to achieve its fair share of representation.

Presidential debate review: Obama v. Romney at Hempstead, N.Y.

Hempstead, a town in eastern Long Island which is home to the New York Islanders, hosted the second presidential debate on Wednesday afternoon (AEST) at Hofstra University, using the ‘town hall’ format. I dread these events – the format is designed to produce mushy, pandering sentiments from candidates, who are forced to nod their heads and look sympathetic while some random tells them their life story and asks them some soft-ball question. The 1992 town hall debate, in which Bill Clinton told an audience member: “I feel your pain”, marked one of the low points in the Oprah-fication of American politics. Obama and Romney continued the sordid history, but also provided some entertaining policy arguments, styles of walking around the room, and mispronunciations of voters’ names.

1) Obama and Biden have spent more time talking than Romney and Ryan in all three debates so far. Somewhere, some right-wing blog will use this to claim that ‘omg teh lamestream mediaz is librulz!!!11!’ But seriously, one wonders whether the moderators take note of this and allow Romney to use more time in the third debate.

2) Moneybags Mitt likes him some black gold. He wants to drill for it on federal land, he wants to pipe it down from Soviet Canuckistan, and he wants lots of tax credits for Big Oil. He claims that the Obama administration hasn’t drilled enough oil on federal land, and gets rather stroppy when Obama disputes those claims. This issue seems to get Mittens fired up more than anything else.

3) Here’s three Romney lines from the debate: “I was a missionary for my church”; “I was a pastor for my congregation”; and “I went over there to help them with the Olympics” (‘there’ being Salt Lake City). He goes to a lot of trouble to avoid mentioning the M-word; not only in the context of religious matters, but on at least two occasions he buttressed his business credentials by referencing his work on the ‘Olympics’ without mentioning whether they were the summer or winter Games, and WHAT CITY THEY WERE HELD IN. Also not mentioned are the country he missionary’d in (France) and the nature of his position in the Mormon church (the freaking equivalent of a freaking archbishop).

4) One thing Mittens doesn’t have trouble with is launching into discussions of things that largely remain inside the conservative bubble. Over the two debates, he’s mentioned Solyndra, the Keystone Pipeline, the Fast and the Furious, the ‘Apology Tour’, the ‘reset’ with Russia not working, and the Benghazi embassy attack as result of anti-YouTube video protest thesis. All have been met with the worm flatlining as low-information undecided voters emit a collective ‘WTF?’

5) The Great Gender Gap of 2012 didn’t quite manifest itself as clearly. The ‘worm’ (actually the collected spontaneous opinions of thirty-five Ohioan undecideds in a room with the lovely Erin Burnett) didn’t diverge as it did in the first debate, and indeed the female ‘worm’ was hidden behind the male one for much of the night. When Obama waffled on about the finer details of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, it flatlined like a West Coast Eagles player on Mad Monday. None of this, of course, will stop the establishment media from continuing it’s anointing of middle-class suburban white women as the Official Swing Demographic of 2012.

6) There were some more weird questions. ‘Governor Romney, how are you different from George W. Bush?’ ‘What’s your position on assault weapons?’ ‘President Obama, why should I vote for you again this time?’ And some forgetting of names: “Lorraine… Lorena… is it Lorena?... hi, Lorena… no, it’s Lorraine… hi, Lorraine.” Apparently, Obama was the winner (it’s hard to tell with these things), and this should stem the Romney ‘bounce’ in the polls.

World Cup qualifier review: Iraq v. Socceroos at Doha

Wednesday morning (AEST), the Socceroos played their fourth match (of eight) in the second group stage of the Asian qualifiers for the 2014 World Cup. Due to Iraq being, you know, war-torn, the Iraqis played their ‘home’ match in front of a far-from-capacity crowd at the Grand Hamad Stadium in Doha. Going into the match, the two teams (as well as Oman) were tied for third place in the five-team group, with Japan and Jordan ahead of them; a finish in the top two is needed to go straight to Brazil, with the third-placed team needing to win two playoffs to get there.

Iraq have qualified for only one World Cup – Mexico ’86, where they lost all three matches (and were tortured by Uday and Qusay Hussain upon returning home). They have enjoyed some success in recent years, including a famous victory at the 2007 Asian Cup, and are coached by Brazilian legend Zico. However, unlike certain Gulf countries given to dishing out citizenship to fresh-off-the-plane Brazilian imports, Iraq’s footballing talent is home-grown; the Kurds, like the Azeris across the border in Iran, provide more than their proportionate share of the national team. Its clubs, heavily concentrated in a Baghdad, have never featured in the knockout phase of the Asian Champions League, and its overseas-based players tend to play in Europe or in the Gulf.

The match took a while to heat up; Iraq could marshal four defenders to the six-yard box to stop any Australian attack, but their sloppy finishing, as well as Mark Schwarzer’s capable hands, made it hard for them to create chances of their own. The Socceroos were forced to try from outside the area, and neither side could seem to convert set pieces into anything approaching a goal. An evenly-fought half (Australia led in the possession stakes 52% to 48%) ended goalless, with both teams earning a yellow card from the steady but restrained argy-bargy which the Korean referee was generally unable to keep a lid on.

The Iraqis came out of the blocks hard in the second half, conceding two free kicks in the first thirty seconds. A series of Australian barrages of the Iraqi goal was halted in the fifty-seventh minute, when Lucas Neill was cautioned for holding a counter-attacking Iraqi forward who would otherwise have had only Schwarzer to beat. Nevertheless, the Lions of Mesopotamia looked rattled, and the few minutes either side of the hour mark were punctuated by two Iraqi substitutions and a nasty foul on Robbie Kruse. From there, the game began to proceed at a staccato rhythm, as Iraq resorted to cynical fouls, usually targeted at Kruse, and always rewarded by the referee’s reluctance to pull out the yellow card. When the ‘Iraqi Kaka’ Alaa Abdul-Zahra scored from a length-of-the-field counter-attack in the seventy-second minute, and Kruse had to be substituted in the seventy-ninth after being hacked to pieces, it looked as if the Iraqis had mastered the tempo of the match and would emerge victorious.

A Socceroos eleven refreshed from two substitutions (Archie Thompson on for Alex Brosque and Tommy Oar on for Robbie Kruse) hit its stride in the final ten minutes. Seemingly out of nowhere, Tim Cahill headed a corner past a statue-like Iraqi goalkeeper and toward the far post in the eightieth minute. Four minutes later, from exactly the same position (ten metres from goal, a 50-55 degree angle to the goalkeeper’s left side), Archie Thompson headed a Tommy Oar cross into the same place. After trying everything else, they had finally found a way through the Iraqi defence – through the air, splitting the Iraqi keeper from his back four. From there, the Aussies cruised to victory, with their only hiccup being a caution for Tim Cahill one minute from the end of regulation time as part of the referee’s belated attempt to assert control.

The Socceroos looked lost at times, unable to capitalise on their technical superiority over the unpolished Mesopotamians. Corners and free kicks went unconverted, and on a few occasions the Iraqi catenaccio strategy resulted in Abdul-Zahra facing Schwarzer one-on-one; Australia were lucky that only one such situation ended in an Iraqi goal. On the other hand, the match reassured the nation that the ‘Roos can indeed win competitive matches, and swept away the irritation of last month’s 2-1 loss in Amman. Iraq relies heavily on its back four and on Abdul-Zahra, and its players are poor finishers and messy tacklers. It seems evident that a Socceroos team firing on all cylinders will have no trouble against Oman or Jordan, and your humble correspondent went to bed confident that the boys in verde y oro will wrap up qualification for Brazil in a clinical fashion next winter.

The Socceroos benefit from Oman’s 2-1 win over Jordan in Muscat, which halted a potential Hashemite charge up the Group B table. After four matches each, Japan lead the group with 10 points, Australia and Oman 5 apiece, Jordan 4, and Iraq 2. Australia has a bye in the next matchday, in November, so the next qualifier will be against Oman in Sydney next March, followed by a three-game stand in June – Japan at Saitama, Jordan at Melbourne, and Iraq at Sydney.

Iraq 1 (Alaa Abdul-Zahra 72’) – Australia 2 (Tim Cahill 80’; Archie Thompson 84’)

Cautions: Carl Valeri (AU) 19’; Salam Shaker (IQ) 42’; Khaldoon Ibrahim Mohammad (IQ) 61’; Tim Cahill (AU) 89’.

Vice-Presidential debate review: Biden v. Ryan at Danville, Ky.

Friday afternoon (Australian Eastern Summer Time), the vice-presidential debate between incumbent Joe Biden (D-Del.) and challenger Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) was held in the middle of nowhere, a.k.a. Center College in Danville, Kentucky. Biden was hoping to halt the Romney-Ryan ticket’s momentum after the Republican ticket’s uptick in the polls since the first debate, while Ryan needed to demonstrate that he was ready for the big time. In some measure, both probably achieved their goals, and both sides are desperately trying to spin it to make it look as if they won.

1) Biden was constantly frustrated by what he saw as Ryan’s dissembling and evasiveness. On occasions, he was amusing in his ribbing of his opponent; at other times, he brought back memories of Al Gore’s sighs against George W. Bush in 2000. He also had moments of extreme frustration, where he would talk down to the moderator and demand that he be given equal time (in fact, he spoke for longer than Ryan in total). How he is perceived to have performed will be determined by whichever one of these modes the media portray him in.

2) Ryan came across as knowledgeable and personable when talking about domestic policy, but his foreign policy talking points sounded as if they were taken verbatim from neocon propaganda (eg. the ‘reset’ with Russia not working, Obama going on an ‘apology tour’). Oddly, when asked about when he believed the U.S. should intervene in a foreign country, he gave a rather Kissingerian answer, that is, that it should do so only when doing so would be in its national interest. He also has a bit of a tendency to disguise his lack of foreign policy knowledge by name-dropping generals he’s met or places in Afghanistan he’s visited.

3) The second-last segment of the nine was a weird one. The moderator said something to the effect of: ‘you’re both Catholics. Whaddya reckon about abortion?’ Not sure what the point of this was, other than to make Ryan look the better Catholic for adhering to the Church’s position on abortion, or to provide the media with more talking points about ‘TEH GENDER GAP!!!11!’ Speaking of which, it wasn’t as pronounced in this debate as the last one – Biden spent at least half of his talking time more favoured by men than by women, and the two ‘worms’ converged more than they did last week.

4) There wasn’t much in the debate that will serve as a ‘game-changer’. The most exciting part was when Ryan compared his tax plan to John F. Kennedy’s tax cut/stimulus, causing Biden to ask “Oh, so you’re Jack Kennedy now?” For a second I thought Biden was going to do a Lloyd Bentsen on him, but it wasn’t to be.

Presidential debate review: Obama v. Romney at Denver

Thursday morning (Australian Eastern Standard Time), Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) went mano a mano in the first of three presidential debates, held at the University of Denver’s Magness Arena. My thoughts:

1) Obama sometimes stumbled with his words and looked ordinary, but he did much better in split-screen mode than Romney. When Romney is speaking, Obama looks down respectfully, whereas when Obama speaks, Romney gives him a slightly contemptuous look. But I agree with most commentators, who say that Romney was the winner on the basis that he exceeded expectations.

2) The gender gap was very noticeable on CNN’s ‘worm’ graphic; I don’t think I saw Romney leading among women or Obama leading among men for the entire (one-and-a-half-hour) debate. This fits into the whole ‘Republican War on Women’ narrative that the Democrats have been using this year.

3) What a pair of un-ideological technocrats the candidates are! ‘An independent study says my economic policies will reduce the budget deficit’. ‘I’ve got another independent study that says your independent study is wrong’. Whatever happened to this ideological rancour that the Very Serious People say is paralysing Washington?

4) The debate won’t be any sort of ‘game changer’ that wins the election for one of the candidates – it probably won’t shift the polls more than one percentage point either way. Romney’s slipperiness regarding which tax loopholes he plans to abolish to help balance the budget, however, is something which could spiral out of control for him. Without providing something resembling a detailed answer, the Obama campaign could keep hitting him and make him look evasive.

Corona the Vote!

My favourite recent bit of political news from across the Pacific comes in the form of this chart at The Monkey Cage, which shows the partisan preference and propensity to vote of drinkers of different types of beer. The key takeaways: Democrats tend to win among full-strength beers and Republicans among light beers, and my own preferred ale, Corona, leans Democratic but its consumers suffer from low turnout (possibly due to them being disproportionately Latino).

America the Unequal

In a recent series of posts at The Monkey Cage, Princeton political science professor Martin Gilens discussed the effects of economic inequality on political outcomes. The key findings of his research are that income levels can predict Americans’ policy preferences on about one-half of the issues he studies, and that elected officials overwhelmingly listen to their higher-income constituents; indeed, they generally only pay attention to lower-income Americans at election time.

Gilens finds that wealthier Americans lean to the left on social issues (especially religiously-charged ones such as abortion) and to the right on economic issues. The issues on which rich and poor Americans agree include defence policy, environmental protection, and social issues less tied to religion (such as drugs, parental leave, and neo-liberal restructuring of welfare policy). The federal government is never as responsive to the policy preferences of lower-income groups as it is to those of higher-income ones, but the gap is lessened during closely-contested presidential election campaigns. (Note that he specifies presidential elections – midterms are decided by an older, whiter, and richer electorate.) Naturally, parties tend to the interests of the core supporters when they can, except when the threat of electoral defeat disciplines them into appealing to a broader base. However, this levelling doesn’t last, and the later years of a president’s term see the policy preferences of the elites rise again in importance.

The most striking part of Gilens’ findings is that the influence of wealthier Americans is not due to their education, civic awareness, work on campaigns, willingness to contact representatives, or more intense preferences about the issues. After controlling for these factors, they still have much more influence; politicians simply heed their concerns because of their money. A person in the ninetieth percentile in terms of income but only the tenth percentile in terms of education has the same influence on their representatives as someone in the fiftieth income percentile and the ninetieth education percentile. Likewise, turnout and work on political campaigns correlate with income levels, but political donations rise rapidly with increased income. All this suggests that efforts to reform American democracy by encouraging such things as voter registration, voter turnout, and fair redistricting are doomed to fail unless the question of money in politics is addressed head-on.

In his third post, Gilens makes perhaps the most important observation: that in modern-day American politics, money is increasingly more effective than other resources. He uses the example of television advertising, which requires more money and fewer warm bodies than, say, door-to-door canvassing. I would add that the decline of patronage has had a similar effect; without the lure of a government job afterwards, there are fewer rewards for participating in a political campaign, with the result that modern campaigns look less plebeian than those of previous eras. (Compare the rustic, backwoods feel of Andrew Jackson’s support with the iPad-using bourgeois hipster demographic which propelled Obama into office.) In both cases, the process has been helped along by the Supreme Court; its conservative wing has been hostile to campaign finance reform (eg. Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United) while its liberal wing dealt the final blows to old-school patronage politics in cases such as Elrod v. Burns (which barred the firing of political appointees for political reasons) and Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois (which prevented officials from denying government contracts to companies which donated to their opponents). It is no wonder, then, that the class of people who fund the television ads and whose Ivy League-educated ‘best and brightest’ staff the campaigns and the permanent bureaucracy are the only Americans who matter to politicians.

Gilens’ work gels with that of Larry Bartels, who shows (in Unequal Democracy) that the votes of members of Congress reflect the policy preferences of the top one-third of income-earners. Another interesting analysis of what drives Americans’ political views is that of Bryan Caplan, a denizen of the über-libertarian economics faculty at George Mason University. Caplan (in his 2006 book The Myth of the Rational Voter) compares economists and non-economists, and after controlling for race, income, and ideology, finds that economists’ support for free market policies are merely a function of their superior knowledge of economics. To that end, he suggests various measures to increase their political influence: extra votes, an economic equivalent of the Supreme Court to strike down anti-free market legislation, and the delegation of fiscal policy decisions to the Fed. Where Caplan goes wrong is evident in his title – even if lower-income Americans support protectionist and welfare-statist economic policies at the ballot box once every four years, it is the policy preferences of their affluent compatriots which politicians heed in the intervening years.

Gilens’ findings paint a disturbing portrait of a nation increasingly in the grip of a narrow, plutocratic elite. But what can be done to make the United States government better reflect the policy preferences of the 99%, instead of those of the elites?

First, as Gilens suggests, sometimes needs to be done about the power of money in American politics. A constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s decisions in Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United is necessary, and should be followed up by a federal campaign finance scheme such as the ‘democracy vouchers’ proposed by Bruce Ackerman.

Second, in order to make warm bodies count for as much as cold hard cash, the spoils system should be revived. In the nineteenth century, it allowed ordinary Americans to hold offices that the Federalist/Whig gentry had tried to monopolise and treat as their personal property. At the state and local levels, patronage helped the Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish poor of America’s cities to capture a share of power, integrate into American society, and launch themselves into the middle class; its demise has prevented African-Americans and Latino/as from doing the same. The enthusiasm for a meritocratic civil service was historically driven by anglophile northeastern WASPs, who calculated (correctly) that government jobs would come to be dominated by themselves. Apart from positions that are merely clerical or administrative in nature, all civilian federal employees should be political appointees subject to dismissal on political grounds. The proposal advanced in the 1840s and 1850s by future President Andrew Johnson, that they be subject to an eight-year term limit, might also be adopted. Parties should be able to collect a percentage of their appointees’ salaries, lessening the need to go cap-in-hand to hedge fund billionaires for funding.

Third, the structure of the federal government could be reformed to promote a less plutocratic politics. If elections make politicians more responsive to the policy preferences of lower-income Americans, let’s have more elections and more elective offices. Some ideas:

*shorter Senate terms and an end to its malapportionment in favour of sparsely-populated, non-urban, white-dominated states;

*separate elections for the heads of executive departments, as is the case to varying extents in all fifty states (would the 2008 electorate have elected a Wall Street insider like Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary?);

*elections for the federal judiciary (historically, merit selection of judges has been implemented at state level at the behest of corporate interests outraged at the election of pro-labour and minority judges);

*elections for federal regulatory bodies (authorities such as the FTC, FCC, SEC, NLRB, and Federal Reserve are rendered toothless and subject to institutional capture due to the behind-closed-doors appointment process; twelve states elect public utility regulators, and the adoption of the practice at federal level would force the likes of Ben Bernanke to justify their policies to the electorate).

With this package of institutional reforms, the government of the United States could once again be one of the people, by the people, and for the people.