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.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back for Kansas Republicans

[This is a somewhat expanded version of an editorial which recently appeared in The Wichita Eagle and elsewhere.] 

Last weekend Mike Brown, a former Johnson County commissioner and a failed primary candidate for GOP Secretary of State Scott Schwab’s job, and someone who has expressed sympathy on multiple occasions for former President Trump’s lies regarding the 2020 election results, was chosen to be the new chairperson of the Kansas Republican party. This is a frustrating result for those local Republicans--and I know they're out there; I know several myself--who keep hoping to separate election conspiracies from their party’s substantive platform, an effort that, of late, one could argue that was, all things considered, going pretty well.

It's easy for the terminally online to forget, but it needs to be remembered that for a great many ordinary citizens, including a significant minority of Republicans, the claims of voter fraud and rigged elections promoted by Trump, culminating in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, had always made little sense, a feeling that has only grown more pronounced outside the hot-houses of conservative websites (and, unfortunately, Republican leadership caucuses, but even there many Republicans are silently trying to extricate themselves). This drift has become even more pronounced as time has gone by; recent polls show that election denialism declined by more than half between the elections of 2020 and 2022, and overall only a third of those not already caught up in conspiracy theorizing say they find such paranoia understandable. In short, continuing to obsess and nitpick over super-close elections has increasingly come to seem to most Americans as pointless, dangerous, and strange.

Kansas, however, has its own long and separate history with Republican electoral paranoia. Long before Trump started ranting about how he was robbed—and started harassing GOP officials and his own vice-president to get them to support his lost cause—we had Kris Kobach, who for years as Secretary of State made claims about illegal voting he was never able to prove, and demanded prosecutorial power to enforce voter restrictions which were thrown out as unconstitutional. Meaning that Kansas Republicans, including the ordinary rank-and-file ones, have long seen hysteria over election security overshadow their other priorities, which is why the failed (but still very close!) efforts to derail Kobach in his race for attorney general had significant Republican support.

Still, looking across the country, particularly at defeated, Trump-endorsed, non-existent voter-fraud-obsessed Republican candidates in Arizona and elsewhere, many Kansas Republicans probably had reason to feel hopeful for the direction of the state party. Despite the closeness of his loss to Governor Kelly, Derek Schmidt left the stage without recriminations (same thing for Kobach, who not only made no criticism of his squeaker of a win but also spoke only of his conservative agenda, and said nothing about contesting the governor's equally narrow win). Schwab won re-election handily in the midst of national under-performance by other local Republicans, all while insisting the Kansas elections were secure and reliable. Perhaps they were shaking off the preoccupations of their former national leader?

Many are, no doubt. Unfortunately, some Kansas Republicans are still obsessed with the idea that ballot drop-boxes or mail-in ballots allow nefarious actors to skew or falsify election results. And now, they have a state party chair on their side.

When running against Schwab in the Secretary of State GOP primary, Brown mocked his opponent for refusing to claim the same voter-hunting power Kobach had previously abused, insisted that all ballot drop-boxes should be banned, and implied that Schwab was at fault for not investigating outlandish, unsubstantiated claims about ballot-dumping and more. As party chair, he obviously won’t be involved in setting priorities for the Secretary of State, much less shaping legislation. Nonetheless, his narrow, 88-90 vote triumph among state party leaders—powered mostly by conservative Republicans in the 3rd District, frustrated by seeing their message increasingly rejected by moderates in the Kansas City area and the resulting “purple creep” that, among other things, kept Representative Sharice Davids in office, despite a Republican gerrymander explicitly designed to get rid of her in 2022—is surely frustrating to those Kansas Republicans who are hoping to move their party out of Trump’s shadow.

Of course, Trump may well be back at the top of the national GOP ticket come 2024, so perhaps the state Republican is just getting ready to fall in line. But for those many Republicans who recognize—even if they keep their views quiet—how hopeless and dangerous adhering that line is, the Brown’s selection likely strikes them as an unfortunate stop backwards, while others try to push ahead.

The Potential of, and the Problems with, Wichita’s (More) Partisan Future

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

 (From left to right: Mayor Brandon Whipple; Mike Hoheisel, councilmember for Wichita District 3; Maggie Ballard, councilmember for Wichita District 6; Brandon Johnson, councilmember for Wichita District 6. Photo credit: Chris Pumpelly)

There’s been a lot of talk about the “new Democratic majority” on the city council that officially took power on Monday night. WSU professor Chase Billingham, in particular, observed last August what the consequences of the November elections might mean should they go the way Mayor Whipple wanted them to (which they did), and in a long Facebook post on Monday, Billingham considered a relatively small-stakes fight during last week’s council agenda review meeting in ways that makes his observations from last year seem pretty prescient: namely, that with three--presumably reliable--Democratic votes on the council, Mayor Whipple appears both capable and willing to pursue agenda items that he previously knew he wouldn’t have the votes to push forward. And he wants the Republicans on the council–who have long enjoyed an unstated and basically uncontested majority on the council but are now in the minority–to know it.

So is the business of the city council, or the way it conducts business, about to radically change, and if so, how should the people of Wichita feel about that? Answering those questions aren’t easy, because it obliges one to figure out just what the business of our, or any, city council, actually is--or ought to be.

Is the business of a city council the sort of thing which even ought to be construed in partisan terms, much less one where talking about having a “Democratic majority” on a council is meaningful? There’s plenty of reason to think “no,” and a lot of those reasons are echoed by the members of this Democratic cohort themselves. In a long article on partisanship in municipal elections published in the Kansas Leadership Center Journal last November, Ballard affirmed “local elections should stay nonpartisan in nature and focused on local issues,” while Johnson claimed that keeping city council elections and candidates “focused on the issues” makes it “harder to simply paint candidates with broad partisan brushes.” These views are reflective of a perspective that is more than a century old: the presumption that partisan groupings, being more national and ideological, have nothing to do with figuring out how to keep potholes filled and otherwise managing the rules and resources necessary for living and working together in a city, and hence that municipal elections shouldn’t involve candidates identifying themselves by a party label, much less running with the support of party organizations. Hoheisel echoed these presumptions in an interview after his election, stating that his “political leanings are irrelevant” to the business of the city council.

One problem with all these assumptions, however, is that they are not actually grounded in complaints over partisan identification or political beliefs. Rather, they really turn on the voting and funding practices which partisanship activity is usually seen as connected to, and the fact that many of those activities are seen as corrupting. To be sure, that’s a legitimate concern. However, there isn’t a lot of evidence that making municipal elections non-partisan actually evades any of those practices or activities (which, of course, shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who remembers the mayoral election of 2019, where the lack of partisan labels certainly didn’t prevent corrupt actions and accusations from dominating the campaign).  In fact, the evidence mostly indicates that Democrats and Republicans elected to municipal positions tend to act—despite the constraints which our system imposes upon city governments–pretty similar to other Democrats and Republicans elected to all other political positions. And voters pick up on that similarity pretty quickly, with Democratic and Republican voters casting their ballots (and making their donations) accordingly.

This doesn’t mean Democratic or Republican voters are any less likely to hold Democratic or Republican officeholders accountable for failing to keep potholes filled, absent other considerations. Nor does it mean that national partisan positions will always be a good predictor of local partisan ones (for example, promoting bike paths, farmers markets, and alternative transportation and environmental sustainability generally are usually seen as liberal or progressive causes in the United States, yet Councilmembers Becky Tuttle and Bryan Frye, both Republicans, have been smart and consistent supporters of both). But it does mean that those “other considerations”—which reflect the wide variety of ways in which most of us identify our interests and respond to public concerns in an electoral way—are always going to be present. Going to extra lengths to prevent cultural or socio-economic or racial or any other considerations from “polluting” municipal elections by connecting them to partisan positions beyond those of pure municipal management is, I think, a fool’s errand (not to mention, given the way our system, for better or worse, strongly supports the freedom of speech and association, potentially unconstitutional). Allowing people to organize and run for office with those considerations—and those partisan connections—explicitly present would make possible a wider (and, I think, a more responsible) engagement with the diverse interests present throughout Wichita’s city council districts. Hence my belief that our city council elections should be partisan, as I’ve argued again and again and again.

But whatever your opinion on bringing partisanship to the forefront or hoping to keep it subdued when it comes to Wichita’s city council, the fact is that in 2019 Wichita elected a mayor who—as he put it in the same article which quoted Ballard and Johnson—has a “different viewpoint” when it comes to partisanship, seeing it as “less scary and dirty” than many may make it out to be. Whipple’s belief that partisanship is a valid—perhaps even unavoidable—tool when it comes to leadership is, I think, correct. That’s not a defense of the many ways in which partisan thinking makes compromise--which the fundamental, ambition-vs-ambition, Madisonian logic of our constitutional system accepts as essential—more difficult. The worries expressed by Lynn Rogers, Kansas’s state treasurer, former lieutenant governor, and a Wichita resident, about the rising partisanship in Wichita’s (and other Kansas) municipal elections, especially when it comes to rules about candidate eligibility, can’t be easily dismissed.

But it is also valid to note that parties and their members—both those who run for office and those who vote for them—don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re shaped by their electoral environment, and those shapings change as the wider environment does. Insofar as the state of Kansas and the city of Wichita are concerned, it is reasonable to see both of them as going through, however slowly, the same demographic and ideological transformations, particularly in regards to both urbanism and liberalism, as the nation as a whole has over the past 30 years. It’s also worth noting that Whipple and all three of the other Democratic members of city council members are young enough (clockwise from top left: Ballard—39; Hoheisel—38; Johnson—35; Whipple--39) to have been shaped by those same transformations.

None of this means, of course, that any of these folks are clones of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other youthful progressive darlings of the moment; they are all their own people, with their own roots and histories here in Wichita, Kansas, which is very much not New York City. (Whipple’s record as a rather moderate Democratic state legislator before he ran for mayor ought to conclusively prove that.) And yet…Wichita nonetheless is an American city, one that is, like other American cities, becoming more diverse than it was before, more progressive than it was before, and thus more Democratic than it was before. (Wichita may not ever be blue, but it went for Biden nonetheless.) And moreover, it’s not like the Kansas Republican party which those who identify as Democrats—like Ballard, Hoheisel, and Johnson--define themselves against hasn’t greatly changed over the same time period. So overall, I think it’s fair to wonder just how much of the angst some feel about Whipple’s willingness to bring partisanship, especially Democratic party partisanship, into Wichita’s municipal elections is a function of either 1) the way it potentially gives effective electoral expression to newly emergent—if hardly dominant--progressive interests in our city, or 2) the way it challenges the (admittedly often successful!) strategies which previous generations of Kansas Democrats developed to deal with Republican dominance, as opposed to solely because it presents a challenge to municipal norms and expectations. If nothing else, it is a question that serious political observers should keep in mind: that Mayor Whipple, by approaching city elections here in Wichita with an unapologetically partisan eye, may have made himself and the city of Wichita into a significant part of the story of party development in the Sunflower State.

I need to emphasize that “may,” however. Successfully building a partisan majority in a nominally non-partisan context will only ever be of interest to political nerds like myself if it isn’t conjoined with partisan direction that can be successfully pursued and will make a difference in the perception of voters; otherwise, that electoral achievement will be remembered by everyone who isn’t a partisan themselves as a lot of conflict which didn’t necessarily change the status quo. Hence, Whipple and the three other Democrats on the council need to be able to show voters that, now that they have a majority, they can do something that wasn’t done before, or do what’s been done before better. Given the heavy policy limitations which city governments operate under, that’s easier said than done. The recent struggle to pass a non-discrimination ordinance in the city, despite the sturm und drang which surrounded its writing and passage, might in retrospect be seen as low-hanging fruit in terms of distinguish votes on the council, at least in comparison to other municipal matters before them.

Among those issues that are most obviously within the legal grasp of the city council—including land use, business subsidies, and law enforcement--it’s not clear that these four Democrats will be sufficiently united as to make their majority position as effective as it might be. For example, Johnson has strongly advocated for expansive (and expensive) redesigns of our downtown core, and pushed against the idea of the council being wholly bound by public referendums on Century II and other historic buildings; Hoheisel, by contrast, has criticized new major downtown projects as inappropriate, spoke fondly of restoring Century II, and defended the idea of conducting a “binding vote” on its fate. Similarly Hoheisel, during his campaign, expressed significant doubts about retaining Robert Layton as Wichita’s city manager; whereas last week, both Whipple and Johnson gave Layton a strong show of support by voting to give him a raise. And while Johnson has long been engaged in efforts to change the Wichita’s overly violent police culture, the police union was crucial to Whipple’s election as mayor, and it is reasonable to presume that he wants to retain their support.

None of these facts suggest policy orientations that might not change or involve a significant rethinking or compromise once people get down to the nitty-gritty, of course—but by the same token they demonstrate, I think, some of the obstacles to declaring some immediately obvious common agenda which this Democratic majority shares. Which leaves this particular electoral accomplishment, at the moment, resting primarily on its members being young and new(ish) and thus, presumably, a breath of fresh air. In politics, where the ability to deal with others from a position of knowledge and influence is often key to getting things done, such freshness can only take you so far. Still, this is their first week, with everyone still getting used to the new arrangements; maybe only now, with these new members officially on the council, will we see some new unifying initiatives emerge that weren’t on anyone’s radar screen before.

Do I happen to have any recommendations for what those unifying initiatives might be? Why yes, I do...

Two Pedantic Problems with Representative Estes's Post

Dear Representative Estes,

Thanks for sharing your reasoning about your January 6 challenge to the Electoral College results, thus your challenge to the certification of President Biden's election. I am in complete sympathy with your statement that "all of us are appalled at the violence, destruction and loss of life that took place at the Capitol on January 6," and I heartily endorse your closing call for your readers to "join me in praying that our country has a renewed commitment to civil discourse." That is all very well said, and I appreciate your including it.

However, you also included a couple of statements that trouble me. Once is simply wrong, and the other misunderstands something that is implied by the first. So forgive me, but I feel a need to play the professor here for a moment. You wrote:

"The Founding Fathers did not want Congress to select the president. Nor did they want the judicial branch, or even governors to do so. That was the responsibility of the state legislatures."

Of course, this isn't correct; the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution stipulated that it was the members of the Electoral College chosen by the states that would select the president of the United States. Those electors are chosen in accordance with procedures established by the respective state laws which obtain in the different states, and since those laws are written by elected state representatives, I suppose you could argue that "state legislatures" are ultimately doing the selecting. But by jumping those steps, you set up the foundation for your action (specifically that "I, along with a majority of the Republican Party in the U.S. House of Representatives, raised objections in regards to what we believed was evidence that several states violated their own laws in administering the 2020 election as they pertained to the office of the president") in a way that side-steps an important truth.

That truth is that those state laws regarding the appointment of electors, just like the state laws regarding all electoral matters--voter registration, absentee ballots, etc.--are subject to constitutional challenge, such as any citizen (including yourself, Representative Estes) may bring. The rights laid out in the amendments to the Constitution have been extended and applied by the Supreme Court many times over the past 232 years to enable citizens to defend the principle self-government. And, of course, when citizens, or their elected representatives, bring forward such constitutional concerns, it is the place of judges in our system to make an adjudication as to the validity of the concerns so expressed.

What is the point of emphasizing this? Simply that when you allege that state legislatures "violated their own laws," what you are actually doing is alleging something constitutionally nefarious when elected representatives, or the election officials they appoint, adjust their statutory requirements (including deadlines and the like) regarding mail-in ballots, or ballot drop boxes, or more, during the pandemic. They did this not just to compensate for the change in voting patterns which the health concerns of the pandemic introduced, but also because if they didn't make such adjustments, they would be subject to exactly the sort of legal challenges which your own column vaguely refers to (though I note that, while you invoke the Constitution multiple times, you only ever call what the state legislatures or state election officials did "improper," not "illegal"). The whole point of these election laws is to support the exercise of constitutional voting rights by the people; when circumstances stand in the way of the exercise of those rights, officials of government are obliged to act. 

Now, if those actions themselves violate someone else's rights (as apparently former President Trump believed they did, since he insisted over and over that he'd won the election by a landslide, and had been robbed of his victory by electoral fraud), then they need to go to a judge and make their case. Which Trump's lawyers did, dozens of time, with a total of 46 out of 54 lawsuits being almost immediately dropped, dismissed, or ruled against for a complete lack of evidence (the rest are currently in the midst of the appeals process). Meaning, in short, that the system which we have determined, over and over and over again, that the claim that state legislatures had vacated their responsibility in regards to the means by which appointed electors make their selection is simply groundless. Rather, it was their view that election commissions, governors, state judges, or even committees of legislators themselves, in these several states, had acted responsibly in the determinations they made about statutory election requirements. In the eyes of the courts, there simply was no demonstrable constitutional harm done here. Which means that, strictly speaking, in accordance with how our constitutional system is supposed to work, your belief that, for example, "the Democratic majority of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania unilaterally violated the U.S. Constitution," is simply nonsensical, because the Supreme Court of the United State itself said so.

Of course, if you want to insist that your love of the U.S Constitution obliges you to disregard the judicial functions which that same constitutional system sets up, that's a political belief which you have every right, as a citizen, to advocate for, and you'd find me agreeing with you partly as well. (You and me, Representative Estes: down with the imperial judiciary, and down with the power of judicial review!) But note that I called that a "political belief," because that's what it is--a belief about what ought to have happened in our polity (which presumably is, in your case, at the minimum: "election officials shouldn't adjust statutory requirements for ballots in the name of supporting voting rights during a pandemic without a complete change in state law"--though maybe, to be frank, the political belief here is actually just: "Donald Trump should be president"). Which leads me to another concern I have with your column. You write:

"In America, we must be able to use the legal processes prescribed in the Constitution without fear of retribution by those who hold the levers of political power."

In your column you speak on a couple of occasions of the "legal and political processes" of government, and as a way of expressing a general point, that's fine. But if you're going to specifically refer to "the legal processes prescribed in the Constitution," then I have to remind you of everything in the previous five paragraphs: the actual "legal processes" which follow from applying the Constitution as written involve petitioning judges to consider potential constitutional violations, and they didn't find any (in fact, usually Trump's lawyers, knowing they had no evidence that met the standard of scrutiny and not wanting the get disbarred for lying to a judge, mostly averred that there wasn't any fraud at all). So you may want to rephrase this to speak of "political processes" alone, rather than legal ones.

Am I saying that when you and other House Republicans objected to certifying the Electoral College votes, that you were doing something illegal? Of course not; as a member of Congress, it was perfectly legal for you to vote however you wished. But the idea that you were legally obliged to so act, or that your actions followed any kind of legal necessity, is silly. You made a political stand, as is your right, but you had no legal rationale for doing so.

And remember, that making political stands--that is, standing up on behalf of a political belief--is a symbolic action. It's not necessarily just symbolic, of course: when one votes, or engages in a protest, or writes a column for a local newspaper like you did (or writes a blog post in response to it like I am), there are often real-world consequences in play: someone might get elected or not, someone might be arrested or not, someone might be persuaded or not. But even those real-world consequences exist in relation to the symbols and associations which surround them. You recognize this yourself; you associate your action with enabling "millions of Americans the ability to voice their opinion" and with honoring "my constituents and the Constitution." So let's think about the particular moment, and some of the other associations which were in play at that moment, when you stood up to be counted as challenging the legitimacy of electoral votes which dozens of courts (many of them filled with Republican judges) had found legitimate.

The Capitol Building, just hours before you voted, had been attacked by a mob determined to do what you did, only much more violently and directly: oppose the certification of President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. Five people died as a result of that violent attack--the worst which the Capitol has experienced in over 200 years. There were people looking for the person who is in charge of the House you are a member of--Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi--with the apparent intention of kidnapping or killing her. Are you responsible for them? No! (Or at least, certainly not nearly as much as former President Trump, who fed them the delusional nonsense which led them to make the attack.) But in the final moment, I fear your actions fell symbolically on the same side of the rioters. After all, you were, at the very least, being motivated (or at least so you claim; I'm writing all this under the assumption that you were sincere in your column, and not just covering up the simple self-interest of keeping the Trumpist voters in the Kansas Republican Party on your side) by the same legally groundless political convictions about supposedly "improper" state electoral determination which Trump employed to fire up the mob in the first place. You may say that you were solely acting on behalf of Kansas Republicans who embraced Trump's dismissed claims about fraud, and you may genuinely believe that. But you can't wish away the symbolic weight which the House carried at that moment, in the wake of insurrectionary violence which was only a few steps logical steps removed from your political cause.

You could, I suppose, embrace this association, and simply insist that while the rioters were utterly wrong in their methods, they were not utterly wrong in their cause. I suspect you'd denounce that as a terribly unfair connection to make, and you'd probably be right. But is it an unreasonable connection to make? That, Representative Estes, I don't think is the case at all.

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.