Online Digest
Volume 1, Number
1 October 11,
2002
Welcome to the online digest of the
Center for Voting and Democracy. Two or three times a month, the
Center's staff will assemble short items about current news and
opinion regarding politics, representative democracy and political
reform. This first issue is edited by the Center's executive
director Rob Richie and senior analyst Steven Hill, author of "Fixing Elections: The Failure
of America's Winner Take All Politics" (Routledge Press, 2002),
where many of the themes to be referenced in these digests are
discussed in more detail.
*** A Woman
Governor-to-be in Hawaii
In an election that could upset the
Democratic Party's control of the governor's mansion since the early
years of statehood, two women will face off in Hawaii's
gubernatorial race this November. Whichever of the two candidates
win, Democratic nominee and two-term Lt. Gov. Mazie Hirono or
Republican nominee, Linda Lingle, the former mayor of Maui, they
will join the lonely ranks of female governors (Arizona, New
Hampshire, Massachusetts and Montana). This marks only the second
time in the nation that two women have won the two major party
nominations in a general election for governor. In 1986, Republican
Kay Orr and Democrat Helen Boosalis ran for governor in Nebraska.
With several other strong woman
gubernatorial candidates, 2002 may mark an increase in women
governors, but it won't be another "Year of the Woman" in
congressional elections. Any increase in women in the U.S. House
will be in the low single-digits, in sharp contrast to the dramatic
increase after the last redistricting in 1992 when far more seats
were made competitive in redistricting. Women currently hold a mere
13 percent of seats in Congress, one of the lowest levels in the
world among well-established democracies.
*** Dancing
the Two-Choice Tango
Thomas Mann, who watches Congress
from the Brookings Institution, was quoted in the Washington Post
recently saying that a new-breed of conservative politicians have
torn a page from President George Bush's playbook. "They reflect the
president, who is a very conservative man on things like taxes,
missile defense and social issues but has figured a way to . . .
appear more moderate than he is," Mann said. Mann said these new
Republicans pursue politics "with more soothing rhetoric and a
seemingly more accommodating style."
Many Democrats do the same thing.
Former president Bill Clinton was famous for "triangulating" his way
to re-election in 1996, while most leading contenders for the 2004
Democratic presidential nomination this month supported giving the
president the authority to invade Iraq despite opposition from most
Democratic Party voters.
"New Democrat".... "Compassionate
Conservative"... Expect more and more of these labels in a
winner-take-all system, where our two-choice politics bestow a
disproportionate amount of power on a small political minority --
"swing voters." In low-turnout elections (all too frequent in the
United States, with some primary and local election turnouts in
single digits), those in a party's base who may sit out an election
if not inspired can be defined as "swing," but the voters who
inevitably draw the greatest attention are those 10 to 20 percent
willing to vote for either major party -- either because they are
single issue voters or because they are undecided. Because undecided
swing voters determine most close elections, it's no wonder so many
campaign appeals, sound bites and television ads from both major
parties are directed to them and sound so similar. And it should be
no surprise that attack ads still dominate the final days of
campaigns, as swing voters can be more easily persuaded of your
opponent's lack of worthiness than of your own positive qualities.
Indeed most major party candidates
become addicted to the new modern techniques of polling, focus
groups and dial meter groups to figure out which issues and groups
of voters to talk to and which to ignore. In the process, many major
issues, including ones that most voters deeply care about, can be
left on the political sidelines. This is leading to a worrisome
dumbing down of politics and a disconnection between what elected
leaders do and what we debate in campaigns. These techniques are
inevitable results of a two-choice, winner-take- all political
system, where political operatives have the latest technology to be
able to easily slice and dice the electorate.
*** German
Elections : On Sunday,
September 23, nearly 50 million Germans went to the polls to elect
their national legislature, a turnout of four in five eligible
voters. Given that more than 90% of Germans directly elected someone
under Germany's full representation system, three out of every four
German adults now have their voice represented directly in their
national legislature. That's a sharp contrast to the fewer than one
in four American adults who elected anyone to the U.S. House of
Representatives in 1998, the last time we elected the House in a
non-presidential election year. That year fewer than one in three
adults voted in a House race, and despite the lack of competitive
races, a third of those votes were cast for losing candidates. (For
more such statistics, see our "Dubious Democracy: 2001" report,
which tracks various election statistics from 1982 to 2000 for the
nation and every state, at http://fairvote.org/2001/ .)
In this year's German elections,
the incumbent Social Democrat-Green Party coalition was re-elected
in a squeaker. Germany uses a "Mixed Member" system where half the
legislators are elected in U.S.-style, winner-take-all district
elections, and the other half by party lists in which five percent
of the national vote is required to entitle a party to a fair share
of seats in the legislature. The German Green Party won close to 10%
of the vote and also its first-ever district seat. The failure of
the Greens to win district seats in the past is a good measure of
how difficult it is for political minorities to win in
winner-take-all elections. Even though the German Greens are far
more established than any third party in the United States and even
though Germany has full public financing of elections and bans most
sources of private money, still a "third" party like the Green Party
would be shut out if the election was held only under
winner-take-all rules.
In fact, former Chancellor Helmut
Kohl, despite his popularity and his party's sixteen year reign over
German politics, never won his local district seat. In that
particular area, Kohl's Christian Democratic party was the political
minority. These examples help lay to rest the notion that, outside
of the lightning-strikes kind of exception, third parties and the
smaller major party in any given area (i.e. political minorities) in
our system can start winning representation if they just "work
harder," "have better candidates" or "raise more money."
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