Deep Dive on Public Financing and Gerrymandering with Sam Berge [10-24-19]

Welcome to Another Way, a podcast brought to you by Equal Citizens, where we talk about how to fix our democracy. First, I'm Jason Harrow, the director and chief counsel of Equal Citizens. Today I'm really pleased to bring you my conversation with Sam Berger of the center for American Progress. Sam is the vice president for democracy and government reform there. And he, he's got experience in the Obama administration. And we were able to really dig deeply into two specific issues that the center for American Progress, which is a left leaning think tank, has really been pushing Democratic representatives on and producing a lot of knowledge about, and that is campaign finance and gerrymandering. And in particular, we go deep into the difference between what certain proposals are in HR1 and elsewhere about campaign finance, what the difference is between matching programs and vouchers. So if you've been wondering about that, we go into that quite a bit and then we talk about gerrymandering and how certain solutions solve it and what existing solutions need to be even more effective, including the concept of voter determined district. So it's a really great conversation. I urge you to listen in. But before we do that, I want to tell you about a couple things we've got going on because we just launched a Patreon page. We launched it for a couple reasons. One is that these podcasts folks, they don't cost a lot of money, but they do cost some money, especially to bring you high quality audio. We're a nonprofit. We're never going to run ads. You're always going to be able to get them for free if you want. But we do want to do something for our loyal supporters. You can go to patreon.com/citizens and you can become an all star and give us just three bucks a month. And you'll be a supporter, you'll be a patron, and you'll also get access to a few special episodes, including Ask Me Anything episodes that we're going to start launching with Equal Citizens founder Larry Lessig. You can increase your donation. We won't turn down five bucks a month or nine bucks a month. If you hit ten bucks a month, you'll be guaranteed to get one of your questions answered on a Larry Lessig Ask Me Anything episode. So that's a really great perk. And then it goes all the way up from there. So again, we're not a public radio station. We're not going to do constant fundraising drives. We only do this once a year. But we got this great new thing for hardcore podcast listeners, patreon.com/ecitizens It's a great way to support us. Please check it out. And otherwise Equal Citizens US is where you can learn about what we're doing and also give directly to the nonprofit there. But again, no ads. This will always be free, whether or not you can give anything on the website on Patreon. We really appreciate your support. We support your share. We support your joining this movement. Now I bring you my conversation with Sam Berger. So, Sam, thanks for talking to us and for having me here in the Washington, D.C. studio of CAP. This is. This is great.

Yeah, no, it's fantastic. And this is an incredibly important topic. And I'm glad for all the work that you all are doing to lift it up.

Of course. So I want to dig pretty deeply into a couple topics here. You all, as we discussed in the intro, have done a ton of work in various aspects of democracy reform in HR1 and beyond. But I think people kind of want to know what's in HR1 and what could be done in an HR1 2.0. I don't know if that will be the name of it if and when Democrats get another chance to revise this, but there still is some room for improvement here and room for tweaking. First, let's talk gerrymandering, which a lot of people really feel strongly about. Why don't you just, you've done a lot of research, first of all, on the scope of the problem. Can you sort of summarize what you found in terms of how bad gerrymandering is today?

Yeah, I mean, the impacts of gerrymandering are quite significant. If you look at, say, the elections from 2012 to 2016, on average, you're talking 50 plus seats that move one to one party or the other based on what you would anticipate given statewide votes. And just so folks have an understanding, because Republicans control more states and therefore are able to better gerrymander, it nets out quite in their favor, 19 seats. So from 2012 to 2016, Republicans on average got 19 more seats than you'd predict based on their vote totals countrywide.

And you're talking only US House, of course. And then state legislatures can be equally gerrymandered or even worse.

Certainly. Yeah. This is just focusing on the House, but at the state level, it's not that folks just gerrymander at the federal level and then say, we'll run fair elections. Obviously, you can have pretty significant gerrymandering at the state level as well.

Got it. So what does HR1 do to try and solve that and then we'll get into what Cap sort of has proposed to go even further beyond that.

Sure. So HR1 has a two step process. The first, first is moving the redistricting process away from elected officials and to an independent commission that basically seeks to try and take politics out or at least balance the politics and make it the case that the people that are running for office aren't the ones who are basically determining what districts they're going to run in. The second thing it does is it puts forward a set of criteria that's intended to reduce gerrymandering, come up with fairer districts, and it's a set of things. So it starts with following the Constitution and the Voting Rights act, but then it takes steps to try and ensure that there's proper representation for communities of color who've traditionally been shut out of the process and to respect communities of interest. And that's a very broad term that basically means the kinds of communities that people might see themselves as being a part of.

Okay, so that's the mandate of the independent commission. I think in some of our conversations about Germany we've often stopped there. And that to be clear, that would be a massive step and a massive improvement over the way we currently do things. Right. And would make essentially every state that doesn't have one of these independent commissions have much fairer lines, most likely. Okay, but you all have done some research and proposed something called voter determined districts. So what is this overlay on top of what's already been proposed?

So as you said, HR1 is a huge step forward, forward in terms of taking politicians out of the process, leading to fairer maps. But it's not necessarily going to get us all the way there. And that's because it doesn't explicitly require these independent commissions to take steps to make sure that the districts reflect voter preferences statewide. So I'm somebody that comes at this from an admin law perspective. I was at the Office of Management Budget and the Domestic Policy Council and the Obama administration for six plus years. And so when I think of things, I think of how agencies are, are going to react when you give them a plan and the first thing they're going to do is what are we supposed to do? And so the problem with the HR one is that it would still allow for, well really two things. One, it would allow for unintentional gerrymanders. One of the issues right now is we're very, the two parties and sort of ideological centers are very segmented in terms of the communities that they live in. You have large cities that are very progressive, and you have rural areas that are very conservative. And so if you don't take into account what voters actually want, you can end up with a situation in which you have a significant rural, significant conservative bias simply by putting sort of boxes on a map. You know, when you box a big part of a city in and suddenly it's 90% democrat, and then you have a bunch of places out in the rural areas that are, let's say, 60 or 65% Republican, and that can skew things statewide. The second problem is that it's not prescriptive enough in terms of what the independent commission should be doing. So take communities of interest, it's a very broad term. It actually, under the current legislation, extends even to political subdivisions, which means, as a technical matter, an independent commission could come in and redraw the most gerrymandered lines that we have in any state, because they could say the communities that we're talking about are the existing lines that have already been drawn. You know, people really like and are friends with folks in their gerrymandered district. And so we're going to keep that. Obviously it's not the case that would necessarily happen, but it could. And so our point is, if you want maps to be fair, if you want to get rid of gerrymandering, then tell the independent commission to get rid of gerrymandering. And so what we propose is two things. We're really balancing two different importance. So first, modern map making technology lets you draw thousands of maps on the cheap. So draw maps that we call voter determined, that are voter determined or voter determined districts, meaning that when you look statewide, the expectation is that if 60% of the people in the state vote for Democrats, 60% of their representatives will be Democrats. If 60% vote for Republicans, 60% of their representatives will be Republicans. The second thing that we want to do is make sure again that we're, to the extent possible, maximizing opportunities for communities of color to elect people to elect their representatives of choice. And this is in part because historically, gerrymandering has been used to shut those folks out of the process. And it's important that we recognize that past history and that we do what we can in drawing these districts, give these folks a voice because they've been denied it for so long. And so if you draw these thousands of fair maps, then you look through them and figure out how to maximize things you want to maximize, and that's how you do voter determined districts.

So what's the response been from some of the House members. I mean, you all are in something of a unique position in the democracy reform movement because of your long institutional ties to elected members of the Democratic Party. So as people think about what the best way to really cut out gerrymandering is and implement this, are members starting to understand the difference here? Do they like it? Do you think this has a chance of sort of being mooted and possibly making it into HR1 2.0?

So I think this is part of the conversation. I think it's fair. We're sort of in a weird situation where we've taken huge, huge, huge strides in a short time period. Right. We went from basically no one wanting to do anything on gerrymandering to something having a bill with the support of every single elected Democrat in Congress. And now we're talking about, oh, how can we even make this bill better? And so that's just been a huge, huge, huge, huge sea change, which is incredibly welcome. I mean, it's fantastic to think that we're having a debate about the best way to adjust gerrymandering instead of being like, maybe we should address gerrymandering. So that is a huge step. So I think that we're still in the process of educating folks up on the Hill, educating folks even in the community about what this would mean and thinking it through. But I do think this is a, this is going to be a part of the debate because it has to be. We have to be thinking about what's the best way we have to address gerrymandering. And it would be a shame if we take this sort of huge moment and don't get all the way there. Let's fully get there and fully address it. And in fact, I would just say that there have been as well, candidates, presidential candidates, I think, have also been kind of interested in thinking through this. Obviously, gerrymandering is a thing that I think across the board, certainly, at least on the Democratic side, you see candidates raising as a real concern, Presidential candidates meeting. But then they're thinking through too, exactly how to do this. And I think, you know, there's been interest there as well in terms of how that voter determined districts might be a really good way to make sure that we actually get what we're hoping we get.

Yeah. And how about, you know, to the extent you can try to predict what might happen with Republican votes or with more moderate votes or even with what a conservative Supreme Court might say, because when I hear voter determined district, I love the idea. I totally agree with having more objective criteria for these independent commissions as being really important. But something, you know, reminds me of the Supreme Court's gerrymandering decision this summer where the Supreme Court said that, you know, the conservative majority said we're out of the business of policing gerrymandering, at least as federal courts. And the Chief justice seemed to kind of go out of his way to really knock the idea of proposal. And he said we don't. That's not the system we have under the Constitution. Right. When you, if you have, as in your hypo, if you have 60% of the voters in your state, the Chief justice expressly said that doesn't mean that you get 60% of the congressional representatives. And it sounds like voter determined districts sort of try and restore something that the Chief justice said is not constitutionally required. So do you think that might pose any legal issues or are these totally separate or is this something that is really popular among, among the population, even if the conservatives on the Supreme Court don't love the idea?

So I think when you're talking about the conservative Supreme Court and its stance towards any kind of democracy reform, I think it's challenging because they've shown a real effort to undermine democracy reforms, whether it's gutting the Voting Rights act, whether it's saying who can figure out whether something's gerrymandered. You know, this is a Supreme Court that wants to get explain to the EPA that, you know, if it's 0.35 parts per million, no, Congress didn't intend that, it's got to be more like 32. But then when it's gerrymanding, they're like, ugh, who can figure out, you know, Republicans got 10% of the votes in 90% of the seats. But man, no way to know on that. So we're just going to throw up our hands. I mean, this is, it's a court that's been hostile to any attempts to unrig our democracy. And in part, you know, it's a court that itself is a product of some of these efforts to rig democracy. I mean, remember that this is a court that was created by conservative court packing by an effort by Senate Republicans to refuse to even consider justice nominated by Barack Obama so that they could fill that seat with a conservative. And remember, they said in the run up if Hillary won, they would hold that seat open until she was no longer president. So, you know, I think it's difficult to predict what the Supreme Court will do on these issues simply because it's shown such a hostility towards democracy reforms. And I don't think that it's because of a consistent jurisprudence. I think it's because they're hostile to democracy reforms. So let's put that aside. When we're talking though, about the broader public, I think people respond to this really well. It makes a lot of sense. If 60% of us want to have a Democratic representative, we should get it. You know, 60% should be Democrats. And if 60% of us want Republicans, then 60% should be Republicans. It makes intuitive sense. And in fact, when people talk about gerrymandering, this is exactly how they talk about it. You know, you see those great maps where it's sort of like, you know, Wisconsin or North Carolina and they show you what the percent votes were and then they show you what the percent representatives were and how skewed they are. And people intuitively get that's wrong. Obviously they're not going to be perfectly matched up. But I think this is very consistent with common sense because we all get what's going on here. We understand how voting works and we understand if we all vote for somebody and somebody else wins, that's wrong.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And we could linger here for a while, but I want to move on to the money in politics and how we finance campaigns. This is something that is near and dear to our hearts at equal citizens. And that Larry Lessig started with in many ways is really the core of HR1 in terms of rooting out the corruption and the really corroding and distorting influence of big money. Let's start with HR1 as we did last time, and just give us a sense of what HR1 does to try and reduce the influence of Super PACS, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and restore a proper dependence of members of Congress on everyday voters and average citizens.

Sure. And I will say that there's sort of, I mean there's a whole array of things that it does. I'm going to focus on just a couple of the biggest ones. And at its core, by far the biggest step that it takes is public financing six to one match system, which basically allows for small donors to be matched at 6 to 1, which shifts the focus of politicians who are raising money for their campaigns from the mega donors down more to some of the small dollar donors. That's not the only step that's taken. For example, there are extensive lobbying reforms and I think more could even be done there. We'd love to see more being done there to change that culture and the, the way in which lobbyists interact on a day to day basis with members and the sway or the influence that can be created through that. There are also steps that are taken around ethics, although actually in congressional ethics, HR1 doesn't do enough. I think a lot of folks would like to see that stuff bolstered, but obviously on the executive branch there are efforts to be there and you see a lot of candidates out there, a lot of groups I think putting forward very bold ideas to, to address these sorts of things. So for example, banning lobbyists from fundraising from candidates, an idea that CAP has been strongly supportive of. Lifetime lobbying ban for elected members of Congress to deal with the revolving door. So anyway, but going back at its core, and I think this is really, this is something that people have been fighting for for a long time and is incredibly important. Is this six to one match, is this public financing? And I think that's probably the most significant step that HR1 takes. Really the most significant step we've seen in quite some time in terms of campaign finance.

So talk a little bit about a match. In terms of what does that mean? How would a campaign look like? Let's say that HR1 passes in 2021 and it goes into effect for the 2022 election. How are candidates starting to raise money in 2022 and how does that affect what they do in 2023?

Well, it means that candidates have to be less reliant on the richest folks, right? The ones who are maxing out giving the full amount and can instead have campaigns that are focused more on small dollar donors because they're getting that six to one match. Hopefully you see candidates doing less big money meetings behind closed doors with large donors and more efforts to excite the larger populace to get people excited about their campaign and want to give them 10, 20, 50, $100. Because in fact that's. Now we're going to test me on my math.

Let's do six times multiplication.

60, 120, 300, 600. I think I got that right. You can fix it in post. If not, it changes that whole dynamic and really shifts the locus of energy and the power down towards the lower dollar donors.

Can you say just a little bit more about that before we get to CAP's proposal, which is also a proposal that we really like, which is vouchers. $20 as you said, turns into $120. So it becomes a lot more profitable for congresspeople to knock on doors and try and just get $20 checks. But doesn't that also mean that $100 turns into $600, doesn't it just sort of push the donations upwards in some sense?

You mean in terms of the total amount of.

Yeah. So the point, what HR1's trying to solve for is become more reliant on everyday citizens and a broader base rather than just the people, people at the top. But if it's also going to multiply people at the top 100 to 600 in the same way it multiplies 10 to 60, isn't it still advantageous for members of Congress to seek larger donations because those are matched at a 6 to 1 ratio also?

Yeah. So I think the way to think about the match is that it takes the existing universe of donors and shifts power within that universe down towards the lower dollar donors, but it doesn't really expand the universe of donors. You might imagine that you'd have some additional folks providing funding if they knew that their $10 was actually worth $60. But you wouldn't anticipate a huge groundswell because presumably if you want to give $10 to a candidate, you want to give $10. It's not that you think, oh, they won't care about my $10, they will care about my $60. It is maintaining the current universe and just shifting where the attention will be from candidates within that universe and from 0 to 200. You're right. It still is obviously more advantageous for you to get $190 than $10.

Right.

But I do, I want to. Before we go to talk about our proposal, I know something used to, I mean, this is still an enormous, enormous change in terms of the way in which candidates who rely on small dollar donors will suddenly be able to better compete without having to go to the mega donors who, who policy views tend to be totally out of whack with where the broader populace is because not surprisingly, they don't like things that, for example, tax them at a reasonable rate, make it harder for them to profit at the expense of others. And so that is a very big change. But we're going to talk about, I think in a second how you could even expand upon that, make the change even bigger.

Yeah, so let's go there. We've at Equal Citizens, we've been grading presidential candidates on their platforms and we've been giving extra marks for candidates who support voucher programs. Though, as you said, lots of marks for people who support matching programs. It's way, way better than the current system. But describe for us what the voucher program that you've proposed and why it does even More to solve this dependency problem than a matching program does.

Sure. So the idea is instead of asking people to put up funding and then match it, which again, very small part of the population actually donates to campaigns, you would give people democracy dollars. What we call democracy dollars, not just us. Others have used the term as well. And as you describe, it would be a voucher. It would be a way for individuals to give money to any campaign in the primary or general. And you could set it at different amounts, but the notion would be that you would try and set it at amount so that it suddenly became advantageous to go to folks that have never had a political voice. Right. So imagine if you could go into an apartment complex in your district that has, let's say 200 people in it. No one there has ever given, but now everybody in there has 100 democracy dollars that they can give to whoever. And so if you come there and basically are fighting for their vote, are standing up for them, and you can say, give me money, I'm going to support my candidacy, I'm here for you all. You can create a viable candidacy that way. It also allows people that don't have a built in network. One of the hardest things about running for office is you have to get off the ground. You have to show people that you're listening, legitimate. And the way you do that is you raise money. And if you have a bunch of friends who are lawyers and doctors, et cetera, then that's doable. It's not easy. Anyone who raises a buddy will tell you it's not easy, but it's doable. But let's say that you've worked as a community organizer, or let's say that you've been working in low income housing projects or at a health clinic that deals with indigent populations. You don't necessarily have that. You don't have a bunch of people that are sitting around with disposable income who can give you $1,000 or $2,000 because they think you're great. They might think you're the best person in the world, but they simply don't have the money. And so that changes who can run, who can imagine themselves running. I think it is worth pointing out that the matching program in HR1 makes a nod to this, which is that it has a pilot program, a voucher pilot program. We, we shouldn't, it's very important to mention that because I think that is a part of this discussion. But we'd like to see leaning into that even more and trying to bring in more people into the system, trying to reshape the way that candidates think about running so that it's, you know, that it's. Every single person already has a vote and that's why they count. But every single person should also be able to provide the support that candidates need in order to run. And that's what moving towards a voucher system does.

So describe a little what's the evidence about how the base broadens, how this really revolutionizes the entire campaign finance system. I know Seattle most prominently has a voucher program. It's early times, obviously, and this is a fairly new proposal in response to a solution that has come up, a need, I should say, that has come about only recently. But what's the evidence on the ground of how things are changing?

Well, I think you hit an important point, which is that this is relatively new. Seattle is the biggest example, and I think we're seeing positive results. But this doesn't have as extensive a history behind it as Match does, which is why it's important, I think, for advocates to be looking to the examples that we have. And again, as you said, Seattle being the biggest one, to see what's going on there and use that to make the case. I think we're now through our second cycle because I think that when this comes back up, this being HR1, and I do believe it will come back up because I don't think that we can keep running campaigns in the way that we are, where a few people basically make all the decisions because everyone needs to get their money in order to run. When it does come up, the first question that everyone's going to ask is, well, show me the details. Show me the money, which actually makes it mean something a little bit different in this context. But I do think that it's important for folks to be looking at those examples. But at its core, it has to broaden the base because the base is so small. Yeah. You know, the vast, vast, vast majority of people in this country do not give money to a political campaign. So almost by necessity, we know that Democracy Dollars are going to expand the pool. Now, how much? How do they expand it? And there are other sorts of questions about how do you make sure people are aware that they have it? There are a lot of details here, but I think the general notion is relatively straightforward simply because we're talking about the beginning, such a small pool of people that actually give money to campaigns.

So I wanted to ask you, since you're really in ground zero in terms of educating members on this about some of the reaction that these proposals have seen. Andrew Yang, I think, was among the most prominent candidates to talk about this on the campaign trail and mentioned the phrase democracy dollars at a presidential debate. And from some people who have never heard of it, the response on Twitter was sort of semi mocking, where they were saying, if we have Democracy Dollars, how about Monopoly dollars? How about Schrute bucks, which is a reference to fake money that Dwight Schrute gives out to people on the office? So what needs to happen to get people to realize that these are not Schrute bucks, these are real dollars that really can revolutionize the political system? A and B, that I think the other response was, oh, we're just giving democracy Dollars to people. This is just another government program, just another handout. How do you kind of solve the criticisms of the voucher program that we've seen?

Well, first, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge the incredible work that Senator Gillibrand has done on this very topic, both when she was running on the campaign trail, but also introducing a bill, quite substantial bill, around public financing, using a Democracy Dollar sort of notion. Just want to give them a shout out for their great work there. Let's take the first one about how do you make people realize that this is real? I'm not very worried about that, because if you suddenly give everyone in America money that they can use to support a campaign, campaigns are going to figure out how to make sure they know that it's real. I don't think that anyone that's ever lived through a presidential campaign has said, man, these campaigns cannot figure out how to, like, reach us, talk to us, not reach you in a way that you might find compelling, but reach you. You know what I mean? No one's like, man, there are no ads. I haven't read anything about this. No one's come and knocked on my door. I just feel like, is there an election happening? And, you know, this is what they do is they go and they. If it's voters, they go find voters and they turn them out. And if it's money, they're gonna go find that and turn that out as well. They're gonna make sure that people understand. I think also, you know, when you're talking about a sea change like this, something that's shifting power away from those who've traditionally held all of it and towards the broader swath of American people, you're going to see the kinds of folks that are engaging in those communities also making that be Known. You know, this is something that we're seeing not necessarily in the context of democracy Dollars, but a whole host of other contexts. Community organizers, people that work providing services to low income folks or organized in those communities and helping those communities recognize the potential they have to exercise political power. The necessity of them organizing to exercise political power, if they want to have be able to improve their lives, they want to not be ignored. And so I think if you see something like this where suddenly all of these folks also have the ability to donate to a campaign, I'm confident that there will be extensive efforts to try and educate folks. I mean, I think that it's not that it's a small problem, it's going to create a tremendous amount of work, but I think it's a problem that can be addressed. On your second point, how do you get around this is just more money for campaigns? Well, I think one simple way to think about it is how does the system work right now? Extremely wealthy people put a lot of money into campaigns. Then they come back after their candidate wins and says, hey, can I get a tax break? Can I get a regulatory break? Can I get X, Y and Z? And we all pay for it then, then they get that money back, they take a small part of it and they dump it into the next campaign, rinse and repeat. So in a sense, we're already paying for it, we just don't recognize it. We're paying for it in the tax bill that gives the vast majority of its benefits to the 1%. It's done nothing for middle class, for working class Americans. You see it in all the regulatory changes that just dump money further and further up. You see it in a whole set of economic policies that have exacerbated inequality. So what this does, it's not giving more money to campaigns, it's giving more power to people.

Right.

The Supreme Court says that money is speech, but as we all know, in campaigns money is power. And when you shift that, what you're doing is shifting power. And if we want to see policies that better reflect our values, then we need to have that political power because that's what people respond to.

Yeah. So let's follow that down to 2023. So HR 1.2.0 has a voucher program and new kinds of candidates pop up and new kinds of campaigns pop up that are relying on 20, 40, $60 donations from broad swaths of the community. Obviously, not everyone, not everyone votes on everyone's engaged politics, but a humongous new contingent of people who are now engaged in the process, what does that unlock? I think people understand that, ok, maybe we won't have to be so responsive to certain narrow corporate or environmental interests who want specific breaks there. And I think that's an easy thing to understand. But what else does it open up in terms of the political landscape?

Well, I think one of the things that's most important is it opens up who runs and who wins, meaning that people from all sorts of walks of life, from all sorts of professions, who have never been able to run a campaign for exactly the reasons we just talked about, they don't have the startup cash, suddenly can be participating in politics, can be running and winning and bringing those unique viewpoints to Congress. It's going to expand the folks from the types of communities that have traditionally been shut out of power, who can be elected, who can have representation. And I think it's going to end up with a Congress that's more responsive to the broader public. So I don't think if 90% of the millionaires and billionaires in this country want a policy, I think most folks think that's probably going to get done. But if 90% of everybody else wants background checks, wants to see wages go up, things like that, it's not clear that that's going to happen under the current system. But in a system in which those folks have political power, in which who you're going back to is not your big donors, but you're going back to the thousands and thousands of folks who don't make that much money, who have supported your campaign, and every two years or six years or four years, if you're the president, you have to go back to them and make the case. That means that you have to be delivering results for them, because if not, those democracy dollars are going to go somewhere else to a candidate who will. And so it changes the whole calculus by which Congress operates, by which elected officials operate. And I think by doing that, it can shift us to make a Congress that's more responsive to what people want, because ultimately members are responsive to folks. They're just responsive to the folks they think they need to get reelected or frequently are responsible to the folks they think they need to get reelected.

Yeah. So what is Cap's role in making this happen? And I ask that because obviously you and many of your colleagues have deep experience in the Obama administration, notably, but also connections with Congress people. And so you're sort of uniquely situated to figure out where this is on people's maps, how this can be tweaked, how this can be implemented once Democrats once again are able to set the agenda in both houses of Congress and have a president potentially sign it and potentially even bring centrists and other Republicans on board. So what do you do now in 2019 as we sit here in this wonderful cap studio, and what do we do in a hopeful in this vision of 2021, 2022 that we've been talking about?

So I think one of the most important things that we can do is stress that democracy reform, these sort of structural reforms, has to be the first thing that the next president does. You know, there's only so many issues that a president can move. You have a short window, two, three, four years, you know, depending on what. And I'm talking about, even if you're a two term president, you have a short window. What you do first is critical. And what we need is a commitment from candidates that this is going to be the first thing that they're going to do, that they recognize that if we're going to have any kind of progress on things like climate, on guns, on lowering the cost of prescription drugs, on increasing wages, first we have to clean up the system, first we have to change the incentives, first we have to shift power away from the folks that have hoarded it for so long to everybody else. And you do that with democracy reform. So it's got to be the first thing, and we need a commitment from the president while they're a candidate that this will be the first thing that they're going to do, that they recognize the size and scope of the problem and that they have solutions that have the necessary size and scope to address it.

So, and we'll conclude here, how close do you think we are there both sort of within cap, if I can ask, a little bit of intramural politics and then within the Democratic Caucus, because, you know, you all here have been putting out these amazing policy proposals for 15 years that have really shaped democratic policy. So is it difficult for you to go to your colleagues and say, hey, you want climate change, which is an incredibly important issue, but climate change can't happen without democracy reform. Gun reform can't happen without democracy reform. Right. Is that message coming through within the policy circles and then broadly to members of Congress, presidential candidates, policymakers, et cetera?

I think very much so. I mean, if you just look at the historic coalition that supported HR1, it wasn't just democracy groups, it was all sorts of environmental groups, labor, all sorts of parts of the progressive coalition that came behind. And obviously not just the progressive coalition, but we're talking now about sort of the progressive side of the ledger. All sorts of progressive groups came together, recognizing that in order to have to be able to take steps on their issues first, we need to fix this broken system. And so I think that there's an increasing support for this notion. I think you're seeing in one of the candidates. And one of the interesting things for me during the debates was the moderators seem to never want to talk about democracy reform, but the candidates definitely do. It's something that they bring up every time we were talking about. They were talking about the scourge of gun violence and how we might address it. And unprompted candidates were bringing up the role that the NRA plays in shaping our political debate by dumping tons of money into certain candidates and basically preventing movement on sensible reforms that broad, broad 80, 85% of the country wants. So, you know, people understand that. They understand because we've been trying so hard for so long to get just common sense reforms, not even big reforms. I mean, they would have a substantial impact on people's lives, but the vast majority of people support those can't seem to move. So people recognize if we're going to have that move, what we need to do is have these big democracy forms, have that be the first thing. Now, I don't think it's uniform among the candidates, but I think that continued pressure and attention from activists, from voters, from people, policymakers, although probably the first two are more, more important in moving folks than our white papers. But continuing to push this notion is critically important, and I think we will be able to get there. Because when you look at the. I mean, the Trump administration really just shows you the scope of the problem. I mean, it's sort of kind of ripped the mask off of everything. It's doing the same. It's not that corruption started with Trump. It far, far predates him, but he's just more obvious about it. He's not as good at hiding it or doesn't care to hide it. And so it's really come through to folks how endemic it is and the impact that it has on a whole host of issues that impact their everyday lives, that impact their retirement savings, that impact their prescription drug costs, that impact their wages. And so we can't keep beating our head against the wall and saying, here's a great proposal, but the wealthy donors that support everything don't like it. What we need to do is say, here's a great proposal, and we don't care what the wealthy donors think. Because we've shifted the focus. We've shifted power to all of us. And we want this. We want better paying jobs. We want lower prescription drug prices. We want our kids to be safe in schools. So do it. And you know, if you fix the system, you'll have a Congress that then responds to that.

Yeah, no, that's a great place to end. Thanks for all your work on this. I'm sure we'll see lots more white papers coming out and we'll have you back on when there's more stuff to talk about, which I'm sure there will be some.

Great. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Sam.