Deep Dive: A Modest Proposal for Better NC Elections
Fri., June 25: Also, how the state bribed Apple + we might get the world’s lamest weed law
+THREE BIG STORIES
1. Deep Dive: What if NC Had Ranked-Choice Voting?
Most of the time, my voting calculus goes something like this:
Find the candidate who
1) most closely resembles my policy preferences BUT
2) can also win an election AND
3) can enact their agenda if they win AND
4) is least likely to have skeletons in the closet.
These qualities, of course, don’t always belong to the same person. For example:
In the 2020 Democratic primary, Elizabeth Warren was my first choice in categories 1 and 4, Joe Biden in 2 and 3, and Bernie Sanders my second choice in all four.
I voted for Warren. With hindsight, though, I doubt she’d have beaten Trump. I’m not sure anyone but Biden—whose everybody calm down, Grandpa’s here vibes contrasted with Trump’s freneticism—would have.
The evidence suggests most Democrats engage in some level of strategic voting during presidential primaries. The party, after all, is made up of disparate racial and ideological coalitions. The result is typically a “safe” choice: Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. (Barack Obama in 2008 is arguably the exception.)
Understandably, the party’s left wing blames the establishment when a moderate loses. (See 2000, 2004, 2016.) Then again, seven of the last eight Dems won the popular vote, so primary voters’ sense of strategy can’t be that bad.
Go down the ballot—e.g., races for Senate or governor—and the head-versus-heart question can become more difficult.
As the Republican Party radicalized in the last decade, it became less coalitional and more orthodox. This is a reinforcing pattern, making the party smaller, more homogenous, and more intense. Strategic voting is no longer a question, at least for the base.
For leftists, this dynamic leads to difficult choices:
If your party runs a milquetoast, corporate candidate, do you vote for them to prevent someone worse from winning, or for a third-party candidate who better reflects your values?
The same goes for non-MAGA Republicans (they exist):
If you are frightened by the GOP’s turn toward antidemocratic authoritarianism, do you support a Democrat pushing policies related to abortion rights and taxes that you diametrically oppose?
If you’re a libertarian, or a socialist, or a supporter of the Prohibition Party (it’s a thing!), you might have a similar dilemma.
The problem is known in political science as Duverger’s law. In basic terms, the law posits that first-past-the-post elections—contests in which the candidate with a plurality or majority of votes wins—inevitably favor two-party systems (see below).
Warning: extremely nerdy image (source)
A caveat: The U.S. is basically the only country where Duverger’s law holds water. The UK, for instance, uses plurality-wins elections but has a multiparty system.
Why? Because until recently, the U.S.’s two-party system wasn’t really a two-party system.
For much of American political history … the parties operated as loose, big-tent coalitions of state and local parties, which made it hard to agree on much at a national level. From the mid-1960s through the mid-’90s, American politics had something more like a four-party system, with liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alongside liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. …
But that was before American politics became fully nationalized, a phenomenon that happened over several decades, powered in large part by a slow-moving post-civil-rights realignment of the two parties. National politics transformed from a compromise-oriented squabble over government spending into a zero-sum moral conflict over national culture and identity. (The Atlantic)
In a polarized environment, once parties take on ideologically disciplined, parliamentarian features—as the GOP has—this system empowers extremism and removes “incentives to compromise or cooperate with political rivals,” the political scientists Noam Gidron, James Adams, and Will Horne wrote.
Duverger’s law also keeps third parties from gaining traction.
Voting for someone who can’t win is a wasted vote. But since no one votes for the Greens or the Libertarians, they have nothing to build on.
North Carolina recently decertified the Greens and Libertarians because they didn’t get enough votes last year.
That’s led a number of leading political scientists and theorists to call for “the adoption of ranked-choice voting … as a means to moderate U.S. politics while also diversifying its field of participants. It’s also appealing because it is practical: States and municipalities can implement RCV without constitutional reform or federal legislation.”
As Francis Fukayama told Politico: “Political polarization is one of the greatest threats to our system today, and replacing our current plurality voting with RCV will facilitate the emergence of third parties by eliminating wasted votes or strategic voting.”
Political scientist Larry Diamond: “Switching to ranked-choice voting would enable general election voters to give their first-place votes to independents and moderates who promise to defy this polarizing logic.”
New York City used RCV for the first time in its election on Tuesday. It’s also used in elections in a few cities and states across the country: Maine, Santa Fe, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Cambridge, among others.
It works like this: Instead of voting for one candidate, you rank all of them.
At the end of the first round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Those who had that candidate as their first choice have their votes redistributed based on their second choice. Rinse, repeat, until someone has a majority.
Proponents argue that RCV makes elections more civil—candidates need to be voters’ favorite, but they can’t alienate their opponents—improve turnout by giving more people someone to vote for, and provide opportunities for more people to seek office.
However, research casts doubt on claims that RCV reduces racial polarization, improves turnout and voter confidence, or changes outcomes.
At the same time, it provides evidence that RCV boosts youth turnout and enhances campaign civility.
Counterpoint: The NYC mayoral race wasn’t exactly rainbows and butterflies.
RCV opponents have fretted that it will confuse voters and decrease turnout, lead to more money in politics, or allow politicians to game the system. In New York, there was concern RCV might hurt candidates of color. Republicans in Maine made all sorts of wild claims about RCV.
The turnout issue is debatable. But the other claims are pretty weak—or, at least, nothing that isn’t already pervasive in politics. And many complaints come from people who stand to lose from RCV.
RCV research comes from either European countries or the American cities that have adopted RCV, particularly in California.
Aside from military ballots and a few party elections, RCV is rare in the South: only Memphis, Tennessee, and Sarasota, Florida, use it in municipal races, according to FairVote.org.
The question: Would ranked-choice voting work here?
A few recent examples show why it’s worth considering:
In 2020, 15 people ran in the primary for the Durham County Board of Commissioners. The county has a confusing (to me) at-large system in which voters pick five candidates, and the top-5 overall vote-getters win.
Aside from the top finisher, Nimasheena Burns, none of the winners was selected by a majority of the county’s 91,193 voters.
More than 50,000 voters did not have either Nida Allam (fourth) or Brenda Howerton (fifth) on their ballots.
The race’s dynamics suggest to me that in an RCV system, the same five commissioners would have won. But that’s a guess, and just last year: Wouldn’t a board that ensured all five commissioners were supported (or tolerated) by a majority of the electorate be more likely to succeed?
The 2020 lieutenant governor primaries:
Yvonne Holley won for the Dems with 27%. Mark Robinson beat a very crowded GOP field with 32.5%.
In both cases, two-thirds of party voters voted for someone other than their nominee. Again, it’s possible—maybe likely—that the outcome would have been the same had voters’ second and third choices been taken into account. But we don’t know that.
In Raleigh’s 2019 elections, Nicole Stewart and Jonathan Melton won the two at-large council seats, with incumbent Russ Stephenson locked out by about 3,000 votes. Stephenson declined to seek a runoff against Melton.
In an RCV system, the margin was close enough that third choices might have made a difference. Three other candidates racked up non-trivial vote counts.
As for turnout: Raleigh had about 54,000 voters in 2019. It’s hard to see how it could get worse with RCV.
The Raleigh City Council’s controversial plan to move its election to November 2022 has an upside—improving turnout—but beyond giving council members a free, unearned year in office, it also gets rid of the city’s primary, meaning that all elections will be held on a first-past-the-post, plurality-wins basis.
In theory, in a crowded field, Mary-Ann Baldwin could win reelection (or lose to someone) with, say, 30% of the vote. (She got about 39% in 2019.)
There are practical reasons for not having a runoff after November. They cost money and tend to be low-turnout. But RCV would obviate those problems and ensure that whoever wins has the backing, enthusiastic or not, of a majority of voters.
And by eliminating strategic voting, outsider candidates would probably make better showings.
The bottom line: There’s a chance RCV could act as a moderating force in legislative and congressional races while strengthening third parties. It might not work as well as proponents think, but it’s unlikely to make things worse.
Many RCV backers have been quite explicit about wanting to break up the MAGA GOP. As one told the Washington Post: “We need a center-right party that believes in free and fair and legitimate elections, and that party can only exist if the Republican Party is split into pieces.”
For that reason, the General Assembly—whose idea of election reform involves voter ID and absentee ballot deadlines—seems rather unlikely to consider such a system anytime soon.
It’s not clear whether a municipality could enact an RCV system without the General Assembly’s permission, though I doubt it.
RELATED: The ballots will take weeks to count—another potential drawback of RCV—but New York City appears likely to elect Eric Adams, the establishment guy, its next mayor. Adams, the media quickly noted, ran against defunding the police.
Democrats, in private and public, are warning that rising crime—and the old and new progressive calls to defund the police—represent the single biggest threat to their electoral chances in 2022. … There has been a big spike in big-city crime, a dynamic increasingly captured in local coverage and nationally on CNN and Fox News. … Democrats say it's no coincidence that Eric Adams, the leader in the New York City mayoral race, ran against defunding the police.
It’s no secret Republicans plan to use rising homicide rates in large cities—which haven’t defunded the police, by the way—to their advantage, and no secret that Fox News will help them.
It may also be true that Adams’s pro-police stance helped him win, assuming he won. I don’t know enough about NYC to say. But the idea that this is some sort of rebuke to the left is a bit much.
It is actually a banal truism that New York has a lot of fairly conservative voters who are also Democrats, because the Democrats are the only game in town (this is common in American urban politics, in fact, which is why American urban politics would likely be more democratic and accountable if it could somehow adopt European-style multiparty elections and coalitions). … A candidate who can adopt conservative positions while still credibly claiming to be progressive has an obvious advantage in urban politics, and indeed those candidates win elections basically all the time in cities across the country. …
In real life, Eric Adams was the law and order candidate and the police reform candidate. He has a multidecade record of making headlines attacking the leadership of the NYPD. He was also rather explicitly the candidate of what centrist pundits typically castigate as “identity politics.” That makes total sense, too, because he was running in a Democratic primary with a massive Black electorate. He was thus able to run as the most conservative candidate in the field and credibly present himself as a true progressive Democrat with endorsements (both official and tacit) from other Democrats representing most of the ideological spectrum of New York Democrats (including even a few nominally on “the left”!)
About that part I bolded: Durham County hasn’t elected a Democrat in about 15 years. There is, I believe, one elected official whose district includes a piece of Wake County, but it’s headed in Durham’s direction.
Unless trends shift dramatically, all of the state’s major metro counties will soon be one-party strongholds.
2. How We Bribed Apple
On Tuesday, the Department of Commerce dropped a bunch of records detailing the state’s four-year pursuit of Apple. I won’t bog down in the details. The highlights are sufficient.
January 2018: Apple approaches North Carolina about a North Carolina site.
April 2018: Apple’s reps meet with Wake County commissioners and Governor Cooper.
May 2018: Apple starts an incentive application for a 5,000-job project. The state eventually offered an incentive package worth $762 million.
December 2018: Apple announces that it’s going to Austin without telling North Carolina officials first.
2019: Nothing.
2020: Nothing.
~April 12, 2021: Apple gets thirsty for RTP again, this time for a 3,000-job project. The state scrambles to throw together a new development package.
April 19, 2021: Wake commissioners renew an offer to give Apple land.
April 21, 2021: Apple formally accepts the incentive terms: $845.8 million. (In case you missed that, the state offered Apple about $84 million more for 2,000 fewer jobs.)
June 9, 2021: A judge warns legislators that if they don’t begin funding schools in accordance with their constitutional obligation, he would make them.
June 24, 2021: Apple’s market cap is $2.23 trillion.
RELATED: The AG’s Office is eyeing an antitrust lawsuit against its competitor, Google, over its app store—similar to the case Epic Games brought against Apple.
3. NCGA Might Pass World’s Lamest Weed Law
Good news: North Carolina might—might—not be the last state to legalize medical cannabis.
Bad news: North Carolina Republicans are writing the bill, and this whole thing is freaking them out, man.
From the N&O:
[Republican Sen. Bill] Rabon said the bill contains the strictest medical marijuana rules anywhere in the country. He said those include advertising restrictions and additional requirements for doctors, plus limitations on what types of medical conditions would qualify for a marijuana prescription—like cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, but not chronic pain or migraines like other states allow. …
Democratic Sen. Natasha Marcus of Charlotte asked why chronic pain wouldn’t be an acceptable condition for someone to be prescribed marijuana. Sen. Michael Lee, a Wilmington Republican who co-sponsored the bill with Rabon, said they decided to exclude it because of a conversation Lee had with a man who worried that his son’s drug problems started when he got a maybe-bogus prescription for claiming to have chronic pain.
Lee said he agreed they didn’t want to allow that in North Carolina.
“Chronic pain means different things to different people,” he said.
Lee made a snap decision based on a conversation with one guy, instead of listening to the expert who testified that “states that have legalized medical marijuana have seen large reductions in opioid overdoses … since doctors like her stop prescribing as many painkillers.”
The bill’s language, as currently construed, restricts use to “debilitating medical conditions.” These include:
“Cancer, epilepsy, glaucoma, positive status for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Crohn’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, or other debilitating medical conditions of the same kind or class as, or comparable to, those enumerated in this subdivision, and for which a physician provides a written certification.”
Even the strictest weed bill in the country—which we’re … proud of?—may be too much for the pearl-clutchers:
Republican Sen. Chuck Edwards of Hendersonville told Rabon he was trying to keep an open mind but that, “I do have a number of concerns, morally and otherwise.”
“Some of us have a bridge we need to cross to get comfortable with this,” Sen. Paul Newton, a Cabarrus County Republican. “... For me personally, I’m really trying to keep an open mind.”
There’s no guarantee this thing will make it to the Senate floor, or that the House will bother with it if the Senate passes it. But a hearing is more than marijuana advocates have gotten, well, ever, so that’s something.
Anyway, while North Carolina parties like it’s Nancy Reagan’s birthday, weed becomes legal in Virginia next Thursday. (Dispensaries won’t open until 2024.)