- Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Andrew Samwick,
and I'm the Director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center. This afternoon's program is What Happened to the Politician Center,
and How Do We Get It Back? Our speaker this afternoon
is Charlie Wheelan, a senior lecturer and policy fellow
here at the Rockefeller Center. Our event this afternoon is
part of the Rockefeller Center's continuing 35th anniversary
celebrations, and I encourage you to visit our website,
rockefeller.dartmouth.edu, to stay abreast of our
programming this fall. Charlie Wheelan is a
member of the Dartmouth class of 1988 and has
been teaching courses in economics, public policy, and education here at his alma mater
full-time since 2012. He holds a master's in public affairs from Princeton University and a PhD in public policy from the
University of Chicago. Earlier in his career, he
was the Midwest correspondent for the Economist for five
years, and he taught courses on understanding the policy
process for master's students at Chicago prior to joining
the faculty at Dartmouth. Charlie brings a PhD's
background and a journalist's approach to the study of public policy. The results are the deep
admiration of Dartmouth students and an impressive range
of articles and books that make serious topics more
accessible, and even fun. His two books, Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal
Science and Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the
Data were instant classics. He followed them more recently with Naked Money: What it
is, and Why It Matters. When discussing the state
of our national politics, there really are no way and no reason to sugar-coat a candid
assessment of where we are. I now hear the phrase gridlock
and think that would be nice. With gridlock, nothing moves
until a compromise is reached. We don't have that anymore. We have an impasse in
which all roads are blocked except the ones that lead
to an even worse situation, and the only ones who
seem to be able to sit behind the wheel are the
extremists in both parties. And so, each time we think
that things cannot get worse, someone hijacks the vehicle and drives us to an even worse place. The twists and turns of
that journey have brought us to what is surely an untenable situation. Perhaps what we are
learning is that 230 years are a lot to ask of any one constitution, no matter how many checks and
balances are written into it. The most politically
motivated actors find a way to gain control, and the
quality of government depends on their
willingness to govern well. If that is the lesson,
then a solution is clear. We need to find a way to get
control back to the political center and to ensure that
the center governs well. Our speaker this afternoon
has been hard at work on just this challenge for
the better part of a decade. Responding in part to the
failure of the Simpson-Bowles Commission in 2011, Charlie
wrote the Centrist Manifesto, a book that imagined a centrist
party that could control a swing vote in the United
States Senate and forge solutions based on the best ideas
from both political parties. The Centrist Party became
the Centrist Project. The Centrist Project eventually
became Unite America, which is building the
grassroots community, donor network, and
electoral infrastructure to help independent candidates
run winning campaigns. We'll hear some of the lessons learned from that experience and hopefully, something optimistic about
a different route forward. In March of 2009, Charlie ran
unsuccessfully for Congress as the representative from
the Illinois fifth district in the special election
to replace Rahm Emanuel. In its editorial assessing the
race, The Chicago Sun-Times wrote, Voters will find a
ballot filled with impressive and thoughtful candidates,
especially Charlie Wheelan, the University of Chicago
lecturer who combines a razor-sharp mind with
a boatload of charm and an impressive expertise in
economics and foreign policy. We expect great things
from Wheelan in the future. Ladies and gentlemen, that future is now. Please join me in
welcoming Charlie Wheelan. (audience applauds) - I prefer to think that I ran successfully for Congress but didn't win. (audience laughs) I had a middle school friend
who called after the election, and he said, I heard it went really well and that you did great. I said, well, usually the
metric by which these things are judged is you come
in first, but, you know, we'll go with whatever people
are willing to offer up. The talk I think is billed as what happened to the political middle. I'd like to talk more about how we can restore the political middle. I'll talk a little bit
about where I think it went, but as Andrew said in his introduction, this is really about restoring
our capacity to govern again, and one particular piece
of that, which is what we're trying to do at Unite
America, which is to run independent candidates at both
the state legislative level and in state-wide races
and even for the US Senate in the hope that those
centrist independents can become what used to be the
overlap between Republicans and Democrats, but the
glue, the connective tissue, whatever metaphor you wanna
use, but to reestablish the center in part by
electing people who are not affiliated with those two tribes, and I use the word tribe
quite deliberately, the partisans of the
two political parties. I stumbled across this picture as I was preparing for Education 20. I teach an education policy class. We were talking about
No Child Left Behind. This is the signing
ceremony, and it just seems it's kind of a throwaway little slide, and then I realized,
wow, you got Ted Kennedy up there with George W.
Bush and with Judd Gregg. I'm not sure who the woman
is, but when was the last time we saw anything approximating that? And I think I would be
hard pressed actually to come up with a major piece
of bipartisan legislation, maybe the Patriot Act, which
was still around that time, that looks anything like this. Now, it turns out, it wasn't
a great piece of legislation, but I think we can still
agree on the idea that by and large, we'd rather
have a signing ceremony that looks like that
then some of the signing ceremonies that we've had more recently. So, I'm gonna throw a bunch
of pictures at you at once, 'cause collectively, they paint
a really important picture. This is political self-identification. The top line is percent independent. It's been lingering
around 42 or 43 percent. The crucial takeaway is that it's bigger than either political party. There's a little downturn, but of late, both the parties have
been losing membership. Self-identified independents
have been growing. There's a lot of discussion, and we can talk about it
in the Q&A, about whether those independents lean right, lean left, whether they're closet
Republicans, closet Democrats. Do not lose sight of the
fact that when asked, they do not identify as
Republican or Democrat. Now, they typically vote
Republican or Democrat. Someone, I was down
speaking in Connecticut the other day and someone
said, well, isn't it true that most of these people
vote Republican or Democrat? And I said, all right,
we'll let's step aside. How many of you like lobster? Most of the hands went up. It was a big dinner. I said, well, how many of you had lobster for dinner tonight? They all started looking around. Well, I didn't. And it was perfect, because
the waiters had come around and they'd said, do you
want the pasta or the beef? And you're offered
pasta or beef, you know, you're not gonna get lobster. So the fact that nobody had lobster there doesn't mean that they don't like lobster. So, why do most people vote
for Democrats or Republicans? 'Cause there aren't many
credible independents on the ballot, and we'll talk
about why that is and how we plan to change it, but I
wouldn't make any inferences. What I would do is instead ask
a much simpler proposition, which is based on this,
roughly how many independents, whatever those folks are, right, whether they're left of Bernie
or right of libertarians, roughly how many independents
should be in the US Senate? The math's easy; there are 100. (audience laughs) The answer is not two, right? So somehow, regardless of
what these people are saying they want, they're not
getting it, and we can drill down more on that, but again,
just kind of file that away. Do I think that many of these independents are in the middle? I do. I think in general, most
things follow a bell curve. I think most of our political
beliefs follow a bell curve. If you believe that America
has hollowed out politically as much as our institutions,
then I don't think there's that much I can offer for
you, other than whatever the 21st century version
of a civil war is, 'cause you can't govern
a country like that. In fact, there are lots of
reasons to think that most Americans inhabit that space
somewhere closer to the middle. We see it on individual issues, when you ask people about
gun control, for example. Most people have positions that are between what the two parties are offering. When you ask people about
immigration, it's the same. When you ask people about
Simpson-Bowles, many people, a majority would have approved
some kind of compromise similar to what Simpson-Bowles
had put on the table. This, if you read David
Brooks's column today, he wrote about this, the
report that came out that said two-thirds of Americans fall
in this exhausted majority. So, other political scientists
can drill down this. I am operating on the
assumption that there is a big swath of Americans
who are less polarized than what the two parties are
offering up, and that they contain the seeds of rebirth
for the political system. This is what Congress looks like. This, by the way, sadly, I've been too lazy to update the slide. What you see is fairly straightforward. You see the two parties
moving away from each other. That's no great surprise. But again, like the
mapping the independents to the US Senate, I'd
ask you to just think at a very basic level
about what this means. If there is no longer any
overlap between Republicans and Democrats, then there
are only, and they are both of equal strength, which is
kind of where we are now, then there are really only two possibilities from
a governance standpoint. Either nothing happens,
a complete stalemate, which is what we see on
the fiscal situation. It's what we see, oddly,
on infrastructure, even though both parties purport to be in favor of investing in infrastructure. I can't say that the stalemate
is what's causing the lack of action on climate
change, 'cause one party clearly doesn't wanna
act, and the other does. But nothing's happening. And these issues, as Andrew
intimated, are problems where it's not gridlock,
because if you do nothing, it is moving away from you. If you do nothing on the fiscal
situation, the debt grows. If you do nothing on climate
change, it gets worse. If you do nothing in infrastructure, it continues to deteriorate. So one option is this
political trench warfare, but it's worse than
that, because, as I said, things are getting worse
as you fail to act, or you ping-pong, which
is to say that one party gets power temporarily, does
something that's antithetical to what the other party wants to do. The other party runs against
that, rescinds it, changes it, vetoes it, and then the first
party tries to get it back. That would be like
passing healthcare reform with no Republican votes,
then trying to repeal it, then running on Medicare for all, right, hypothetically speaking, so
you kind of go back and forth. And you can't do that
with 18% of the economy. And this is an example of the latter, which is if you look at some
of the historical pieces of legislation, Social
Security, the Highway Act, civil rights, Medicare, welfare
reform, you see red and blue and then it gives way to
this much more alarming trend where it's either blue or red. Most recently, with the
Tax Act, you have all red. Before that, Dodd-Frank, the
Affordable Care Act, all blue. And you get something akin
to what I described earlier. You get legislation that
would have been better, arguably, if there'd been meaningful input from the other side, or
certainly more durable, because what you see is the other side trying to come to power
and eviscerate Dodd-Frank, repeal Affordable Care
Act, or what have you. One of the reasons that
Social Security and Medicare have been so durable is because they had bipartisan buy-in in the first place, or you see the former,
which is where we just don't do anything, even
as the problem gets worse, and that would be the fiscal situation. And I draw your attention
to the fiscal situation because in some ways, this is a good barometer of our political dysfunction. It doesn't matter whether
you think we should solve this problem by raising
taxes or by cutting spending. The fact is, we haven't done either, and this is the numerical
manifestation of the problem. Andrew and any other
macroeconomist would tell you it should be extremely alarming
to be running large deficits at a time of near-full
employment and a strong economy. That is the equivalent of
having the best job you're ever gonna get, and not being able
to pay the credit card bill. It's not gonna get any better than this. And so, a structural deficit at peak employment should
be particularly alarming. I spent 20 years in Chicago;
I grew up in Chicago. Anyone who's been there, you
know that we judge our mayors in part by how quickly
they plow the streets. Mayors have lost elections
over this, right? And the reason we do that
is it's a really fast and easy way to judge the
quality of governance. May not be fair, but
people look at the streets, and if they're plowed quickly, they infer that the rest of city
government's working pretty well, and if they're not getting
plowed, it must all be a morass, just like the fact they
can't plow my street. Well, I would posit that this is kind of like plowing
the streets in Chicago. If you're not dealing with
this, then you're probably not dealing with a host of
other governance challenges. And then this one follows logically from just the fact, if you've been alive for the past 10 years,
you've watched this, trust in government falling
to near all-time lows, maybe all-time lows, which
of course feeds back. A lot of what I'm talking about is dynamic in that it feeds back
into what we're seeing. People lose faith in the system; they're less likely to run,
less likely to participate. But this shouldn't be a great
surprise, this loss of faith in government, given everything
that I've just described. We're not solving some of the
key public policy problems. There are political scientists who can tell you more
about this than I can. There are a host of things,
many of which have happened in your lifetime, my
lifetime, that explain some of the increase in partisanship. More residential sorting. You know, if you live in Norwich, you're part of the problem. You're likely to live around
other people like you. I was on the Upper West Side
of New York not long ago talking about this, like, what do you think is causing this problem? Like, well, people live
around other people like them, and they hear their ideas, and they're not seeing
the rest of the country. They're like, wow, that sounds terrible. (Charlie laughs) You know, like, you should get over to the East
Side at a minimum, right? So, residential sorting, gerrymandering, which has been around for
a while, but I'll show you, we're getting better at
it, which is a bad thing. We're also getting better
at micro-targeting voters and other things like that,
so increasingly, politicians pick their voters rather
than the other way around. Again, we've had primaries
since the progressive era, but primaries interact with
some of these other things. Primary voters don't look
like general election voters. They've become increasingly important, for some of the reasons
that I'm gonna talk about, and therefore, mobilizing
primary voters, which requires a set of fairly partisan tools,
is particularly important. It also means, you know,
just think, for example, about how it interacts
with gerrymandering. One of the things you hear
when you talk to members of Congress or former
members of Congress is, because there are so few
competitive districts, which is a function of
gerrymandering, they are most likely to face a
challenger from their own party. So if you're in a heavily
Democratic district, you look to your left; if
you're in a Republican district, you look to your right, which
means there is absolutely, that alone discourages you
from reaching across the aisle, because as soon as you make
a compromise on anything, then you get that challenge
from your partisan flank. And to the extent that primaries
are where that happens, primary voters become
particularly important. This one, you've lived through. I know many of you are
at least as old as I am. How many of you grew up in a household where you had to get up off
the couch and turn the channel? So, we're before even remote controls, let alone 900 channels were
you can pick, you know, dial in your beliefs, and
they'll give you a news show that just mimics what you've
been saying to your wife. So that, and more seriously, this blurring of news and entertainment
is shockingly new. We now take it for
granted, but I would argue it has a very pernicious
effect on the news that people are getting about politics
and issues, and of course, it feeds back into the
other forms or partisanship. Social media as well, the
fact that on Facebook, social media is just
a more extreme version of the residential story that
we've been talking about. Money, I think political
scientists would say that money is more of an
accelerant than other things, but this one too feeds back in other ways, in that if you need to
raise a lot of money, and you wanna send out an
email or a Facebook ad, you don't say, you know, if
you believe in compromise to deal with the fiscal
situation by giving up some things you care
about, please send me $20, or Joe's gonna take away
your Social Security check. Which one do you think raises more money? It's the latter, so I would
argue that this, again, interfacing with social media,
with the need to compete in a primary, they all
kind of feed on each other. This, I don't fully
understand, but if you look at some of the works done by
Jonathan Haidt, another social psychologist, particularly
for young people, political identification is taking on
a certain identity aspect. He would argue, I find it
plausible, but I can't prove it, that as religion recedes from public life, that our identity increasingly
is around other things, with politics being part of them. And of course, once
politics becomes tribal, certainly one data point
on that would be how the Republican party
has been able to pivot on issues like trade and
dealing with the budget, and the party's kind
of gone along with it. That suggests that I'm part of something, and the beliefs may change,
as opposed to, I share a set of beliefs, and then that
makes me part of something. But that does mean that
dealing with people's politics increasingly is like
dealing with their religion, and if you've seen the, I
can't vouch for the methodology of it, but this study that
shows, you go back to like 1960, and you ask people if they
would be upset if their son or daughter married somebody
from the other political party. It was like, four percent. You fast forward to the present day, it varies by party, but
it's on the order of 40%. And that gives you some sense
that this is about identity. I think it's all been
exacerbated by poor leadership. One of the classes I teach here at Rocky involves a travel component. I've taken students to Northern Island. I've taken them to the Middle East. I've spent time in South
Africa, and one of the things you find is that individual
leadership can help transcend these kinds of differences,
or it can exacerbate them. And to my mind, we've been
blessed with poor leadership, and as a result, people
have been able to use the tribalism, the partisanship,
for their own advantage, but much to the detriment of the country. Now, the sad part, the scary part, is there is nothing that
I've just described, nor is politics more
generally self-correcting. And I think one of the
scary things is that people are used to self-correcting mechanisms. The private sector is
largely self-correcting. If there's a restaurant you don't like, and the food gets really
bad, if you stop going, other people will stop going,
and either they're gonna fire the chef, or it's
gonna go out of business, and you'll get a new restaurant. We're used to being
able to withdraw support and let the problem kind of fix itself. I'm a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan. (audience laughs) There's a guy, Allen Sanderson, who's a sports economist at
the University of Chicago. I was interviewing him for an NPR thing, and I said, Allen, you
know, we're done now. When are the Cubs gonna get better? I'm a season ticket holder, and I suffer. And he says, they'll get better when you stop buying season tickets. Wrigley Field was full year after year, so what was the point? So, if we don't intervene,
then the partisanship, there's every reason to
believe it will get worse, that good people will
be less likely to run, less likely to involve
themselves in the process. For many years, I think
it's changed a little bit, it used to pass as wisdom,
though it never was, where people would say, oh,
politics, I am so done with it. Okay, well, that's like, you know, this war with Germany, I'm done with it. I've just had enough, right? Like, you can't do that. And so, I think people
have grown out of that, but for a long time, it was something that people perceived to be beneath them, particularly if you talked
to business leaders. Oh, politics is, you know,
so sullying and difficult and inefficient, and of course, the reason that's all true is politics is how we make communal decisions, and communal decisions is a lot harder than
selling tennis shoes, right? But, I think in the last two
years, and as Andrew said, I've spent a lot of time doing this, people are waking up to the fact that we have to involve
ourselves in this system. This, I found this today. This is us getting
better at gerrymandering. So, although gerrymandering has been with us for a long time,
like everything else, we've brought more technology to it. So, we can figure out household, you know, we have more information
about household level voting behavior than ever before, and therefore, we can draw districts that look like that bottom-right quadrant. The district I ran in was
the Illinois fifth district, which had been gerrymandered
for Dan Rostenkowski, right, so every white ethnic
suburb out of Chicago just kind of snaked out. Then Rod Blagojevich held the
seat, and then Rahm Emanuel. So when I ran, I'm like, okay, only two of the last three
people have gone to prison. (audience laughs) And one went to the White House. So, you know, let's build on the latter. But that is a district where,
at the household level, there were still a lot of
Russian, Ukrainian households, but it was increasingly Hispanic. And I was ringing doorbells. I, by coincidence, rang
the doorbell of the mayor of one of those communities, and he said, oh, you know,
you don't know this community. I said, well, I'm learning. And he said, you know, if
you go to a Polish household, you do not wanna have
a Spanish interpreter, and if you go to a Spanish household, you better have an interpreter. And I said, well, how am I
supposed to know which is which? And he just looked at me and said, that's what you learn over time. But, you know, increasingly, you figure out what the demographics are, and you draw the district in
a way that's most favorable. Okay, all of this came
to a head; two different strands of my life led to
the Centrist Manifesto. One was the political journey. I suspect if you're here, many of you feel that you've been left behind
by the political process. My first job was writing
speeches for Jock McKernan, who was governor of Maine. He is now more famous as
Olympia Snow's husband, although he was Olympia
Snow's husband then too, but she was only a member of Congress. They were the two Republican,
both classic New England Republicans who, when that
Senate seat opened up, it was either Cohen or Mitchell,
I can't remember which one, they were the two logical candidates. So you can imagine your
dinner party conversation. Honey, one of us gets
to run for the Senate. Her poll numbers were
much better, so she went on to the Senate, and
he got term limited out. But the important point is,
he was like many of the other New England Republicans who
were responsible, by the way, for much of the overlap
with the Democratic party, if you go back 20 or 25
years; the Republican party's obviously moved in a different direction. That was 28, 29 years ago. So, if you fast forward
to when I ran for Congress in Chicago, I ran as a
Democrat, in part, because that was then where I felt more
comfortable, if I had to choose between the two; also, 'cause
I was in Chicago, and nobody was gonna get elected to
anything as a Republican. The race was determined
in the Democrat primary. The general election was
a complete non-issue. I went in to the endorsement session. At the time, I'm still
married to the same person, so grammatically, this is gonna sound, I was gonna say, I was married to somebody who was becoming a charter school teacher. It's just she's now principal,
not a charter school teacher. She's still my wife. But anyways, she was
training to become a charter school teacher, so I go into
the endorsement session, which looks a little like
this for the teacher's union, and they say, you know, Mr. Wheelan, how do you feel about charter schools? And I say, well, it could be
an important part of providing education for kids who
are otherwise left behind. (audience laughs) It was a lot quieter than that, and I just kind of stood there. I'm like, all right, well,
I've got eight minutes left. What do we do here,
'cause I know I'm done, you know I'm done. Like, do I still get the pastries? This is like you know
one of those blind dates when you know in the
appetizer it's going nowhere, but it's rude to leave. So, at that point, I wasn't Republican. I wasn't a Democrat. I was, to my mind, on policy issues, very close to the center,
and didn't have a home. Now, in parallel, I'm spending
my days teaching about public policy, so all the issues
I talk about, healthcare, entitlements, climate change,
energy, the environment, are things that I teach about,
and on all of those things, not only were we not dealing with them in a constructive way, and one can define constructive way in a lot
of different directions. But I would have argued
and still would argue that if we ask thoughtful
people of the near left and near right to design a
policy for infrastructure, for budget reform, and then we put them in a hat and just pulled one out, it would be better than
what we're doing now. Again, not the fringe solutions,
but just doing something. So, the book was really
written out of partial despair, the fact that there was
no longer a political home and that it wasn't just my
own personal crisis; it's that because the nation no longer
had this political overlap, we were unable or unwilling to
solve these important problems. All right, the Centrist
Manifesto argues two things. One is that on most issues,
there is some compromise that involves pain but is gonna move us in the right direction. The strategic insight of the book is that if you were to elect
centrists, at the time, I was thinking of a third political party. Now, just think centrist independents. In a closely-divided legislative
chamber, you only need or three of those centrist
independents to be the fulcrum. Again, think Kavanaugh hearings, and imagine three centrist
independent US senators. Everything about that
process is different, beginning with the fact that those three would pick the majority leader. I've spent a lot of time
with Parliamentarians. There was one particularly
wine-besotted evening with the former Parliamentarian
for the US House of Representatives going
over all of this stuff. In the Senate, at the beginning of each session, the
elect a majority leader. They set the rules of the
chamber, which also make a huge difference, and if it's
like a parliamentary system, if at any time a majority
believes somebody else should be majority leader,
we're not used to that, because unlike a parliamentary system, we don't have snap
elections, but those three could go to the Democrats and say, okay, it's the beginning of the session. Who would be your majority leader, and they say, Chuck Schumer. Eh, I don't know. You go to the Republicans,
they're like, Mitch McConnell. And you laugh for a while, and
you go back to the Democrats. (audience laughs) And I'm like, wait a minute,
what about Joe Manchin? Like, that would be
interesting, and meanwhile, the Republicans are like,
Susan Collins, Susan Collins. Like, okay, right, or maybe
one of your three independents. You could, for example, at
the Supreme Court hearing, if you had the three, the
fulcrums say, you know what, we're not voting for any
candidate that doesn't have 10 votes from the minority party. We're just saying that now,
before you even make your pick. Everything about that is different. So, the fulcrum strategy turns out to be the strategic linchpin of
what we're trying to do. What it means, by the
way, since this whole talk is about how we can most
expeditiously change the system, is that you don't need
to elect that many people to have a fundamental effect
on how the system operations. Now, obviously, if
things are more lopsided, you have to elect more people. It would be a bigger lift
in the House, for example, because you need to elect a lot more independent House members. But in you started in the Senate, that would at least be a
step in the right direction. Angus King, Dartmouth grad,
is already an independent, though he doesn't have any playmates, so there's really not
a whole lot he can do. He's effectively been a Democrat of late. Lisa Markowski, Joe Manchin, right? These folks are the
ones, the kind of people who, I would argue, if
elected as independents, would have more flexibility
to break with their parties and more importantly, reach over and collaborate with
folks on the other side. So you see those little
three chairs in the middle. All right, lotta problems with
trying to elect independents. We're gonna spend a lot of
time talking about this. Historically, the most difficult reason, the hardest thing about
electing independents is that we've historically
not elected independents. Therefore, it's hard
to get good candidates. There's a big spoiler problem
that I'm gonna talk about. But because you don't get good candidates, voters are not likely to
consider independents, because voters are not likely
to consider independents. They don't get much funding because they don't get much funding. Anybody who's competent isn't likely to run as an independent, right? So you've got this cycle of defeat. What we're trying, the short
answer for what we're trying to do with Unite America is
to provide the infrastructure to make that problem go away. In many ways, we are
mimicking what the parties do, hopefully without the partisan baggage, in that we are recruiting candidates, we are supporting candidates,
financially and otherwise. For example, if you run as an independent, even if you are fabulously wealthy, you've got a hundred million dollars. You're willing to spend 20 million of it on your own Senate race. Five years ago, who do you hire
to be your campaign manager? Probably your dog walker, right, because there's no current
political operative who doesn't already
have a party allegiance. And if they were to come work for you, win, lose, or draw, they can't go back. This really is like leaving a street gang. Therefore, even if you
were a strong candidate, had financial resources, you did not have the political
expertise to get elected. Ross Perot runs for president in '92, gets 19 to 20% of the vote. Who voted for Ross Perot? I'm not asking you. I'm saying like, who, if
we were to go get the data, where did the voters come from? What did they look like? Why did they vote for him? Yeah, we don't know, right? We have no information. The most important thing in any
election these days is data. We've created a data
engine so that every time an independent runs, we can target the households most likely
to support an independent. First of all, we can
find the independents. The voter roles are things
that the two parties traditionally control and
give to their candidates. Nobody has done that for independents. We can figure out what
attributes are most likely to be those who are gonna
support independent candidates, and we can capture that information and feed it back into elections. So all of these resources,
and the money, are things that we're trying to
bring to good candidates, beginning with that recruiting part, which becomes easier once all
the other pieces are in place. So, candidates, infrastructure, resources, but it's really not a
linear process like that, because you're only gonna
get the good candidates if you can provide them a
reasonable path to victory. So it's really more like a circle. Okay, and three, all of these people are currently on the ballot. They're currently running as part of the Unite America slate. They're all running as independents, which has legal significance. So they're on the ballot
as an independent. That's how they get ballot access. But they're running under
the Unite America banner, including Bill Walker, who is the sitting governor of Alaska,
running for re-election. They all announced that
they were running together at the National Press Club in Washington. To our knowledge, it's
the first time that any group of independents has
run together as a slate, which matters a lot,
because one of the problems about running as an
independent that I have not discussed is there's
a branding problem. Independent means not
Republican, not Democrat. It doesn't stand for
anything, and it could be, you know, there are plenty
of complete whack jobs out there who would describe
themselves as independent. So our first challenge
is to put some meaning around what independent means. So, Unite America, in endorsing, we have an official endorsement
process, certain candidate says, yes, they are a
moderate in temperament. They are qualified. They're the kind of people who
are interested in governing. They're people who will work
with members of both parties. They're fundamentally honest, and we think that they would be effective in office. So, these folks came together. Now, you know, Neal's running
for Senate in Maryland. Craig has no chance of
winning in Missouri. Orman almost won for the
Senate in 2014, and is now doing not so well in the
gubernatorial race in Kansas. Walker is in a tight reelection race. So, these folks all have very tough races. I think it's unlikely,
honestly, other than Walker, that they're gonna win,
but it is possible. Neal Simon could pull
off an upset in Maryland. The more interesting
activity, I mean, you know, by the way, that's like the major leagues. That's like saying, I wanna play baseball. Hey, you know, I'm gonna
walk onto the Houston Astros. So it would be great if
something like this happened, but the bulk of our strategy right now is build around the states. One thing that surprised us
when we first started looking at it is there are a fair
number of state legislatures that are as evenly divided
and unfortunately as partisan as Congress. There are a handful of
states, and the slide shows, where one or both
chambers are just divided by just a handful of people, which means that the
fulcrum strategy might work. Colorado, you'll see, is one where both chambers are tightly divided. We set up shop in Colorado
and said, we're gonna focus on trying to elect a few
independents in the states where it's cheaper, it's much easier, because roughly 40% of
state races are uncontested, which means that if
you run an independent, it is a two-way race,
not a three-way race. You do not have the spoiler problem. I'll talk more about what
the districts look like that are particularly
amenable to this strategy. But we are spending a
lot of time, this is, we got all of our candidates
together in Colorado. Those are all people whom
we've endorsed in this cycle. You'll see Orman's there and
some of the other national candidates, Marty Grohman's
running for Congress in Maine, but most of them are state
legislative candidates. For an independent, it's a big deal, because they're used to
being not around other people who are running as independents. So, among other things, we could give them the assurance that
they're not alone anymore. And this got a tremendous
amount of publicity. There can't be many
events that were covered by both Fox News and MSNBC, but
we managed to pull that off, and CNN as well, but that's
kinda what the slate looks like, and they're all running in November. Colorado's where we
focus most of our time. Colorado's a place where,
since we set up shop, we actually spend a lot of time trying to recruit the
candidates that are running. Many of the other candidates
you saw came to us once they found out what we were doing. So we've got a slate of
five candidates in Colorado, I think three of whom
are running, as I said, in races that are two-way,
and we hope that a couple of them are gonna pull off victory, in which case they could
make the difference, and this is also true in
Maine and in New Mexico. They would play that fulcrum strategy with just a couple wins. All right, that's the picture
of all the people running, which is kind of cool. The other thing the strategy
hopes for, but is not dependent on, is that we
will get some defections. The idea is that if you
elect a couple independents, that folks who are currently
in the chamber will say, you know what, I'd rather be
with them than with my party. I mean, I can think of a few
senators in the US Senate who I'm still not quite clear
why they're with their party. It seems like more of a headache. Cheri Jahn is the evidence of two things: one, that this is likely to be the case. She is an eight- or nine-term legislator. Unfortunately, she's term limited out, and it was only in her final term that she left the Democratic party
to become independent. But the interesting thing is,
once she became independent, she was able to get a transportation bill out of the Colorado Senate
unanimously, and this, I mean, the whole strategy, unfortunately, I kind of glossed over it,
depends on independents governing differently and
governing more effectively. I was in Maine last night. One of the interesting things about Maine is that they already have
a handful of independents. Some of the folks that you saw up there are running for reelection. There's a guy by the name
of Owen Casas who is, he's a great guy, but he's
very hard to pigeonhole. He was a former Marine,
served in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and he said, you
know, running as an independent is just like serving
in Iraq or Afghanistan. I'm outnumbered and I'm surrounded, so this all feels very familiar to me. (audience laughs) Last night, we were talking
about the possibility in the Maine House of
them having the fulcrum, electing the speaker, and they
were talking about the rules that they would ask for as a condition of supporting any speaker candidate. And this is gonna blow your mind. One of the things they're asking for, hold onto your seats, is that Democrats and Republicans would
sit next to each other. (audience laughs) Right? So like, wow, right? Instead of like, all
Democrats and all Republicans, we either mix you up,
or we go alphabetical. Like, whoa, isn't that crazy? One of the reasons I like Owen
is he's a great storyteller. So he, as a current independent,
tells a story, and again, it's kind of like mixing
people up in the chamber. You'd think that this was
already happening, but it's not. He'll go and he'll talk to
the Democrats, and he'll say, hey, guys, what are you doing? And they'll say, oh, you know,
we're working on this bill, but we don't know what the
Republicans think about it. Owen said, he says, well,
you know, we could ask them. (audience laughs) And they're like, well, you know, do you think you could do that? He's like, I know, yeah, I'll do that. So he walks over to the other
room where the other party is meeting and says, you know, hey guys, what would you think about this? And they say, it seems
like a reasonable idea. So, he walks back. He's like, they're willing to do it. That's a true story. That particular bill passed
unanimously save one vote, which was the leader of the
party that was not originating the idea, clinging to whatever
partisanship was relevant. So, we do believe that these
folks, by virtue in part of running as independent, which
is a very hard thing to do, are likely to perform
differently in the chamber and to play that role of connective tissue which we kind of lost when there was no longer any overlap
between the two parties. So that's what we're trying
to do: recruit, support, elect independents with a
goal towards governing better. I've been at this now for a long time, and here are some of the
lessons that we've learned, and then we'll go to questions. The first is that the governance problem is worse than you think. I mean, this is a scary
thing, in all seriousness. I spend a lot of time talking
to very serious people, Former Senator Bill Bradley,
Former Senator Bob Dole, people who are not hysterical people. And they sound hysterical
when you talk to them. Long-time journalists,
people in the think tanks. This is the opposite of
like, New York in the 80s, when you'd go to New York, and you'd say, can I ride the subway. The people in New York
would roll their eyes like, oh, God, yes, you can ride the subway. It's fine, right? Everybody who's there says,
you know, you're hysterical 'cause you're far away
and you don't understand. This is, oh, no. You're far away; you
don't know how bad it is. I had lunch last week with the guy at the New America Foundation, which is a mainstream, relatively
moderate institution. He has a PhD in public
science from Berkeley. He is a sane person, and
as he was eating his salad, he said, yeah, I'd say there's
like a one in three chance that the US breaks up into
five countries by 2040. (Charlie laughs) And he's just eating his salad. I'm like, okay, that's
a big statement to make. And do I think the US is gonna break up? No, but the fact that somebody
who is a serious person even says something like that. You have Michael Lewis, who's
just written another book, saying on Terry Gross's show
that he wouldn't be shocked if Donald Trump selectively
defaulted on some of our debt. He'd come up with a reason. I mean, these are preposterous statements that are being made by people
who are not preposterous, and they are underscored
by lots and lots of things who've been deep in the
system, who are saying, it really is a crisis of governance. Donald Trump, I would argue, is a symptom of what's going on. He is a mixed blessing, as it says there. On the one hand, more
people, this is a much easier pitch for me to make than
it was five years ago when I said, look, the
system's broken; we need to elect different kinds of people. Like, eh, the Republican
party'll fix itself, you know? Democrats will win. That's not what people are saying anymore. It's not as difficult to persuade people that we need some fundamental changes. At the same time, the extreme partisanship has caused people to dig
deeper in their own trenches. So you have this simultaneous
reaction where yes, I'd love to do something
different, but not right now, because we need to win back the Senate. And that, I mean, that is just a tension that we're feeling,
particularly in the midterms, but it's gonna be a problem if we wanna get to a better system writ large. I've already talked about how independents govern differently. There's actually a really
interesting exchange between Bob Dole and Greg Orman when Orman was running
for the senate in Kansas. They debriefed after the
race, and Dole said to Orman, you know, you could have won
if you'd run as a Republican. Orman said, I know, I believe
that, but do you think I would have made any difference
if I'd won as a Republican? And Dole said, no, I don't,
and that makes me sad. By virtue, you know, I don't
think Orman's gonna win this time, but he is different
than somebody who would take what for him would have
been an easier path. When I wrote the book, I
assumed that purple states would be the place where we
could elect purple people. It turns out that that is not the case. If anything, the opposite is true. Purple states tend to have
the most closely contested elections, which means the
spoiler problem is the biggest. You're most, particularly in
this partisan environment, you're most likely, or
at least have some risk, of tossing the election
one way or the other by virtue of being that
third person in the race, whereas in deep red or deep blue states, where one party has had a
lock on it, Kansas being a perfect example, until
recently, the gubernatorial race. The party out of power is not gonna win. This is what happened in Alaska. It's how Walker was
elected as an independent. The Republicans had
controlled the state forever. He was running as an independent. There was nominally a
Democrat in the race, who had very little change of winning. He and the Democrats started talking, agreeing in the debates. Everyone said, I don't think
you're allowed to agree. Can you just imagine a
debate where one guy says, yeah, that's a really good idea. When was the last time you saw that? And the Democrats said, you
know what would make more sense, why don't I drop out and run
as your lieutenant governor? And so, that's how. They did something similar in
the legislature, where they now have a fusion legislature
that is run by independents, Democrats, and Republicans,
as opposed to the legislature formerly being controlled
only by Republicans. In Maryland, where Neal Simon's running, Ben Cardin has had that seat forever. He's been in government
longer than Neal's been alive. There is virtually, I think
the Republican candidate in that race had only
raised $5,000, to date, and has zero chance of winning. So really, it's a head-to-head race. Either Neal wins, or
Cardin gets reelected. He's not going to elect a Republican in a state that's very, very blue. So that takes away the
spoiler effect, and it means that you can serve the
independents, you can serve the party that's been locked
out of power, and increasingly, you can serve members of
the governing party who just don't like how extreme
their own party has become. So, those are the states and the districts at the state level where
we've had the most success. It's particularly true at the
state level in those races that are uncontested,
'cause it's a two-day race between somebody who's
usually gone pretty far one direction or the
other, and our independent can pick up the middle and
all the folks out of power. As I've said, I'm relatively optimistic at the state legislative level. These races are quite cheap,
you know, 150, $200,000 is a real, that's a lotta
money to spend in a state race. Most state races, depending
on the state, you can knock on most of the doors, which
matters a lot for independents because of the branding
problem that I talked about. So, when someone shows up
and is a credible candidate and explains why they're
running as an independent, that tends to work. The folks who've been
elected in Maine and Alaska have spent a lot of shoe
leather time going door to door. So that is at the present,
and of course those, once you have a legacy of
electing independents and they can prove that they govern
differently at the state level, then that hopefully will
feed into other aspects of the system, and it will trickle up. Also, those people will trickle up, and that is your farm
league, in terms of people who then move onto higher office. Marty Grohman, who's running
for Congress in Maine, served as an independent in
the state House in Maine. So this is how we hope things will work. I'm not gonna talk about it, 'cause it's not the work that we're doing, but there are a number of
groups working in parallel on process reforms that
we think are synergistic with what we're trying to do. So that's campaign finance
reform, which is a tough lift right now, but the
anti-gerrymandering stuff, independent redistricting in a number
of states has traction. Maine just passed rank choice voting, which is extremely powerful. That is a hard thing. They actually had to pass it
twice because the legislature repealed it, recognizing
that it makes it much easier for people outside the two
party sometimes to get elected. So rank choice voting,
our two party system is less sophisticated than
most of the school council elections that you may
have participated in, because we have no runoffs. It's very hostile to third parties. With rank choice voting,
you list your first, second, third, fourth choice. If your first, and so,
all the votes are tallied. However gets the fewest
number of votes is eliminated. Everybody who had that person as their first choice goes
to their second choice. They add 'em up again. If somebody gets a majority, it's done. If not, somebody else is eliminated. If you think about how this
would have worked in Florida in 2000, people could have
said Nader's my first choice, Gore is my second choice. Nader gets eliminated. Presumably, many of
those votes go to Gore, and we retabulate. It means that third-party
and independent candidates are not spoilers, and people
can vote their preferences without having to worry
about that spoiler effect or gaming the system. So, in Maine and elsewhere, we think that will absolutely help
what we're trying to do. And this is, you know, I'm
becoming hardened and cynical, which is, we're gonna have Q&A, and you can ask skeptical
questions, as you should, but increasingly, I'll finish
now with this metaphor, which is I think we're
on a deserted island running out of drinking water. I've just proposed that we
cut down a tree, make a canoe, get into the current, and
sail for the mainland. I think it might work. I'm not positive it will. But I'm really keen on a better idea, 'cause we're on the island,
running out of drinking water. And so, if you don't have a better idea, then I would urge you to get in the canoe. So I will stop there and be
happy to answer questions. (audience applauds) And please, wait for the microphone. - [Max] Hi, Professor. Thanks very much for the informative talk. My question is about, so
you mentioned examples of the powerful types of
preconditions that that fulcrum group could have that
could set in the legislature if they gain those three
or four crucial seats, and I'm curious how you'd
counter the narrative of, say, an opponent in
an election who says, my opponent wants to
concentrate all the legislative leverage in the hands
of just a few people. - I think you'd go with that narrative, which is I'm gonna
concentrate it in the hands of a few people who
can't do anything alone. So those few people are
concentrated in the middle, and they are there with the avowed purpose of building connections
between the two parties. In our system, at the
state or federal level, three people, they can elect the speaker, but the speaker can't
then pass legislation. So, I would go with it, which is, they're gonna have disproportionate power, just like a coalition partner
in, say, Israel or Italy, except that in those coalitions, those last couple parties
tend to be the crazies, and they have disproportionate influence, but they're pulling the
party way left or way right. These folks have disproportionate
power because there's just a few of them, but
they're gonna use it to try and rebuild the connective
tissue between the two parties. That is their avowed goal,
and the kinds of rules that they're gonna set up,
if you make that charge, and I've just described by
plan to have Republicans and Democrats sit together,
it's gonna bounce off of me a little, right, because
what I've described is what people, first of
all, they're gonna say, wait a minute, they
don't sit together now? Most people don't understand
that the Republicans and Democrats caucus separately. What kind of institution
have you ever been a part of where we say,
we got serious problems. Let's divide up into two
warring camps and get to work. (audience laughs) None! So I think, it depends on the people. It depends on the other things
that they're asking for, but it depends on this overarching message that the reason they are doing this is they're trying to get
the system to work again. - [Audience Member]
Hey, Professor Wheelan, how are you doing? So, I had a question,
'cause you mentioned earlier in your talk, originally you had proposed that there would be this centrist party, and in the Centrist Manifesto,
you actually lay out your kind of theoretical platform. It's not fully fleshed out,
but you have a lot of ideas of commonsense reforms that
you think make a lot of sense. So now that you've shifted
away from that strategy, talking, kind of following
up on Max's point about narratives that might
emerge in an election campaign, what about the narrative
that a person voting for an independent has no idea
what stance they might take, since they're not grounded in a party? Why would a voter be convinced
to wanna vote for a candidate in which they have no
idea where they'll go? It's just wherever the tides take them. - So this tactical question
of party or no party remains one of the key decision points. In fact, I'm going to New York tomorrow, for those of you who've heard
of the Serve America movement, which is doing something
similar to what we're doing, but they're trying to get
ballot access as a party, and we're trying to figure
out, do we wanna merge, you know, we're in the same space. The short answer is that we're
doing a lot of the things that a party would do, but
we're not calling it a party. So, the branding piece is fundamental to overcoming the
problem you've described. The Unite America brand
has got to mean something, and by the way, it's Unite
Colorado, Unite New Mexico. The state chapters are
under that umbrella. That's got to mean something,
or else, we will be sunk by that independent could
be anything problem. We're also doing the kinds
of things I described that parties do, which
is providing information, providing resources, providing money. One advantage we have over the parties, we don't have many, is that
we're only running 30 people, which means we can take 50
states' worth of support and channel it to 30 races,
including state races. So they've gotta run 50 states'
worth of races, so we can magnify our national interest,
our national support. But that is a big challenge. We've gotta to the branding right, and we're gotta do the
institutional support, and then the last piece is okay, do we have a common platform? I've described these people kind of glibly as centrist, moderate, what have you. I'm a policy wonk. The Centrist Manifesto lays out positions on climate change and this and that. We've moved away from that,
in part, for two reasons. One is we needed some
flexibility on a statewide basis. So somebody's running as an
independent in Utah is gonna look different than somebody
who's running as an independent in New York, and we want
some flexibility there. But, by virtue of having
an endorsement process, we can ensure that both
of them are gonna be broadly consistent with
what we're trying to do, and that they're not gonna
embarrass each other. And part of the strength
of running as a group is you get the strength of the group. Part of the problem is you're
tethered to everybody else, and one wingnut will bring everybody down, particularly at this young juncture. So we continue to wrestle
with it, but mostly, we're trying to take the
good things that parties do without some of the partisanship baggage, but you've put your
finger on one of the key strategic things that comes up repeatedly. - [Audience Member] Hi, professor. In 2016, there was some temporary talk when it looked like Bernie
Sanders might have a chance of winning the Democratic
nomination and it looked like Trump was coasting to
the Republican nomination that Michael Bloomberg would run
as an independent candidate. What are your thoughts on
2020 with regards to that? - So, I almost put the bullet point, Michael Bloomberg is not going to save us, (audience laughs) because I've just spent
too much of my life trying to get Michael
Bloomberg to save us. He could. I think, first of all, the presidency is not the place to focus. For those of you who
are institutionalists, the electoral college is so,
even relative to the rest of the system, is so hostile
to third-party candidates. Unless you get a majority
of electoral votes, which is unlikely, it goes to the House, where there are no independents,
and that would be a mess, to have somebody who wins
the electoral college but not with a majority
then not become president, perhaps the third person. So I'm disappointed that Bloomberg keeps flirting with the presidency. I'm not even sure he could
get the Democratic nomination. He doesn't do particularly
well west of the Mississippi. I would prefer that
somebody like Bloomberg or somebody of that stature,
maybe a Silicon Valley type instead says, I'm gonna
build the apparatus to elect independents to offices
other than the presidency. We have an unhealthy
obsession with the presidency, and he, by virtue of his
reputation and his resources, like a number of other
people of that stature, could really move the dial. So I have spent the better
part of the last decade trying to get to Michael
Bloomberg, and it's interesting. So, in the early days,
I spent a lot of time with Howard Wolfson,
who's his political guy, and of late, Howard won't
take our meetings anymore. And I think that's because
Bloomberg's playing in the Democratic sandbox and
wants to wash his hands of us. So, people like that
play an important role, but at present they're not. Meg Whitman did just
sign onto Unite America in a big way, so she is a supporter, and some other businesspeople like that. But Bloomberg is a big player. He has not got onboard with this, and we'll see what happens
with the presidential race. You guys are doing a great job of waiting for the microphone, by the way. - Hi, professor. One thing I've noticed in the statistics coming out election after
election is that young people tend, following trends of
the generations behind them, to be increasingly identified
with political parties. As a centrist myself,
centrism is not sexy, and it's very hard to get young
people involved in centrism. - Believe me, it's not. - And especially as you
talked about earlier, political parties become more
about tribal affiliation, and they've replaced, I tend
to agree with that theory. - Yeah. - I guess the question I have for you is how do you sort of envision
that we make centrism, moderism, independent sort of politics appeal to young people
who tend to sort of be more tribal than perhaps older people? - Yeah, so my sense, someone
may have better data than I, is that young people have very
strong political identities, but not necessary any great
love for the two parties. So they may self-identify
as liberal or conservative, but I think they're drifting
away from the two parties. You know, if I could
make centrism more sexy, man, there would like Nobel
Prize waiting or something. I think part of it is this
marriage of, it really matters, and lemme just say, for the young people in the room, you gotta show up. Like, the percentage of young people under 30 who vote is so
disappointingly small. When I ran for Congress, you
know, I'm in a college town in Chicago, and my campaign
manager, who had been a student of mine, said
yeah, we really can't worry about the young people,
'cause they don't show up. Instead, I'm calling
bingo at retirement homes, true story, not one of
my proudest moments. (audience laughs) But that's because those
folks are gonna vote. So, I think it's, you
know, it's some combination of this matters, some
combination of what you're seeing a number of people, particularly
disaffected Republicans like Max Boot and others saying, you know, I'm a passionate centrist. We went with the phrase
insurrection of the rational. I mean, something about
the fact that like, we're gonna get our democracy
back, and that may not be sexy, but it's
really, really important, and I think that's probably
the best that you can do. - Hello. Following the 2016 Trump election, I would often see on late-night news shows a common structure of a three-way debate where they would have
a pro-Trump Republican, and anti-Trump Republican,
and a Democrat debating, and oftentimes, that
structure would then present actually quite conservative
people as the center. And I was wondering if
you think that common structure that we've seen has impacted public perception of what the center is. - Yes, it's a terrible
structure, and I would say that the media is complicit in the
horse race view of elections. It used to be just a
Democrat and a Republican, even in the face of the
data I just showed you, that more people are not
Republicans on Democrats. It should be, at a minimum, three people up there, and probably five. So yes, of late, by them
doing two Republicans and one Democrat, it gives you
an increasingly skewed view, but it misses everything
that I've been describing. Part of the reason that you see that is a lack of imagination, which is, okay, these are the political
buckets that exist. Part of it is, it makes for better TV. The producers don't really
want you and the person next to you saying, another great idea. I would modify it slightly to say this. You know, they'd be like, oh my God. People tuned out 15 minutes ago. So, the more that we can create conflict for the viewership, the better
it is for entertainment, but it's not entertainment. May I give you a heartening example? Some of you may have gone
to the debate, but it wasn't a debate, between Jared
Bernstein and Greg Mankiw about three years ago
over income inequality. So, Jared Bernstein I think
was Biden's chief of staff. He's kind of center-left,
and Mankiw was chair of the Council of Economic
Advisors, I think, is that right, Andrew, for George W. Bush. Was he your boss? He was Andrew's boss, so
he's kind of center-right. And it was billed as a debate; in fact, it was an evening in which they agreed on 85% of the things that we need to do, and the disagreements
were really interesting. It was things like, all
right, well, I'm not persuaded raising the minimum wage is gonna work. I fear that if we do
that, it's gonna speed up technological replacement
of low-skill workers. But if you can persuade
me that's not the case, then perhaps I would be,
you know, it was the way responsible adults talk about hard issues. If we had just said at
the end of that night, okay, let's forget the
disagreements and focus our legislative agenda
on where they agreed, they would have had eight
years of work to do. So back to your original question,
I do think that the media plays an irresponsible and
outsize roll in making people believe that these are the
only choices that we have. - [Audience Member] Hi, professor. Thank you for a really interesting lecture and for all the good work you're doing. I just had a question about
like, if, as more data emerges, about independent voters
and people who are more likely to vote for
independent politicians, if it turns out that it's
disproportionately one party's voters are more likely to switch
to voting for independents, wouldn't that defeat the
purpose of the movement, and if so, how would you correct that? - It would. So this is one thing we've
had to protect against, particularly with our candidates. A lot of people say, oh, it's always a wolf in sheep's clothing. Democrats think you're
a closet Republican. Republicans think you're closet Democrats. So far, and we've been careful about this, our candidates tend to
be fairly evenly mixed, in terms of former
Republicans, former Democrats, or lifelong independents who kind of lean one direction or the other, and the voters who support them, it's highly situational. It's gonna be very different
in a rural district in Colorado than it is in a Senate
district in Maryland, so, so far, we haven't had that problem. It would absolutely undermine
what we're trying to do if it turns out that we're just a stocking horse for
one party or the other. Way in the back. - [Audience Member] It seems
like to me that the Democrats don't have an appealing
platform that attracts people because it doesn't deal
with the personal issue that so many people in our
country are sensitive to. I have to go back to a book
I read not too long ago on A Stranger in My Own Land, about the people of Louisiana. They're good people. They're not too well educated. I mean, this is a generalization. They're not too well educated in terms of being able
to think critically. They have a good family tie. They are religious, but their same focus, their whole focus, is on essentially, I'm not being dealt with,
and what's in it for me? I don't see the Democrats
with a platform that has an attractive appeal, so
to speak, to the issue of what's in it for me,
and I hate to say that, but unfortunately, most
people are looking at things as personal and what is in it for me. - Yeah, the only thing,
so, I've read the book. I would agree with your analysis. The one thing I would,
I would use the word narrative instead of the word platform, that the Democrats, to my
mind, haven't been able to tell a story about how
their policies writ large, 'cause the honest truth is people don't open up the Democratic platform and try to figure out where they
stand on policy X, Y, and Z. Instead, they say, they look at the party and say, broadly speaking,
what are you trying to do? Currently, that's a party that is perhaps at war with itself. Certainly the Elizabeth Warren
wing and the Bernie wing is gonna be different than the more traditional moderate wing. I don't think they have
sorted out, other than, we're not Donald Trump,
which is not a narrative. I mean, that's a reason to
vote for us in the midterms? That is not sufficient
to get people excited about what you're trying
to do, and the one visual from that book that stuck with
me is I think it described the Democratic party as,
you know, people line up, and if you get in line
and keep moving, your life gets better, and she described
the people she interviewed in Louisiana saying, yeah, there's a line, and people keep cutting ahead of me. And that is, I mean, that explains a lot of why people are so
fed up with the system, but it also explains why
you have people deciding between Bernie and Trump. They're both running against the system, and the Democrats and
certainly the mainstream Republican party, to the extent
that that's still around, haven't created a narrative
that I think is compelling for the political center,
in part because the money and the votes in the
primaries are on the polls, but I think it's also been the lack of imagination,
lack of leadership. - Thank you. Hi, my name is William. I was wondering how the,
as you might call it, the political pendulum
of the United States, where every four or every eight years, even every two years, we seem
to swing on way or the other, depending on how attitudes are changing. I was wondering how that partisan pendulum affects the way this
country is viewed overseas or on the international
stage, because if we create, if we sign a deal or a pact with a country or with the globe, such as
the Iran nuclear agreement or the Paris climate agreement,
under one administration, and then repeal it under the
next, and then renege on that in the following
administration, how does that, how does that shape America's
perception by other countries on the world stage, and how
might the rise of central or centrist leadership
help to ameliorate that? - Yeah, I'm not sure I
have any special insight. I'm watching the same film
that the rest of you are. I would say it's less about
the pendulum and more, what is a relatively unique phenomenon, which is this kind of withdrawal
from the global system and this kind of explicit
America-first approach. Obviously, we've always looked
out for our own interests, but we historically have
been much more expansively supportive of international
institutions and so on. I can say, as somebody who
takes students around the world, that our influence in
places where we don't spend a lot of time thinking about is profound, whether it's the Middle
East, where it's Colombia, whether it's Brazil, and often,
we take that for granted. So, I suspect, though again,
I have no special insight, that the rest of the
world looks on with alarm and fear and puzzlement as
America abdicates its role, especially at a time when
Russia and I would argue to some extent China are not proving
to be great global citizens, that, you know, if you were
to ask me broadly speaking what we ought to do, it's
to kind of circle the wagons with the other liberal
democracies, because now's the time when we really need to be
defending what we have fought for and what has proved
to be so important for us. But that's not the
direction that we're going. So why don't we take two more, so we'll get outta here on time. - [Audience Member] How is Unite
America going about vetting the candidates that you support,
'cause you're suggesting we're gonna work from the ground roots up. I'm from Arizona. Our legislature is full of wackos. (audience laughs) - That's a technical
term, for those of you who haven't studied public policy. There's a scale. - [Audience Member] So I'm wondering how, 'cause it'd be crucial that the candidates you support are really solid people, because that will lead to
the success of the movement. - Yes, so we spend a lotta time on this. I don't have the exact number. I wanna say, you know,
once we started doing this, something on the order of maybe 300 people who were running as
independents came to us, said, look, I'm running as an independent. I would like to be under
the Unite America banner, which by the way, doesn't
guarantee you money. That's a separate decision made, about whether you're
likely to win and so on. We've endorsed 30. So you can do the math on that. And it's not because the other 270 were gonna cost us a lotta money. There are some people we've
endorsed who don't need our financial support, but we said, we're proud to have you under our brand. So, we have, there's a committee. That's what the
endorsement committee does. There's a set of criteria. They are, if I can remember them, one is just your general character. So, irrespective of whether
you're likely to win or your politics, are you
a fundamentally decent, solid person; the second
is, are you electable, and we're willing to
sacrifice on the electable. What we actually say is,
is there a path to victory? And we're willing to sacrifice. If you're a really strong
person, we're willing to sacrifice a little bit
on the path to victory, because you're not gonna embarrass us. And then, there's the
situation of the race, which is, okay, are you
likely to be a spoiler? So yes, you're a solid person;
you might win under some circumstances, but this is a
tightly contested three-way race, and we don't know what
the dynamic is gonna be. I think there's a fourth one;
I can't remember what it is. But collectively, and
we score each of them and talk about each of the
candidates on a conference call with the committee, because
we know how important it is. And if we're gonna err, we'd
rather have somebody of strong character who we think
would do the job very well if they were elected than
we would have somebody who's highly electable or might
sneak in or can use their own resources who then
is gonna turn out to be, in a technical sense, a
wingnut or a whack job. Those are two different characterizations. (audience laughs) But yeah, no, it's really,
really important to what we do, and we turn away many,
many people for every one whom we're willing to accept on the slate. All right, last one. - [Audience Member] Hi, professor. If this sort of dangerous
melding of news media in entertainment is one of
those actors draining our desert island of its water, then
what would you say is like, the task of the journalist
who wants to write responsibly and not feed into polarization? - One ray of hope here
is that there has been a burst of very good journalism. You're seeing some great
investigative journalism. You're seeming some of the traditional magazines doing great work. So I hope it's not
ephemeral, but I think people are rediscovering, you
know, we kind of went so far down the line of news every five minutes, and we've kind of moved,
that pendulum has moved towards more thoughtful, more
investigative, deeper pieces. I was actually, we went
to the Washington Post when I was down in D.C.,
shortly before the lunch where the guy said the country
was gonna break into five. And the Washington Post had just hired, now, this is a Jeff Bezos
thing, they'd just hired something like 50 new journalists,
and that was the first time in 15 years where
anybody has used the word hiring new in the same sentence as media. So I thought that was
extremely encouraging. So, I'm vaguely optimistic
on the journalism side. I don't know there's any solution to the entertainment problem, but at least we're trending a little positive there. The social media question,
I mean, this one is really important, and it's
so new, but the hacking, the bots; I mean, these
companies have to come to terms with the use of these
tools to derail elections, to mislead people, and this is
like nuclear weapons in 1952. We invented it, and it's like, wow. This is really powerful. What are we gonna do with it? So I think we're gonna
have to think long and hard both about the first amendment;
we can't chuck the first amendment, but what we can
do within the parameters of the first amendment to
try and make these things less destructive and less
distorting of our elections. That is a huge policy challenge. All right, let's go ahead and fix this. Thank you very much for coming. (audience applauds)
