Elections Matter
But not necessarily in the way you might think.
Happy Election Day, Virginia (and New Jersey, and elsewhere)!
Today, I’ll be voting for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, state Attorney General, Representative to Virginia’s House of Delegates, Mayor of my town, six Members of my Town Council, and on a local school bond issue that is required to go to the voters.
Five points—old school!—about elections:
#1: Whether or not you personally vote is almost completely inconsequential to the election outcome, but having the right to vote for people like you is crucial to defending your interests. Virtually every identifiable group that is (or has been) denied suffrage in America—teenagers, non-citizens, prisoners, racial minorities, women, and unpropertied men prior to the various effective suffrage movements—gets/got the short end of the stick in public policy.
So go vote today if you are eligible in your community. Or not. It won’t affect the outcome. But thank God or the Founders or Jackson or Lincoln or the suffragettes or LBJ that people like yourself are allowed to vote. It’s improved your life dramatically. You live under the least-worst form of government ever-devised, where the incentives of the rulers line up best with the interests of the population. Don’t take that lightly. Still…
#2: We probably have too many (and to much) elections in America. All we do is vote. Jonathan Bernstein loves to count up all the ballots he casts each four year cycle, and it’s just ridiculous. No one needs to be voting for local water boards or on 30 legislative ballot referendums, and no one has a clue how to choose a candidate for utility commissioner. We have political appointments and elected representatives for a reason. We should trim the ballots and toss the direct democracy.
And from an international point of view, elections are American democracy, because (comparatively) our elections are incredibly numerous, our campaigns are never-ending, and our politicians are far more vulnerable to defeat. This has all sorts of consequences for political culture and public policy, but to me, the main drawback is that it makes people think politics is exclusive electoral politics, when such a huge part of actual politics occurs between and way from the elections. Which brings us to…
#3: Voting is the universal symbol of political participation, but too many people see it as the sum total of political activity. It’s wonderful if people vote, and I encourage everyone to do it. But it’s entry-level politics. It doesn’t even require you to do the one thing that probably most-accurately defines politics—interact with another human. And it makes politics very impersonal and private for people who only vote. Which is really strange when you think about it.
So this year, if your main form of participation is just voting, challenge yourself to take on a bigger political role in your community. My suggestion: go (politely) yell at a local official. In person. About an issue you care about. Believe it or not, they listen! There’s a reason those six grandmas show up at the local planning board hearings. It actually works. And they also know that…
#4: Local elections (and local politics) are important. Local elections aren’t sexy, they doesn’t feature larger-than-life characters playing out a soap-opera drama on your TV, and there aren’t morons on the internet making 5,000 word guides about how to consume the returns. But contrary to the indications derived from media coverage, your town and school board elections routinely have a bigger effect on you and your family than anything going on in Washington. There are no federal elections today, but check out Daniel Nichanian’s awesome election guide. There’s just a ton going on.
And if you want to get involved—running for office, donating money, or just trying to shift public policy—local politics features a impact-to-bullshit ratio that is orders of magnitude better than anything you can do to influence national politics. In fact, my most basic advice for electoral politics is never donate your money or time to a presidential candidate. Instead, pile it into a local race. The marginal good it can do is just so much bigger.
#5. Elections Matter. But perhaps not quite how you think. Reprinted below is an old blog post from 2020. The point is very simple: most people view elections as important because they can alter which people hold decision-making authority in government. But that’s only one way elections affect politics, and it might not be the most important. Equally importantly, elections send a signal to all existing players in the political system, about future possibilities across policy, politics, and elections. How political actors come to understand the meaning of the election shapes their choices about what politics to pursue, what coalitions to form, and what future offices to run for. And that has a profound impact on all of public life.
Today is an excellent example of this. We have state elections in two of our fifty states, plus some various local elections across the country. The actual change in the compositions of the governments of Virginia and New Jersey will of course have an impact on public policy in those states, but the signal received from these two elections—and they way they are understood throughout the rest of the country—is going to shape how national actors behave over the next few cycles.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the results tonight in Virginia will affect choices among some actors about whether to run for president, and how to run for president. In turn, there will be a massive battle this week to shape the understanding of this election, because the actual truth of what happened has much less impact on future politics than the received understand, and the ability to bend that understand has a huge impact on future policy and politics.
But do read the whole thing.
On Tuesday, the United States will hold its 117th biennial federal election to fill seats in the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as its 59th quadrennial election to fill the office of President of the United States. Representatives elected will serve in the 117th Congress, from January 3, 2021 until January 3, 2023; Senators elected will serve in the 117th, 118th, and 119th Congresses, from January 3, 2021 until January 3, 2027. The elected president will serve from January 20, 2021 until January 20, 2025.
How does this familiar structure of elections affect public policy and politics in Congress?
The most basic answer is the one most people intuitively understand: the election will change the composition of the federal government. New members of the House and Senate will have different views on public policy than the departing members they replace, and different priorities for the policy agenda in the 117th Congress. Retirements in both chambers will change the leaders of various committees. New partisan leaders may be elected by the caucuses and/or the chambers. If either chamber sees a change in partisan control, chamber rules will empower entirely different actors to set the agenda, in both committees and on the floor.
Similarly, the composition of the administration will change as well. If former Vice President Biden wins office, virtually the entire political staff in the White House will turnover, as well as some 4,000 executive branch posts that are filled by political appointees, ranging from foreign ambassadors to cabinet secretaries and deputies to lower level agency appointments in the Senior Executive Service. If President Trump wins reelection, there will be less administration turnover, but still more than in a typical three month period. The post-reelection period is a natural breakpoint in an administration, and a common spot for appointees to resign and new nominees to take their place, in addition to hinted administration changes.
Less obvious are several other ways the election will change public policy and politics in the coming months. First, the election resets the time horizon for political actors. With an election looming in the short-term, political actors will often prioritize strategies that reflect the imminent judgement of the voters. With the next election now as far away as possible, those same actors will have fewer concerns about short-term public opinion, giving them more flexibility in making policy compromises or in taking up agenda items that are either less popular or perhaps politically risky.
At the extreme, defeated members and those retiring at the end of the 116th Congress will have no electoral horizon. Freed from ever having to face the voters again, such members can often be recruited to cast votes during the lame duck congressional session in November and December for public policies they would not have backed before the election. Likewise, lame-duck presidents routinely issue lame duck pardons and urge the promulgation of agency rules that reflect a freedom from voter punishment.
The new time horizon alters the outlook for returning members of Congress as well. For example, in the Senate, members who have just won reelection now know they will not face the voters for six years, a political lifetime away, and a full Congress after the next presidential election. They will have maximum freedom from electoral concerns. Conversely, a new class of Senators will instantly be “in cycle,” and may adopt strategies that more closely resemble those of House members, actively focusing on campaign fundraising and increased state attentiveness.
Representatives will be contending with an additional hurdle as they look forward: theredistricting of congressional seats in 2022 subject to the 2020 census. Some members will find themselves suddenly running for districts that are much more liberal or conservative than the one they were elected from, in some cases increasing their probability of a primary challenge, in other cases making the general election much more ominous.
The most underrated impact of the election, however, is the effect it has on the outlook of all players in the political system. The election is a cataclysmic shock to the political system, one that provides a strong signal to everyone involved about what public policy choices will likely succeed or fail in the public sphere going forward. As everyone struggles to understand the meaning of the blunt vote results, elected officials will consider their public policy opportunities. Will new ideas likely be accepted now? Is it the right time for a bold initiative? Are the conditions now right for me to run for Senate, or President?
This becomes even more important for the non-elected actors, who greatly outnumber the elected officials. Executive branch political appointees, interest group leaders, lobbyists, financiers for the parties and candidates, party leaders, staffers, and even individual citizens will all be looking at the signal the election sends, altering their influence strategies. What policies will they push for (or not)? What candidates will they support? Who will they fund? Where will they expend their resources? How will they adjust their operational strategies?
Of course, none of these actors will sit idly by, waiting to receive the signal about what the election “meant.” Instead, most of them will actively try to shape the public meaning of the election, hoping to create optimal conditions for the policies they would like to pursue, the officials they would like to empower, and the future candidates they would like to see succeed. All of this sums to a massive policy fight in the public sphere, where actors who existed before and after the election must reassess their strengths, weaknesses, possibilities, and resources as they plan new strategies in the world created by the election.
As it does every two years, the disruptive nature of the election will rearrange the composition, time horizon, and political outlook of American politics. And while the voters will have their say at the ballot box, the consequences of those votes will be shaped by the continuous public sphere fight among all actors in the political system, as they struggle to understand, shape, and respond to the meaning of the election.
My favorite example of #5 is how the people of Wisconsin essentially voted Elon Musk out of the federal government in last spring’s judicial election.
Run for local school board. Volunteer for the library.