John Henry Vansant, acting chair of the Boulder County Dems, really kept his cool throughout a new experience, our online county assembly!
I started writing this piece just hours after leaving the Boulder County Democratic Party’s County Assembly – not by walking through the doors of a high school as usual, but by clicking “leave meeting” on my computer. We had to do an entire county assembly for more than 750 people online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but I’d guess very few participants left this meeting wishing we could go back to doing an eight-hour party-process-heavy event while cooped up in a school auditorium, maybe not even the poor overworked project team that came up with a functional new system in mere weeks and had to run the whole thing. The future sometimes shows up without an invitation.
That everything’s going online is not my real focus right now. I also just finished reading Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat,” released in 2005 when not everyone had a smartphone and user-friendly programs by which rank novices could do countless things that used to require specialists. Friedman painted a picture of how tech was allowing greater access to possibilities that weren’t readily available mere single digits of years before his book came out, and his thoughts about our probable future generally played out over the years to follow.
Today, even Boomers have to be Zoomers if they hope to do certain types of meetings, but Zoom the company was founded in 2011 and meetings launched in 2013. What’s going on at this very moment is not necessarily a quantum technological leap, and might be more of an explosion in demand because the option to using tech may literally be serious illness or death. Of course, increased demand will almost certainly lead to tech improvements or even breakthroughs, but in particular the remote meeting whether it’s via Zoom or Skype or FaceTime or anything else is nothing new.
My real focus here is on what might happen with the political party nominating process moving forward, and one fundamental and possibly controversial question – “Who really deserves to be on the primary election ballot?”
Caucus: Serves a Purpose, But Needs an Upgrade
This picture from the March 7 caucus is misleading. There were more people behind me and to my side, but I still can’t claim attendance was great!
I wrote a blog post in 2018 about still being a fan of the precinct caucus, and not much of my logic as to why has changed. However, this year’s caucus had very small attendance in most precincts, and while there were reasons for the lousy turnout unique to 2020 (the emerging threat of COVID-19, too close to the Presidential primary date, negativity spread on social media, gorgeous weekend weather among them), I can’t deny that its popularity momentum is heading downhill and it didn’t start the year at a high point. So, I’ll grudgingly look at the options for change.
Physically, doing a precinct caucus meeting via Zoom or some other platform should be completely possible and manageable. There are two obvious advantages to an online approach like what the Boulder County Dems did for County Assembly. First, you could store candidate audio and/or video stump speeches on a webpage so people could watch or listen to them at any time, not just for one hour at a live meeting on a given day in March. Second, you could keep the voting open all day, or even for multiple days. I’m going under the assumption that nearly everyone has a computer and internet access, but online caucusing might need to include plans for folks who don’t have these things or aren’t tech-savvy to be truly inclusive.
I’ve bristled in recent years when people describe caucus as “anti-democratic,” when the caucus is actually just one way to begin the process of deciding which candidates qualify for the primary ballot, as well as one way to apportion a small number of delegates (example: our precinct got eight delegates no matter the turnout) for future assemblies and conventions. The actual democracy in Colorado happens in June, when we have a primary election open to not only registered and active party members but also unaffiliated voters, and they all get ballots delivered to them in the mail whether they’ve ever been involved with the party or not. However, it’s an undeniable fact that some people CAN’T attend a caucus at any one given date and time, so an online approach with archived stump speeches and extended hours for voting could nearly eliminate that complaint.
But let’s be honest – it’s also a fact that a lot of people who don’t attend caucuses CHOOSE to do something else, and that’s probably the biggest reason why “anti-democratic” grinds my gears. I’ve seen with my own two lying eyes that unexceptional turnout has normally been the case in recent years, unless there’s a hotly contested race like Bernie vs. Hillary in 2016 or Hillary vs. Obama in 2008. I ran my first caucus in 2014 with seven total attendees, only 18 showed up in 2020, and we have a very large district!
I like that caucus brings actual people together, neighbors meeting neighbors, for face-to-face discussions during the first formal contest of an election cycle. The personal dimension dissipates to a certain extent online for me, even if you can see and hear real people. But the options of shaking a neighbor’s hand or talking in close proximity are lost to us for the time being, maybe for a really long time, so it’s probably time to think about moving online if we choose to keep caucusing.
There are at least three other things I like about caucusing. First, it can be one part in the process of narrowing down a large candidate field. I’ll write a bit more about “winnowing” candidates in my other sections below, but for a starter frame I simply don’t believe it’s beneficial to have too many candidates on a primary election ballot. Second, candidates who do well in caucuses and assemblies can avoid the time and resources they might otherwise spend to petition onto the ballot, which in turn means people won’t get hit up to sign petitions for these candidates. Third, caucusing is not just about candidate races, it’s also a political party social function where party faithful and interested newcomers get together in small and large groups and become directly involved at the beginning of an election cycle.
For the reasons above, I hope we don’t completely eliminate the caucus/assembly process, but I won’t resist sensible change. With online structures, we should be able to boost not only turnout but also the sense of being a part of the process. I’d like to see us try this in 2022 before giving up on a long-held tradition that actually serves a purpose if we don’t look at it cynically.
Petitioning: It’s Got Darkness and Light
Petitioning isn’t all bad, but sometimes you just want to walk around without being badgered for a signature! [Photo by cyvanceforda]
Petitioning for large numbers of signatures normally means campaigns hire a petitioning company or lean really heavily on volunteers, who then go out to malls or parking lots or large events and bother complete strangers to sign for candidates that potential signers often know nothing about. I don’t love being flippant about this, but this is to a large extent exactly what happens.
Good political discourse isn’t the norm on the petition trail, though I know there are exceptions. Paid gatherers are often just in it for the money, which means they might not know anything of value about the candidate or even care that much about the race. Gatherers of all types might tell people who are uncertain to “relax, this is just to get Candidate X on the ballot.” That’s a bright red flag to me, and you ought to think twice whenever you hear it. Gatherers are paid or encouraged just to get a signature as quickly as possible, before a person moves on to shopping or lunch or a show, and they won’t tell people that “just putting someone on the ballot” is not a benign action. I will. Putting the wrong person on a ballot literally risks giving a bad candidate a chance to take office, or giving a mediocre candidate a chance to split votes and destroy the chances of winning for a better candidate.
And I’ll pile on a bit. Petitioning at higher levels favors campaigns with money, since they can pay a petitioning firm to do most of the work. Petitioning instead of caucusing can bypass the party faithful, who candidates will need for donations or support if they make the general election ballot, and petitioning can be a very strong admission that the campaign doesn’t think it can do well in party assemblies. But despite what I’ve said so far, I realize petitioning might be a candidate’s best course of action and certainly don’t want it eliminated, though I hope it doesn’t become the only way to qualify for primaries.
Of course, COVID-19 has done a number on live petitioning as well, since it’s become for practical purposes impossible for petitioners to hit large gatherings or go door-to-door, handling paper and certainly being less than six feet from other people. So, can technology come to the rescue?
Like Zoom, online petitioning has already been physically possible for quite some time, and it will almost certainly be a larger part of our future. But let’s be honest and admit this means we’ll be trading getting bothered at farmer’s markets and malls for getting blasted on every digital platform we use – e-mail, text messaging, they’ll call you on your cell phone, social media, digital ads, and whatever tech advance is coming next. This even happened to a certain extent this year, when we still almost exclusively used paper petition forms. It will only get worse.
I really want to believe that online petitioning will be better than live petitioning, but I’ve seen too many awful social media debates and too much reliance on shallow “clicktivism” to get this religion. I’m certain that too many people will make uninformed split-second decisions while multitasking, while those who want to take their time will be bombarded with annoying follow-up requests, again on every platform you use. There are positive points about online petitioning, though – you can go to websites and learn more about the candidate before signing, and it’s got to be great for tech-savvy campaigns able to use analytical tools – plus campaigns won’t need to manage a room full of boxes of paper.
Whatever medium we use for petitioning in the future, I hope we will not relax signature standards to the point that it’s too easy to get on certain ballots. Magnitude matters. If we want to keep signature requirements to run for Boulder City Council at 25, it’s no big deal. I trust that most candidates who get elected will learn citywide zoning and land use standards quickly enough, and the life-and-death decision is rare at the municipal level.
But the featured race in this year’s Democratic caucus/assembly process is the U.S. Senate contest. The Senate is a body of immense importance – it handles Supreme Court and cabinet member confirmations, treaties, impeachment trials, and it’s one of the two chambers in our legislative branch that make gigantic decisions including on COVID-19 related topics like healthcare and emergency relief packages. Keeping petition signature requirements large for higher offices is another form of winnowing, since it forces candidates to demonstrate they’re able to at least begin a viable campaign for the office they’re seeking. If they can’t, it may be a sign that they need to run for a different office, and that might sound harsh but it’s rooted in watching the political world for decades and seeing many candidates learn their truth the hard way.
Big Ballot Bandwidth: Points of Diminishing Returns
Ballot access can be a good thing, but I never want to get a behemoth ballot like this from the 2003 California recall!
I don’t love taking an argument to the extreme or even absurd, but I think we need an illustration to help us consider in the worst-case what could happen if we make ballot access too easy. In 2003, California went to the ballot for a recall campaign against their sitting Governor, Gray Davis. As you can see in the image at left, 135 candidates were on the recall ballot, one of them the actor and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger. Look closer and you’ll see a former porn star and the former publisher of a porn magazine, the actor Gary Coleman, Arianna Huffington of Huffington Post, Michael Jackson but not THAT Michael Jackson, and the occasional actual politician – including the sitting Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante and then-State Senator Tom McClintock.
You’ll also see more than 100 people you’ve probably never heard of, thanks in part to lax requirements for ballot access, which according to Wikipedia consisted of “65 signatures from their own party and pay a nonrefundable $3,500 fee to become a candidate, or in lieu of the fee collect up to 10,000 signatures from any party…” This is what it took to get on a ballot to potentially run the largest state in the Union in population, a state that ranks as the world’s fifth largest economy even when including nations, at least before the recent COVID-19-related economic emergency.
A lot of the Californians running in 2003 got washed out in the tide of name recognition. Plus, imagine the advantage of being placed near the top left of this humongous ballot, as opposed to Bustamante’s placement second from last in the right-hand column. We typically read from left to right and top to bottom, and people are impatient.
The second-best singer from this singing duo, and I mean second by unfathomable light-years, was in fact elected to Congress.
The Terminator won this race like it was a Best Actor award, with Bustamante a distant second. I’m originally from a state that once elected Jesse “The Body” Ventura as Governor. Sonny of Sonny and Cher got elected to Congress in California. The guy who hosted “The Apprentice” had the authority to plan an effective American COVID-19 response at any time after the outbreak in Wuhan, China. Name recognition is a big advantage in a popularity contest like an election, and it doesn’t always mean celebrities will do a bad job, but to me it does mean they deserve a fair and competitive vetting that might counter their prominence on an unwieldy ballot.
Democrats and Republicans alike also know what it’s like to have too many candidates onstage for a debate. Seventeen Republicans ran for President in the GOP 2016 primary process, and 29 Democrats had their hat in the ring at some point during the 2020 process. Televised debates were unfocused hot messes, and Democrats even had to break theirs up so half the candidates who qualified could speak for like 8 minutes each on different nights. And there were 15 candidates on the Colorado Democratic presidential primary ballot in 2020, though more than half dropped out between the time ballots were printed and Election Day.
I’d rather have winnowing and a comprehensible candidate field. Back to the Colorado U.S. Senate race – what I really want are candidates able to very directly answer the question “Why am I qualified to be a U.S. Senator?” I’ve tried with an open mind, but at this point I can’t help concluding that painfully few left in the race could give a satisfactory answer for my standards. Still, with winnowing through assemblies and petition signature requirements, we could have a small or small-ish primary field, and by limiting the field everyday voters and media might find the bandwidth to give each candidate the consideration required to make a high-quality decision. Candidates in smaller-field debates might get the time to expound on difficult questions, rather than giving too many candidates 60-90 seconds each to explain their views on crucial issues like COVID-19 or Afghanistan or a looming economic depression.
At least 21 Colorado Dems launched campaigns for the U.S. Senate this cycle. A fair number of them “self-winnowed” some time ago because they understood they didn’t have the polling numbers or financial viability to continue in a statewide race that will require eight-digit spending ($10 million-plus) against a Republican candidate who will have big-dollar backing. I’d like to see the winnowing continue, so we have a 2020 primary ballot of no more than give or take four or five candidates. But even if the number’s a bit bigger, the caucus/assembly system and rigorous petition signature requirements mean those still in the race will have at least cleared one serious hurdle and proven themselves worthy of the next step. I’d like to keep it that way.
Ranked Choice Voting is not “42, the Answer to Everything”
I’m trying to stay non-specific about 2020 candidates here, but I couldn’t help noticing one candidate for U.S. Senate who suspended a petition drive in March due to the threats of COVID-19. The candidate then put out a statement floating the idea of putting all remaining candidates on the primary ballot, then using ranked choice voting to determine the winner. This idea couldn’t be implemented this year anyway, and I probably would have preferred other options like extending deadlines and/or fast-tracking an online petition system due to emergency, but I totally get that this was a rotten situation for candidates scrambling to meet a hard petition deadline set long ago. From here on in, I’d like to disassociate anything I write from this individual candidate, and I’ll start by saying I hope we don’t overreact to a rough 2020 by considering a ranked-choice system without some type of winnowing in the long run.
It isn’t so much the ranked-choice I’d oppose, it’s the thought of putting candidates on a high-profile ballot without qualifying via caucus/assembly or petitioning or clearing some other reasonably high bar. First of all, I’d consider putting myself on that type of ballot. The Senate pays $174,000 per year right now, with excellent benefits except for the downside of possibly getting exposed to Rand Paul’s COVID-19, so why not try? Plus, there’s the rhetorical question: how many of the 2020 candidates who dropped out earlier in the race – many with great qualifications – would have stayed in at least through the primary if they were going to be on the ballot?
How I wish 42 truly was the answer to everything, per The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but things ain’t quite that simple!
With winnowing and a manageable field of qualified candidates, I’d be OK with doing ranked-choice for the next primaries, but I don’t believe it’s some sort of mythical sword in a stone that will remove all dark magic from politics. We’re in a Twitter era where ideas and beliefs travel at lightning speed, while deeper consideration is becoming anachronistic, and it’s become too easy just to digitally ditto that one idea or the next is a panacea that will fix everything. Ranked choice voting in particular has become a reflexive response for too many electoral forks in the road, and I fear some of its proponents are putting too much stock in the talking points about its potential benefits.
For one, ranked-choice won’t flat-out take money out of politics. Those from the political center or left-of-center had better accept the reality that GOP candidates for U.S. Senate will have big financial backing, because the potential prize of controlling the Senate is immense and one race can easily tip the balance. Going to ranked-choice without winnowing in primaries might in fairness make the first part of a campaign cheaper, if only by eliminating the cost of paid petitioning, but I’ll make an educated guess that money will come back into the picture when it comes to an actual hard-fought primary. Those interested in the pros and cons of ranked-choice might appreciate this story from the New York Times, and in it a political science professor who has researched ranked-choice concludes this system “usually advantages people who are incumbents or well known, or who have a lot of campaign funds.” Of course it’s one opinion of many, please do your own extra research, but don’t blindly buy the talking points either.
Other ranked-choice talking points might say it enhances diversity or reduces negative campaigning. Well, we’ve had a diverse Senate field of candidates running at some point in this election cycle under our current system, and to speak for myself I could vote for a person of any race or sex or orientation or identity if they had qualifications for the job at hand. For the record, I voted for a Native American Senator in 1992, a Latino Senator in 2004, an African-American President in 2008 and 2012, a female Presidential candidate in 2016, an African-American Congressman in 2018, and a gay Jewish man for Congress in 2008-2016 and the same person for Governor in 2018. On top of this, I’ve voted for or supported a long list of female candidates or candidates from a minority category for lower offices, and all of this was under our current system.
Ranked-choice might reduce negative campaigning in some cases, if for example a candidate wants to avoid angering voters that might consider them for a second or third choice. However, candidates under ranked-choice can still win solely by taking a 50%-plus-one majority of “first choices” on the ballot, so I can’t buy that it will automatically end negative campaigning in high-stakes primaries, especially if there are marked differences between candidates or weaknesses/controversies to exploit. Front-runner candidates may naturally try to knock out the closest competition with negativity, and it’s a battle-tested strategy for demonstrating contrast between candidates. Plus, I’ll guarantee you’ll still see nasty ads in general elections if the top choices are right vs. left, even if perhaps not always Republican vs. Democratic.
Try this story from Democracy Journal for a little perspective, and I relate to the following excerpt: “...concerned citizens are looking to procedural minutiae as their savior. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that voters are grasping for a solution as simple as the problem is daunting.” For now I’ll trust in my lifetime of experience with political and human nature when it comes to predicting how merely shifting to a different system of tabulating popular votes will change political behavior, and I suspect the longer-term behavioral results of going to ranked-choice will be closer to “the more things change, the more they stay the same” than trend-setting devotees would care to admit.
Conclusion: Improve the System, Don’t Blow it Up
We have a system today in which candidates can work directly within their political party through caucus/assembly, or hit the streets to get petition signatures if the party structure isn’t their forte. This means many candidates have to do something significant to qualify for the primary ballot, and even darlings of a party can face challenges from a motivated opponent who’s able to get signatures. In Colorado, tens of thousands of citizens will have direct involvement in establishing the primary field through caucusing or signing a petition, then hundreds of thousands will vote in each party’s primaries. Yet even if anyone considers these to be decent numbers, there’s no doubt in my mind we can do better.
We can almost certainly improve our caucus system and citizen participation by incorporating digital tools like online meetings, webpages for candidate videos and information, and extended hours for voting. Online petitioning might make it easier for candidates to reach significant signature thresholds, since candidates might not need to hire petitioning companies or rely on finding large numbers of volunteers.
But we shouldn’t expect changes in election structure to make a difference in one fundamental aspect – the qualifications of the candidate for a given office. To put it bluntly, some people shoot far too high in their first campaign, when perhaps one campaign for a lower office first and serving in that office for a term or two would make them a much better candidate for higher office.
Sometimes the system does seem rigged, but for the most part, people still have to be honest with themselves about who they are and what they bring as a total package to a competitive table. That’s at all levels, from first-time caucus-goers who find the whole thing sort of bewildering, to candidates for the highest office in the land who might spend $936 million on a campaign only to drop out after three months (not naming names, of course). No matter what, let’s pick ourselves up from this awful patch of history when we can, and look to necessity as our mother of invention!
