Make It Stop
If you’re like me, and you’ve donated more than $1 to either major political party in the past three decades, then your phone is likely in a constant state of convulsion as we approach the midterm elections a week from today. I’ve recently felt rather overwhelmed by the “personalized” appeals from candidates in emoji-laden, sky-is-falling text messages, and the never-ending barrage of unsolicited calls with caller IDs displayed as “Potential Spam” or “Robo Caller.” These political solicitations are on top of the normal relentless stream of spam emails, texts, and calls, relegating my phone to a constant source of annoyance.
If, unlike me, you live in a so-called “swing state” or “purple district,” you are likely asking yourself why you still own a phone at all and are shooing canvassers off your property. In a recent visit to my home state and perpetual battleground, Wisconsin, every single ad during an hour-long morning TV show I appeared on was political. No car ads, no mobile phone ads, no fast food ads—only political ads. One after another.
Elections are the most crucial and cherished facet of any representative democracy. Like most Americans, I consider free and fair elections to be so sacred as to almost take them for granted. I vote in every election and consider myself an engaged and informed voter. During the Trump Administration, as my Goodreads history will attest, I became somewhat consumed by politics. I read all the books, devoured all the news articles, listened to all the podcasts, and watched all the shows. I found what was happening in our political system and discourse alarming, challenging the most foundational elements of our democracy. I needed to be engaged and active, and I wrote about it often on this blog.
But it was also exhausting.
During the last two years, it has been a relief to return to relative normalcy. To once again assume our government can function without demanding our constant attention and intervention. One of the things that has enabled America to thrive economically over the last century is our political stability. Unlike citizens of countries ruled by autocratic regimes, plagued by corruption, or teetering at the brink of civil war, we Americans have had the luxury of being able to expend our effort, skill, and mental energy elsewhere—providing for our families, building businesses, growing our economy, and improving our overall prosperity. In other words, by “insuring domestic Tranquility,” we have been able to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Our founders uniquely recognized that the responsibility of a nation is not only to protect its citizens, but enable them “the pursuit of Happiness.”
Robocallers don’t make me happy.
Before I continue, let me state that I fully believe in and support the right of politicians and their supporters to campaign, debate, advertise, and otherwise practice free speech. But something about the tone, tenor, and volume of modern elections and campaigning seems . . . different. Less of a rational political debate and more of a corrupted, self-serving business. As we brace ourselves for the midterms and look ahead to what is sure to be another bitterly contested Presidential election only two years from now, I’ve given some thought as to why elections feel so different and what we might do to make them more civil, credible, and constructive.
First, the communication machinery of campaigns has overwhelmed our mental capacity as voters. Unlike more expensive channels like direct mail or advertising, the cost of electronic communication—emails, texts, and robodialers—is effectively zero. As solicitation lists are copied and contact information shared to an endless array of candidates, PACs, and special interest groups, we as citizens are getting increasingly bombarded. Though I have no doubt about the genuine intentions of the candidates and their campaigners, the effect of this bombardment is not a more-engaged citizenry. The effect is tuning it out. As every channel of communication gets saturated by spam, we become overloaded. Ironically, the same elected officials who pass privacy and anti-spam legislation are ignoring their own laws. We need to enforce and improve data privacy laws, including universal opt out. Tech platforms need to make this easier.
Second, all campaigns are national. It used to be that campaigns were local. That only the candidates representing your district or state were interested in coveting your donations and support. No longer. With the balance of power in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives typically hinging on only a handful of elections, those contests have become national. Understandably, the campaigns of those candidates are seeking support beyond their district or state boundaries. How can a Californian or Texan, where the outcome of an election is often preordained, make a political donation that will matter? Donate it to one of those closely contested elections in another state. The problem this practice creates is that, as a voter in California, I get inundated with solicitations for candidates in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida, and elsewhere. This is a hard problem to fix. The simple solution would be to prohibit out-of-state or out-of-district donations. But to make such a ban fair, we need a more representative democracy. The Electoral College and U.S. Senate representation are disempowering voters in states like California and Texas. It makes no sense that my state has only 2% of the Senate vote, despite having 12% of the U.S. population. My county, San Mateo county, has a population greater than three states: Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska. It is that under-representation that makes me care about the Senate race in Alaska.
Third, the rhetoric is more caustic. One of the most pernicious byproducts of social media and online advertising is that it has accelerated the shift of our political rhetoric away from substance and toward more “activating” (i.e. polarizing) messages. Pollsters, campaign managers, and politicians have long known that negative messages can sway voters and win campaigns, but analyzing clicks and response rates has confirmed and calcified that practice. Fear, grievance, and outrage simply perform better. The goal of campaigns is no longer to inform voters but to alarm them into action. Why? Because it works. But such rhetoric has a cost. Look no further than the recent disturbing attack against Paul Pelosi to understand the deleterious effect of such rhetoric in our political process. We need to more effectively regulate online misinformation, slander, and hate speech. We have allowed extreme rhetoric to flourish in these online forums for too long. Somehow, we still see mass media—the communication of one message to millions of people—as more dangerous than social media, which micro-targets messages to the most niche and extreme segments, often with misleading or outright false information. That needs to stop.
Fourth, and most importantly, dark money has flooded into our political process. Wealthy donors for both parties are funneling huge sums of anonymous donations into our political process via 501(c)(4) nonprofits created specifically to advance political agendas and Super PACs which illegally coordinate with political campaigns. These gigantic loopholes have allowed wealthy individuals and lobbying groups to secretly and brazenly influence our politics and corrupt our campaigns, forcing both parties to pander to these special interests to raise the funds they believe they need to be competitive. As this dark money continues to flood in, the amount spent on campaigns continues to explode, and each of us as citizens continue to feel overwhelmed.
The core problem underlying all these issues is a complete lack of campaign oversight. The Federal Election Commission has been rendered ineffective due to a deliberate effort by Senator Mitch McConnell to stack the sole federal agency responsible for protecting our election process with commissioners who refuse to do their jobs. One would think, if there’s a single issue the two political parties should agree upon, it is fair elections—and the existence of a bipartisan entity to ensure that fairness, by investigating and enforcing the mutually agreed-upon rules. That is not the case. Sadly, the evident belief of Republican leadership is that the only way they can win federal elections despite consistently trailing in the popular vote is not by adopting a less extreme political platform that might sway moderate voters, but by handicapping from within the very organization that was created to ensure fair elections. Of course, since 2020, a significant segment of the Republican party has taken election undermining a step further, believing that baseless assertions that our election process is “rigged” or was “stolen” will be to their political advantage. Although I readily admit I am a Democrat, I always try to argue for moderate, middle-ground, bipartisan, and democratically fair policies. The Republican hypocrisy on this point is striking. If the Republican party truly wants fair elections, the mechanism for achieving it is in their hands: let the FEC commissioners they’ve appointed do their jobs. Until the FEC is fixed and existing campaign laws are enforced, it is impossible to consider additional steps that would further ensure our elections are fair.
Unfortunately, the FEC dysfunction notwithstanding, common sense campaign finance reforms—such as enforcing campaign spending limits, requiring public disclosure of campaign donations, and closing dark money donation mechanisms—have been notoriously difficult to achieve. Both parties are too addicted to the current loopholes they perceive to be to their advantage to pass more effective legislation. I recall from my time in the 90s working for former U.S. Senator Carl Levin, who, as chair of the Governmental Affairs Committee made meaningful campaign finance reform a cornerstone of his time in office, what a frustrating battle that was. But the passage of the Restoring Integrity to America’s Elections Act (H.R.1414), which has received bipartisan support in Congress, would be an important step in reforming the FEC, so it can fulfill its mission.
I worry that the business of politics—chasing money not votes, getting clicks not conviction, entrenching biases not debating policies—may simply be too entrenched. But both parties need to recognize the long-term damage the current system is doing. I don’t object to political spam or robo callers out of apathy, but out of a desire for a more genuine political discourse. Our election process seems to no longer be about policies, platforms, or ideas, but tribalism, self-validation, and dark money special interests disguised in the veil of free speech. Consequently, trust in our elections and elected officials is at an all-time low. A disillusioned, disgruntled, and dis-informed electorate doesn’t benefit our nation or either political party. It’s time to make it stop. Stop the spam, stop the misinformation, enforce the laws, and restore a semblance of legitimacy to our election process. It’s time to form a more perfect union, instead of a more polarized one.