Former Patrick chief of staff Doug Rubin called today in the Herald for more Republican state legislators, and said the Party is to blame for its sorry state:
The Republican Party has failed the people of Massachusetts. The lack of competitive elections during the past 10 years has hurt the commonwealth, and there is simply no excuse for it. … The blame lies with the Republicans. … The simple truth is, we would all benefit from a stronger, more competitive Republican Party. There would be more accountability in all levels of government, and a wider range of ideas and solutions. … So what does the party need to do? … Republicans must make a sustained commitment to build from the ground up. … Issues such as economic development, education and public safety offer Republicans opportunities to help develop better solutions. … The party would be better served getting out of the office and talking with real people, building a statewide organization of voters who support their issues. … Massachusetts needs a strong and engaged Republican Party. Now.
Rubin’s advice is spot on, but aimed at the wrong end of the political spectrum. We don’t need more Republicans. We need more progressive Democrats who will challenge the status quo in the legislature. Lack of competitive elections may have hurt the Commonwealth, for example, but adding Republicans is not the only solution. Deval Patrick’s 2000 primary victory over Tom Reilly and Chris Gabrieli is a case in point: a vigorous struggle that widened the “range of ideas and solutions” and helped the state. More immediately, there actually is a “sustained commitment to build from the ground up” on the right: it is called the Tea Party, and walks with the Birther and Deather movements in the shadow of Glenn Beck and Roger Ailes. A prominent local Tea Party leader called Allah a “monkey god.” That is not progress.
This is how I think the column should have read:
The simple truth is, we would all benefit from a stronger, more competitive Democratic Party. There would be more accountability in all levels of government, and a wider range of ideas and solutions. … So what does the party need to do? … Democrats must make a sustained commitment to build from the ground up. … Issues such as economic development, education and public safety offer Democrats opportunities to help develop better solutions. … The party would be better served getting out of the office and talking with real people, building a statewide organization of voters who support their issues.
In short, we need more progressive Democrats in the legislature. Just as Rubin argues, we need to organize from the ground up to get them there.
amberpaw says
EVERY seat and office is “The People’s Seat” and “The People’s Office” – but our state has fewer competitive elections against incumbents than any other! Mac D’alessandro taking the “heretical for Massachusetts” course of challenging an incumbent should not be treated as heresy – EVERY seat is and must remain the people’s seat.
striker57 says
but too often when the incumbent wins we get the weeping and moaning from the progressives (and the Republicans) that the process is “rigged” for incumbents. Seems very little respect for the will of the voters. Mac D’A ran but the voters overwhelmingly voted for Lynch. Good for Mac for running but have some respect for the voters. They were given a choice and made a decision.
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p>And that weeping ands moaning becomes “term limits” next. The last resort of the lame and unsuccessful candidate or political faction. Limit my ability to vote for an incumbent I support because your canddiate or political point of view can’t win an election. How undemocratic is that!
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p>Don’t like a conserative Dem, find a candidate to run against her or him. Too often progressives choose to run aganist reasonable incumbents, thus shooting ourselves in the feet. Give voters a real choice in Worcester or Norfolk or Merrimack Valley instead of running progressives in Cambridge, Somerville, etc.
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p>And stop the complaining when your canddiate doesn’t win. Don’t mourn, organize.
amberpaw says
I DO however have real respect towards MAC for running, and think he ran an excellent campaign.
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p>The voters in each district choose among candidates – if and when they GET a choice – and I note my post said ZERO about term limits and that bringing up term limits is a straw man argument, and not what this post is about.
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p>Again, each and every seat is “the people’s seat”; no incumbent “owns” their seat, and I would like to see incumbents challenged more often, not because the challenger is a “progressive” – and have no elected official immune from challenge because they are a “reasonable incumbent”.
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p>Too many unchallenged incumbents leads to a weakening of democracy, period.
judy-meredith says
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p>Term limit advocates drive me to distraction. Lack patience to argue anymore. Should I suppose.
jimc says
The last election was pretty damn competitive.
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p>The one before that … ah, I don’t want to talk about it.
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peter-porcupine says
Widely discredited TEA party profiteer Mark Williams is not a “local teaparty leader”. He is based in Califirnia, and has no connection to Mass.
stomv says
Bob, I don’t disagree.
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p>In addition to more progressive Democrats, we need fusion voting. It is a wonderful thing in New York, as it allows smaller parties a legitimate seat at the table, and their issues to be heard and measured pretty accurately. The Conservative, Working Families, and Green parties have all done well in engaging the electorate and getting Dem and GOP politicians to pay closer attention to the issues of the smaller parties. I suspect that in MA we’d end up with Green, Working Families, Tea, and Libertarian minor parties securing ballot access [and maybe even a pro-life, anti-death_pen, pro-social_welfare, anti-gay_marriage Catholic party], which would allow for a much richer Legislature and give legislators and the gov a much more accurate understanding of where the voting people’s interests really lie.
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p>It wouldn’t be a real threat to the Dems because the minor parties wouldn’t likely take many seats directly… they’d simply influence the Democratic legislators more finely. It’d be a welcome richness to the electoral system of MA, and I think it would drive turnout since more people would feel that there was a group which more closely matched their interests.
medfieldbluebob says
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p>Stomv, I don’t disagree with your overall point. But…
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p>Any examples? Cases where the fusion party’s votes elected a Dem/Rep that otherwise would have lost? What role, if any, did fusion candidates have on the 2009 NY Senate leadership debacle? In as closely divided a house as the NY Senate is, shouldn’t a fusion party have increased leverage?
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p>What little I know of NY politics, it seems the fusion parties have only a marginal effect on the overall system. But that’s just me, which is why I’d like you to educate us a bit more about NY and the fusion parties.
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p>Massachusetts?
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p>Maybe it has some effect. But then…
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p>Tom Finneran was a “fusion” Speaker. He was first elected Speaker with Republican votes after he lost in the Dem caucus. This could come back, as some cross party conservative alliance that replaces the hack/progressive alliance everybody seems to think runs the state.
stomv says
A NY statewide race was within 10,000 votes and the Working Families party got 25k votes on their line. Now, had the WF party not been on the ballot, would many of those 25k voted for the candidate on the Dem line? Sure.
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p>But, had the WF party not been on the ballot, would all of those WF oriented people worked hard canvassing to get folks to vote for the WF line? Absolutely not… just like Green Rainbow Massholes don’t work for the Dem candidate.
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p>So it’s hard to know. On the one hand, voters could just vote that candidate on another line. On the other hand, many volunteers are party specific, even minor party. Without having the incentive to support a non-minor candidate (and keep their line on the ballot), they might not get out there and drum up voters.
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p>It’s not at all clear how much effect the fusion parties have on leadership elections, since it’s pretty rare that any legislator discusses his reasons for supporting Sally or Joe for leadership with the press anyway.
stomv says
The election out of memory took place in 2010…
stomv says
The NY statewide race to which I referred was actually in CT… see below. That I got the state wrong is probably why a quick google search was fruitless.
kgilnack says
Democratic Dan Malloy 567,278 49.50%
Republican Tom Foley 560,874 48.95%
Independent Thomas E. Marsh 17,629 1.54%
Write-in Paul Copp 13 <0.1%
Write-in P. Robert Thibodeau 5 <0.1%
Totals 1,145,799 100.0%
Democratic gain from Republican
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p>Note: Malloy also appeared on the line of the Connecticut Working Families Party and received 26,308 votes on it. His Working Families and Democratic votes have been aggregated together on this table. wikipedia
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p>In other words, WFP delivered well more than CT Governor Dan Malloy’s margin of victory.
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p>I was working with WFP and ACORN in CT back in 2006 and was disappointed a ballot question for fusion voting failed in Mass – it’s a much better way to hold viable candidates accountable and influence elections without a spoiler affect (cue someone replying to tell me that 3rd parties aren’t spoilers or that even if they do, it’s worth the principal…) ballotopedia.
christopher says
…that Mr. Molloy would not have simply received all his votes on the Democratic line if WFP were not there?
stomv says
But what we do know is that WFP hustled like crazy to drum up votes for the candidate on their line. They have lists of folks who tend to vote WFP when motivated, and they shook those trees, just like all other GOTVers.
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p>You’ll never know what voters would have done in a parallel universe, but we also know that the population of those who actually vote is not fixed — it’s substantially influenced by competitiveness of race, weather, length of election cycle, and by GOTV efforts. Fusion voting has made the WFP a relevant group in Connecticut; without fusion they’d be as relevant as the GRP is in Massachusetts.
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p>Of course, if a party like WFP (or libertarian, etc) ever started getting significant percentages in a district, they might not cross-endorse. They might run their own candidate. What’s nice about fusion, though, is that it can force politicians to not be loyal to a single political party. In my mind, that’s a step in the right direction. In this case, it’s certainly in Mr. Malloy’s interest to pay attention to the leadership and rank-and-file of the WFP. Also important is that it’s in the interest of the GOP to encourage the WFP to not cross-endorse, which the GOP can do by also championing perhaps even one of the WFP’s core issues. At the end of the day, because the voters aren’t simply lined up on a left-right scale whereby the two major parties simply play for the median voter, it allows issues to be more complex than simply left-right, and it allows voters to better inform politicians just which issues they are most interested in supporting.
marc-davidson says
which examples of Republicans Rubin thinks best embody this ideal.
Perhaps he’s thinking of such regional Republicans as John Chafee or James Jeffords. Sorry, but their ideology is now well within the rightward-moving Democratic Party. Even William Weld of the 90’s isn’t representative of any living and breathing New England Republican.
Bob is right, the diversity that Rubin longs for is in the DP and the fragmented movements to it’s left.
doug-rubin says
Bob, you raise a great point. My main argument was that more competition for positions at all levels of government in MA would benefit all of us. Whether that comes from the Republican Party, or in primaries from progressive Democrats, I believe that it would bring more accountability and a wider range of ideas to our public life. Your point about a “stronger, more competitive Democratic Party” is right on…and definitely an effective way to accomplish this goal.
jconway says
I would argue that Patrick has run and moved significantly to the right of where he was in 2006 and honestly ask if Gabrielli or Reilly would have been all that different. He has managed the state decently and maintained the status quo under Romney while being more socially liberal. But the sweeping vision and promises of a truly revolutionary movement in politics to alter the fabric of our state has died and it died rather quickly after Patrick abused that movement for his pursuit of power.
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p>Under Patrick we get insiders getting selected for plush appointments (most recently for Middlesex Senate), we get DINO or hacks backed over progressive challengers (Wilkerson over Diaz). The governor has sold out his power base to get weak concessions from DeLeo and Murray, the real power center of this commonwealth. We used to have false choices between Republicans led gridlock when they were in power, and progressive like Dukakis making shady deals in the name of the better good. Patrick promised to radically redistribute power to the people directly by building a movement that would reshape the state legislature and make it more progressive, dump the DINOs and replace them with Deval loyalists committed to his vision of change. Instead he sold that vision up the river to make Dukakis style deals with the hacks and DINOs that have always run Beacon Hill. Business as usual, and the only thing that saved him was a complete lack of a compelling opposition and a rally to make MA a blue island in rejection of the tea party fever that swept the rest of the country.
jconway says
*correction
doug-rubin says
I must be watching a different Governor Patrick than you are – if anything, these past four years and this most recent election have shown that this Governor is willing to stick to his values despite the political consequences.
medfieldbluebob says
The point isn’t so much about “values” as it is about “movement”. There was this expectation that “Together We Can” meant exactly that: that the campaign would become a movement that would restructure state politics and free progressives from the “hack/progressive alliance”. That grassroots campaigning would become grassroots governing.
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p>Many were willing to step up and work with the governor, and other progressives, to do just that. We can knock on legislators’ doors as well as we can knock on voters’ doors. We can have house parties to discuss issues and develop agendas as well as we can have house parties to raise money.
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p>That 2006 campaign brought out a lot of people, reenergized local Democratic organizations, taught us how to organize and campaign. People felt like they had a role and a voice in politics they hadn’t had for awhile. Then it all sorta disappeared.
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p>Same with the President, I might add.
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p>Has he been a good Governor? Yes. Has he stayed true to (most) of his values? Yes. He’s done a good job in trying economic circumstances. He deserved re-election, and most of us here supported him.
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p>The deal making. The appointments. Some of that showed more of a get along / go along thing than most liked. Sure, maybe realists expect that in politics.
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p>We were hoping to change the politics.
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p>The politics in this state aren’t going to change unless we can get from grassroots campaigning to grassroots governing. Until we get a progressive something to counter the hacks.
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p>I was at the state house for the opening ceremonies. For three ex-Speakers, all indicted and two of them convicted, to sit in a place of honor and receive the cheers and applause of the house was revolting. The rest of the fawning and prattling wasn’t much better.
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p>The grassroots was there for the Governor to work with to change this.
jconway says
Perhaps I was too bitter before, but I would agree with this sentiment
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p>
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p>And so did Deval, in every conversation I had with him, every exposure I had to them, this was what I took away. I would not have volunteered my time, my money, and my energy towards a candidate who was just another generic Democrat. And in that sense I doubt Gabrielli or Reilly would have been that much different. And it is in this sense above all others that Deval has been a disappointing and mediocre governor. To go from radically changing politics to the least of three evils as a campaign justification is a major drop off.
medfieldbluebob says
I dont think the governor is mediocre or disappointing. Especially the last couple of years. Maybe we were a bit naive and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washingtony” about this, about how easy it would be to continue the grassroots work and take on other Democrats. Especially entrenched and powerful Democrats.
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p>This is a two way street. For all the people disappointed that the grassroots didn’t continue there are others that felt their job was done on election night.
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p>And no grassroots organization emerged out of the campaign. There still isn’t. OK, maybe the gov (and Doug Rubin or John Walsh or somebody) could have created something. But, we didn’t either.
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p>There doesn’t appear to be any progressive caucus in the Legislature. Nobody seems to be willing to step up and challenge the status quo.
jimc says
I think this comment could be diaried out to yield fruitful discussion.
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p>Full disclosure, though, I’d be a bit of a gadfly on the thread. I’m not sure grassroots governing is possible, especially in a state with as much government as we have (200 full-time legislators, etc.). But what do I know?
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judy-meredith says
roarkarchitect says
Barney Frank’s district goes from Newton to Fall River and is just one town wide at points. State Representative districts split towns in half. This has been done by the democratic powers that be, to prevent nary a republican to getting elected. It has been quite effective.
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p>It’s bad for both parties and I doubt it’s going to change. At both the state level and the federal level it’s important to have a competitive party, they keep each other honest.
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p>I’m afraid it might get worse with the upcoming redistricting.
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stomv says
even if there are no political objectives… should districts be drawn to be demographically similar or demographically diverse? Should they be drawn to be economically similar or diverse? Should geographic boundaries be considered? How about transportation infrastructure? Do historic boundaries matter? Should the home address of the incumbent representative be a factor?
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p>Even if there is no political interest in drawing the boundaries, it’s not at all clear to me precisely what data should guide the drawing of the lines.
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p>Having written that, I’d love to see a US Constitutional Amendment more clearly guiding the drawing of lines be considered. It needs to be done on the federal level because both parties know that to do it state by state gives the other side of the aisle a clear advantage. Why should MA/NY/CA do it if TX/GA/FL won’t, for example?
usergoogol says
Members of at least one house of the General Court should be elected by some method of proportional representation. The more votes a party gets, they should get somewhat proportionately as many votes.
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p>A legislature should be approximately representative of those it governs. First-past-the-post representation distorts this. Of course, since Democrats are the benefactor party it’s easy to not want to give Republicans a bunch more seats in the state house. But I think that’s wrong. The big benefit of proportional representation is that it allows third parties, or perhaps more realistically sub-parties to emerge.
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p>As it stands, the Massachusetts Democratic Party is a big tent of interests which monopolizes the state house. It is very hard for voters to choose between which faction they want to support, (it’s hard to find information on state representative primaries) so there’s a big tendency for the party to tend towards inertia and the status quo. And so voters have a fairly hard time influencing who will be the Speaker of the House, and in turn have a hard time actually influencing the course of legislation.
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p>Under proportional representation, candidates could make their distinctions more obvious by breaking down into sub-parties. The more progressive Democrats could be one thing and the less progressive Democrats could be another label, and they’d all run against each other in the final election to get as many seats as they could. And yes, Republicans too could split up among the crazier Tea Party types and the more bland corporate types. And of course, maybe some sensible third parties could enter the mix. And if you end up with multiple parties in the state house, then leadership elections would require a more explicit coalition, which would increase transparency.
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p>My ideal would probably be single-transferable-vote, although open party list is fine too. The seats should probably be broken down into districts of relatively small number of seats (five? seven?) so that people who like having a local representative can still have that, and so that there’s a minimum so that completely insane parties can’t get seats.
nopolitician says
How would this work without sacrificing district-based representation? I understand that if, on the whole, Massachusetts is 30% Republican, that maybe 30% of an elected body should be Republican, and that our winner-takes-all system makes that difficult because the Republicans don’t make up a majority many districts, but what gets around that?
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p>Other than political party, should other factors be proportional? Should a percentage of a body be Jewish? Or homosexual? Or Latino? Or low-income? Or urban?
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p>What about increasing the number of representatives? That makes the representation more granular, and more likely to represent a wider variety of people.
usergoogol says
If you make a district only, say, five times bigger than the existing House districts (which are only about 40,000 people each) then the districts would still be pretty smallish and regional. This is how most countries do proportional representation, and in fact proportional representation is pretty popular in much of the world. And the argument has been made that having slightly larger multi-seat districts gives constituents more options, since it means you have your choice of asking your favorite local rep for constituent services.
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p>And I wouldn’t say it’s proportional to party. It’s proportional to votes. The difference is that instead of a district electing one person you elect several, and systems like single-transferable-vote allow that the votes get distributed in a way such that it’s not just winner-takes all. Proportional representation doesn’t have to be explicitly based on party alignment; hell, you can do it with nonpartisan elections. (Although open party list does obviously, which is a weakness, although I mentioned it because it’s simpler.) Proportional representation broadly construed just tries to make sure that if a certain kind of candidate gets 30% of the vote, then they get 30% of the seats. The motive which leads voters to vote a certain way could be party, it could be gender, it could be anything you want.
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p>To be concrete, how single transferable vote works is that it’s basically instant runoff for multiple seats. Voters rank the options. Any candidate who gets more than 1/(N+1) of the vote (where there are N seats) gets a seat, and the votes in excess of the cutoff are “transferred” to the voters’ second choice. (And if not enough candidates meet the quota, the least popular candidate is eliminated and their votes are given to the voters’ second choice, like instant runoff.) For N = 1, 1/(N+1) is 50%, which is why it’s just a generalized case of instant runoff. This tends to produce semi-proportional results most of the time.
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p>And for the record, how open party list works is that people vote for a party on one side of the ballot and simultaneously they vote for the preferred candidate from that party. Then each party gets a certain number of seats based on how many votes it got and the individual candidates get awarded seats by order of how many votes they got from their party. (There’s also closed party list, where the party organization itself writes the ranking, and various in between.)
nopolitician says
I don’t think I agree that this gives constituents more options. I live in a city that had “at large” elected representatives. We just went back to having ward-based representatives. When it was at-large, the representatives did not have to answer to the people as closely, because they could afford to brush off any individual knowing that there were plenty of other voters to back them up. The campaigns were mainly done via TV and radio advertising, and incumbents held a huge advantage because a challenger needed to raise a lot of money to compete. Incumbents mostly sided with larger, moneyed interests like developers.
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p>With ward representation, I traded in theoretical representation from 9 councilors for definite representation from 1 councilor. That councilor is in closer contact with me and his other constituents. He knows that he has to listen to the ward because that’s what he’s tasked to do.
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p>A side effect of our at-large system was that even though Springfield is about 33% non-Hispanic white, the city council was about 2/3 non-Latino white. When we went to wards, many of the ward reps were Black or Latino. Maybe instant runoff voting would have changed that, but I don’t think so — I think it was the advantage of incumbency.
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p>I think the incumbent advantage was amplified by the fact that people had to vote for 9 councilors — so two things happened; first, most people were not informed enough to choose 9 councilors wisely, so they voted by name recognition.
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p>Next, there is a mathematical problem with at-large voting — with 9 councilors, 75% of the population may want to vote against a certain councilor, but they often couldn’t agree on who to vote for instead. The opposition vote was split among 9 challengers, so an incumbent could retain office with a small percentage of the vote — theoretically about 12%. I suppose IRV could counter that effect though.
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p>I agree that competition is a good thing for elections; I would propose an open primary system with IRV. That would mean that in a heavily Democratic district, the final election could be between two Democrats (maybe a conservative Democrat and a liberal Democrat). Or between a Democrat and a Green candidate. In a more traditional district it would be Democrat vs. Republican. A more conservative district could see two Republicans. The benefit would be two strong candidates running against each other in the final election.
usergoogol says
Single transferable voting exists almost exactly to resolve the mathematical problems you mention with at-large voting. At-large voting is indeed deeply perverse. And switching to instant runoff voting for single-seat elections would be an improvement too (although I prefer range voting for single-seat elections.)
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p>Also, nine seat districts seems like far too big a number, although it depends on the voting system. Under party list, it’s a lot easier for voters to be informed, since they’re not voting for an unknown individual, but a party with a longer track record and platform. (Which of course is also the weakness, sometimes people like voting for an individual.) But in general, nine-seat districts seems indeed hopeless for elections which are individual-based.
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p>And of course, it needs to be kept in mind that district size and seats-per-district are separate issues. You can keep districts the same size but have more seats per district by just increasing the number of representatives. And of course, the State Senate already has district sizes four times the size of State House of Representatives districts.
christopher says
SMDs allow for each discrete locality to elect its own representative. I also prefer not to have to put together ad hoc coalitions. I also appreciate that we have managed not to constitutionalize parties, which this would require. If a district wants an independent representative, that is their right as well.
usergoogol says
You can have single transferable vote even with completely nonpartisan elections, parties have nothing to do with it and to some extent STV weakens parties by removing the spoiler effect. The “proportionality” of it becomes a bit more abstract in that case, but it works just as well.
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p>But also, I explicitly prefer ad hoc coalitions. People have a multitude of interests that don’t quite coincide with any fixed coalition. It seems quite preferable that people vote for the candidate who is closest to their own opinions, and then for the particulars of how to pull together a majority be decided once the representatives have been called together rather than forcing people to commit to things they don’t want before all the facts are in. I think that actually follows from the logic of having independents in government: an independent is just a party of one, who chooses to join the coalition or break away from it.
christopher says
My understanding of proportional representation means if GOP candidates got 30% of the statewide vote for their House candidates, then 30% of the House membership will be GOP. If you insist on the chamber as a whole reflecting a statewide result you cannot simultaneously guarantee that each district gets the representative it wants, nor can you even guarantee that there will be a representative from each district.
kyledeb says
That’s what we need here in Massachusetts to start making things competitive in my opinion
jconway says
They won’t get my time and money until they start building locally and from the ground up, which ironically should be the goal of a grassroots focused party. Instead you keep running the same candidates for higher office that do not succeed, and run the same selfish whiner for national office that probably loses votes you would otherwise have (Ralphie in case you didn’t guess it). In Illinois the Green Party got ballot access in 06 because of Rich Whitney, and they were smart enough to have a wide field for all the downballot races. While they didn’t win they competed statewide and in every Chicago state senate, rep, and congressional district. If they competed in some aldermanic races they might start building a coalition.
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p>Similarly in MA I would run Greens in districts that are safely held by DINOs and thus by running outside the primary the Green could pick up independent and progressive support, and maybe even some conservative support. Luc Shuster, in confession a personal friend, did a great job by winning local office and consistently winning re-election before he resigned due to grad school. It can definitely be done, just gotta build up.