Candidate Jake Auchincloss on Reforming Our Elections

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.

This is Larry Lessig. This is another episode of Another Way. This season, Season four. We're talking to candidates about their commitment to reform, why reform is important, and what they think reform includes. Our guest today is Jake Akencloss. Jake is a candidate for Congress in the 4th congressional district in Massachusetts. That was the district that Joe Kennedy occupied until he ran for Senate. Jake has just come through an extraordinarily competitive and at times vicious 8 person race in the Democratic primary where he prevailed with 23% of the vote and now runs in the general election. But in this district, the presumption is that the Democrat will be able to prevail. Jake had an extraordinary education and then went to serve in the military. And after that service he returned to Newton where he is on the city council and run for reelection and been reelected to the city council and had become something of a local leader before he stepped into this really competitive Congressional race. And in this conversation we're going to focus exclusively on the question of what he conceives reform to be and how reform could be achieved. Stay tuned. Great. So welcome. Jake Auchincloss, thank you so much for having this conversation. So the whole world is not aware of exactly how the election in the primary for the 4th congressional district in Massachusetts happened, but it was a quite striking example of both the incredible vigor of democracy because there were so many candidates, but also some of the ways in which this democracy doesn't work as well as it could. So I'm really eager to understand from your perspective, how would you describe to an alien or somebody from California what this election was like, what happened? I don't mean the substance so far because we'll get to that in a bit, but I mean just from a Democratic perspective, what was this election about?

Sure, thanks for having me on. You are right, this was a lively primary. And I think I understand the meaning of your question, which is to kind of try to describe to an alien what the political mechanics were like of this process. So I think the first thing to state off the bat is that there are something like 750,000 human beings in the Massachusetts forth, all of whom are entitled to representation in Congress. Roughly 500,000 of them are registered voters, but about 150,000 of those registered voters are the ones who actually participated in terms of selecting the Democratic nominee for Congress. And Democratic nominee in this district is the one who's the favorite to then become the next member of Congress, although by no means is that assured. There's Right off the bat, a clear demonstration that not all voters are participating in what you might describe as the center of gravity in selecting the next member of Congress. And this is a process in which it's not majority vote for who is the next nominee. It is a plurality vote. So the path to victory is not one that runs through 51% of the voters. It's one that runs through roughly a quarter of Democratic primary voters. And so I think kind of the headline statement to anybody who's interested in political anthropology would be a sample set of voters are selecting. Someone who has a strong chance of being the next member of Congress. And that sample set of voters is not actually kind of statistically representative of the entire district. I think that right off the bat, that might surprise people.

Yeah, I mean, there's two ways in which they're not representative. I mean, one way they're not representative is true in every primary, which typically, people who show up to primaries are the more politically engaged, and that typically means politically more extreme, whether on the right or the left, depending on the primary. But secondly, because there were in this primary so many people running, the actual breakdown of, like, what people might be supporting or not supporting is hard to measure when you've got this plurality system. Right. I mean, you won. I can't remember. It's like 23 or 24% of the votes. And we don't know for the other people who didn't vote for you in their first choice what their view about you is. And so that you've been a strong. I mean, you know, people should know you've been a strong supporter of ranked choice for a long time. You're a supporter of what I think is a really fantastic idea, the Fair Representation act, which I want to talk about a little bit. So it's not like you own this fact, but it must make it hard to kind of have confidence as the Democratic nominee to be in a system where you haven't been able to at least get the affirmative support of, you know, 40% or 50% of the Democratic voters.

Well, it's a challenge I relish, though I hear your point, which is

I

think an elected official always wants to have the basis of majority support. However, it is support that can be earned over the next couple of years. As I work with state and local officials, as I do outreach to all 34 cities and towns, someone once said, you're not fully elected until you're reelected. And that is certainly a mindset that I bring to the potential for a first term, is how do you build bridges in such a way that establishes a political basis that is bigger than a plurality vote?

Right. So I think that's a great way to think about it. But I wonder whether in the course of this primary people had a stronger, more visceral sense of just how the ranked choice system might have worked here. What do you think the campaign would have looked like or how it would have looked differently if question two, which of course if Massachusetts supports it, will establish ranked choice voting that will affect your reelection. If question two had been passed and this had been a ranked choice election.

There are two big picture reasons why I like ranked choice voting. The first is that it creates an incentive for candidates to talk to the median voter within a given election, to talk to the 50th percentile voter, which does not mean to ignore issues that are important to people, that maybe where the issues run may be more narrow and deep, but rather it means that you do have to anchor yourself in sort of the political mindset of the people that you're trying to represent. And second is that it discourages really deeply negative attacks between candidates because you're trying to get another candidate's supporters to choose you second or third. Those are two big picture reasons why I think it's a good policy. Now. It's a policy that would be more powerful if paired with other reforms like multi candidate districts. And frankly the combining of primary with general elections into one single election where you had a multi candidate district, one election, ranked choice voting, I think you would get a really powerful diverse set of candidates who were reflective of the full district. How it would have changed this election. So most obviously it would have prohibited any candidate from thinking in terms of a lean to victory in sort of a single, whether it's demographic or ideological lean to victory. You can't do that in ranked choice building, or at least you, you can do that. You have to do that much more carefully. And I think that would have been a good thing. I think it probably would have reduced some of the, the really fierce infighting in the prime year, although maybe that's not true. I think that's something that would have to have been seen. One area that I do want to flag, and I think we can't make the mistake of idealizing any given policy and thinking that it's a panacea because no one is, is that I do think that ranked choice voting would actually increase the power of outside negative, ie, spending, independent expenditure spending. And for our listeners, what that is, is that's when a, a super PAC comes in and is not associated with any given candidate, cannot coordinate with any given candidate, but can pay to make communications about a candidate for good or for bad. And the reason that RCV would highlight or accentuate the power of a negative ie campaign is that if that campaign comes in and says I think that Jane Smith is terrible and says that to 50% of voters and those 50% of voters then rank Jane Smith number 10 out of 10 candidates, Jane Smith's probably out of that election. It's just too difficult. Under ranked choice voting you're probably out. However, if they do that under a first past the post system, well, Jane Smith can still get, you know, those 50% of voters may not like her, but she can still get 25% of the vote and get, and get to victory. So we have to be conscious of this because it is an asterisk that's important to pay attention to.

Well, that's another issue that we're going to talk, I want to talk about about this race. This is obviously a race that was affected pretty substantially by super PAC spending. But I want to make sure we close the loop on a point that you've raised about what the ideal system would look like. So you are describing essentially this innovation of the Fair Representation act which is actually proposed in Congress, doesn't yet look like it can pass, but it's a really innovative idea to basically create where you can multi member districts. Obviously in like a state, like Montana you can't, but in most states you can create a default of multi member districts and then you have a ranked choice system for choosing the representative. And what that means is a wider range of representatives or people with different concerns could imagine their views being represented in Congress. Now I support this, I've campaigned for it and I think I'm still committed to it strongly. But here's the hesitation which the first part of your comments suggest. I mean the reality is that will make it easier to bring in more candidates more systematically who don't represent the majority of their district. Right. Because under the current system, if you got eight people running, you're not going to get a winner who represents the majority. But in an ordinary two person race, you're going to get a person who represents the majority of the district. But with the Fair Representation act, if we had imagined every congressperson coming from multi member districts, except for a minority who can't because of the way states are laid out, would we worry that then we're going to get more representatives who actually are plurality representatives rather than majority Representatives.

So I'm trying to do some of the math work in my head right now. I don't see that actually, I don't think that's the case. I think that if you have one elect now, if we're talking, we're kind of, we're combining primaries with generals here. You got one election, instant runoff. All candidates can run in there. I think a really big district where you're ranking the candidates, you're going to get candidates who are the most resonant, closest to the median voter.

I mean, maybe. Right. I can see how that's possible. But imagine for example, you had a Green Party that was like systematically running candidates in every district in the country and you had multi member districts, six members or five members. And what the Green candidate realized is they needed to only get like 30% of the people to rank them 1, and they would be part of the 5 or 6 who would be sent to Congress. Right. So that would. Imagine you could get Green candidates in Congress, which obviously, I mean, I'm not against that idea, but my point is we don't have any Green candidates in Congress right now because the existing system makes it really hard for those type of candidates to compete when it's typically one on one against somebody else.

Well, I'm not sure, I don't think, I'm not sure. I totally accept the premise of that because they don't need just to get 30% of the first place votes. They would also need to get some meaningful share of second and third place votes. And it could be that. I'm not asserting this, but if you presume that a Green Party platform might be deeply alienating to the other 70% of voters who don't choose it, number one, and they choose it at the bottom, then that's not going to be a successful strategy. They're going to have to, they're going to have to modulate that platform to get second and third place votes and that's what drags you towards the median voter there. But I think what you're getting at is maybe a deeper point also, which is whether you look at it at a micro or a macro level. So whether any given individual member of Congress represents the district in the most high integrity way, high fidelity way, or whether you'd want to be able to look at Congress at large and have the relative percentage of different parties in Congress reflect roughly the kind of ideological mindshare in America. And this is sort of a debate between congressional versus parliamentary representation the way that European and countries do it, that's a whole other vein of debate because I think it's fair. You had mentioned that there's no Green Party members of Congress right now, but clearly there are sort of Green Party voters in America. Right. And so there's an angle of argument that says, well, if there's 10% of American voters are Green Party affiliated, maybe 10% of members of Congress should be Green Party affiliated. And that would be a higher fidelity system of representation.

Yeah, and that's a really hard question. I can't begin to figure out whether parliamentary or the Westminster system makes more sense. So let's move. But I think that it's really important that you've taken fair Representation, the Fair Representation act, as an issue that you're pushing. But on your reform page or your reform section, you start off the bat with Citizens United. Okay, so Citizens United, we understand, is a decision that liberated corporate and union spending in elections, which made them the same as individual spending, which had been liberated in Buckley vs. Vallejo in 1976. But actually, the most significant consequence of Citizens United was not corporate spending. There isn't much Citizens United money out there. It's the decision that it inspired called SpeechNow, which created the Super PACS. The Super PACS were created when the D.C. circuit said, if you've got a constitutional right to give unlimited amounts of, to spend unlimited amounts of money, you got to have a constitutional amount right to give unlimited amounts of money to super PACs. And this race in particular had some pretty dramatic interactions because of super PAC spending. So the super PAC associated with Emily's List spent a lot of money attacking you and Alan Casey. And I'm sure that you felt the attack was unfair with you and Alan Casey. The Boston Globe eventually called it a mugging, and. And eventually they withdrew their attack. But obviously the dynamic of super PAC attacks is that you deploy the attack, you do your damage, and you walk away. And because you're a super pac, you don't pay the price. You're not like somebody who's gotta be held responsible for the integrity of what you've said. So I wonder, did that experience harden you in your view about what kind of reforms we need here, or what did that feel like as you went through.

I think harden is exactly the right word. I walked into this primary eyes wide open. I knew the way that the mechanics of this race were going to unfold, which was that almost without question, outside money was going to get involved. And while I might have wished that it stayed positive as the outside expenditures that supported me did, I Am not naive. And I had a feeling that was not going to be the case, so. So while I started this campaign opposed to Citizens United and its corollary rulings and effects, Hardin is precisely right. It demonstrated, I think, that the way spending has evolved in American politics has gotten more and more divorced from the typical voters experience of how politics should play out. I don't think actually that voters have a problem with the idea that fundraising should be an element of political campaigns. Fundraising has an important dimension to it in that it demonstrates a candidate's seriousness and viability early on. It requires commitment. It requires you to canvass, I think, a wide array of interests and people who are engaged early in the process. There's nothing sort of inherently wrong about some element of fundraising in politics. What's wrong is when it gets totally detached from the political system as it's experienced by the typical voter, and that's what super PACs are, is that voters have no idea who's giving, who's spending. And there's all these different shell entities that obscure it now, because those are the set of rules, every candidate walks in knowing they're going to have to put by those set of rules if they want to have a chance. It's classic sort of prisoner's dilemma in a game theory mindset. Right. And so I don't hold it against any candidate or any entity for playing the game by the rules, but we've got to fix the rules.

Yeah. And I mean, and I also have taken the view that there's no such strategy as unilateral disarmament. All there is is commitment to the right policy. So, you know, you're going to run a campaign the way you got to run a campaign, given the rules as they are. But the question is, what are you committing to, to change the rules? Now, obviously, as a member of Congress, you're not going to overturn Citizens United or get the Supreme Court to overturn speech now. But there are other things that can be done about money in politics. And this is the part of your reform package which I'm not as clear about, at least from what's on your webpage. So I wonder, when you think about money in politics, what is the package of reform that if you could walk in on day one and just pass

it would include, I do think overturning a congressional amendment to overturn, sorry, a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United would be important. I don't think we want, that is to have the same amount of influence as it does in American politics currently. I think you would want to not necessarily lower individual contribution limits, but you might want to find a way to amplify small dollar donations. Now, there's different ways of thinking about how you do that. You can do that in sort of the six to one match that's been proposed in the past. You can also think about doing that in a quadratic way, which is a little bit more of a mathematically complicated one that's been proposed by Glenn Weil and some other economists. But that basically. Which is an interesting format. It's a little complicated, a little wonky, but I think it actually kind of is the mathematically cleanest way of doing it. But the point is amplifying small dollar donations to encourage individuals who are committed to the political process early, who want to contribute to candidates who they care about, but don't have the resources to write the $2,800 check to encourage their voices to be heard early on in the process as well.

Okay, so it's interesting you talk about the quadratic solution. That's something I've just also written about and supported. But you didn't mention the Seattle plan or the voucher plan. And the reason that's important, I think, to think about is that if you look on our side, on a democratic side, where the resistance to matching fund proposals come from, it comes from people like Ezra Klein who assert that the matching fund proposals will increase polarization, because the kind of people who give money are the kind of people who are most invested when it's their own money. And those tend to be polarized. And I don't think that's true. But if it is true, what's interesting about the voucher proposal or the Democracy Dollar proposal, which Bernie Sanders supported and Kirsten Gillibrand supported and Andrew Yang supported in the primary, is that you would basically be giving resources back to every citizen so they all could participate in the funding. And so in the way that you think about hewing to the middle, you would be much more eager to be raising money where a lot of money is, which is basically in the middle of the district. And so if you could be attracting these vouchers from people who have nothing else they can do with it, it would seem to be a way to get more people involved without the worry of polarization. I wonder if you've thought about that.

Yeah, the only. I think it's a very intriguing proposal. I think one of the dimensions that though that might get overlooked here is it's incredibly expensive and challenging to communicate with people. So there's 750,000 people in the district, like I said. And if I understand correctly, the Seattle proposal gives a voucher to all of them or all registered voters. Is that accurate?

Yep, that's right.

Right. So how do I talk to all 500,000 of those people and reach them? The concern I have there is that actually who that ends up helping is the person who has the highest name recognition at the very beginning of a race or who has individual wealth at the very beginning of a race and thereby can talk to those voters early to get their vouchers. It creates an incredibly self fulfilling and potentially very heavily path dependent process to do it that way. Because I can tell you right now I don't have a means of. At the beginning of this campaign, I had something like 15,000 email addresses probably, and that's who I could talk to. I didn't have the money to go on TV or radio or anything like that. I'm concerned about systems that at the very beginning of a race would just accentuate existing advantages of name recognition or wealth.

It's a great concern. I think typically you see with all of these proposals a kind of blending of proposals together. And sometimes it's suggested that like you get a qualification once you qualify, you get a subsidy to get going to get your campaign up and going so you can begin to talk to people, or you could have the matching fund and this together, that wouldn't be a problem at all. But I think the big dynamic after you begin to get going is that there are different people you're going to go talk to, different people you're going to go raise money from. Because there's a whole bunch of people out there who have resources to give you, who right now wouldn't or even wouldn't under a matching fund proposal. I mean, in our, you know, I live in your district, so in our district there are not a lot of people who, I mean there's more people in this district who can afford to give $100 to support a congressional campaign than in most districts across the country. So even in a matching fund proposal, you're filtering out the average American from the game of contributing, which I think you agree you've said is a problem.

Yeah, and I'm not trying to be a devil's advocate, but it's fun to just go back and forth on this because I, I actually think there's a lot of merit to this proposal. I would just say again that if there are 500,000 people who you're trying to fundraise from it's incredibly expensive to do that effectively. Just a little act of communicating with those people to get that money. And so at the very beginning, that's going to be, obviously, potentially a massive barrier to entry. But I think what would also end up happening is you'd see incredible amounts of inflation in the cost of campaigns overall. So right now, just to use an example, you only do TV to talk to voters in terms of persuasion to persuade them to vote for you. And that you do that very close to election day, typically within the final eight weeks. Roughly speaking, if we had this system in place, there's a chance that actually it would make sense economically to go up on TV at the very beginning. Because if you've got 500,000 viewers out there, all of whom can give a significant amount of money, maybe you actually go up on TV in October or November and you just start asking for money. You're not trying to do persuasion, you're trying to do fundraising over tv, which would never happen. Now, to do that in a mass media. Well, TV costs money. And I worry that what ends up happening is now a congressional campaign goes from being, instead of $2 million, it goes to being $25 million. We spend a huge amount more. At the end of the day, the people that end up getting really wealthy are the TV consultants or the mail consultants or the radio consultants, and the money kind of gets churned up in the processes as opposed to in the communications on issues.

Yeah, that's a great concern. I guess you have to figure, I mean, we got to figure out whether those numbers actually make sense as, like, predicting how this, quote, inflation occurs. But the big difference between the two systems is, like, who ultimately is paying the piper. So in a matching fund system or the existing system or a super PAC system, it's a tiny fraction of the 5% who are paying the piper. In the super PAC system, it's a tiny fraction of the 0.01% who's paying the piper. In the voucher system. You've obviously increased the possibility of a wide range of people participating in the paying of the piper. And if he who pays the piper calls the tune, then in a democracy, we ought to be worried about who's paying without question.

I think, to me, some of the potentially more impactful reforms, or maybe not more impactful, but very impactful reforms, might even be more at the logistical edges of all this. So a way to basically unlock funds that make campaigns viable based on demonstrations of commitment and resonance. So people make fun of signature gathering, for example. I actually Think signature gathering is an incredibly meaningful political metric. It's hard to get signatures. Nobody likes collecting signatures. It's hard work. You have to have volunteers, you've got to have organization, you've got to be committed. I think using signature collection to unlock public funds is actually sounds like a kind of a basic, but I actually think a pretty powerful system.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes, though. I mean, like some states like California allow you to pay signature gatherers, which obviously could create a perversion in the dynamic you're trying to facilitate. Right.

And I think, you know, that could be acceptable in some circumstances. I think of, like a recount challenge. Maybe you still want to allow people to pay because the time is really of the essence there. But at the beginning, I would agree with you. You probably don't want to allow that. And then I also think about how you allow people. I think a lot of what makes campaigns, what raises the barrier to entry for who can campaign, is sometimes more of the humdrum of daily life. It's like, who can afford to not work for a year and who can afford childcare while they're campaigning. Right. I mean, that's an incredible privilege, frankly, to be able to do that. And that doesn't necessarily require massive structural reforms. It just maybe requires some public funds that you can unlock at the beginning and some changes to how you're allowed to spend existing campaign finance funds, like being able to spend them on childcare might be something that widens the aperture more.

Yeah, I mean, that's incredibly important because when you think practically, both at the congressional level, also the presidential level, you know, I mean, the people who can afford to run for president 247 for two years are either members of Congress or billionaires. Right. Nobody else can afford to do that. And you're not allowed to pay your salary when you're running for office, except close to the primary. And so obviously that's a nice way to filter out anybody who doesn't come into it in exactly the wrong place.

And I think a big picture thing here also, and this is a tough way to frame it sometimes politically, but is to think of campaigns as a public good and not as a source always of corruption. Part of the challenge, I think, in talking about using campaign funds to pay a salary for the candidate or pay for childcare or giving public funds out to all candidates in some type of disbursement, is that it sort of feels at first blush like, wait a minute, this feels like taxpayers are paying someone to go on an ego trip. Like this feels like a Little bit corrupt. And I think in economic terms, it's recognizing that campaigns are quote, unquote, public good and that they create popular positive externalities. And treating it that way, I think, makes the case a little bit crisper for why we want to use public funds that way. In the grand picture of American finance, campaigns are not expensive. The amount of money that goes to campaigns is really not a lot. And to do them more cleanly and to have candidates be able to spend more time thinking about policy and talking to voters and less time fundraising and to allow more people to enter the political process because they had access to funds to bootstrap, I think pays dividends far in excess of the incremental cost.

Yeah. So one chunk of campaign costs is voter turnout. A lot of people are talking about mandatory voting, which we recognize a system that would induce people to have to vote. You would reduce the cost of a paying to make sure that people are out there and voting. What do you think about the idea of requiring voting the way the Australians do?

Yeah, I'm not sure I have a strong opinion on that. My sense is that so one, I've read some research and I couldn't quote the source, but that actually if the other 40% of Americans voted, the outcomes wouldn't be that different. That there's this conviction that non voters are ideologically somehow very different than voters. And it actually doesn't play out that way, that when tested, the outcomes are pretty much the same. So take that for a grain of salt because they can't remember the source. And obviously it's a little tough thing to test, but I'm not sure it would meaningfully change the electoral system. And I also don't know if that's the right way to get about voter engagement. To me, the deeper question is why were people voting in much higher numbers in the 1950s and 60s and why aren't they now? Is it about social capital a la Putnam and Bowling Alone? Is it about lack of confidence in federal institutions? It's about polarization. It's a much more interesting set of problems to confront than, I think, the surface level challenge of requiring people to vote legally.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, people rationally choose not to vote, right? Many of them do. And it's striking to recognize more people choose not to vote than are prohibited from voting by voter suppression or anything like that. And so we should be worrying about why is it rational not to vote? Like, why is that making sense? And gerrymandering and the outsized role of money in politics and all these other systems that make it so. In fact, you don't really matter the way you should matter in the political system would be great problems to solve first.

Well, and I would to pull on that thread more, if we're using the term rational in the strict economic sense, it's almost never kind of quote unquote rational to vote. Because the way an economist might frame this is, well, what's the given amount of work to go vote and what's the chance that your vote would be the deciding vote and blah blah, blah, and it's basically zero and it's a wasted effort. So clearly people aren't going to vote because of some strictly economic rational calculation. And going to vote, I think for social reasons. I don't mean social in the term, in the sense of like, you know, going to a party. I mean social in the deep human sense and wanting to feel connected to our community and to one another. I think voting is a deeply, deeply pro social act. It's a commitment to care about the community. I would say I would tie lower amounts of voter engagement to lower amounts of social trust and civic engagement, especially in our local communities. I think people are feeling less invested in the threads that connect them to one another at the local level. And that to me is arguably one of the deepest problems facing this country right now. How do we rebuild that civic capital?

Yeah, and there's two sides of that, right? I mean, one side is how you feel, but the other side is how you feel. They think you matter. Like, do you, do they think you matter? Does the system think you matter? So if you're in a neighborhood where you feel government doesn't care anything about you, doesn't give you anything, it's hard to get the attention of representatives. Why would you participate? You don't feel like you have efficacious role in the actual election, then step aside. And so changing that, I agree that's got to be the objective to sort of get to that. Okay, so the last part of trying to understand where you are on these issues of reform is this. So I think if you sort of went through the checklist of the things that reformers care about, you've checked all the right boxes and that's great. Where do you see it in the priority? I mean, because in a very minuscule sense, it's not high on the kind of list of issues that you're talking about, Though unlike many people, it's at least on the list of issues that you want to talk about. But Are you somebody who thinks that this is like one of 10 issues or is this like an issue that we've got to get if we're going to get other issues done first?

I'm not sure I would treat it as a monolithic issue. I think reform has at least two to three dozen smaller bills and issues nested within it and some of them are higher priority than others. I think there's a set of axes, kind of impact on one axis and vital liability on the other axis. And there are some measures like independent commissions and the Voter Choice act and undoing the Uniform Congressional Districting act that are both very powerful and I think quite viable in the 117th Congress. And they should be priorities. I think the Fair Representation act is incredibly powerful, as we've discussed. I also think it's, to be blunt, unlikely to get passed in the 117th Congress and probably not worth it. Huge amount of political capital to invest in that. Until some of the things, until some realities on the ground change. 18 year term limits for the Supreme Court, powerful and viable, probably should put the shoulder into that as well. So I cheat them on an issue by issue basis. And I think the ones that have a chance of passing a Democratic Congress and getting signed into law and that are powerful, those should be top priority because they have perpetual impact.

So are some more generative than others? I mean, I say that and I obviously think money is the most generative of all of them. Like if you could fix the economy of influence, then you would make a thousand other issues easier. Not just reform issues obviously, but like healthcare and climate change and everything else.

I would actually disagree with you there. I don't dispute the tremendous impact on the economy of influence. I like that term. I haven't heard that before. I agree. I would say that electoral incentives for candidates is actually even more upstream than that. And what I mean by that is how our primaries and general elections work together. I think getting most states to a California like jungle primary system, for example, would be a huge, would have huge, huge impact. Independent redistricting would have huge impact, maybe even more than campaign finance reform.

So is that because you picture in your minds the life of the normal modal congressperson who needs to spend 30 to 70% of their time raising money and you imagine the effect that that has on them is small?

It's because I think, I think a lot of times a lot of the money right now in politics is a little bit washing itself out on either side, whereas the incentives for candidates are structurally skewing the way that elections are happening and the way that issues are being treated. So I think about gun safety. Let's use gun safety as an example here. You could take two approaches to the gun safety issue. One is that there is a tremendous amount of money flowing from the gun lobby to Republicans in particular that are keeping them sort of walking the NRA line on that issue. I think that's true. That's just true that that's happening. The other is that a lot of Republicans, if you can kind of ask them one on one, hey, do you think that we should have universal background checks? Like does that make sense to you? They would say yes, I understand that we should have universal background checks, but I can't vote for it because if I go back to the Alabama first, I will get primaried and I will lose on this issue because there is a deep well of narrow but deep voters, narrow but committed voters who will just vote against me on this issue and I will get primary and I will lose and the general election doesn't matter. It and the fact that the median voter in Alabama actually is in favor of universal background checks doesn't matter because I will get primary. I would argue that in that situation the more powerful incentive for why we can't pass gun safety is actually the latter is actually the primary system that's preventing those Republicans from taking that vote. More than the money. Because there's money coming from the pro gun safety side too, right? There's like there's those $5,000 checks will come from the pro gun safety side as well. Well if people are taking those kinds of votes. So I think it's more structural.

So I mean, and that's also something you could observe with climate change. So in 2010 when the Koch brothers declared that any Republican who acknowledged the truth of climate change would find themselves primaried is taking advantage of the primary system. No doubt. But when you think about like the micro attention that members have to pay direct to like the lobbyists who are coming through and the coming through is about channeling money through as well. It's an interesting perspective because I've not really confronted it. Who would think that that is relative even, you know, not on the same level, at least with every two year dynamic that might come up in Congress because of the primaries again? I mean it's possible, I guess, but it's hard to know why one would think that. Maybe it's because, I mean you've been a representative locally, I mean obviously city council in Newton and so that's not cheap. But it's not 70% of your time raising money. Maybe perspective changes when you've spent 70% of your time raising money.

Yeah, and I'm not disputing, like I said, the impact of the economy of influence. I think it's a first order challenge. I'm just pointing out that my sense is there's tremendous amounts of money on both sides of most issues. And what ends up bending votes and making votes intransigent is as a member of Congress, the one thing you can't change, you can change your vote on things and there's new veins of money to tap into on different issues, but you can't change your home district and the primary system in that home district and you can't change how the voters are going to feel about certain issues. And that just makes some votes off limits. I mean, look at why the Republican Congress won't stand up to Donald Trump. It's not because I don't think that's a money problem. I think that is a political courage problem because they all, they'll all tell anybody who will listen frankly in private, hey, I don't like the guy, but if I speak out against him, I'm going to get primary and I'll lose my seat. That speaks to me of the deepest, deepest challenge we have in this democracy, which is those electoral incentives even more so than the financial ones.

Yeah. And if you imagined every issue has money on both sides, I guess I would find that more plausible. But there are a whole bunch of issues that are not issues because there's not money on either side. Because, for example, people on welfare who need better systems for running welfare don't have lobbyists who are pushing for those better systems. And there's no money on the other side either. It's just because this is not an issue that there's a sufficient rent to be captured that anybody's going to spend money in Washington on it. So the priorities are affected dramatically by where the money is. And that priority, you know, even if there is money on both sides of it, that priority, that budget effect is going to be quite significant in figuring out what Congress can do.

I hear it not disputing your point, just pointing out that there are, I think there are deeply ingrained incentives with the primary system that are really making a lot of issues impossible to solve.

So how, at the congressional level do you think you'd achieve the success on the primary system? So obviously Congress would have the power to regulate states in their ability to have primaries for Congress, not beyond Congress, but for Congress, do you look at California and say there's a really convincing case to be made in California that this has really dramatically changed how representation in California is working?

Well, I think it's probably too soon to tell. California's only had it for I think four years and this is something that takes an entire generation of elected officials cycling through it to really see. So I think we're probably 20 years too early. But to your point about that, it's actually more of a state level series of reforms than it is Congressional because it's the states that can determine how these work and it's independent of ranked race voting. Actually, you can do this without it like California did. So can Congress maybe allocate funding and provide some type of center of excellence and nudge states along the road to doing this? And can members of Congress use the power of the office to talk about it and convene people about it? Absolutely. But it actually needs to happen really more at the state level.

And you. So I love your dimension, your question of like impact versus feasibility. Do you, do you get a sense that people in Congress are going to rally around the idea of eliminating the primaries?

Probably not. I would say almost by default, incumbents don't like change. Right. Because the things that made them in office, changing them are more likely than not to erode rather than support their position. Obviously I have canvassed opinion in Congress, but my general disposition is that change is hard when it comes to people's seats.

So Nancy Pelosi in 2018 promised that if the Democrats took control of the house in 2019, they'd pass HR1, which he did. Do you agree with that commitment? Are you going to support on day one passing HR1 again?

Yes, I do support HR1. I'd like to see HR1 be something that can actually. Well, I think in 2018 could have gotten some Republican votes and become law. I think now in 2020, if it's a Democratic House and Senate presidency, we should sign HR1 again. I mean, I think there's things to modify or add, but the heart of the bill is a good bill.

Yeah. And one last question on the reform. So there's a lot of press around the way we elect our President and obviously we're seeing the incredible fragility in the system we have for electing our president right now. And part of the fragility of the Electoral College, the other part is the ridiculous complexity of the Electoral Count Act. We don't have to go into that. But I just wonder when you think about the Electoral College. Where do you think people resonate on the question of the Electoral College? I mean, and I don't mean your experience here in Massachusetts where our view is maybe not the representative view, but where do you think the right answer in the question of the Electoral College lies?

The right answer. Me personally, what do I think the average American voter is at?

Well, let's start with you and let's see where the imagine American voter is.

So in general, my, my viewpoint is I'm always very deferential to the Constitution. I'm very hesitant to tinker with a set of rules, norms and precedents that have served this country incredibly well for three centuries. Having said that, we know now have a system wherein I want to say what no is it? No Republican president has won the popular vote in the last seven election cycles and yet by a majority. Yeah, a majority, excuse me, in the last seven election cycles. And yet the Supreme Court is going to be 6 to 3 conservative leaning because of the amount of power that Republican presidents have had in appointing justices. We've got a system that's clearly heavily indexed to rural areas and within the increasing urbanization of the country that's getting exacerbated and it's creating this really, it's basically this structural imbalance in how the country works. And that wasn't, I don't think, immediately noticeable for the first 150 years of the country because it was largely a rural economy. Now, at the growth of these great metro regions, it's really, really becoming glaring in the sense that someone who lives in California versus someone who lives in Wyoming, their relative power to choose the next president is just something like 600 orders of magnitude or 600% off. I mean, it's absurd. So this is an issue I'm grappling with, but I would say I'm leaning pretty strongly towards the idea that we need to abolish the Electoral College and that the President of the United States needs to be chosen by a popular majority.

So when you pick Wyoming and California, I mean, one perspective, yes, Wyoming is much more powerful than California. From another perspective, both of them are irrelevant because neither of them is a swing state. And what the current system does is concentrate power in swing states because those are the only states where presidents campaign, because those are the only states that matter. And the only reason for that has nothing to do with the Constitution. It has to do with states deciding to allocate their electors in a winner take all away. So a million people vote for Donald Trump in Massachusetts, not a single electoral vote. From Massachusetts goes to Donald Trump because of that dynamic, making Massachusetts and California and Kentucky and Wyoming irrelevant. If we fixed that, if we said we could allocate electors and even better, allocate them fractionally so that you could get 1.45 electors depending on your vote, then we would fix the fact that California and Wyoming and Massachusetts and Kentucky don't matter. Right. Because every vote would matter. Not equally because of this difference, but still every vote would matter. So I wonder when we recognize that there's a strong opposition to abolishing the college, whether this wouldn't get us close to what national popular vote would be. At least everybody would feel like their relevance. Everybody would turn out to vote because they know their vote counts. Even if Wyoming has more power in that than Washington, than California would.

I think we'd basically get almost exactly towards the national popular vote if the electoral votes were allocated proportionally. And you're right, by the way, the California, Wyoming example is really more about the Senate than it is about the Electoral College and the presidency. Just to circle this back, though, to your principal topic, that's going to make presidential campaigns way more expensive. So if you. You've got a system where all 50 states are battleground states. Right. That means TV in all 50 states, and that I think you probably just multiplied by 10 to 50 how much needs to be raised.

Yeah, well, of course, I don't care about how much is spent. I care about where the money comes from. So it might be a dark motive. But I desperately think that this might push for public funding of presidential campaigns quite effectively because they can't imagine that they can fund it privately. But the other thing it would do, unintended consequence, but really great, is it would make state parties more relevant. Like they would be much more involved in actually making sure that candidates win in their state, which, if we could revitalize local parties, that would be a very valuable thing to the overall democracy. But you're right, absolutely, it'd be much more expensive. But you made the point. I think we can make the point. We spend a fraction of the amount every year that we spend on advertising soap, electing our candidates. So, you know, I think we can afford a little bit more. Maybe not with the negative ads. They're pretty miserable. Well, so I'm grateful for your time. You've given me a lot of your time. You face a contest in November, although this is a solidly Democratic district which Joe Kennedy represented before he stepped aside to run for Senate. So I don't have to wish you a Lot of luck. I think you've got a pretty solid chance and I'm grateful for the, for the breadth and depth that you've brought to this issue. So thank you very much, Jake.

Well, I appreciate you having me on. We're laser focused on November 3rd, definitely not taking it for granted. I appreciate your well wishes, and I hope that I can serve the Massachusetts fourth in Congress and help realize some of these reforms we've been discussing.

Now, I appreciate the fact that you're talking about reforms most people don't even understand. That's really critical. All right, thanks very much. So what's striking about that conversation was first, the flat out brilliance of Jake. I had never spoken to him before. I'd never met him before, even though I should have. He's a member, he was running in my district, and if I'd been a better citizen, I would have sought him out and spoken to him before. But. But I think it's the first time we've spoken to a candidate who's spoken about the idea of quadratic representation of people's preferences, an idea which is really prominently displayed in a book by Eric Posner and Weil about how to reform politics. And I talk about it in my book as well. But it evinces somebody who's thought deeply about these issues and the range of issues. And though I don't think we found any place that we would disagree, I was struck in the sense that I want to rethink his commitment to thinking about primary reform first, something I don't think he thinks and I certainly don't think is going to happen tomorrow. But as far as something that would have the most impact, there's a large number of people who are increasingly trying to suggest that primary reform would have a significant impact, may be more important than money. I don't think it's true, but I do think it's an extremely interesting question. And I think best would be to try both, because whether you've got primary reform or not, if you've still got to raise the money from the tiny, tiny fraction of the 1% who's supporting people who run for office, there's a very narrow range of issues you're going to feel safe to address in any aggressive way. So stay tuned for later episodes where we'll be talking to more candidates, including candidates for the United States Senate. It's turning out to be a little bit harder to find the press people, they don't want to talk about their views, they just want to write their views. But I'm hopeful we'll turn some twist some arms and get someone who can help us understand better exactly why the press thinks reform is such an issue not to be discussed these podcasts are produced by Equal Citizens Us. You find us on the web at equalcitizens Us anotherway. There's a place there to share the podcast and give us your feedback and your ideas and your suggestions for your candidates to talk to. Please share this broadly and suggest a way, because whether or not these ideas are true or good, they matter not at all if no one hears them. And they hear them only if they get plugged into them through these episodes and work that's similar to this. You've been listening to these podcasts, I know, because we we listen and watch exactly how broadly they get shared. And if you have ideas for where we could share them better, it would be enormously helpful to hear those. And if you have ideas about how we can do our work at Equal Citizens better, it would be enormously helpful if you can share those as well. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support. This is Larry Lessig. Until the next one of these.