Why Even Uneventful Primaries are Better than Raucous Caucuses

[This is an expanded version of an Insight Kansas column which appeared in the Wichita Eagle today, March 22, 2024]

When my wife and I went to vote last Tuesday, in the first organized presidential primary which Kansas has authorized in over 30 years, our usual polling station was unusually quiet and empty. I talked to one of the election workers, the volunteers who do the real ground-level work to enable our creaky electoral democracy to continue to function. She told that, as a veteran of multiple elections, this was the least busy she'd ever been. Others who reported on the vote here in Wichita basically said the same thing--which, as a political junkie, ought to sadden me. It doesn't really, though.

I say that despite the dismal turnout: overall, barely over 8% of all registered Democrats in the whole state participated, with the Republicans doing only slightly better, with not quite 11% showing up to cast ballots. Given that the 20-year average for turnout across the nation for presidential primaries is somewhere around 27%, Kansas voters clearly weren’t fired up by the choices available to them. But then, no one expected them to be. President Biden and Donald Trump had already secured more than enough delegates to win their parties’ presidential nominations, and all of the candidates who posed even the remotes challenge to either of their re-nominations had dropped out. So what substantive reason was there to participate, anyway? Why did my wife and I, along with thousands of others?

First, because the substantive results aren’t the whole story; sometimes, voters have symbolic goals in mind. Some Republicans wanted to run up Trump’s totals as much as possible as a show of support in the midst of all his crimes and controversies. (He received 75% of the Republican vote, which wasn’t quite the record some Republicans were shooting for.) And some Democrats cast protest votes as a way of communicating their disapproval of some of Biden’s policy choices. (This was my wife's reason for voting; she, along with about 10% of the Democratic voters state-wide who participated, chose “None of these names," over the current president, who did end up with 84% of the results anyway.) But second, there is also the civic value of the procedure itself.

True, the civic process of this primary election was exceptionally tame--and while this election was particularly lacking in substantive electoral value, even those primaries where the selection of delegates in support of a party's presidential nominee is hotly contested would still be pretty low-key, in comparison to the caucus system which dominated the way the parties organized voters and vetted candidate support for more than 150 years. Some, including Governor Laura Kelly, have talked wistfully about how they prefer the “energy and excitement” of the caucus system, during which those party leaders and voters and activists who are able to gather in specific places at appointed dates and times, arguing and yelling, giving and responding to speeches, casting (or sometimes re-casing) nomination ballots or sometimes just literally pulling one's fellow caucus-attenders one way or another, as supporters of the different candidates line up and get counted.

I participated in the Democratic presidential caucuses in Kansas in 2008 and 2016, and observed the Kansas Republican caucus in 2012, and I agree—the level of engagement on display there is appealing, or at least was very much for me. But then, I'm quite intentionally a political animal, like our current governor and probably pretty much anyone else who ever actually runs for political office--while most citizens are not. For everyone who doesn't vibe with blocks of voters shouting down their opponents, with the hurry-up and wait and rushing to line up or stand up and cheer (or boo), all of which makes the halls that parties have to rent out to handle the crush of voters who show up confusing and cacophonous--well, for folks like that, the whole thing can be pretty alienating, especially if you know your preferences are in the minority, yet you still have a symbolic stand you wish to take. And all of that, of course, doesn't even begin to touch upon all the impassioned yet introverted citizens out there, or the opinionated folks who can't get off work or don't have reliable transportation or can't find child-care or are dealing with physical disabilities, etc., etc., etc. The fact that caucuses are simply not the best way to represent the great majority of folks who actually affiliate with our political parties is indisputable.

I can understand the argument that, for all of these costs and limitations, the participatory democratic virtues of caucuses make defending that system worth it. I certainly respect that a lot more than the grumpy attitude of Kansas's Secretary of State Scott Schwab, who thinks that spending state money to allow Republicans and Democrats to vote for their preferred presidential candidates is a waste of money, and should be left solely for the parties themselves to handle through caucuses (or not--don't forget that many times state parties don't even bother with them, and just select delegates for their party's conventions internally). I'm strongly of the belief that the processes of electoral democracy, however flawed, shouldn't be subject to demands for economic efficiency, and certainly not when you dealing with as relatively cheap an expenditure as $5 million dollars. But should they be subject to, as a matter of theory, a direct and participatory ideal?

In the end, my attitude here hasn't changed in 16 years, when I wrote up my thoughts after participating in the rushed, chaotic, in many ways enjoyable but ultimately just exhausting and frustrating Democratic caucus that was organized here in Wichita in 2008. The fact is the, for all the differences in the many ways the different states and the two major parties have employed the caucus method of selecting presidential delegates over the past century and a half, their one commonality is that they presumed more rural, more spatially intact, less diverse, and less divided and demanding political and socio-economic environments than the great majority of American voters live in today. For all the direct democracy that caucuses supposedly provide, in the much more generally urban and disparate and hurried social contexts which obtain across the majority of the United States of America, simply allowing for a straightforward in a statewide primary makes far more democratic sense. I'm not going to claim that there may not be parts of the country (Iowa, maybe?) where the prevailing political culture and existing democratic practices still fit relatively well with the participatory, caucus ideal. And, to be sure, I'm talking about the presidential election process; I'm more than happy to grant that caucus or caucus-type arrangements might well be an empowering improvement in how many parties struggle to connect with those voters sympathetic to their platforms on a local or state level. But yes: practically everywhere in the country, including Kansas, presidential primaries, staid as they may be, are best.

Of course, if that's the case, and simply asking people to show up and vote for the candidates they want their party to support, then one has to accept that you’re only going to get a large turnout if the results are expected to have an actual impact on what those parties do. Which, in Kansas this year, they didn't.

A couple of local pundits I know have their suggestions. Joel Mathis, more ambitiously, points out that since the candidate being voted on are "running to be president of the entire country," the only solution is "a national primary." His arguments for this are good, but they run smack into the reality of state control over elections (when the Supreme Court allows that, of course). I suspect that what Joel wants will only be possible when--or if--the Electoral College itself is on the table. But functionally we might get closer if we move, as Bob Beatty suggests, the Kansas primary to Super Tuesday. The earlier Kansas's primaries come in the election year calendar, the more likely they are to have some substantive weight in determining what presidential candidates parties select--and while Bob doesn't make this explicit point, since there are already 16 states--nearly a third of the whole country--that hold their primaries on Super Tuesday, encouraging Kansas to join that bandwagon would just get us functionally closer to Joel's ideal.

Whatever happens though, I was glad this primary happened, and I hope the legislature will organize another one in four years’ time, no matter what they naysayers complain about. True, a straight-up primary vote isn’t an exciting, participatory democratic process, and this year was especially predictable. But giving citizens broadly the chance to democratically express themselves doesn’t have to be exciting; sometimes, it just needs to be.

Why Championing American Values May Not Be Enough

[This is an expanded version of a column which appeared in The Wichita Eagle on Sunday, July 11.] 

When Mike Pompeo launched his "Championing American Values” political action committee recently, he employed what some would call some pretty dark and defiant language. The Biden administration's economic policies are "sickening," and their foreign policies are "naive." Claiming that the United States of America is "the most exceptional nation in the history of civilization," Pompeo insisted that America today is confronting “the dividing line between freedom and oppression.” Leaning heavily upon his military background, Pompeo's PAC foregrounds the idea of a conservative, pro-Trump, Republican calvary riding to battle against the Biden administration and the Democratic party, filled with "pipehitters" who will "never give an inch...against the radical Left’s agenda." A milquetoast foray into national politics this was not.

Personally, I don't find any of this language all that unusual, or even especially extreme. It doesn't frame itself in terms of an apocalyptic culture war, as so much political rhetoric today does, after all. Instead, it's actually entirely conventional for political action committees: it aims to win elections, specifically to "take back majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and in state legislatures." You can't get much more normal for American party politics than that.

But perhaps the very normality of Pompeo's stated intentions is what makes his language stand out to some observers? Hard to say, but the fact that some people can look at something as routine as a political action committee and see it as a frightening harbinger perhaps says something about the broader fears held by some in America today.

Of course, fear is actually part of Pompeo’s argument. If “the encroachment of socialism” and “the woke cancel culture” really are dire threats to “our liberty and freedoms,” as Pompeo’s announcement suggests, then perhaps every America should rightfully fear whether our constitutional democracy will survive. But if so, then the fact that Pompeo’s appeal does exactly what, according to at least one understanding of our constitution, we are democratically expected to do suggests that seeing our current constitutional situation as especially dire may be flawed.

The constitutional reading and democratic expectation I'm talking about is the Madisonian one, laid out in Federalist #10. His entire vision of our constitutional system will handle disagreement and diversity is premised upon the idea that we Americans, in order to promote our disparate values, will form discrete factions. Through those factions--which came to be most purely embodied through the mechanism of political parties and interest groups, though it is doubtful Madison himself had any so institutionally formal in mind--voters can attempt to influence the government one way or another, by recruiting candidates and lining up voters and cultivating donors with resources and more, all with the aim of winning elections. But given the diversity of America, none of these factions will ever elect enough people to be able to achieve majority control of the government on their own. Thus they’re forced to compromise, to work together. None of the relevant groups ever get all that they want, but all get enough to keep on going.

As I said, that’s one understanding—an understanding that looks at Pompeo’s new PAC, and salutes him for taking the exact same electoral actions which every other political action committee, working on behalf of every other possible set of values, also does. We may be deeply divided in our policy preferences when it comes to what we want our government to do, but how can we worry too much about the influence of one division or another when we’re all going about our political business in the same way anyway?

Some worry, I suspect--and I count myself as one of them--because we recognize that the bumpy but supposedly consistent “going” mentioned above actually doesn’t always work the way some constitutional thinkers believed it would. For me, the reasons it doesn't work the way it was supposed to are rooted in democratic theory itself; as I've written before, I suspect that Madison's vision of pluralism presumed a controlling classical republic background (as represented by the men who would be the presumed default leaders of these factions; "men who possess the most attractive merit, and the most diffusive and established characters" as Madison called them), and thus by praising factional interactivity as he did, he was actually undermining the conceptual requirements of his own constitutional vision. But even if I'm wrong, and Madison really was just a pragmatic liberal all the way down, with little interest in the common good, preferring just to manage our diverse, we still must confront the fact that he was a product of his time and place. Worried American citizens today don't have to know anything about Madison's philosophy or constitutional theory to suspect that things may go very wrong when factions, thanks to long-standing government dysfunction and increasing cultural divides, become sources of permanent frustration and anger. The hard truth is that the traditional story of American pluralism provides no solution when such impasses emerge. The Civil War, which there was no compromising out of (despite the delusions of some revisionists), is proof of that.

True, vague talk about how we may be facing “another civil war” is pretty common, on both the left and right, so much so that, as I wrote above, Pompeo's language might arguably even seem tame by comparison. And frankly, such language is arguably to be expected. Madison's whole system assumed people will be passionate believers, and will fight hard for their factional causes. But that fighting, at least in the century between the end of the Civil War and the breakdown of the New Deal party system, took place in a context where, among other things, media outlets were subject to political requirements which standardized a certain degree of regional variety and fairness, the controlling presumption of whiteness effectively enabled cross-ideological compromise, and campaign finances were closely watched enough that there was rarely any upside in political extremes. But the civil rights and women's movements, combined with technology and money and deregulation, have long since broken down most of these electoral structures and practices which once defined our factions, with the result that political movements are increasing driven by which ever micro-faction can effectively leverage grievances over values, so as to allow them to dominate their fellows by pure momentum. As a result, it’s become easy for the passionate believers to assume they face uncompromising extremists, not fellow citizens that they’ll have to deal with eventually. As that assumption becomes standard it become self-fulfilling, making Madison's vision seem ever more quaint and out-of-date when we consider the cultural conflicts of today.

I confess I have come, over the past 10 years, to embrace this dark diagnosis almost entirely. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of reasons to think things aren’t all that bad; locally, in particularly, I suspect good government through traditional pluralistic politics is still possible. When all is said and done, though, if you’re one of those who look at political actors like Pompeo and—even if you agree with the values he expresses—wonder a little about just what the endgame of his absolutist language is, then you’re like those of us who are beginning to fear that our constitutional machinery for dealing with disagreement may not be able to handle the internet-empowered, shame-resistant, mutual-destruction, cultural factions of today. Does that mean that some entirely new electoral and political machinery is necessary? I suspect so—but unfortunately, getting any compromise on what that machinery should be remains far away as well.

What Happens When Parties Can No Longer Be Managed Moderately?

[This is a somewhat expanded version of a piece that appeared in the Wichita Eagle over the weekend; I received an e-mail on Sunday which causes me to think more about what I mean by "moderation," and this is the result.] 

A few weeks after the dust settled from the 2020 elections here in Kansas, I was giving an online presentation on the election results to the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. Many of the virtual participants had good questions, but the most common one was some variation on a question that has been a constant here in Kansas, and elsewhere, for decades now: “Whatever happened to moderate Republicans?” It's a good question, thought obviously not a new one.

That the parties--both following and, not frequently, shaping the voters which support them--have become more polarized over the past generation is well-supported. I think the only people who can honestly say today, as I think could be at least plausibly claimed in the 1990s, that there is "no real difference between the two major parties," are people deeply committed to revolutionary or reactionary causes--everyone else clearly understands that, in both marginal and major ways, elections have consequences. And it follows, therefore, that when you see party positions become less variable and flexible, and more tightly wound around ideological poles distant from each other, that's going to have consequences for governance. It is those consequences--and specifically, in Republican-heavy Kansas, the consequences of the state Republican party having become inhospitable for the moderates and liberals who once found shelter within it--which had my good-government-concerned interlocutors most worried.

Kansas's strongly Republican (and, yes, "conservative," but actually, for reasons of history, it's even more a matter of party than ideology) majority has been in place for many decades. But for a good number of those decades the state Republican party was a fairly crude instrument, one that contained diverse factions, but those factions could be played off one another, allowing for a degree of elite management. I use "management" there purposefully, because that is--for many observers of elections and the processes by which parties serve as the machines which transform, through representative elections, voter preferences into actual legislative and executive action, anyway--exactly what is presumably demanded: managers who, through the judicious orchestration of the mechanics by which voters and candidates produce majorities which can pass bills and enforce laws, do their best to make certain that those majorities are in respectable, balanced, or above all "moderate" ways.

More often than not, those who found themselves in the role of managers were various moderate and liberal Republicans, politicians and donors and strategists who worked hard to connect with--and, by so doing, cultivate--a particular kind of Republican voter. This isn't anything unique; this type of Republican--mostly suburban, mostly college-educated, and mostly committed to the success of their local public schools and other civic organizations--was the backbone of state Republican parties for decades all across the country. These voters (and in Kansas, you found them overwhelmingly in the suburban and exurban communities which surrounded Kansas's cities, and hence the largest numbers of them were found in northwestern Kansas, in and around Kansas city) faithfully supported the GOP, but they also often protected and rewarded those who dissented from any strictly conservative or libertarian ideological line. The result was a consistent majority party that nonetheless remained somewhat flexible, with many elected representatives who tended to move left or right as the times warranted.

Ed Flentje was a long-time Wichita State University professor, a scholar and a gentleman whose place as a regular column writer for Kansas newspapers I had the honor to take over. One of his great themes over the years was to trumpet this historical happenstance in the history of Kansas's political parties as one of the primary virtues of politics in the Sunflower State. We are a state with a decided (more than 2-to-1) Republican majority among voters, thus providing stability and predictability. At the same time, this Republican majority was divided enough between moderates and conservatives that a crucial number of its elected representatives could, from one issue to the next, ally with the minority Democrats or with the more conservative part of the Republican majority in the legislature, thus allowing the party to adapt, innovate, and pursue good government policies, even progressive ones on occasion. This is, Flentje strongly implies, the best of both wolds: consistent Republican party leadership, but a Republican party that regularly had moderates like Dick Bond and Bill Graves and Jean Schodorf leading the way. So thorough was the managing power of this party faction over the decades that the representatives elected by strongly conservative voters--whom, in the wake of the Summer of Mercy and the movement of Wichita, Kansas's largest city, to the right, probably constituted the majority of Kansas Republicans--were themselves seen as the small, trouble-making faction: "Republican rebels" who messed with the state party's commitment to be "the party of government," as Burdett Loomis, another long-time observer of Kansas politics, once put it.

In the introduction to a recent collection of his newspaper writings, Flentje remains confident that the patterns he often defended still hold. The collection includes ten years of columns which follow the path of Sam Brownback as he thoroughly remade the Kansas Republican party, driving out moderates in political primaries throughout his first term as government, and embarking on a fiscal revolution that had terrible consequences for our state. Though the “Brownback Revolution” took the Kansas Republican party, and thus the state government, in what he recognizes as an immoderately right-ward direction for a time, he sees that as a historical aberration, and believes the moderate Republican faction--who were essential to Governor Laura Kelly’s election in 2018--will continue to provide balance. He says this, while noting at the same time that he writes as one who is almost certainly a "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) in the eyes of many of his fellow Kansas Republicans, and also noting that moderates need to do their job as managers of the center of the party better ("grassroots politics will require tending" is his observation). Nonetheless, his commitment to the value of elite party management, of working to promote and fund campaigns and narratives which will put moderate Republicans in a deal-making, compromise-finding position, remains firm.

I don't dispute the value of Flentje's determination, given the convoluted ways that we have historically gotten our nation-wide, representative, two-party system we have. The United States was filled with various informal state-based party arrangements which functioned in mostly moderate ways--even though that regularly involved the exclusion of small segments of the local electorate--throughout the 20th century. But those arrangements may no longer hold. The 2020 election delivered a Republican majority to the Kansas House almost exactly the same as the one which existed when Sam Brownback was first elected governor a decade ago, and that similarly defiant, un-moderate, Trump-centric campaigns led to Republican wins in Congress and state legislatures across the nation, perhaps it is the rather election of Kelly two-years ago, an election made possible by Republican crossing over to vote a Democrat, that will someday be seen as an aberration here in Kansas from the new, 21st-century style of party politics.

What is that style? It is, most of all, a nationalized one. Regional variations that once characterized American politics are dying out. Flentje and others long presumed that state parties were capable of local adaptation, and continued to believe so--as recently as 2014, despite the changes which the Tea Party had by then spent carrying out (some would say "hollowing out") with the national Republican party, Flentje still suggested that Kansas Democrats take a page from the playbook of Democratic Kansas Governor Bob Docking and explicitly rebuke the national party, signing off on the winning strategy of tying his re-election in 1972 to Richard Nixon's. This year, Kansas Democratic senate candidate Barbara Bollier's similar strategy, which included explicitly highlighting voters who intended to vote for her and President Trump, obviously didn't work nearly so well.

The nationalization of American politics has many sources. There is growing congressional dysfunction, the result of campaign finance rules and the way in which ideologically committed interest groups have captured political primaries, which has allowed (or even encouraged) presidents, our only nationally elected figure, to claim, as a matter of necessity, more and more executive power. There is the growing homogeneity and finance-centered character of the America's service economy, with powerful corporations, increasingly distanced from the variable work of actual production (since natural resources from which things can be produced naturally vary around the globe), imposing a kind of accidental uniformity of interests which makes ideology much more appealing way of eliciting voters' attention than traditional political log-rolling. But today, in particular, I think of my old friend Damon Linker's recent--and excellent--two-part essay on how media technologies are turning the tools by which party elites once kept populist extremes at bay against those same managers. His conclusion to the first part is striking:

[This is] what social media does: It allows for the constructing of identities and the cultivation of resentments in a virtual space among likeminded people separated by vast distances in the physical world. Instead of [James] Madison's highly differentiated republic of discrete communities with their own regional, factional interests--or the kind of slow-motion grassroots organizing we saw in the real world during the mid-20th century--we have new forms of rapid-fire, technologically facilitated solidarity among tens of millions of Americans separated by hundreds or thousands of miles but united by a sense of shared grievance and a commitment to lashing out against its sources, real and imagined.

In short, in a centralizing world of instantaneous communication, ideological slights and crusades, whether real or perceived, can amass a movement overnight--and apparently many voters, fearful of being represented by their ideological opponents (or so their news feeds depict them), follow along. Party leaders and donors are, predictably, sensitive to this, start operating on the basis of it, and perhaps are even happy to do so. Why would that be? Obviously, people whose political preferences cannot be easily packaged in a particular ideological construct are frustrated: their swing-vote tendencies are making them less and less important, particularly in states like Kansas, where one-party dominance is mostly unquestioned. But it's not unreasonable to suppose that a good many people in those areas of local dominance have long chafed at the management they've experienced, and wanted real contestation to take its place. The fact that the breaking of this state-specific Republican status quo was primarily due to national, to say nothing to global, movements and technologies is a frustrating irony for believers in participatory and local democracy like myself. Still, unlike some, I can't pretend that I see the eclipse of the cult of anti-populist moderation as entirely bad thing. Bad for Kansas state policies, its taxes and programs and civil society? Absolutely! But bad for Kansas's democratic health? There, I think I mostly agree with Ezra Klein, who draws upon research showing the degree of ideological and historical randomness out of which the label "moderate" emerges, and concludes that frequently the moderate label is "little more than a tool the establishment uses to set limits on the range of acceptable debate." In this jerry-rigged national political system we call our constitutional order, the conviction that there is something fundamentally wrong or illegitimate with ideologically unified and disciplined parties--if that is, in fact, the direction we're going--seems a step too far, to me.

Of course, 2020 was just one election. Who knows how the Republican party will evolve once Trump, whose constant Twitter declarations overwhelmed potential intra-party factions, is out of the White House? There's no good reason to believe that we'll see a complete return to some idealized 20th-century American "normal," but it may that at least a couple surviving moderate Republicans up in the northwest corner of Kansas may find themselves not quite so pressured to either abandon or conform to their party. Still, that's a slim possibility at best. More likely, we here in Kansas may need to start assuming that nationalized, polarized, and deeply divided parties are all we have for turning voter preferences into successful public policies.

That isn’t necessarily impossible; parliamentary democracies, with their “loyal opposition” and “shadow governments,” do it all the time. But that, obviously, involves a great deal of structural adaptation, the sort of thing that would have to emerge over time as parties confront more directly their paralyzed reality, and slowly shake off the deeply ingrained belief that "one more election" could make the difference in squelching their intra-party opponents. How to create such governing forms in Republican-heavy Kansas, however, where deal-making moderates were so central to the whole idea of good government for so long, is far from clear. So I guess I'd just conclude with this, speaking hypothetically here to those who asked me where the moderate Republicans had gone. Let's say times have changed, technology has changed, funding has changed, and that for all those reasons the times wherein moderate voters would regularly send a sufficient number of dissenters and adapters to Topeka under the Republican party, such as would necessitate compromise, are at an end. Figuring out how to enable our state government to work as it once did without that party crutch has to be job number one.

Power, Friendship, and a Better Set of Democratic "Rules"

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

In the wake of the chaotic mess that was this year's Iowa caucuses, the politically inclined out there might not be in the mood for more fake news. Still, seeing clearly through the lies told about--and often, it seems, to ourselves--democratic politics can be a helpful thing. Hence my appreciation for Eitan Hersh's delightfully contrarian--and yet also genuinely encouraging--new book, Politics is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. Yes, I was turned off by that too-long subtitle too. I picked up and read a copy is because a former student of mine strongly urged me to, and I'm grateful for that too. What I thought would be another overly earnest political how-to book turned out to be packed with surprising, well-supported insights and recommendations, of the sort which anyone who believes in the value of defending one's values in America's broken-but-not-yet-abandoned democratic arena (and that should be all of us) ought to consider.

So what about that fake news? Well, first of all, studies show that lots of people lie about their political engagement: in one study, the number was as high as "50 percent of confirmed nonvoters say[ing on a survey] that they had voted in a recent election" (p. 46). A depressing fact, that. (Also worth noting is that controlled studies show the reverse isn't true: people who actually vote essentially never falsely claim to have not done so.) On the other hand, it seems that lots of people lie about their expressed political hatreds too, so that's a silver lining. While outrageous stories exist, the key point is exactly that word--such stories are magnified and echoed throughout the social media ecosystem for the purposes of performative outrage. According to Hersh's data, outside of a few rare actions and the subsequent overreactions to them by online audiences, the evidence for the high levels of contempt supposedly characterizing American politics is scant, about as deep as the "play hate" of sports fans, who will "report believing false claims" and "whin[ing] about their kids marrying [supporters of] their rivals" to about the same degree that committed Republican or Democratic activists report the same. In short, while some do experience "tension at family reunions," there is good reason to believe that, behind the surveys, most actually don't. In fact, it seems probable that the rancor presented as "poisoning" our political atmosphere actually just mostly consists millions of people who think its fun to "shout from the bleachers that the other side sucks" (pp. 33-34).

It is not a new criticism, of course, to point out that large numbers of Americans treat political debate as a sporting match, or better, as a hobby, with all the episodic intensity and general casualness that implies. The argument which Hersh develops in the book, however, takes the criticism of hobbyism in revealing and important directions. As he has laid out in a couple of recent essays in support of his book's thesis (backed up by a good deal of solid survey and social science research), the shouting-from-the-bleachers metaphor is not a general one. Rather, it mostly describes a population which is mostly more white, more college-educated, more male, more self-identifyingly "liberal," and more white-collar-employed than the American mean. Moreover, it describes actions that become more pronounced when a win is assumed, or when the candidate is personally exciting, or when the issue is "postmaterialist"--that is, more focused on narrow issues that lend themselves to moral identification, rather than broader socio-economic issues. Hence it is that we often--not always, but fairly often--see voter turn-out declining in tightly competitive races (p. 47), greater online enthusiasm for protecting dolphins and funding NPR than for anti-poverty programs (p. 62), more Democratic donors concentrating their money on high-profile fights than on nuts-and-bolts state-level legislative contests (p. 80), and protest actions that are more cathartic than strategic (p. 115).  In short, Hersh concludes (speaking very much to college-educated male white liberals with jobs in an idea industry--in his case, a tenured professorship at Tufts University--like himself):

So there it is. What news do political junkies demand? Outrage and gossip. Why? Because it's alluring. What news do we avoid? Local news. Why? It's boring. What do we think of our partisan opponents? We hate them. Do we really hate them? No, but politics is more fun if we root for a team and spew anger at the other side....When do we vote? When there's a spectacle. When do we click? When politics can be a frivolous distraction. When do we donate? When there's a cocktail party or a viral video. What are we doing? We're taking actions not to empower our political values, but to satisfy our passion for the sport of politics (p. 82).

That paragraph might lead one to believe that Hersh's argument is very much in the localist and Luddite spirit of Neil Postman or Robert Putnam, two scholars who, in very different but related ways, made clear some of the corrupting effects which technology and professionalization have had on civic life. That belief wouldn't be wrong; there are plenty of arguments in this book--as well as plenty of sharp observations--which can be filed alongside every social critique of Facebook (p. 125) or of the enlightened "spiritual but not religious" posture (p. 102) you can imagine. But it wouldn't be entirely fair either. Hersh is no scold; he recognizes that our present-day information ecosystem makes possible a healthy engagement with ideas, and he's unwilling to dismiss the potential validity of "slacktivism" (the idea that social media-enabled token actions actually contribute to voter enthusiasm and civic participation--see pp. 137-141). The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the many persuasive claims Hersh makes are really best understood as a form of class critique. Let me unpack that interpretation.

I'm not saying that Hersh reduces all his data to a simple Marxist analytic; on the contrary, his book touches upon the historical developments (say, the rise of the primary system for choosing nominees--see pp. 49-50, 177-178), technological developments (the effect of instantaneous communication on making political connections--pp. 143-144), and structural developments (the changes in campaign finance and branding--pp. 131-132) which have contributed to the phenomenon he's describing. (If anything, especially when it comes to the way the primary process has been warped by campaign finance rules, he leaves the reader wanting more.)  But above these important variables there is, again and again, one truth that comes forward: those who are living more or less comfortable lives, lives that have, at least in their basic outlines, the support of America's majority establishment, tend to treat politics as a game--as entertainment. Which means they don't as much worry as much about actually canvassing neighborhoods or actually having conversations with those they disagree with; they're not as concerned about alienating potential voters or dividing their own potential movements--because they don't fundamentally need the power which democratic success can deliver, whereas others do. Just to highlight a few of Hersh's observations:

In gender studies of politics, the average man has been found to know more facts about politics than the average woman...[But in] actual political behaviors, as opposed to just survey responses gauging interest and knowledge, the gender gap often goes in the other direction. For a number of years now, women have been consistently more likely to vote than men. The progressive activist groups that have emerged since 2016 are overwhelmingly populated by and led by women (p. 97).

While non-white Americans, particularly those in the middle and upper classes, can engage in political hobbyism as much as anyone else, research on racial politics suggests some important differences....[W]hen I asked about how people use their time on politics, whites said they spend more time on politics than nonwhites, but that's only because they spend more time consuming news online. Blacks and Latinos dedicated a significantly larger portion of their political time to actual volunteerism than whites reported.... Among respondents who were not college educated...blacks and other minorities were three times more likely to engage in political volunteerism (pp. 185-186).

In communities with real needs, where stakes are high, where fears are palpable, politics and service are not different things....The meshing of politics and service happens in minority communities and immigrant communities...because group members feel mutual obligation to serve those needs. They feel a linked fate....[P]olitical mobilization happens not through the lethargic political parties, which generally no longer see their role as serving those in need, but in local community organizations, which help families facing legal issues, health issues, and work issues. These organizations know that part of the way they help is through political empowerment (p. 193). 

Fleshing out these observations are numerous hopeful and edifying stories that Hersh shares of people genuinely connecting with others, and building local democracy--and thus local power--through doing so. He tells his readers about 98-year-old Naakh Vysoky, who from his handicap-accessible apartment in Brighton, MA, has, over the decades, helped hundreds of Russian and Ukranian immigrants obtain citizenship, find apartments, secure jobs--and not coincidentally, got them to deliver their votes to elect a state representative who made sure the sidewalks from Naakh's apartment complex down to the subway line were shoveled every winter. He talks about Angela Aldous, a nurse, MS survivor, and veteran of the doomed Scott Walker recall effort in Wisconsin, who in her new home of Westmoreland county, PA, has built a service organization which provides transportation to doctors' appointments, finds housing for evictees--and not coincidentally, delivers votes that get congresspeople elected. Perhaps most importantly, he discusses Dave Fleischer, a pioneer of probably the only approach to political canvassing whose effectiveness has actually been subject to scientific tests, whose whole approach to civic engagement is premised on those classic neighborly virtues of  respect, reciprocation, and trust. It is built upon the idea of giving and receiving stories; it requires patience and understanding; it is socially awkward; and it requires, more than anything else, mixing ones political convictions with a sense of pluralism and humility. It's not a nationally scalable method by any means. But as a way of approaching the problem of political power locally? The evidence in support of it is not easily denied.

Early last year, I read a wonderful book by an old friend of mine, Michael Austin, in which he argued, on the level of history and psychology and philosophy, that there can be no future for America's democratic experiment without "civic friendship"; to reduce America's political debates to Alinsky-esque struggles over power is to deny the genuinely moral accomplishments which have attended 230 years of American self-government. As a call to a political ethos, I thought it was brilliant; as a diagnosis which unavoidably confronts ideological and structural realities in American today, though, I found it lacking. Hersh's Politics is for Power, with its detailed consideration of structural obstacles and ideological differences, is a marvelous complement to Austin's book. It tells us--or at least one set of us, a demographic set that really needs to hear it--that the civic work of actual face-to-face, small-scale engagement is the key to power, and friendship too.

With that mixture, one might imagine Hersh is setting out to reject Saul Alinsky and his famous argument for politically strategic confrontation in Rules for Radicals entirely. Instead, he never even mentions the man. Is that because he disagrees with Alinsky's ideas? I don't think so, at least not entirely (actually, I strongly suspect that Hersh would agree with Alinsky's condemnation of "consensus politics"--which he distinguished from the real work of compromise--as an ideal embraced solely by the comfortable or those who make a fetish of "reconciliation," usually both). Instead, I think it's simply because this is a different America, one transformed socially and technologically from that of Alinsky's a half-century ago. In a sense, our real elite "consensus" today is a lot of play argument, heaps of sound and fury which keep people comfortably separated in their pools of upper-middle-class online spite, while real harms are being perpetuated in the livelihoods of those--the poor, the refugees, the religious minorities, and more--who don't have the time or ability to endlessly respond to President Trump's ignorant provocations on Twitter. For those tired of the fake news and play hate, who are convinced by Austin and their own better natures that accomplishing something better is actually still possible within the American system, Hersh provides a new, detailed, 21st-century appropriate set of adaptable "rules" for us all, radicals or otherwise. (Peter Levine, a colleague of Hersh's and a scholar of civic life, gives a great example of locally adapting them here.) I'm grateful for these rules, and I think anyone who can pull themselves away from owning the libs on their phone long enough to read it will be too.

Ten Moderately Short, and Only Moderately Philosophical, Theses on Voting

1) I don't think there is a duty to vote, and I wouldn't support compulsory voting, even if that was a political possibility in this country. I probably was tempted by that idea back when my fundamentally communitarian intellectual orientation and sympathies were more civic republican than localist/anarchist/radical democratic, but I'm not inclined to think that way now.

2) I do think voting is responsibility though. The difference, I suppose, is that duty, to my mind, implies being part of community or organization which, because it is constitutive of who one is, compels one, by virtue of one's own identity with it, to support any or all of the operations of the community or organization, whereas a responsibility implies something more relational: that I am obligated, by affection and attachment, to take those actions which most fully reflect and incorporate my connection to all the other members (and all the other interests of all the other members) of said community or organization.

3) That doesn't mean I reject the idea that one's formal citizenship or civic identity is constitutive of who one is; I just don't believe it is comprehensively constitutive of who one is. Which is another way of saying I'm a liberal communitarian: connections to, and dependencies upon, the whole come first, both psychologically and anthropologically, but connections to the whole are always--or at least invariably, so long as we live under conditions of modernity--to be realized through the subjectivity of the individual. (For anyone who has bothered to read my ruminations over the years, this philosophical determination to see the deep communal grounding of our moral existence realized through individual expression is hardly new; I just keep evolving, I suppose, in terms of how I articulate it politically.)

4) In terms of the present articulation, it means, I think, that voting is a way of showing responsibility towards and connection to one's fellow human being--but so can not voting, under certain circumstances.

5) Those circumstances exist but are, I believe, very rarely defensible at the present moment in the United States of America.

6) Yes, I happily concur that our current winner-take-all, single-member-plurality voting structure, operating in its gerrymandered districts which both reflect and entrench sociological polarization, dominated by often internally rigged political parties, and funded in ways that almost always effectively marginalize anything except elite political preferences, presents few ways of expressing our responsibility to one another. We would be far, far, far better off--despite all of the foregoing's own particular flaws--with a) parliamentary government with general legislative supremacy (and thus providing for greater vote accountability), b) a tightly regulated and limited election season (and thus preventing the sort of electoral exhaustion which empowers those with the financial resources to outlast the attention of ordinary working people), c) a broad awareness that moneyed interests can influence the electoral process in ways which effectively deny equal representative opportunities to all (and thus obliging that we overturn the horrible Buckley v. Valeo and all the Supreme Court decisions which built upon its flawed individualistic premises), d) proportional voting (and thus allowing for a greater range of the populace to have actually electorally effective reasons to organize on behalf of their ideas), and e) significant decentralization, regionalization, and municipal empowerment (though admittedly the point of this last one has already long been greatly compromised by the leveling and centralizing consequences of global capitalism, but that would involve a whole different set of theses). Since we don't have any of the above, I can sympathize with people who think there's no point in voting.

7) But all that said, the fact remains that the two dominant parties in our kludgy, oft-dysfunctional, but still-standing-and-operating governing system nonetheless do represent actual substantive differences in political priorities and, therefore, often actual substantive differences in policy outcomes. And so if you believe either one of those sets of outcomes could even just theoretically involve even something as little as doing marginally less harm to those to whom you have a responsibility, then you really ought to express that choice through voting for the candidates of the party in question. (And moreover, if you happen to believe there actually is no substantive difference between the stated political priorities and the hoped-for policy outcomes of the different parties, then I would respectfully suggest that you are either terribly misinformed or marvelously uninformed about the parties and candidates in question.)

8) Obviously, given the realities of local, state, and national political structures and calculations, the foregoing is subject to whatever contextual considerations might come into play in any given electoral contest. Lack of local knowledge is a problem, as is lack of real choice. The first can be blamed on our unfortunately nationalized (and usually starved to the bone) local media ecosystems, but is still, I insist, something that can be rectified by being individually willing enough to follow through on our responsibility to our fellow community members by learning more about whom are presenting themselves as their representatives, and why. The second could be a function of understanding one's responsibility, quite legitimately, as overwhelmingly tied to a single policy issue or deep structural concern, and not seeing any way as a voter to express that responsibility through the available candidates. To which I can only say: perhaps consider rethinking your conception of how to express your responsibility to your fellow members--and if that doesn't change anything, then do the best you can with the choices available, using whatever creative options are available to legally expand those choices where you can, all while balancing those considerations in light of the aforementioned consequences. (As a two-time Ralph Nader voting, one-time Jill Stein-voting, one-time Bernie Sanders write-in-voting citizen, I would be a hypocrite if I claimed otherwise.) But either way, take up your responsibility, and stand, either strategically or expressively or some calculated combination of both, for whatever your responsibility to others morally obliges you to use our tottering system to, at the very least, publicly affirm, and vote.

9) The only exception I can see to the foregoing is if you understand your responsibility to others as demanding the promotion of radical, even revolutionary, alternatives, and that which any participation in the present, deeply problematic but still meaningful-in-terms-of-causing-or-mitigating-costs-and-harms system actually interferes with that promotion. I know and like people who affirm that they find themselves in such circumstances, and I don't dismiss their sincerity. However, I confess that I've personally never yet heard from any of them what I consider to be a persuasive argument that participating in a flawed process necessarily excludes or limits participation in the business of building radical, even revolutionary, alternatives to said process. If you have one, please, lay it on me. Maybe there's some new form of Marxist accelerationism or Christian end-times promotion that I haven't heard about yet.

10) In the meantime, watch this. And also, you have less than seven hours left to vote here in Kansas, so get busy, dammit.

Of Parties, Primaries, and (Gubernatorial) Endorsements

It's 15 days until the August 7 primaries here in the state of Kansas, and early voting begins today. I'm a vote on the day-of person myself (I just like the vibe of going into my designated polling place on election day), so I still have two weeks to change my mind about which Democratic candidates I'm going to support--but given all the thought I've already put into it, the odds of anything happening that could make me rethink things some more is unlikely. So, as a few people have asked me which Democratic candidate for governor I'm supporting, I'm giving a follow-up to my post from months ago here--but you're going have to wade through all my usual pedantic ruminations first. Sorry, that's just the way I blog. (Hint #1: just go to the fifth paragraph if you can't wait. And if you absolutely can't put off the announcement even that long, Hint #2: it's the one from Wichita who has graduated from high school.)

1) I know party primaries are a problem. Primaries emerged onto the scene of American politics more or less a century ago, in conjunction with a large number of other Progressive reforms on the local, state, and national level, with the aim of taking power away from party bosses and the plutocrats who supported their positions and giving it to party members instead. Today, though, thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, communication technologies, and the internal rules of parties themselves, primaries don't do a particularly good job at preventing those candidates with large pockets and/or the explicit support of other wealth donors from quickly dominating the nominating process. And along the way, primaries bring their own pathologies with them: low voter turn-out makes it ease for well-organized extremists to dominate the intra-party debate, and the competition between even narrowly divided candidates can create narratives and animosities that end up driving media dynamics and funding pitches for the remainder of the campaign. So, yeah, primaries often create more problems than they're worth.

2) That said, I have no confidence whatsoever that the participatory genie could ever be put back into the bottle. Even if it were legally, organizationally, and politically possible to get us back to state of affairs where either of our two mass political parties were able to effectively choose, groom, and present candidates to voters (and doing so would, in my judgment, at the very least require the Supreme Court to overturn multiple precedents laid down over the past 40 years), I am highly doubtful that voters of either party would accept such a state of affairs--I strongly suspect I wouldn't, and I say that as someone fully aware of all the above-mentioned problems. And moreover, it's not like resurrecting that level of party control would somehow prevent all the corruptions that primary elections were originally designed to combat from flooding back.

3) So is the problem political parties entirely? Possibly, but I know of no other mechanism whereby a mass liberal democracy can be operated so as to actually respect the freedom of citizens to organize themselves around and in support of distinct causes and candidates except through some kind of party structure. The people who wrote the Constitution didn't really give that possibility much thought, but within a few election cycles the democratic need for parties was blindingly obvious. General plebiscitarian contests simply won't do it, despite being pushed by vaguely (but rarely actually) populist dreamers for decades. This year we have Greg Orman running as an independent candidate for governor, and he's an impressive guy, with a smart grasp of both the fiscal and the electoral realities facing our state. I like Orman, and have a lot of respect for his Lt. Governor pick, John Doll. Ultimately, though, Orman's whole drive remains deeply self-referential, insisting that he represents nothing more or less than independent, practical, business-minded thinking, as opposed to any particular set of beliefs. And human beings, being the communal animals we are, generally both want and need to be part of set.

4) Why is the Democratic party my set? Well, it's not my only set, nor the one I'm most attached to, either politically or in terms of time or money. But yes, here in Kansas in 2018, in the long wake of Governor Brownback's still-mostly-unchallenged transformation of the state Republican party into a vehicle for economic individualism as a religious conviction, the state Democratic party, for all its flaws (and heaven knows it has plenty), is the only place that folks who are committed to promoting egalitarian economic policies and expanding civil rights have to organize themselves electorally, at least practically speaking. So while the idea of switching to the Republican party so as cast a vote for a responsible conservative as opposed to an actually dangerous one had some appeal for my wife and I, ultimately we decided to stick with this particular set to see what we could do to help their candidates across the finish line in November.

5) Which brings the rubber to the road: what mix of strategy, symbolism, and substance is leading me to endorse one candidate over another? Well, like every other voter in every other primary contest everywhere in the United States, I'm thinking about what ideas best represent my wishes, thinking about what different candidates reflect in terms of different factions within the party, and thinking about what are the relative odds for any candidate to win in the general election. For Democrats (and liberals, progressives, socialists, etc., whatever your preferred handle) in Kansas, given that we're significantly outnumbered, yet have a genuine window of opportunity in 2018 thanks to the Brownback stink, that last component--a kind of second- or third-level chess, trying to figure out who has the greatest likelihood of winning one contest while still keeping themselves in contention for the next--is even more important, even though it becomes more and more of a crapshoot the further you attempt to extend your analysis forward. In any case, here's why I've come down on Brewer's side.

(Wait!, you're saying; there will be more on your ballot than just the Democratic primary for governor! True, but I'm not going to weigh in on the Laura Lombard-James Thompson race to be the Democratic candidate to run against Republican Ron Estes to be the congressional representative for Kansas's 4th district. I like and respect both of those candidates, do not see any major political differences between them, have known and supported one of them for a long time, and plan on continuing to do so. For better or worse, I don't see a need for a lot of thinking there.)

5a) First, I like all three of serious candidates (yes, I'm dismissing without comment both Jack Bergeson, the Wichita high school student, and Arden Andersen, the cool but slightly whakadoodle doctor from Olathe). Senator Laura Kelly is a smart, savvy, experienced poll, who almost certainly is the best positioned of these three--in terms of finances and in terms of party support--to run a traditional state-wide campaign for Governor. The criticisms which have been lobbed against her regarding a procedural vote of hers on the proposed expansion of Medicaid, or regarding connections between her campaign and interest groups opposed to expanding Medicaid, are, in my view, cheap and silly, reflecting no real knowledge of how legislation needs to be positioned for votes in the long term. And her Lt. Governor pick, the flat-out brilliant Lynn Rogers, is one of my favorite people in all of Kansas politics. I also like Joshua Svaty, in part because he and his Lt. Governor pick, Katrina Lewison, absolutely do represent something desperately needed in the state party: generational change. I like Svaty's practical yet unconventionally progressive opinions about the future of agriculture, and I like the fact that he was the only gubernatorial candidate sufficiently unconcerned about the "progressive" label as to make the time to get out to the Bernie Sanders rally here in Wichita. Most of all, as a religious believer with more than a couple conservative streaks in me, I like the fact that he hasn't tried to deny or repent of past votes he's taken but instead allows himself to argued about right in the middle of messy debates over abortion, faith, and much more.

5b) Still, for me, for now, it's former Wichita mayor Carl Brewer, who is almost certainly the least well-funded and the least organized of the big three. Though my contacts with Carl have been minimal over the years, I've long admired him, and have supported him since he first declared his candidacy. Why, especially given that the political ends I value most--economic egalitarianism and democracy--he's quite possibly the least progressive of the three? It comes down to substance, symbolism, structure, and--yes--strategy.

5c) On the level of substance, Carl's stated goals as governor aren't significantly different from any of the other two. He will govern with Democratic party priorities in mind, and for all their limitations (and again, I can think of many!) those priorities--pushing Medicaid expansion, loosening the penalties on marijuana usage, reforming Kansas's criminal justice and child welfare services, and most importantly, working to overturn the legacy of Brownback's tax experiment--are ones I support. On the level of symbolism, it's obvious: there have only ever been two African-Americans elected governor anywhere in the U.S., and Kansas, so far as I have been able to discover, has never had an African-American serve in any statewide elected position. Carl almost never makes reference to racial symbolism in his campaign (though it comes out occasionally; in a recent debate, after another candidate talked about his grandfather's impressive political history, Carl started his reply with the quiet snark "of course, my grandfather wasn't able to hold political office..."), but obviously, to even be able to vote for a black candidate for governor is, to my mind, a huge step forward. On the level of structure, I plead my own personal affections and interest. While there is a lot of movement between the state and the national level in American politics, there isn't nearly enough movement between the local level and the state level--and in an era when the continued urban concentration of people are making the governance of cities more and more crucial to whatever the next steps in American democracy will be, bringing the sort of real, tactile knowledge which being a longtime city leader teaches into the realm of state governance is, I think, of major theoretical and even constitutional importance. (Besides, it's been a century since a committed Wichitan, someone from the Kansas's largest city, became governor; it's time for that to happen again.) And as for strategy? Frankly, Carl doesn't have the baggage that the other candidates have, which may mean he could hold together the state Democratic coalition better than the other candidates could. Am I certain of that? Not at all. Does Carl seem able to inspire new, progressive voters? The jury is out. Will racism doom his candidacy in the general election anyway? Quite possibly. All these, and others, are legitimate strategic concerns that Democrats have to ask themselves. But to my mind, above and beyond all the aforementioned rationales, in a year when Orman will be looking to poach Democratic voters, a thoughtful, mild-mannered, quiet candidate, one who doesn't offend any particular group of Democrats and thus could be acceptable to just about all of them, is nothing to sneeze at.

6) Let me make it clear; I will strongly support, both with time and money as well as my vote, whomever wins this primary (unless something truly nuts happens, and the high school student wins, and the Republicans choose a moderate like Jim Barnett as their candidate--then all bets are off). But primaries are what we have, and so primary calculations we must make. These are mine.

Can Wichita Elect a Governor?

[The Wichita Eagle ran a shortened version of this argument this morning; he's my fuller piece. And yes, I've already handicapped the governor's race as I see it today; consider this an addendum.]

Wichita is the largest single city in Kansas; more than a fifth of the state’s total population resides in our metropolitan area. It’s the regional economic center for over half the state. Its media outlets have greater penetration across the breadth of Kansas than those from any other city. And yet, for all that, it’s been a century since a Wichitan was elected to live in the governor's mansion in Topeka. Why?

True, Mark Parkinson (who was governor from 2009 to 2011), was born in Wichita–but he lived his adult life, and built his political career, in Overland Park and Olathe. And it's true that Edward Arn (1951 to 1955) came to Wichita and had a law practice here–yet he left for his military career, and when he got involved in politics he relocated to Wyandotte County, only returning to Wichita later in his life.

No, the only real example of a Wichitan in the Kansas governor’s mansion was Henry J. Allen (1919 to 1923), a newspaperman from Clay County who came to Wichita as a young man and built a small publishing empire here before being elected governor, then later returning to live the rest of his life in our city. (You can visit his historic Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home, the Allen-Lambe House, in College Hill.)

There’s no law mandating where governors come from, obviously. If you look through the list of Kansas’s 46 governors, dozens of Kansas cities, towns, and rural counties are represented. Still, there are some commonalities among nearly all of them, especially over the past half-century: namely, some strong connection to the University of Kansas, to the state capital in Topeka, or to the cross-border urban agglomeration of Kansas City.  Given the way in which politics is often a function of path-dependency–people making use of the connections, both personal and financial, that others have already established, thus deepening them–maybe it isn’t surprising that Wichita, despite its large population and economic base, should go a century without providing a successful gubernatorial candidate.

Will 2018 break the streak? Among the serious candidates there are multiple Wichitans running: Republicans Wink Hartman and Mark Hutton (and maybe we could claim Ed O’Malley as an adopted son), and Democrats Carl Brewer and Jim Ward. Since this a year--thanks to the deep divisions in the state Republican party caused by Brownback’s great unpopularity, as well as the increased fired-up enthusiasm one sees on the Democratic side--in which state politics may be rather unpredictable, perhaps this will be Wichita’s chance.

But then again, perhaps not. I was recently asked, during a presentation I was giving to a local civic group here in the city, if I thought both parties coordinated to maintain the political dominance of the Topeka-Lawrence-KC corridor. I seriously doubt that--I’m not a conspiracy theorist by nature. But when one compares the positioning taking place in our state parties, and adds to that a close look at the campaign finance analysis provided by the Wichita Eagle, one may begin to wonder.

Kris Kobach, thanks to his name recognition and his small core of ideologically committed followers, is widely--and, I think, rightly--considered the favorite to win the Republican nomination, with Lt. Governor Jeff Colyer, seen as his most plausible rival. Yet this is despite the fact that Hartman has more money to spend on his campaign than both of them combined, and that O’Malley and Hutton both have had more individual donors here in Kansas than either of the front-runners as well.

Similarly, on the Democratic side, the late entrance of Topeka-based state senator Laura Kelly into the race was surely at least partly the result of a panicked party establishment convinced that, in this year of opportunity, they needed a better connected candidate than a couple of politicians from Wichita. Yet this despite the fact that their level of state-wide name recognition (Brewer’s in particular) dwarfs hers. That Kelly’s fund-raising has quickly outpaced (if not entirely overtaken) all of the other Democratic candidates might reflect the reality of this judgment–maybe it’s just another reminder that the entrenched political connections of northeast Kansas are self-reinforcing.

I suspect that Wichitans running for governor today face challenges similar to our city’s social and economic prospects as a whole: namely, we often seem stuck in the middle, too big not to be considered a major player, but not big enough to compete with the major players who came before us. We clearly have the people (look at those candidates!) and the money (Wichita-area donors max out their possible contributions more frequently than those anywhere else in the state). But is that enough to convince political operatives and party establishments to take us seriously? Not to mention the voters in the primary contests in August?

As always, success breed success. So if any of those Wichita candidates break through--and if course, there are many other variables at play here than just location--they’ll be doing more than ending a long political drought: they may also open the doors to a political change in our state parties which is long overdue.

Handicapping the Kansas Governor's Race

Back to blogging? Well, I'll try.

So a little over a week ago, the day before Governor Brownback's final State of the State address, I gamed out some possibilities for Kansas's 2018 gubernatorial race on Facebook. The post attracted a fair amount of attention, and let to a couple of long private conversations with some campaign insiders. I'm posting an updated version of my post here, adjusted some things I've learned and by the latest campaign fund-raising numbers, which were released just a couple of days after my original post.

1) The longer Sam Brownback remains as governor--meaning the longer the Republican leaders in Congress fail to take a simple vote on his nomination to an put-him-out-to-pasture ambassadorship--the harder it will probably be for any Republican gubernatorial hopeful who isn't Secretary of State Kris Kobach to put together a financially and electorally successful coalition of "of-course-I-reject-Brownback-but-of-course-I-embrace-the-Kansas-Republican-majority" GOP primary voters.

2) Why doesn't Kobach have to thread such a needle? Because his name recognition and his small-but-disproportionately-powerful-and-well-connected base of GOP true believers (not just in Kansas, but among Trump-supporters and immigration-bashers across the country) make him the prohibitive favorite for the nomination already, especially assuming a large and divided field, and in particular if Brownback remains governor for weeks (or months?) more to come, forcing all of his other Republican competitors (with the possible exception of Wink Hartman, who is essentially self-funding and will appeal to the libertarian faithful and probably no one else) to dance among each other while he focuses on winning the general. His comparatively low campaign fund-raising numbers thus probably worries Kobach only a little; through his association with President Trump, his talk radio show, and his constant inserting of himself into battles over voter rights across the country, his narrative--one which is guaranteed to be persuasive among at least one segment of Kansas Republican voters--has been set.

3) Kobach being chosen as the GOP nominee is probably Greg Orman's only actually plausible route to the governor's mansion as an independent candidate. To win the governorship, he will need to capture both Democratic voters (which will be a much harder proposition in 2018 than it was when he ran, without any Democratic competition, against Republican Senator Pat Roberts in 2014, but ultimately probably not all that hard; being a young, moderate, self-made millionaire will always appeal to some) and, more importantly, Republican voters. Why more important? Because there is simply no evidence I am aware of which plausibly suggests that there are enough actually "independent" (however you define that) voters in the state of Kansas to carry him to victory, even if he also won every single vote cast by Democrats. State-wide, registered Republican voters often outnumber registered Democratic voters by 2-to-1, which means his winning over GOP voters is crucial. (Might we have a repeat of 2014 with the Democratic candidate pulling out? That seems to me astonishingly unlikely, given the rise of activism and energy among Kansas Democrats since Trump's election, to say nothing of the excitement of the blue wave that has been slowly building for Democrats all through 2017).

4) In other words, if the polarizing, extreme, no-daylight-between-me-and-Trump Kobach is the GOP nominee, then Orman just might, perhaps, have a real shot of picking up enough alientated segments of the Republican electorate in November.

5) Which puts the ball in the Democrats' court. The Kansas Democratic party may yet be years away from fully shifting in a metropolitan, diverse, progressive/populist direction, but it has definitely at least begun to do so; James Thompson's win back in March of the Democratic to run in the special election over Dennis McKinney, who as a perfect example of a traditional, socially moderate/conservative, rural-based, New-Deal-appealing Kansas Democrat, proves that. All of which means that if former Kansas Secretary of Agriculture Josh Svaty gets the nomination, who hues to that old model at least insofar as his religious opposition to abortion rights is concerned, then part of the state Democratic base will likely fracture at least slightly, even despite the momentum which the nomination of Kobach will inspire locally. The pro-choice Orman would be the obvious beneficiary of any such fracturing, assuming he reaches out to the right women's groups and says the right things (which he surely would; I think he's politically naive, but he's definitely not politically stupid).

6) That means you're going to see some Kansas Democratic activists playing some three-level chess if Svaty seems to be hanging on in the run-up to the convention over the next few months. (Which he might: more than one local Democratic insider has pointed out to me the decent number of millennial activists, who played a big role in Thompson getting his nomination, who are trumpeting Svaty's youth, as well as the fact that he seems to be taking the Sanders approach when it comes to fund-raising; he had the greatest number of small individual donations of any candidate, Republican or Democrat, who reported.) The question they'll ask themselves is simply: do they want to stop Kobach more (which an Orman win would do), or want to elect a Democratic governor more, especially if the unlikelihood of that, thanks to a nominee with little name recognition and with a divisive impact on the party, was increasing? I could easily see Orman managing to poach for his team a number of prominent Democrats if Svaty seems capable of capturing the nomination.

7) But such three-level chess won't only happen among some Democrats in the (I think ridiculously unlikely) case of Svaty going all the way. Every serious Democrat knows the registration disadvantage in Kansas, and every one of them knows that none of the alternatives for the Democratic nomination--former Wichita mayor Carl Brewer, Kansas state senator Laura Kelly, and Kansas state representative Jim Ward--can remotely compete with Kobach's name recognition. (Fox News watchers from Idaho or Indonesia know the man, for heaven's sake.) They also know Orman has the money to make the run, and thus they know Democratic vote poaching will happen no matter what they try to do. And finally, they will also know that, among Republicans who don't like Kobach, Orman will, on average, have a much better shot of grabbing them than any Democratic candidate would, for all the usual partisan tribal reasons. So which gubernatorial candidate, they may think to themselves, will best be able to control the bleeding and do some triangulation in a three-way race that will likely be Kobach vs. Orman vs. a Democrat? (Obviously if Kobach's people fail to carry him through to the nomination, and the GOP gubernatorial nominee turns out to be an establishment Brownback-clone like current-Lt. Governor Jeff Colyer, this calculation will change...though perhaps not that much. Though if the Republican primary electorate somehow, bizarrely, actually manages to nominate a moderate without ties to either the Brownback legacy or the exciting-but-distasteful-to-many Kobach machine--say Kansas Leadership Center president Ed O'Malley, another relatively young man who is wildly popular among Wichita's donor class--then not only does this whole calculation get thrown out the window, but both the Democrats and Orman might as well just call it good and head home.)

8) Wasn't all this Orman-inspired angst--in the midst of what, in the wake of the unpopular Brownback administration and facing the polarizing Kobach juggernaut, was supposed to be year of hope for state Democrats--going to be avoided by Kelly's late entrance to the race? Her fund-raising numbers support that: after announcing only a month ago, and having to report her donations after only two weeks, she had still out-raised both Ward and Brewer. More than a few observers declared her the prohibitive Democratic nominee the day she announced, and with good reason; after all, she's from northeast Kansas (it has been more than a half-century since either state party had a successful flag-bearer who wasn't part of the Lawrence-Topeka-Kansas City nexus), and she has former governor Kathleen Sebelius--and her donor list--on her side. But worries remain. Her name recognition is minuscule (less than half of either Ward's or Brewer's). And her getting into the race so late smacks of...well, of a bunch of people getting desperate, fearful that the wrong candidate will result in the Democrats losing their best shot at the governor's mansion in years. Ward, despite his tireless efforts on behalf of the Democratic party and progressive causes, has a personal history that will likely make at least some Democratic donors and activists leery, with their memories of how 2014 Democratic gubernatorial candidate Paul Davis was treated (one meeting with a client at a bar/strip-club = Davis, lifetime pimp and pornographer) driving them to aforementioned game of three-level chess. And Brewer?

9) Well, here is where my somewhat adjusted predictions come into play. Moving from the city level to the state level (or higher) of government makes good sense in terms of policy experience; less so in matters of politics. For better or worse, voters think about local and city politics differently than they do about the much more partisan levels of politics above that. And here in Kansas, especially in terms of trying to organize a financially and electorally plausible route to a major party nomination and then a general election win, while being from Wichita (which is already often seen as conservative also-ran city by many state Democrats) as opposed to being from metropolitan Kansas City poses...well, some image problems. Still, Brewer was basically a successful mayor of the state's largest regional economic urban engine, and as a consequence--and given the fact that the Wichita media market has far more penetration throughout the state than anything from the northeast corner--he has more positive name recognition than any of his Democratic competitors. Yes, his fundraising numbers have been terrible, but there have also been shake-ups in the campaign to get things going...and more importantly, Brewer's strongest financial basis will likely be, frankly, moderate Wichita professionals and business-people, and so long as there's a shot that an O'Malley, or even an establishment Republican like Colyer, could win the nomination, many of them will be keeping their pocketbooks closed.

10) So, my conclusion? So long as Orman moves forward with his plan for a no-holds-barred run, and so long as Kobach seems on track to be carried over the finish line to the Republican nomination (likely against the wishes of at least a few major figures in the Kansas GOP) by his devoted fans, you'll eventually see certain Democratic players and donors looking more and more at Brewer. Why? Because despite not having the same organization or base of support that Kelly and Svaty and Ward all do, and despite being from the wrong part of the state, he has two things going for him. First, there is very little evidence that any remotely sizable portion of the Democratic base would be turned off by his candidacy (and the fact that it was apparently African-American turnout that made the difference in Doug Jones's recent election in Alabama will not be lost on the people who seriously contribute to the local Democratic party, I think). Second, his leadership record, because he's been out of state politics, will lack the sort of red flags which might prevent a disaffected moderate Kansas Republican who really doesn't want to vote for Kobach from considering the Democratic alternative, and turning to Orman first. (And that goes double, obviously, for moderate Kansas business-people who liked and worked with Brewer in Wichita, and basically don't have any problems with Democratic priorities, but could be scared away from donating to his campaign by anything that looks, or could be painted as, too extreme.)

11) Long story short? I wonder if perhaps the single greatest variable as to whether or not the state of Kansas might actually elect not just a Democratic governor (we've had those), but a black governor (we've never had one--in fact, so far as I've been able to discover, no African-American has ever been elected to any state-wide office in the entire history of Kansas), is whether or not Trump and the Republican majority in DC, in whose hands Brownback's nomination rests, continue to be a bunch of Keystone Kops, thus Kobach's path to the Kansas GOP gubernatorial nomination through a crowded, divided field that much more likely.

Okay everyone, have at me.