For those who (like me) worry about Trump’s dark, quasi-authoritarian brand of populism and his apparent contempt for constitutionally ordered government, the polls offer a hint of solace, at least about the public if not necessarily about the president-elect. This election was a hail-Mary pass for change, not an ideological statement or an endorsement of Trump’s dark vision.

Here’s the case, in six propositions.

• Trump’s base didn’t win it for him. Trump rallied Republican partisans and locked up whites without college degrees, but there weren’t enough of those to win the race.

Evidence: Republicans and non-college whites each made up only about a third of the electorate, and there’s considerable overlap between the two groups.

• Trump won because independents broke late for him.

Evidence: Independents made up about a third of the electorate, and Trump won them by six points. He won late-deciding voters by five points, whereas among early deciders, Clinton narrowly won.

• Independents chose change over qualifications. That is, they understood that Clinton is (much) better equipped to be president, but they cared more about change and decided Trump is an acceptable risk.

Evidence: 52 percent said Clinton is qualified to be president, versus only 38 percent for Trump. On temperament to be president, Clinton beat Trump by a whopping 20 points. But qualifications and temperament weren’t what voters most wanted: 39 percent said “can bring change” is the most important candidate quality, far ahead of “right experience” (21 percent) or “good judgment” (20 percent).

• Change voters want better outcomes. They decided change trumps qualifications (pun unintended) because they believe the economy is rotten and the country is going in the wrong direction, and they didn’t think more of the same would fix either problem.

Evidence: Voters thought the economy’s condition is “not good” or “poor” by a margin of almost two to one. The same is true for country’s being on the wrong versus right track.

• The email scandal proved fatal to Clinton, because it neutralized corruption and character issues that could have tipped the scales against Trump. With corruption off the table, voters were free to weigh change versus experience—the calculus which proved decisive for Trump.

Evidence: The two candidates effectively tied on whether they’re “honest and trustworthy”: 61 percent said Clinton isn’t, and 63 percent said Trump isn’t. Similarly, 63 percent are bothered by Clinton’s use of private email, not far behind the 70 percent bothered by Trump’s treatment of women.

• Thus, this was not an ideological election. It was not an endorsement of Trump’s dark vision or authoritarian tendencies—and certainly not of his character. Rather, it was a hail-Mary pass for change: a call to shake things up and produce better outcomes.

The implication is just as Trump implied in his victory speech, when he said “We have to do a great job”: he’d better perform, or it’s curtains, and soon.

      

 

 

“Parties exist so politicians can hold each other accountable,” Rauch explains. “When that breaks down, you get pretty much unaccountability. It’s every person for him or herself. You get a kind of renegade politics … and out on the campaign trail, the people who are getting the furthest are not the people who play well with others. They’re the people who don’t play well with others.”

“We have never been in a situation where one of the two major political parties is having an organizational meltdown,” Rauch expands. “It’s not a time to daydream about third parties. It’s a time to focus on fixing the party system we’ve got.”

Also in this episode, Metropolitan Policy Program Associate Fellow Devashree Saha examines the impact of crashing oil prices on state and metro economies.

Show links:

How American politics went insane

The state of state parties, a neglected path to healthier politics

Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

Permanent trust funds: Funding economic change with fracking revenues

Thanks to audio producer Mark Hoelscher, plus thanks to Carisa Nietsche, Bill Finan, Vanessa Sauter, Jessica Pavone, Eric Abalahin, and Rebecca Viser.

Subscribe to the Brookings Cafeteria on iTunes, listen in all the usual places, and send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu.

      

 

 

On June 16, the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings released two papers examining these issues. Authors and Brookings Senior Fellows John Hudak, Jonathan Rauch, and Philip Wallach were joined by experts from government, private industry, the non-profit sector, and academia to assess the papers’ findings that state-level regulation can help rein in special interests and that big corporations can bring benefits as well as risks.

Read the papers:

• Worry about bad marijuana—not Big Marijuana
• Bootleggers, Baptists, bureaucrats, and bongs: How special interests will shape marijuana legalization

Join the conversation on Twitter at #BigMarijuana and @BrookingsGov

      

 

 

Although marijuana remains illegal under federal law, medical and/or recreational marijuana is now legal in more than two dozen states. As the federal government has largely tolerated state legalization, corporate capital and muscle have begun moving in on these new state markets. Such commercialization raises a new set of concerns about how industry dynamics may impact consumer behavior and potentially incur social costs.

In their new paper, “Worry about bad marijuana—not Big Marijuana,” John Hudak and Jonathan Rauch argue against alarmism. In analyzing the likely implications of the corporatization of marijuana, they conclude the following:

• The marijuana industry will remain a diverse one even as large corporations emerge. The Big Marijuana rubric is more misleading than helpful as a guide to policy because it oversimplifies and stereotypes what is in reality a continuum of business scales and structures.
• The marijuana industry is very unlikely to transform into something that looks like Big Tobacco during its notorious heyday. It is more likely that a commercial and regulatory model would look like the one governing alcohol, which is regulated primarily at the state level, combines mandatory with voluntary measures to police industry conduct, does a credible job of preventing antisocial and abusive commercial behavior, and has proven stable over time and broadly acceptable to the public and the industry.
• Intelligently regulated and managed, Big Marijuana can be part of the solution. Corporatization, though not without its hazards, has considerable upsides. It brings advantages in terms of public accountability and regulatory compliance, product safety and reliability, market stability, and business professionalism.
• Policy should concern itself with harmful practices, not with industry structure, and it should begin with a presumption of neutrality on issues of corporate size and market structure. Attempts to block corporatization are likely to backfire or fail. For policymakers, the concern should be bad marijuana, not big marijuana.

Read the full report, and the companion report, “Bootleggers, Baptists, bureaucrats, and bongs: How special interests will shape marijuana legalization,” by Rauch and Philip Wallach.

      

 

 

Why did legalization of marijuana break through in the face of what had long been overwhelming interest-group resistance? In a post-disruption world, how might key social and bureaucratic actors reorganize and reassert themselves? As legalization ushers in a “new normal” of marijuana-related regulation and lobbying, what kinds of pitfalls and opportunities lie ahead? In this paper, Wallach and Rauch address those questions through the prism of what political economists often call the theory of public choice—the study of how interest groups and bureaucratic incentives influence policy outcomes. Their conclusions include:

• For many years, the marijuana-policy debate was dominated by an “iron triangle” of anti-legalization interests: moralists and public-health advocates who believe marijuana use is wrong or harmful; commercial and gray-market interests with stakes in drug treatment and medical marijuana; and law-enforcement and quasi-governmental entities whose budgets and missions are sustained by the war on drugs. Those interests’ combined firepower stunted change even as public support for marijuana prohibition softened.
• To make possible the wholesale disruption that has happened with marijuana legalization, public opinion change was necessary, but it was not sufficient. Also required was the disruption of the iron triangle. That was accomplished in the late 2000s through a shrewdly crafted campaign of “asymmetric warfare” that aimed money and argumentation at the incumbent coalition’s weakest points. In particular, reformers shifted the public’s focus from harms of marijuana use to harms of marijuana criminalization.
• The rise of commercial marijuana interests and a potentially controversial “marijuana lobby” may impede legalization’s momentum as its opponents change the subject once again, from harms of criminalization to harms of corporate predation.
• The present disrupted regulatory environment is unlikely to last. Old prohibitionist interests are discombobulated and new commercial-marijuana interests are still getting organized, giving legalizing states a degree of regulatory freedom which is exceptional but probably not durable. Over time, multiple interests will coalesce and colonize the regulatory process.
• Despite widely touted concern that one or more disproportionately powerful players will dominate the regulatory system, regulatory incoherence should be a greater concern than regulatory capture. As policymakers increasingly need to navigate complex and conflicting interest-group politics, the result is at least as likely to be overregulation and misregulation as it is to be systematic underregulation.

Ultimately, Wallach and Rauch conclude that the emerging model of state-level regulation provides valuable insulation against interest-group depredations in the marijuana industry. Even if the federal government eventually legalizes marijuana, they argue, it should leave marijuana regulation primarily to the states.

      

 

 

Reformers have proposed various remedies: disclosure rules, the appointment of a liberal Supreme Court justice to reverse Citizens United, even a constitutional amendment to overturn that decision. Those long-shot strategies, however, are unlikely to create the kind of small-donor democracy that many reformers seek. Money, like water, will inevitably flow into the political system. Laws can’t do much to reduce the amount of money in politics; what they can change is where the money goes.

An easier path to improving politics

In our new Brookings paper, The State of State Parties, we suggest an easier path to improving politics—one that is right under our nose. Strengthening state political parties can help offset the clout of super PACs.

Our study, based on a survey of 56 state-party organizations plus detailed interviews with 15 of their leaders, points to the distinctive and constructive role that state parties play in American politics. In an era when politics seems to be spinning out of control, party organizations are among the few actors that seek to integrate and balance interests—for instance, by recruiting candidates with broad appeal, by playing honest broker among contending partisan factions, and by building coherent strategies among campaigns up and down the ticket. Party organizations also generate a lot of grassroots activity to mobilize volunteers and voters.

How regulations on parties increase super PAC spending

State parties are among the most heavily regulated entities in American politics, a situation that diminishes their influence relative to non-party groups. For instance, the vast majority of state parties face restrictions on the source and size of donations, and some contribution limits are unrealistically low. In Massachusetts, no donor can give more than annual aggregate of $5,000 to all local and state parties. That’s a paltry sum in statewide elections that can easily cost $55 million, including $20 million in independent expenditures.

Super PACs and other groups naturally fill the vacuum because they do not have to contend with limits on raising and spending money. Often, outside groups effectively drown out the parties. In our survey, only half the parties said they advertise on TV and radio sometimes or often, usually because they lack the resources to do more.

The figure below shows that parties’ independent spending is miniscule compared to the growing expenditures of non-party groups over the past five election cycles. In the 2014 election cycle, the parties accounted for just six percent of total independent spending in the states for which we had good data.

An especially significant finding is that restraints on political parties seem to amplify the activities and influence of outside groups. As illustrated in the table below, 65 percent of respondents in states with contribution limits to parties said that independent groups sponsor more than half or almost all political ads, compared to only 23 percent in states without contribution limits. 

In other words, independent spending is significantly lower when parties are not limited. These differences translate into electoral clout. In states with contribution limits, 65 percent of respondents said independent spending is often a key factor in gubernatorial elections, while fewer than half said the same in states with no limits.

Correlation does not prove causality, but our findings provide strong circumstantial evidence that when you restrict the parties, you get more independent expenditures by non-party groups.

It’s not hard to strengthen state parties

We recommend changes to strengthen state parties and restore them to a place of prominence in campaigns. First, state governments should raise or eliminate contribution limits so the parties can acquire sufficient resources to compete with outside actors. This would allow state parties to serve as clearinghouses for campaign money, which would bring more “dark money” toward accountability and transparency.

Second, parties should be allowed full freedom to coordinate their activities with their candidates and allied groups. This would make them more valuable to candidates and would allow the parties to perform their irreplaceable role of supporting candidates across the party ticket.

We also suggest giving parties favorable tax treatment so that donors are more likely to give to parties than candidate-sponsored super PACs or interest groups. We also recommend other regulatory changes that would encourage parties to do more grassroots work with voters.

Loosening the constraints on state parties would not stop the flow of money into politics (nothing can do that), but would channel more of the money to accountable actors. That’s why we think of this solution as building canals, not dams. And the incremental steps we propose require no sea-changes in public opinion or heroic legislation. In fact, they command support in both parties’ establishments, making them a good starting point for reform. That’s why we conclude that strengthening state parties is a realistic path toward a better balanced, more effective, and more accountable political system.

      

 

 

On March 8, the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings will host a panel of experts to discuss a groundbreaking new report that combines interviews, financial data, and new survey results to assess the state of the state parties in 2016 and offer sensible, attainable recommendations for reform.

After the session, panelists will take audience questions.

Join the conversation on Twitter at #StateParties and @BrookingsGov

      

 

 

That is what Raymond J. La Raja (a political scientist with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and I conclude in a new Brookings report. In “The State of State Parties,” the two of us, along with U-Mass (Amherst) researcher Samuel VanSant Stoddard, looked up-close and in detail at the condition of state party committees, surveying all 100 of them (56 responded) and interviewing 15 of their leaders. We also compared our findings with earlier surveys, gathered national data, and interviewed national-level party officials. Our main conclusions:

• To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of the death of state parties are greatly exaggerated. Embattled as never before, state parties are struggling to remain relevant amid growing political competition. Yet they are putting up a spirited defense and adapting intelligently by focusing on areas such as grassroots mobilization and voter data.
• The state parties’ problem is less a decline in absolute resources and standing than a decline in relative resources and standing. Keeping pace with the rapid inflow of money and messaging from outside groups and other non-traditional actors is a severe challenge.
• State parties provide important benefits to the political system as a whole, and they retain untapped potential to reduce long-term polarization and extremism by balancing the influence of purist groups.
• Restrictions intended to constrain state parties’ activities and fundraising do exactly that—with the perverse effect of weakening the parties and strengthening unaccountable outside groups. Our findings suggest that outside groups have less influence in states where the party committees have more freedom to raise money.
• Much can be done to bolster the state parties by removing rules that unnecessarily and counterproductively tilt the playing field against them. We recommend raising or eliminating limits on contributions to state parties, eliminating restrictions on state parties’ ability to coordinate activities with candidates, narrowing overbroad federal regulation, and pruning other rules. Making contributions to state parties tax-deductible also deserves consideration. 

Beyond its conclusions, our report provides a rich account of what state parties are doing and how well they’re doing it in the real world. The report’s findings are data driven and complemented with rich quotations and stories.

The disorganization of American politics is a generational problem that will take years to sort out. Being political realists, La Raja and I believe reforms need to be gradualist and doable, and they need to cut with, rather than against, the grain of everyday political incentives. State parties have been overlooked for too long, and they offer fertile ground for practical and attainable solutions for the growing dysfunction in American politics.

      

 

 

In a new paper detailing the challenges facing state parties, co-authors Jonathan Rauch and Raymond J. La Raja surveyed 56 Democratic and Republican state parties and conducted interviews with 15 state-party leaders. To gauge how state parties have changed, the authors compare their results to those of earlier surveys, and review years of financial data. The resulting report is the most extensive collection of data and information available on state parties’ activities, spending, and goals.

Key findings include:

• Relative to the political competition, state parties are losing ground (even if their absolute resources have remained stable).
• Well-meaning laws and policies impose disadvantages on state parties; restrictions intended to constrain state parties’ activities and fundraising do exactly that, with the perverse effect of weakening the parties and strengthening unaccountable outside groups.
• Outside groups have less influence in states where party committees have more freedom to raise money.
• Much can be done to strengthen state parties by raising or eliminating limits on contributions to state parties, eliminating restrictions on state parties’ ability to coordinate activities with candidates, narrowing overbroad federal regulation, and pruning other rules. Making contributions to state parties tax-deductible also deserves consideration.

“State parties provide important benefits to the political system as a whole,” argue Rauch and La Raja, “and they retain untapped potential to reduce long-term polarization and extremism by balancing the influence of purist groups.”