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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host Rich Helppie. Today, our episode is about voting and all manner of voting, including proportional voting, with our guest, Eli Zupnick. The Common Bridge, of course, is available at substack.com. Please go to substack.com, enter The Common Bridge in your search engine, and either read the material or even better, subscribe; there's no cost. We're available on most podcast outlets, on YouTube TV, and of course at Mission Control Radio on your Soundgarden app. People are frustrated; we see people voting for a team - they're voting for red or blue - or they're voting against the candidate. If you're in a primary state right now you're seeing the so prevalent negative ads. People aren't voting enthusiastically for a candidate. They're not voting for a platform or a policy necessarily - if you can actually find information about that. So we're stuck. Our guest today is one of the central figures in a group called Fix Our House. Their website is www.FixOurHouse.org. Eli Zupnick believes that winner take all elections [are] just two hyper-partisan political parties caught in what he calls a "doom loop of hatred and gridlock". And frankly, it's really hard to argue with that position. But the binary, us versus them, politics that we've talked about so frequently on The Common Bridge, it just creates total war between the parties. It does not help the citizenry, just escalates the stakes around each election, and incentivizes the politicians and the partisan media to dangerously dehumanize the other side. We've talked about the parallels of today with the American Civil War of 1861 many times on this podcast and this video too, discussion and of course, in our writings on substack.com. I hope we all want to avoid a civil war. And so today, we welcome to The Common Bridge, Eli Zupnick. Eli, welcome.
Eli Zupnick
Thank you. It's great to be on. And I appreciate you covering these very important issues.
Richard Helppie
Well, thank you. It's the least we can do to try to get the information out. Our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests. So tell us where did you spend your early days and maybe your academic preparation and a little thumbnail about your professional work?
Eli Zupnick
Sure. I grew up in New York. I was born in Queens, New York. I grew up on Long Island. I went to Queens College and like many people in college didn't really know what I wanted to do coming out. So I was into politics. I was interested in what was going on. It was 2005 so we were a couple of years after 9/11, the war in Iraq, the Bush years, people were more politically engaged. I decided I want to get involved. So I jumped on political campaigns. I didn't really know what else to do. I worked on campaigns in New Jersey, I worked on a campaign in Rhode Island. I got very excited about a young United States Senator from Chicago named Barack Obama, who was making some waves and getting ready to run. So I jumped on his campaign. Nobody thought he had a shot at the time, I didn't think he would win but I thought it'd be an interesting way to advance a politics of hope and of optimism and of bringing the country together in the way that he was talking about in 2006, 2007, 2008. So I worked on his campaign and we won and I decided to move to DC with my girlfriend - now currently my wife - we moved in 2009. I got a job with Senator Patty Murray from Washington State. I ended up working for her for ten years. I started off as her deputy press secretary then her press secretary, I worked on what was called - for some of your guests, some of your viewers may remember - the Super Committee and the Murray-Ryan budget deal where we had a series of fiscal crises and a series of budget impasses culminating in a government shutdown. Senator Murray and Congressman Ryan were able to work together on a deal to to keep things going, to patch things for a little bit. That was a formative experience for me. I stuck around for a few more years after that as her communications director for all of her committee work, Washington State work, her personal office work and her leadership office work. She was the assistant Democratic leader in the United States Senate. Over that period I also went off to work on campaigns. I worked on campaigns in Iowa or campaign in Connecticut for Chris Murphy; I worked on Senator Murray's re-election campaign. I took some time off from my official work to do that campaign work. Then after I left in 2019, after seeing how broken things were, and how much worse things were getting; every single year I was there, it was getting worse and worse and worse. And it seemed that we couldn't go on this way. I decided I wanted to commit myself to democracy reform and trying to fix the structures that were broken because one of my big lessons I saw inside was that it wasn't that the people were bad. There are some bad people, there are some people who get into it for the wrong reasons. There are some people who are corrupt or power hungry or egotistical, mean, nasty people. But there are also a lot of good people, a lot of people who go to DC because they genuinely want to make a difference. People who could be making more money or did make more money or have more influence somewhere else, but genuinely are committed to public service. But they are in a broken system, a system that just does not reward that, that incentivizes everything in the opposite direction: gridlock, dysfunction, rancor, fighting, and I wanted to try and change the system. So when I came out of the Senate, I got to work on a filibuster reform campaign. Many people think that the filibuster promotes bipartisanship. What I realized inside is that the filibuster actually stymies bipartisanship because the minority has such a strong incentive and ability and tool to block everything. I thought that filibuster reform would be the best way to make sure that the party in charge is held accountable for whatever they do; actually has the ability to execute on that. Because it never made sense to me that...let's say Democrats were in control of government or Republicans were in control of government and they were going to be held accountable by the voters if they couldn't actually pass the things they said they would pass, then how can they be held accountable? What was the point of voting them in if they couldn't actually implement their agenda? So I saw filibuster reform as an important first step to unlock the door to actually making our policymakers, our lawmakers, accountable, trying to get the gridlock a little bit eased, making sure people knew that if legislation was moving, they had to actually work with the other side to improve the legislation or influence the legislation instead of just blocking the legislation - which is the current status quo - and also to just open the door to further reforms. Because unfortunately, right now, there's no way you get 60 votes for anything. So if there's any chance at reforms, it has to be with voters putting a party in charge saying they're going to make reforms and then them actually doing that. Ideally, it's bipartisan. Ideally, it has major buy in. But I think we're at a crisis point right now, where voters say they want reform and one party doesn't want to do it, we should still be able to get those reforms. So I worked on that for a little bit then I got to know a political scientist named Lee Drutman. He's at the New America Foundation, he did a ton of work on lobbying and corruption, he wrote a great book on lobbying for anyone who's interested in it and then how that influences and corrupts and hurts the system. Then he turned his attention to structural reform. His big focus, he wrote a book called "Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop: The Case For Multiparty Democracy in America". His thesis, as you laid out as you were introducing me, is that we have a two party system for really the first time in American history that we've - and I could go into this in a bit - how things have shifted. But for the first time, we have a true two party system in a structure that just doesn't work for two parties, we now have two parties that are butting heads all the time; we're trapped in this binary, where it's us versus them. The parties have sorted sort of geographically so most people live next to people who vote the same way they do. They don't know people who are in the other party anymore, they see them as the enemy. Every election is so high stakes, because if the other side wins, it's the absolute opposite of everything you believe in. And his thesis, that I buy based on what I've seen and what I've learned, is that we need more parties. It's not that parties are the problem. It's that two parties are the problem. It's the binary choice. As you noted before, you choose the lesser of two evils, and no party has any incentive to say what they're for. They just say what the other side is against. So I'll stop there. I could go into any of that
Richard Helppie
We should unwrap all of that today. And I think it'll be a fascinating conversation because the Republicans and Democrats have actually enshrined their position into law, it's very difficult to get ballot access. We've talked about that on the show before, about who can actually get on the ballot. There are certain districts that quite frankly, there's just despair because it doesn't matter what your view is, your voice isn't going to be heard. You're just not important because population center can dictate so much about the outcomes. I mean, my home state of Michigan, we have most of the population down in a little corner. Trying to win a statewide office is very difficult against that kind of alignment. But voting is central to self-rule and our form of democracy is a constitutional republic. I know that the framers, including George Washington, talked about the dangers of a party getting too much power and inflicting the tyranny of the majority, that's why checks and balances have been built into the system; they've been done by the Constitution, by rules like the filibuster that perhaps has outlived its usefulness. But those checks and balances are under great stress because of the hyper-partisanship that we're seeing. I do want to get into proportional voting and why people vote the way they do today. I love the notion about more than two major political parties, I have been around long enough to experience - at the presidential level - a couple of serious independent runs that did indeed change the outcome of at least one of the elections; set us on to a different course. I'm also a person that traveled both for learning and recreation and doing business in all 50 states. I've been in the wealthiest areas and I've been in some of the most distressed areas; in Appalachia and inner cities. I find that our country is made up of generous and good people. Yet, the way that we're talked about in the predominant media, and the way that we're talked about by the political class doesn't reflect that at all. Theoretically, they're working for us. Even in the last presidential run, we had a presidential candidate look a blue collar auto worker in the eye and say, "hey, I don't work for you" and I was a little shocked by that. But Eli, in the Fix Our House and the fix our Senate, take us through the basic building blocks of this. Also many people in our audience are not as sophisticated as you are on the political machinery. So if you could break it down - like what issue or problem is being addressed - in a concise way - what's the solution and how do you think this would work in practice?
Eli Zupnick
Sure. There are two major problems that we need to solve, or that I'm focused on solving. There's the problem of the two party binary; the fact that we have two parties in America. As you noted, we have a big country, a diverse country with lots of viewpoints, we have lots of ideologies, we have lots of priorities. There's no reason that 350 million Americans should have to choose between one of two parties, should have to be jammed into a Democrat or Republican, or blue or red; it's always felt kind of funny to me. I think a whole lot of people...that if you are a, let's say pro-choice person who supports gun rights, or a pro-life person who thinks we should have Medicare For All, there is no home for you. There is no...you have to choose to jettison some part of your priority, policy priorities, or your ideology and choose you are on the blue team or the red team because those are the only choices you get. So the most important thing we can do is break that loop, that doom loop that we're in, where everyone has to choose one side or the other; then you're on that team and then you hate the other team. Then there's fighting and then you don't want your team to compromise to the other team, because that can help them win. The way to do that, the best way to do that, is to add more parties. Nobody has ever said, we have to choose between the lesser of three evils. It's just not a thing. Once you have more parties, you have more ability to represent the public, you can have different groups form, you can have people actually express their true beliefs. People can be represented. You can have a Democratic Socialist Party, you can have a Libertarian Party, you can have a party for people who care deeply about the environment, you can have a party for people who care deeply about traditional values, however they define that. There are many ways parties can form. Now you don't want a system like Israel or some other countries where you have 20 parties or 25 parties sometimes. We could talk about how, what would make sense for America. I think Lee Drutman, our co-founder, who has led the way on many of these ideas and policies, thinks that we should have about four to six parties; [that] would make sense for a country like America. But that changes the dynamic a whole lot, that makes it so that you can form different coalitions. If there's 70% support in America for let's say, clean energy and climate change legislation, you can form coalition's that can get to that 70% because it is much more reflective of the American people. So what we want to do with Fix Our House is we think the way to get there is you need a structural change to the single winner district system. Right now in the House of Representatives, we have 435 districts, every single district elects one member; if you get a plurality in that district, you win the seat. So if you get 40%, and your opponent gets 35%, and your other opponents gets 25%, the one with 40% wins, even though 60% of the people voted for another person in the district. And when we are dealing, right now, with districts that are gerrymandered and non-competitive in the latest redistricting - that's just wrapping up right now - it's estimated that 90% of the districts in America will not be competitive, meaning the winner will essentially be chosen before we even get to November by low turnout, primary elections where tiny slivers of the districts - usually the most extreme elements of each party - are selecting members. That is not representative. I mean, I think a lot about how in Oklahoma, 33% of voters voted for President Biden; in Massachusetts, 33% of voters voted for Trump in the 2020 election. They have no representation. Massachusetts has nine members of Congress, they're all Democrats, Oklahoma has five members of Congress, they're all Republicans. But that doesn't actually reflect the reality of Oklahoma and Massachusetts
Richard Helppie
Aren't you really making a case, though, that the behavior is partisan. I say it this way. So in the district that I vote in, because of the way it was before we had a public commission that did the redistricting - and I think they did a pretty good job with it - but we had a very conservative Republican, he won comfortably. His office was unresponsive - because I did try - and we've been now redistricted and now we're in a district that's likely to go Democrat. And I think it's a reasonable Democrat that is there. But I don't like to think that I'm not represented because if the job is to be beholden to the party, well, then I wouldn't be represented on either/or because I am an independent. But if they're representing the interests of the people that live in our communities, they should be doing that over party. So how did we get this flipped around where the loyalty goes to Kevin McCarthy under one majority or to Nancy Pelosi under another one?
Eli Zupnick
I blame the two party duopoly. I think that the fact that we are structurally set up to essentially block third parties from being formed means that there's a duopoly and when you see a monopoly or a duopoly anywhere in the world - whether it's consumer goods or anything else - the duopoly or the monopoly, they have no incentive to do better. Their incentive is to entrench their own power, to pursue their priorities. And like you said, it has evolved to be that it is leadership driven in the two parties. Individual members have very little influence almost all of the time, except for rare cases where they're able to find some way to leverage something or other in. But if there were more parties, if people felt that your representative was too beholden to leadership and would vote for someone else who is going to do something different in our current two party system, there would be no chance they could do something different. But if they were able to affiliate with a different party, or if they knew that, in their district, let's say it's a very Republican district, and the Republican nominee knew there was no way a Democrat would ever be elected in that district, he or she has no incentive to ever be responsive to that district, they know they're a shoo-in, the only thing they have to worry about is a primary challenge. As long as they cater to the extreme elements of their base, they're fine. But if there were multiple parties that could be more reflective of the district, maybe it's a conservative party that's slightly different than the Republican Party - maybe it's more of a chamber of commerce Republican Party, maybe it's more of a religious, traditional values, pro-life party in some districts - then that Republican candidate would have to actually cater to the voters, he or she wouldn't have the luxury of just sitting pat, focusing on DC, maybe focusing on the lobbying career they're going to get after they leave DC or leave Congress, and they would actually have to be responsive. So I think so many of our problems go back to this two party system that we have and that we just can't break out of it without some changes.
Richard Helppie
And if I understand it from reading some of the material from the Fix Our House - and again, it's www.FixOurHouse.org. - you use Wisconsin as an example, and that the proposal would be let's take Wisconsin from its current...was it 11 districts today...(Eli Zupnick: I believe so.) down to two. Each of those districts, though, would have multiple representatives in the Congress. If somebody reached the threshold, I think in your theoretical outline it was ten percent. Then they would get a ten percent representation. What do you think the behaviors of the two major parties would be in a situation where there were five seats up for grabs? Pick an area of southern Wisconsin.
Eli Zupnick
I think what would what we would see is...so just to take a step back for a minute; right now, the reason that third parties have such trouble forming - in addition to the ballot access issues and other items that you mentioned that you've had guests talk about before, which are critical - one major problem is that third partie can only be essentially spoilers in almost every election in the country. Because if you are let's say, a conservative, and you are running; there's a district where there's a Republican, a Democrat, let's say a Green Party candidate and a Libertarian candidate...you are a Libertarian, let's say, in that district. If you vote for the Libertarian, you are essentially helping the Democrat because there is no way a Libertarian is going to get a plurality, there's no way a green candidate is going to get a plurality. So every vote for a person who has no chance of winning is essentially a vote for the person you like even less - the Democrat in this case.
Richard Helppie
You're echoing the words of the famous conservative scholar, writer, intellectual, William Buckley, who said, vote for the most electable conservative. (Eli Zupnick: That's right.) What he said was, don't necessarily vote your conscience or vote who you think is the best but make a calculation on who's electable, which again, fuels that duopoly.
Eli Zupnick
Exactly. That's the way things are, it's not the way things ought to be. We should be able to have a democracy where people can vote their conscience, they can vote for what they actually believe, for the kind of country they want to see, for the policies they truly believe in and not have to worry that they're throwing their vote away, or even worse, helping the other side. Because there isn't another side, there's only two sides. So what we want to do - what Lee has proposed, what many other advanced democracies do, what more and more people are realizing is the right thing to do - is to have a proportional system where if you have a district, let's say, we combine five districts into one, into one larger five member district, and 40% of that district's votes go to the Democrats, 40% goes to Republicans and 20% goes to maybe a regional party, maybe it's the Chamber of Commerce party. Democrats would send two members to Congress, Republicans would send two members to Congress and that third party would send one member; it would be in proportion to the votes they receive - everyone would be represented instead of having districts where half the district feels like they're not represented, where half the district feels like the other congressman just doesn't align with their values. Anyone who can reach that threshold of, in this case, 20%, if they could get 20% of the vote [they] would be represented. It's more representative. It's more fair, it breaks up the red and blue states because you'd have Democrats, you'd have liberal members coming from Oklahoma, because there are places in Oklahoma where liberals can get 20% of the district, you'd have conservatives in states like Massachusetts.
Richard Helppie
I don't think even as individuals we're that binary, and I've talked about it on my show. I've had guests on my show; we're not painted red, we're not painted blue and states aren't painted red, states aren't painted blue. In fact, I've just been disgusted by that whole shorthand, treating it like a sports team. But I could see that perhaps in practice, an independent running and saying, look, I'm not going to be beholden to Kevin McCarthy, I'm not going to be beholden to Nancy Pelosi, I'm going to run as an independent. All I need to get is one out of five votes, in this hypothetical case, to represent in Washington as the guy that's got a lot more inside experience than I have. So I'm asking this completely out of ignorance, but my understanding is that oftentimes, the speaker or the minority leader can say, look, we control a lot of money for congressional re-election campaigns and we control committee assignments. We're going to need your vote here, or you're going to get in a backwater committee and not on international relations or appropriations or something like that. Is that true?
Eli Zupnick
It is true, it's become increasingly true. The Congress, again, with some exceptions, and not all of the time, is very leadership driven. It's very centralized. Many members really don't have many options or ability to introduce their own policies that have a chance of getting signed into law. A lot of that has to do with the fact that there's just very few bills that move. I mean, it used to be the case when we had a slightly different system - and not to paint too rosy a picture of the past, there were problems then too of course - but it used to be the case that there was a long committee process where members had input, they had amendments brought to the floor. It'll be done in a bipartisan way. There'll be amendments on the floor, there will be debate. Now if you look at how legislation gets passed, it's all we get to the precipice of a crisis and then leadership comes together on a deal and it gets jammed through at the last second, or there's some back-peddling. I mean, we're just seeing right now, as of the end of July for those who are paying attention to the news right now, we're seeing that Senator Manchin and Senator Schumer work together to come to a deal that's going to move to the floor and probably get signed into law. I personally think it's a good deal. I personally think that it should be signed into law, but I don't think it was a good process. I don't think it was a process that we should aspire to; having two senators in a backroom, figuring out exactly what they can do, and then coming out with likely very little changes - maybe a few, it sounds like they're talking about some changes - but no changes and just jamming that through. Again, I don't blame them, I think they have to do that because we are in a system right now where the minority just is going to try to block them and they need to do whatever they can do to deliver some results that President Biden ran on.
Richard Helppie
One of the things that's missing in this whole debate or is hard to find; it's what's actually in the bill. Again, I'm fairly astute and I'm a voracious reader with a very high reading comprehension, very high speed reading, I had to go dig to find out what was actually in the bill. You can't turn on a so-called news program and say, all right, we're going to do away with carried interest, but we're going to preserve the cap on state and local taxes - both things which I'm fully in favor of - and it just talks about the horse race and the trading aspect of this, instead of what's actually in the legislation. That, to me, is something that we need to get past. We still haven't figured out health care or firearms, student debt. These are all real issues affecting a broad swath of people. But people here in the upper Midwest, we're wondering, is anybody on the coast listening? And again, I travel and spend extended periods of time in all those locations so I think I've some understanding of that disconnect. I remember Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan meeting together over cocktails and figuring out what to do in the best interest of the country; Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton sitting down and saying, okay, we've got ten agenda items, how do we get through? Those of you that will remember, Bill Clinton ran on; it's a third way, not Republican, not Democrat. After the shellacking in the midterms, he said, hey, I got dragged so far to the left by my own party, I didn't recognize myself. He made the steps and we need that statesmanship. Then, while I was an admirer of Barack Obama, he never invited John Boehner up to the White House to sit down and figure out how to do things. I'm pretty certain that our current president hasn't invited congressional leaders to come up to Camp David and talk about things. Certainly the immediate past president only wanted people there to celebrate him, I think, [laughter] something like [that]...Lord knows what it is. But again, I think that speaks to this unsatisfied populism that's in the country today, that we let a guy like Trump in. We have to examine how that happened and it's not because people are crazy or stupid, they're mad and they're frustrated - everything you're talking about. So Eli, what do critics say about proportional voting? If you were to take somebody that was an proponent of keeping things the way they are or doing something different, what arguments would you expect to hear that you'd have to react to?
Eli Zupnick
That's a great question. I think there are some people - and I will say it is a diminishing number of people - who think that the status quo is okay, who think that the structures are sound and that all we need are better politicians. I don't think that's right. I think that, of course, we could use better politicians. I would hope that more people who care about our country, and who care about government working well and who have a vision for what we can do when we come together, that they run for office, and that they want to lead and they want to step up, but we can have the best people, we can have all of those people run for office and win and they're still going to be stuck in a system that is broken. It is a system that doesn't work. They're going to fall right into those grooves and it's going to be just as bad and continue to get worse the way it is now. So I would say to those people that they are not wrong, that we need better people, we need people who want to work together, we need people who want to spend more time together, who want to talk to each other, want to learn about each other; that's necessary, but it's not sufficient. We need structural changes that allow those good people and those people who want to do good work that allow them to succeed, that incentivize the kind of traits and processes and outcomes that we all want. So that's the first critique that we get. And I think that it's an important one to to address. The other one that comes up a lot that isn't exactly a critique, but there are a lot of people - and I think you talked about this sometimes too - who think that parties are the problem, who think that the best thing that could happen is for partisanship to decrease and for individual candidates to be more of the focal point of our politics; where individual independent candidates, people like Mike Bloomberg, maybe or Jesse Ventura, back in the day in Minnesota. I think that comes from a good place but I don't think it's ultimately right, because I think this, again, comes a lot from the work of Lee Drutman and many others who have focused on the political science of this. I think parties are important. Parties help organize policy issues, they help organize voters, they're sustainable. They don't depend on one single person who could leave, who could have a scandal, who could decide that they don't believe that thing anymore. I mean, I'm from New York. I mentioned before, actually my first job in politics, I interned in Mayor Bloomberg's City Hall in New York. I liked Mayor Bloomberg, I thought he did a lot of good things. I don't agree with everything he did but I thought he did a lot of good things. When he left, he was gone. There was no organization, there was nothing carrying on his vision or his ideology or his values. It just went away. Parties are very important. I think the problem is two parties. The problem is everyone getting jammed into one of two parties. So when people think about partisanship being bad, now they are right, because partisanship in a two party system is bad, it becomes a team sport, becomes an us versus them. But with multiple parties, parties are very valuable. There are a lot of people in the reform community right now who are oriented toward things like open primaries, or top five primaries, where anyone can run and the top few candidates go in. I think - don't get me wrong - that is an improvement on the status quo but I ultimately think that it doesn't lead us to where we want to go, which is to create more parties, and have people value parties and have people realize that parties can be a place where they get together with like minded people in their communities across the country on values that they share. It's not a team, it's not entertainment. It's a place where if you care about your country, and you care about issues, you join with other people who feel the same way. You try to persuade people who don't yet feel that way. Then you go out, you vote, you count the votes, and you're represented in our representative government.
Richard Helppie
Well, you know, if it's not a team and it's not entertainment, I don't think the cable, so-called, news networks are going to carry this podcast in any way, shape, or form, because that's kind of their business model. And not to go off on a tangent on Mayor Bloomberg but he mounted a good campaign and was destroyed by the partisan system in a primary on a gotcha question. I mean, the right answer would have been look, we signed NDAs so everybody quits talking about whatever the dispute was and so we're done talking about it. That's the only thing he could have said. But it's like he just wasn't practiced at that. Elizabeth Warren, who I have a high regard for her, she just pounded the guy right out of the race at that point. Eli, when I think about what people might say, I imagine someone up in the Keewenaw Peninsula of Michigan. Do you know where the Keewenaw Peninsula is? (Eli Zupnick: I don't.) Okay. It's that little horn shaped thing that sticks up into Lake Superior. It's further away from Detroit than New York City. I could think about a voter up there saying, hmm, I've got this big, urban, left leaning environment there, 600 miles from me. Are they going to represent me under this? Or what about my rep that covers the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, maybe I feel a little more comfortable with that rep that I know hunts the same forest that I hunt and conserves the same natural resources, won't let new minds come in and dump tailings into the Great Lakes and so forth. How would you answer that voter?
Eli Zupnick
That's a great question. And that is absolutely one critique of multi-member districts is that it pulls members a little bit further from where they live, because you have larger districts that have five members instead of a smaller district with just one member. There are ways to address that. I think, to the first point about them feeling not represented, they would still get to be represented because they would vote. They would still be able to vote for members that would go and represent them; maybe it's regionally, maybe the people in different regions of Michigan would vote...
Richard Helppie
There's just not enough of them up there. They can't overcome Southeast Michigan. They're just...the numbers just don't work.
Eli Zupnick
But they have one member that represents them right now, I think, and so that member it would be...if it's a sparsely populated region...(Rich Helppie: large geography, yes.) That's right. So it'd be a very large district, but they would be represented in proportion to their votes. So there's about roughly a million people in every congressional district right now, maybe 700,000 to a million people. So the 700,000 to a million people in the current congressional district up there would have 1/5 of the representation of the larger districts. So they would be represented in proportion. What you see in other countries that have systems like this, is that smart, innovative politicians think about ways that they can best represent the people. So if there's, let's say, an environmental issue that you mentioned that people care a lot about, smart politicians in that area would talk to voters about that issue, knowing that there could be 20% of that district that cares a lot about that. And that's all you need to get a seat. The other thing I'll say is that many people who talk about proportional representation and multi-member districts pair that with ideas for expanding the House. Because if you expand the House of Representatives - and there's nothing in the Constitution that sets the number of representatives, in fact, as I'm sure you know, it's expanded many, many times over the years until the early 1900s, when it stopped - but there's nothing that caps the House of 435. And if you expand the House, then you're able to make multi-member districts that are smaller, because you have more members. You can have, let's say the Upper Peninsula, or Michigan regions more generally, have more members and have larger districts member-wise, but that still have the same space.
Richard Helppie
That'd be a very thoughtful way to go about it. And again, I'm intrigued by the idea. I do agree with your basic premise that we have a system that's broke that is becoming increasingly unresponsive. Before we move onto some other things I'm going to share with you an actual conversation I witnessed and it was about firearms. It was a fellow - with a house in Scarsdale and apartment in Manhattan - saying that nobody should own a gun, etc., talking to someone from Northern Michigan, who says, well, the first responders to me are the State police; they're an hour away. It shows that diversity that we have. When sport utility vehicles were new, there were people living in Southern California [saying] it's a horrible thing, we can't live with them. People that live where there's snow, they're like, hey, what a great idea, we're not going to be stuck anymore and have to get pulled out. So I think that this needs to be done thoughtfully, and perhaps adding more people. Eli, before I forget, who funds Fix Our House?
Eli Zupnick
We rely on a mix of private donations; individuals who support this work and who care about democracy reform, and foundations. Thankfully, there's been a lot of energy and interest among large foundations, philanthropies on democracy reform, people who see that...(Rich Helppie: Who are a couple of the big ones?) So one of the big ones is Arnold Ventures. Arnold Ventures is one; they fund a number of democracy reform groups. It's a couple that comes from Houston, they were in the energy business, and they're dedicating a lot of their money and resources now to criminal justice reform and education and democracy reform. They are our primary funder at this point. They are very generous with democracy reform issues, they've funded a lot of the rank choice vote, the final five and other issues. Anyone who wants to check them out should check out ArnoldVentures.org, I believe. They're our primary funder. But we also have a number of smaller funders that just care about this issue - a lot of individuals - and I'll say anyone who wants to donate could go to FixOurHouse.org/donate. If you want to support us, we rely on those donations.
Richard Helppie
Would they be able to see the names of the large donors?
Eli Zupnick
We don't have them up on our website. But that's actually a great idea. We do care about transparency. We just got off the ground a few months ago and that's something that we should absolutely do.
Richard Helppie
You mentioned your co-founder, Lee Drutman, and [he was] actually the way I located you for this podcast. Thank you, by the way, so much for joining us. He had a survey, a quiz, in the New York Times and I'd encourage everyone to get that because if you take the quiz, it's 20 questions. It's quite simple. And he says, okay, this is one of the six parties you belong to. I played with this, it's quite accurate and really well done. Mr. Druckman wrote the book "Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop", and he talks about parties called the Growth and Opportunity Party, the American Labor Party. What's really interesting is how close those two parties are policy-wise and where they come out on the grid. But if it was put into our current media environment, it would be like we're digging trenches to fight the next Civil War. Most people are pretty much in the center culturally - live and let live - most people are wanting us to take care of those who are in need and giving opportunity for those that have the ability. Would Andrew Yang's Forward Party be helpful or make things worse? It seems like he's kind of coming at this from a national level, if I understand what he's up to.
Eli Zupnick
Well, I think that anyone who is out there talking about the need for third parties, it's helpful. I think it is a good thing. Anyone who's talking about the challenges or the problems with our two party duopoly, the fact that they don't actually represent the vast majority of people across the country, I think that's a good thing. I would say it's hard to see them winning in the short term, but I absolutely value [it]. In fact, one of the people that Andrew Yang has partnered with is a man named Myles Taylor; people may remember him as Anonymous in the Trump White House. He's a conservative Republican who is now a Never Trump Republican conservative...
Richard Helppie
He's a kid. (Eli Zupnick: Yeah, he is...) 28 years old. And that to me is a great example of - I hate to cut you off, but - it was because it was anti-Trump, it was promoted as being something he's not.
Richard Helppie
We may have to agree to disagree on this one.
Richard Helppie
That's just one, where, sure that young man has a career ahead of himself and so forth. And I don't know him from Adam but the way it was portrayed in the popular press, when the speculation [was], oh, was it really Melania Trump that wrote this, and maybe it was Mike Pence, and so forth. This, to me, is one of the problems that we've talked a lot about journalism and journalism reform and getting out of the cheerleading for this. Again, I'm not talking about this guy as a person, but he's a very young inexperienced person who did a thing that got amplified way beyond what its actual content was. I'll let you have the last word on that.
Eli Zupnick
Sure, I know him a little bit; the only thing I'll say there - and I agree with you about the media, the media circus around it - from what I can see, he is a conservative who truly wants to have a pathway in politics for fellow conservatives who don't think that Trump is the right way to go. So what I've admired about him and seeing what he's been doing is nothing to do with the anonymous work that he did before, but all about tackling the structural issues that are getting in the way of conservatives who care about conservative policies, but just can't currently get themselves to support Trump. And there's a good chance - I know you may disagree with this, he sent me some stuff in advance that I read on you and your thoughts on 2024 - I think there's a good chance Trump will be the nominee in 2024.
Richard Helppie
If he is, the Republicans are done, I mean, in the history of politics can you imagine anybody being better prepared for op resurge? All you'd have to do is play Trump's hits. This is the guy that wasn't prepared for the job, didn't take it seriously to learn it, and has massive personal issues. I think the Trump phenomena really was a result of a lot of things that you're talking about, that people are just frustrated, disgusted. And it's like, we don't care. Even Michael Moore, who's an ardent progressive, said, look, this was just a big middle finger to the establishment. That's the way I look at it; it's a cry for help, like, hey, pay attention. I've hired a lot of executives, I've worked with a lot of executives, and I'll tell you a little survey that I do. I've been on executive search committees - not for profits, for profits, public, private, fairly broad - and I talked to other people that have been there and I said, look, if we were on the committee to select a chief executive and they brought us these two finalists, what would we do? In one hundred percent of the cases they said, we'd go back to the search firm and tell them to go get us more candidates. [Laughter]. So if the Republicans are stupid enough to nominate Donald Trump, they will deserve the shellacking that they're going to get. The guy never did anything to expand his base.
Eli Zupnick
The problem is, and the reason that I am more worried than you is, I think he very likely will be the nominee if he runs, nothing is certain but I think he very likely will be the nominee if he runs, and I think he has a chance of winning, he has a decent chance of winning. I wish, as someone who is more on the left side and a Democrat, I wish it were true that if he were the nominee, it would be a guaranteed Democratic victory. That's what I thought in 2015 and 2016. I vowed I would not make that mistake again because you can't underestimate the frustration and anger - much of it legitimate - of the American people. People are sick and tired of the government. There's a strong anti-incumbent sentiment and if President Trump runs again, I think there could be enough anger and desire to just up-end the system, as you alluded to, as you mentioned before, that he could win. But the reason that that's possible is because there are only two choices, because everyone would choose what they perceive to be the lesser of two evils. If he can get the plurality of Republican voters in the primary to support him, which by all polling right now, he very well could - he's far ahead of DeSantis and others in much of the polling that's done, especially in some of these early primary states - who knows if the others actually run. If he gets a plurality, he will be the Republican nominee, and anyone who wants to vote against the incumbent will only have one choice - Donald Trump.
Richard Helppie
I would hope that doesn't occur, first of all, and I will tell you this as a non-aligned person who's supported Democrats and Republicans for a very long time, some more ardently than others. My personal take on this, and I've written on this, I wrote a column a couple of months ago called "Advice to Democrats, Advice to Republicans," and my advice to the Republicans was dump Trump. I said that consistently, for the five or six years that he's been around in public office. He's going to yell, he's going to get mad, he's going to call names; so what. And then he's going to go away. Advice to the Democrats is quit gaslighting and start governing. I mean, if you're a party that can't come up with a better answer than Donald Trump, and that's what I think they ran into in '16. They thwarted a populist in Bernie Sanders - who I believe would have beaten Trump - for Hillary Clinton, who just ran an arrogant campaign. I know many Democrat women who would not vote for her because of her enabling. Here in the state of Michigan, which surprisingly went for Trump, Hillary Clinton never went to an auto plant. I mean, this is the cradle of organized labor. We have freeways named after Walter Ruther and like, you don't come here and don't go to a union hall? She didn't do it and lost the election. So maybe I'm too optimistic, but Trump's collapsing and I think he's been pumped up by all the investigations that have gone nowhere. It's like fuel. It's like that; it just builds him up. I've written and talked about what the results of this January 6 committee is going to do. If they indict and there's a defense, that's basically going to be more fuel. Maybe the indictment's unavoidable, I don't know. But I just don't want to see the guy in office for anything. He just needs to go away.
Eli Zupnick
I completely agree with that. I do worry that may not happen too soon, but I would also say he is a symptom of the problem. He is a particularly toxic symptom. But him going away won't make it all better. We're still going to have problems.
Eli Zupnick
Okay, and by the way, I'm one hundred percent on board with you, Eli, on that; on everything you just said stamp "yes." If you had a third party or a fourth party, fifth party and you were the guy and you said that, you'd have my vote, okay, that's because I agree on everything you said, especially with the toxicity; he took a bad situation and made it worse. Have any of the ideas here been back tested? And what I mean by that, is that, if we said, hey, imagine if the 2016 election was played out under these rules what would be different? Has anybody ever done that? I'd love to read that and obviously it'd be theoretical to a degree, but I'd sure love to read it.
Eli Zupnick
There has been some analysis done; it's hard. This kind of analysis is hard, because you're dealing with hypotheticals. It's hard to know where people would vote if there were different options. There's some polling that's been done that tries to test this; I could send you some materials, if you're able to, if you want to put it on your website and your Substack, there's some analysis that's been done that I can send you. But I think the best examples that we get are from other countries, where we see countries that - there's no country like America, America is unique in many ways, it's very large, it's very diverse, it has different cultures, different different political culture, different political traditions - but there are still some analogies that can be drawn from other countries. So those are some of the best ways, best places to look, in those other countries. You see coalitions come together, generally around the center, where they have center left, center right, coalitions that form. You see countries like Germany, for example, countries like France, which have a slightly different - not fully proportional system - where they are able to push aside the extremes, because unfortunately, there are always, maybe not unfortunately, maybe in some cases unfortunately, I mean, take, let's say white nationalists, for example. It takes the extreme white nationalists - you see that in France, you see that in Germany - of course still, they're always going to exist, we're never going to stamp out hate, at least not in our lifetimes. There are going to be people who let hate drive their politics, who are true racists and truly hateful people. I think it is a small sliver of America. I think there may be more organized groups in countries in Europe. In our country, right now in a two party system, they are able to have more influence sadly - the extremes on both sides - they have more influence. In a country like Germany, they're able to take that far right party and just push them aside. They're not in coalitions generally, if you look across the country, they're able to keep them out of coalitions; they don't have power. The five to ten percent of the country that actually believes those things, they're able to express themselves, they're able to vote for the people they believe in, but they're not going to have the kind of power that they would have if they were able to take over one party in a two party system. So I think that those are the kinds of lessons that we should look to from from countries across the world. I think this may be something that you've mentioned or talked about before, it's something that many political scientists talk about. But when America works with countries that are moving from authoritarian to democracy or are moving to different democratic systems, nobody advises those countries to go take the American system. They understand that the American system doesn't make sense anymore. It made sense in 1789, that was the best we had back then. There were no proportional systems back then, our founders took the best, the most modern system. Jefferson, when he was watching from France, said that America every 20 years should re-visit the Constitution; that to keep the Constitution from a past generation was like keeping a jacket that didn't fit anymore. He encouraged new changes every 20 years, that we shouldn't be beholden to the decisions of the previous generation. That was ignored, we have now gone almost 250 years without change, major [change].
Richard Helppie
Human nature hasn't changed. I know when I ran companies, we'd have incentive programs and the first year, you'd set out the incentive program; members kind of learning it, and they're trying to figure out how to work, then they learn it; year two, year three, they're actually executing great. And kind of near the end of the third year, beginning of the fourth year, they figured out how to game it, and you're not getting the behaviors that are built into the incentives. I think there are a lot of parallels, and that the change does have to occur, that we are going to get more of the same. I really, really endorse what you're saying about pushing the extremes to the edge. I don't care if that fire in that riot is a right wing or left wing or something else, they just shouldn't be doing it. But with a coalition in the middle saying, hey, you know what, we're going to have disagreements, but we're not going to invade the Capitol or burn stuff down, great, that's going to moderate that extreme behavior. So I really encourage you to continue to look for the answer. I hope that you or Mr. Drutman would be willing to re-visit the show. I know sometimes folks don't want to get into this detail of a conversation or your perspective that's not exactly in alignment but it's all about the common bridge, where can we find common ground. I really applaud what you're doing. Eli, before we wrap up today, anything that we didn't cover that we should have discussed, or any closing thoughts or anything about policy at all that we can leave our listeners, and our viewers, and our readers with?
Eli Zupnick
Well, first of all, thank you, again, for discussing this in such detail and covering so many angles of this issue over the course of your podcasts and writing. I think it's so important. There are so many things going on right now in our politics and our world, in our day to day lives, it's so easy to ignore these structural issues and focus on the house that's burning around us and not focus on the repairs that need to be made to make sure that it's actually something we could live in for a long time. So I truly appreciate that. We're happy to come back on again anytime. I think I would say for your listeners, there's a certain set of listeners, I would imagine, [who] are over-represented among your audience that care deeply about democracy and structural reform. I think those people, I would encourage them to go to our website, do some more research. I think we can...I feel very confident that we will persuade many of those people. I would say for others, if you care about guns on any side of the issue, if you care about abortion, if you care about climate change, if you care jobs, the economy, inflation, health care, prescription drug costs, anything; anything that is caught up in the gridlock and dysfunction right now, anything where the conversation is just food fight or an us versus them battle where nobody's actually talking about the substance, anyone who cares about anything - the future of our country, transportation - you should pay attention to the structural issues and know that we have a system right now that is built to not get these things done, to not make any progress on issues no matter how popular they are, no matter how much they're needed. Climate change is a great issue. People think that this is a Democrat versus Republican issue, that Democrats care about the climate and Republicans don't; that's not true. You look at the polling, more than 70% of Americans support what pollsters described as drastic action on climate change. I mean, I know I've seen in polling, I've talked to people, people who are conservative, people who are in rural areas, they don't want the grandchildren to be dealing with hurricanes and droughts and storms there, and they want the jobs that clean energy brings. That's just one example, that there are solutions to be had. But when it's caught in an us versus them - one side wants to stop it, one side wants to do it - then when the positions are reversed, the other side wants to stop it and the other side wants to do something else.
Richard Helppie
Isn't that crazy? (Eli Zupnick: Truly is.) Two episodes ago, we had a fellow on named Fred Gallagher, who is a geologist by training, did oil and gas exploration including in the Arctic, and then began to find places to site wind farms and solar, and he's going to be on again talking about hydrogen as an energy source; it's science and it's progress, it's about energy systems and the engineering on what needs to be done. And the vitriol that we got on some of our social media was astonishing. I thought, well, if there's anybody can agree on anything, it's let's not burn the place down. Apparently that's not too popular of a notion and I liken this to any other change that's gone on before in humankind. If you look when the gas buggies were replacing the horses, people said about the same things: oh, those things break down, you can't go as far, they're not reliable, only special people can use them. It almost parallels what we're seeing as we go to the electrification of motor vehicles. But we'll get there, as a an optimist, we'll get there with the proviso that if good people, like you, and good people, like our listeners, viewers, and readers are thoughtful about asking for policy changes, doing respectful conversation, including respectful disagreement; let's go find our middle ground. It's there, we can find things that we all agree on. We can recognize our differences and where people need to perhaps approach things differently because of where they live, climate-wise, or regional-wise, there's a lot more that unites us than divides us. I hear the passion that you're trying to help get there, so godspeed to you. I hope that you have great success with that.
Eli Zupnick
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Richard Helppie
We've been talking today with Eli Zupnick of Fix Our House; that's www.FixOurHouse.org. A great conversation about where we stand today with voting representation in this great democracy. You can find us on The Common Bridge at substack.com. You can find us on your podcast outlets and on YouTube TV and on your Soundgarden app; look up Mission Control Radio. With our guest, Eli Zupnick, this is Rich Helppie signing off on The Common Bridge.
Transcribed by Cynthia Silveri
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