SPEAKER_03 0:00

So if you wanted more competitive elections, if you wanted to have more competitive elections.

SPEAKER_02 0:04

Would you have to undo the two-party system?

SPEAKER_03 0:07

Well, that would be one way to achieve it. It's not necessarily the only way. You could also just imagine allowing both parties to really have robust competition in all of the districts that we have. That could be another way to get a competitive election.

SPEAKER_02 0:20

But it's not in the interest of the parties to facilitate that because as you said at the very beginning, the more vociferous the primary fight is, there's a punishment in the general.

SPEAKER_03 0:28

Yes. And their probability of winning the election is just much lower as well. Yeah. So it would never be in the party's interest to increase competition in elections, but I think it's in democracy's interest to have that happen.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Oh boy. Is the only alternative a parliamentary system? Because, I mean, as we've seen, parliamentary systems have lots of their own problems. I mean, they're such a mess trying to like they end up having elections at all the time and snap elections, the governments fall apart and all these things.

SPEAKER_03 0:56

Yes. And in these parliamentary systems, you're expected as a member of Congress to always are a member of parliament, to always vote with your party, no matter what. There's either it there's really not a huge role as an MP to shape individual policies and to cast your own vote.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Really?

SPEAKER_03 1:11

Yeah. So in in our Congress today, this still happens. There are Democrats that will vote with the Republicans, Republicans that will vote for the Democrats. This doesn't happen very often, but in critical moments, it happens. This never happens in Parliament.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

They just don't, it's like it's like this block always votes with this. They always vote the same one. Every bill. Exactly. All 10 of them or all 50 of them or whatever. And that's and doing that is what gives them their power. That's what gives them a block power as well. So they have to have, they have to do it.

SPEAKER_03 1:40

Yes. This is not necessarily the way that a parliament has to work, but that's at least how it does work every day. Wild. Yes. Yeah. I was very surprised by this.

SPEAKER_02 1:57

Alright. So this is Andrew. Uh okay, let me I'm gonna do my best. Andrew Myers. Yes. Uh not a postdoc PhD.

SPEAKER_03 2:12

PhD candidate.

SPEAKER_02 2:13

Fourth year PhD candidate.

SPEAKER_03 2:14

Here at Stanford University.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

Yeah. And then and then doing a year at a fellowship at Hoover. So you're finishing your your PhD this year.

SPEAKER_03 2:22

I've been spending my dissertation in just about a month.

SPEAKER_02 2:24

Yeah. Oh boy.

SPEAKER_03 2:26

Yes. Very exciting. Yeah. I'm thinking right now about exactly how I want to format the presentation and getting all of my committee together, but it's going to be a really great experience. And then after that, I'll spend one year as a postdoc at Hoover. I'm going to be doing some work on election administration and campaign finance. Interesting time for it. It's a fascinating time for it. And then after that, I'm off to MIT as an assistant professor.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

Yeah. You actually got a job.

SPEAKER_03 2:52

I actually got a job. Yes. I feel very fortunate.

SPEAKER_02 2:54

That's cool. Yeah. And you're so your field is political science. You're doing a PhD in political science.

SPEAKER_03 3:02

PhD in political science. My expertise are American politics and political methodology. So I spend a lot of my time. Oh boy. I spend a lot of my time thinking about polarization in American legislatures, campaign finance, and what we call election administration.

SPEAKER_02 3:17

Yeah. Oh boy. Oh boy, indeed. Well, so okay. Um I was thinking about this. Because I've thought about this a fair amount too, right? Of course. Uh and my first question, and probably my only question, because I'm guessing from here we're not going to have any trouble finding wherever we're going to go. Is what's something you have discovered in your work that I or others who are like consumers of media and like paying attention but in a in a non-academic way. Like, what's something you've discovered that I would know wouldn't know or would be surprised by?

SPEAKER_03 4:06

That's a great question. Let me give you three, if that's okay. And they kind of center around what is the dissertation that I'll be defending in a couple of weeks. The first is about the role of money in campaign finance. So this is one of the most controversial areas of American elections and American politics right now, with Citizens United a decade and a half ago, uh, campaign finance kind of became the wild west of American politics, where many groups can spend as much money as they want. And the time that this campaign finance ruling, Citizens United, was made, American politics also became much more polarized. And there have been many claims made that campaign finance is one of the reasons that Congress and American state legislatures are so dysfunctional. So one of the papers in my dissertation evaluates a portion of this claim by asking the question: when parties nominate extremist candidates, do those extremist candidates fundraise better or worse relative to a moderate candidate in a general election? It's a difficult question to answer.

SPEAKER_02 5:12

Yeah, because they don't have to track the money, right? That's the whole point.

SPEAKER_03 5:15

Is like it's uh it can all be well, it depends upon the type of money that you're looking at. So the type of money that I'll look at are direct campaign contributions to party, uh two candidates' committees. So me making a donation to Nancy Pelosi for Congress.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

But that's such a limited component of where of what Citizens United opened up. I mean, that's the whole thing that Citizens United opened up was that you don't have to directly, you can just make a PAC. So it's about nothing in particular, and take money from anyone and don't, and don't even, and you can't even track, you don't have to report where it's coming from, right?

SPEAKER_03 5:48

Well, there are disclosure requirements for money sent to super PACs. It's difficult to understand who they're spending for or against, if they're supporting me as a candidate or they're contributing against me as a candidate, but all of that super PAC money is logged to some extent. Recently we've seen an explosion of what we call dark money, which is really money that is not uh recorded in any way on the FEC website. Yeah. Um we think that this is like somewhere in the range of one to two billion dollars a cycle. So I just I can't study that at all in this paper.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:19

But I take kind of the first pass of looking at these direct campaign contributions to candidates' committees. And you know, as I mentioned, this is a really difficult question to answer for multiple reasons. One, just because it's difficult to get the data and the outcome.

SPEAKER_01 6:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:33

But another because it's difficult to identify who's a moderate and who's an extremist in a primary election. We only see one candidate that wins an election and how they end up voting in office to determine if you're kind of an AOC or you're more of a down-the-line staying hoyer. So we have no information on who lost that primary and how they would have voted were they elected to office.

SPEAKER_02 6:54

And you'd have to disentangle um extremism in campaign message from actual voting record, which are not going to be the same. Which are very different topics. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 7:06

So I take one approach, it's probably not a perfect approach or the only approach, but I use a small set of campaign contributions as a training matrix and apply this in a machine learning context to infer how people would vote were they elected to office. So the way you should think about this is that we have some training matrix which applies to everybody that I want to study.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 7:30

If you run an election, you raise money, whether you win or lose, but only a set of people that win elections ultimately go on to office and accumulate this roll call voting record, which we can use to determine if you're a moderate or extremist.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:43

So we learn the mapping from campaign contributions to roll call voting for people that were elected. Okay. And then we apply that to the set of people that are not ultimately elected and infer the roll call voting records of these members of Congress and people that don't win in Congress.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

The idea being if the that you would be able to map from the campaign contributions to voting record.

SPEAKER_03 8:04

Yes, exactly. So there's a lot of assumptions that are baked into this process. Yeah. And it's difficult for many reasons, but mostly in this case because the outcome that I'm trying to study in this paper is also campaign contributions. So you can imagine a circular world in which campaign contributions show up on both sides of the regression equation, as we like to say. It's an outcome I'm trying to study, but it's also the treatment that I'm trying to identify. And if I'm not really careful about how I identify each of these, I could just be picking up some mechanical correlation between money and money.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:35

So the solution in the case of this paper is that I infer a candidate's ideology, or I create that training matrix based only on the primary election contributions the candidates receive before they enter office. So this is one set of money. It's only one election. It's like half of an election, actually, for a candidate. And then the outcome that I look at is this separate outcome. It's the amount of general election fundraising that you receive. So one is primary election money in your first primary, the other is general election fundraising in a current election.

SPEAKER_02 9:05

So you're mapping from primary election fundraising through voting record to general election fundraising?

SPEAKER_03 9:12

So for inferring ideology, I'm mapping from primary election fundraising to roll call voting record. Right. That's the treatment that I'm interested in studying. Are you a moderate or are you extremist?

SPEAKER_01 9:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 9:21

And then the outcome I'm studying is the amount of general election fundraising you receive relative to your opponent. So you got 55% of the general election fundraising and your opponent got 45%.

SPEAKER_02 9:34

I see. I see. Yes. And then it's a question of like what so do the people who are more extreme Do they fundraise better? But that's interesting. So because it well the way you're identifying extreme or not extreme is it, it seems like it's a linear thing. It's like we have the primary fundraising and also the voting record, right? But it seems like those are actually two separate variables that would determine extremism versus moderate.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

They certainly could be. In this case, I combine the two of them to provide the best estimate of ideology in the primary election possible. Right.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

So it's two independent variables.

SPEAKER_03 10:14

Well, it they're two independent variables that are ultimately combined into one way to measure Canada ideology.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

Well you get to right, you get to like a final like what's the idea. Like are we like on the continuum of moderate to extreme, where do we land? That's but but but there's but these are the it's not one goes into the other and then that one goes into the X that they both sort of contribute to. Oh yeah. That's like, I mean, it just becomes such a zoo of of moderate and like trying to trying to move moderate, trying to like make the whole thing boil down to moderate to extend that single continuum. Seems like you you miss all kinds of stuff because you have um, well, corporate versus not corporate, right? You have big money interests versus individual voters. You have states' rights versus federal. You have, right, um, all these different things that like one could be very moderate on states' rights, but very extreme on cryptocurrency uh, you know.

SPEAKER_03 11:11

Um You're sounding like some of my reviewers. So these are all important concerns. What I've done to address them is, at least in this paper, I focus only on contributions made by individual donors. So I throw out all the money that are made by corporate PACs because we tend to think that these corporate PACs are access-seeking donors. They just want to contribute to whoever wins. Um this scaling process is only on these ideologically motivated individual donors. The outcome that I focus on is just your share of total money, because that's really ultimately what we care about.

SPEAKER_02 11:41

Which then includes corporate money?

SPEAKER_03 11:43

Which includes corporate money. So it's probably helpful at this point to take a step back and describe kind of the actual analysis that I'm gonna run, besides just focusing in on this measurement task. So kind of the ultimate question that I want to answer in this paper is do donors punish extremist primary election candidates? So if a party decides to nominate the extremist candidate in the primary, do they do better or worse in the general election in fundraising?

SPEAKER_02 12:08

Right. So and when you say do donors punish, you mean do general election donors? Do general election donors punish. Yeah. Right. Punished extremism, because of course primary primary voters are gonna reward it. You would think.

SPEAKER_03 12:19

You would think so. Yes. So to study this question, I adopt what's called a regression discontinuity design. It's a research design. I like it. I like very cool.

SPEAKER_02 12:28

Regression discontinuity.

SPEAKER_03 12:29

So it sounds very important.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

Can that be a like, let's make a band and that's gonna be our like that's that's like a great band name.

SPEAKER_03 12:35

That's a great one.

SPEAKER_02 12:36

Regression discontinuity?

SPEAKER_03 12:38

I remember that one.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Yeah, that'd be math. That'd be a great band name. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:42

Yes. So the basic idea of a regression discontinuity or RDD, as if you're gonna have a metal band or is it more of a punk band?

SPEAKER_02 12:49

Sorry.

SPEAKER_03 12:50

I think it's definitely a metal band.

SPEAKER_02 12:51

It feels, but it's got some punk in there.

SPEAKER_03 12:53

A little bit of a mix of the two.

SPEAKER_02 12:54

Yeah, I don't think it's a funk band much.

SPEAKER_03 12:56

Yeah, it's too angry.

SPEAKER_02 12:58

Anyway.

SPEAKER_03 12:59

So the idea of this regression discontinuity design is you're gonna leverage the as if random variation in election outcomes that are very close.

SPEAKER_02 13:08

So as if random variation.

SPEAKER_03 13:09

As if random variation. So you could think about a really close primary election between candidate A and candidate B. Okay. And candidate A gets 50.001% of the vote, and candidate B gets 49.999% of the vote. Okay. And that means that candidate A ends up winning this primary election and goes on to run in the general election, candidate B barely loses. But what's beautiful about using these really close primary elections is that we can say that essentially this is a coin flip election. You can imagine flipping a coin, and if it's heads, candidate A wins, if it's tails, candidate B wins. And as a social scientist, having this coin flip or random nature of an election outcome is really beautiful because it means that everything else at the district level is balanced on covariance. So the only thing that differs between a district that nominates a moderate and an extremist is that that coin flip happened to be a heads or it happened to be a tails. So the way you should think about this is that all the different confounding stories you can imagine in your mind about extremists are running in very politically lopsided districts, or they're running in very wealthy districts, or something like that, that is all taken away by this regression discontinuity design.

SPEAKER_02 14:18

The only thing Do you actually remove them from the so like if they win 70% of the general, then you just remove them from the from the analysis?

SPEAKER_03 14:26

Yes. So you're focusing on a very small sample.

SPEAKER_02 14:29

Because then of course extremism is going to be rewarded. So we're not even going to look at it.

SPEAKER_03 14:32

So it in this first analysis, yes, you're just gonna forget about all these other cases and just focus on this very specific sample. Right. The econometrics literature, we call this a late, a local average treatment effect. That means that it's it's very local to this small context, but we're able to precisely identify an effect without having any of these confounding variables.

SPEAKER_02 14:52

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_03 14:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

So this is because you've got a lot of confounding variables, like did it rain that day? Yes. You know? So something you should know about me. Um I worked for Barack Obama in 2004. Wow. Um I worked on his US Senate campaign. Um I was a political intern in the Jackson Street office downtown in Chicago. And so I I like my job after I got the I mean, they didn't pay me, but like I volunteered for a week and then they should they noticed that I was showing up for eight-hour days um in the call center. Uh and then high and like brought me in. And I did a bunch of different things. I mean, just like spending a couple hours like typing in the checks, right? Um, but also then I was a political intern and I did walk maps, right? Excellent. So the fundamental thing in Chicago politics, right, basic Chicago politics, is identify your pluses and get them to the polls. Very straightforward, right? So you do all the time. Well, so it's initially, so it's like, yeah, it's not a, it's not um it's not about changing hearts and minds, right? It's about it's about calling enough people and asking who they're gonna vote for. And if they say they're gonna vote for your guy or your girl, right, then you make sure there are uh people in the like you make sure you have somebody um by the polling place in that district to make sure there's nothing untoward happening, right? You make sure that um if it's in a if it's in a um a neighborhood where people don't have cars, that you have vans that can drive people to the polls. Um but it's all about identify your pluses and get them get them to the polls, right?

SPEAKER_03 16:40

And I should note that this is one of the longest running debates in American elections, that the study of American elections. Is an election outcome determined by persuasion, or is it determined by motivation or code?

SPEAKER_02 16:52

Well, I feel like that was answered a long time ago.

SPEAKER_03 16:54

Well, at least in the academic literature, there's some evidence that both of these pathways have some effect, but I think as you're leaning towards that this Well, because the persuasion is the persuasion is is is systemic, right?

SPEAKER_02 17:06

The per the whatever whatever component of persuasion there would be, it ends up being largely the zeitgeist of the time, right? So like um people lose, like presidents lose midterm elections, right? And that's not because they failed to persuade, it's because they now own the damage, right? And so the people are persuaded by the economy, right? And you can do as much persuasion as you want to try and do, but people don't vote with their ideas, right? That's kind of what people have figured out, right? That's why all of the social media engine, you know, election engineering works so well, is that is that people don't vote with their thoughts. They vote with their um they vote with their feelings. And that's where that's where um truthiness becomes Trumpiness and all that stuff, right?

SPEAKER_03 17:56

I agree. I think it is also difficult to explain the Republican Party's success in 2024 just on the basis of turnout. Really? If you look at the maps of the the swing in vote shares across the counties, you see, of course, like almost every county moved to the right in the 2024 presidential election.

SPEAKER_02 18:13

But it wasn't a Republican victory. It was a Trump victory. Well, and you could it would be I think it's hard to argue that that Trump is a Republican.

SPEAKER_03 18:22

But he was also on the ballot in 2020, right? And this would be a mobilization effect or a persuasion effect relative to 2020.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

Maybe, but you've also got four years of Iden. Yes. Right? So that you end up with you end up with with um, you know, um, you know, like I forgot, or I'm tired of this thing, so I'm gonna go for that thing, right? Or they or they gave me somebody that I didn't vote for in a primary, so I'm not all that motivated, right?

SPEAKER_03 18:50

Right. And in the end, a lot of this is all made moot by the fact that partisanship matters more than ever in American politics.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:57

So there really is not a lot of room for um persuasion to really matter at all.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:02

And mobilization might matter even more nowadays because I just want to turn out and support the person on my party's ticket.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's the first thing.

SPEAKER_03 19:10

So back to Barack Obama's campaign in 2004.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

And that was it.

SPEAKER_03 19:13

Oh, great.

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Okay, just saying like that's that's so like I have some, so I have some like familiarity with um election mechanisms. Yes. First, firsthand, some familiarity. I ended up, I ended up going to Michigan after we had won, because the Republicans in Illinois that year just imploded. And then the first the first candidate got pushed out by his own party because nasty stuff came out of divorce paperwork. And his own party. Um a disaster. Oh, yeah. And his home party was like, we can't have this, we don't want you. And then they brought in Alan Keyes, who was a total carpet bagger, and they were just trying to find, they were like, we we need an African-American candidate to compete with this African-American candidate, but he was like a carpet bagger and everybody knew it, and that imploded too, right? Um, and and Obama just had like won, right? Um, by so much that he, I mean, the guy is so bright, um that he started uh using what he had to do political favors. So his staff, he like farmed us out. So I went to Michigan um for um like four or five weeks um for all of October to to um run two districts for the Kerry campaign. Um and it was really interesting to see how the local when we got there, the local um uh I don't know if he was a congressman. I don't think he was a congressman. I I'm not sure. Um but all the money that had been coming from the national campaign, he had just steered into his own campaign. And he had built absolutely nothing. So so the so the campaign office that when we got there, there were like six of us. And there was uh an office that was completely empty and there was a phone in it that no one was that like nobody was there. So he had like set up this sham office um and was and was just like spending the money on, right? And this is what happens when you don't have like local, right? So the carry campaign was giving him nat was giving him national funding to like also help with the national campaign and he was just spending it as own campaign.

SPEAKER_03 21:14

Um And there was no oversight from the Carry campaign to catch this.

SPEAKER_02 21:18

It's pretty hard to do oversight on 435 right? Yes. It's just a lot, it's like it's this is part of why what makes um like what makes a really good national campaign is organization. And it's really hard to build that. And it's really hard to build it from scratch, and it's really hard to build it fast.

SPEAKER_03 21:41

Um And this is what a lot of Obama's 2008 success is credited to is having one of the best ground games and some of the best organization of a campaign in the digital era. It's essentially the campaign that invented these modern walk routes.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

It's a Chicago campaign.

SPEAKER_03 21:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

It's a machine campaign. Right? Like say what you want about the man. Right? I have a lot of positive feelings towards that guy. Right? He is still truly a politician.

unknown 22:10

Right.

SPEAKER_02 22:10

Of course. Right. The way he won, you know how he won his first election.

SPEAKER_03 22:15

The state senate campaign.

SPEAKER_02 22:16

Uh the state senate campaign. Are you familiar with how he won that?

SPEAKER_03 22:19

It was I remind me of the details. I don't remember.

SPEAKER_02 22:21

No, no, I'm super curious. Yeah. Like what you what you what you know of it.

SPEAKER_03 22:25

All I know is that he ran quite young. He was a young state senator. And what? Was he in office for two, three years before he decided to run for the state, the federal senate?

SPEAKER_02 22:36

Uh he was still a state senate. I don't know how long he'd been in state senate. Or if he don't if had he been re-elected. I mean, I know he was only in the U.S. Senate for two years before he decided to run the national campaign. Right. Um, but I don't know the timing of the um so he had run, like, yeah, so there's that that's all you got.

SPEAKER_03 22:56

That's all I know. Pre-US Senate. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 22:58

Okay. So um he had run to so, okay, so Barack um is a black white guy. Right? Uh he talks about it a lot in his first book. The fourth chapter in his first book, Dreams from My Father, is the most impressive and insightful and meaningful treatise on race in this country that I've ever read anywhere. Um it's basically his coming of age as, you know, between the ages of like 12 and 16 and discovering that he's black. Because up until then he wasn't, right? His mom's white, he's raised by his white grandparents, his black father has showed up for one month once when he was 10, right? Like he's a white guy. And then he gets into the socialization of late junior high, early high school, and his peers decide that he's black and he's no longer welcome. It right, it's like he has to learn how to play basketball, and he's not very good, but it's like that's what they all do, and he's like, he doesn't, right? Um and some of the stuff he says about discovering that his white grandmother, who he knew loved him, was actually afraid of black men, right? Um and the the older black man that his grandfather um connected him to, who was able to explain some of this stuff to him in a way that made sense. It's beautiful, it's incredible, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough. The book is too long, but that fourth chapter is like astounding. Um and then he goes to Harvard, right? Um and it's pretty clear he knows where he's going. Um but he understands that he's never gonna he's never gonna make it as a white politician. Like it won't it won't be allowed, like it's just not gonna be allowed, right? Um but he's able to exist in these in these higher levels of leadership in ways that previous black candidates couldn't, because he didn't have the profound and deep um distrust of white people that like Jesse Jackson has, right? That like grew, you know, they're like they grew up in African American culture, like they're like um because like he's able to like hang out at the Harvard Law Review, and like he got in. It was like, I mean he got in because but it was like during a time of significant affirmative action, right? Um and he knew it, but he's but he's still who he is, and he's still the most potent guy in any room he's in, right? Of course. Um and so he ends up editor of the Harvard Law Review, right?

SPEAKER_03 25:42

Very prestigious position.

SPEAKER_02 25:43

Right. Um and he's I don't know if he's the only black guy in the room, but certainly in the minority, and he might have been the only black guy in the room, right? And he's and he's like, and he's able to navigate this without having the um the deep fear of the like of the people around, like, because they're all you know, because like he's like hanging out with white people is like that's his family, right? But he also knows that the electorate will never accept that. So he's gonna have to become a black politician in some way, right? So he moves to Chicago uh to be a community organizer, right?

SPEAKER_04 26:17

Right.

SPEAKER_02 26:18

And he loses his first two elections, they're both um state congressional elections. I believe he lost to Bobby Rush both times. Um because he's too white. And because the black people on the south side of Chicago, even though he married a woman who's darker skinned than he is, right, he started going to black church, right? Like he's being a part of the community. But they see him as a carpet battery. Like they can it's like you can just kind of tell like he's too white.

SPEAKER_03 26:45

Well, it also didn't hurt that Bobby Rush was a longtime incumbent.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

So that was fundamental, right? And then so he's he's lost twice, and he bides his time, and he and he like builds the organization, right? Um and the woman who was the US uh the state senator from that area um decides she's gonna retire. And so Chicago is a machine town. And in order to succeed, you have to be a part of the machine, right? And so you don't get to run until it's your turn to run. And so she's gonna retire, and so they let him, it's like, okay, you can run, right? And then partway into the election, she decides to un-retire and run.

SPEAKER_03 27:29

For the seat that she currently held. Yep. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 27:33

And this is one of his like true crucible moments, right? Where where the the the real politician shows up, right? Where where he's not gonna he's not gonna take no for an answer, and he's and he's he's not gonna and he's willing to like play a little dirty. But the way he played dirty is so awesome. So he figured out that in order to because he's the smartest guy in any room he's in, right? And he's and he's uh like a real lawyer, like and he's read the details.

SPEAKER_04 28:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 28:09

And he knows he that that when you to get on the ballot, you have to get a certain number of signatures right from people in the area to submit your to to get your name on the ballot. According to the rules, in that in that place in that time, you had to number the names on your petitions. Right? Okay. You had to like, people had to sign and there had to be like number one, here's the name. Number two, here's the name. And the woman who had decided to join the election after saying she was going to retire, hadn't numbered the names. Oh no. And he got her thrown off the ballot. Wow. And then he figured out that everyone else on the ballot had done the same thing. And he got them all thrown off the ballot.

SPEAKER_03 29:00

So he won by default?

SPEAKER_02 29:02

He won an uncontested election.

SPEAKER_03 29:05

Okay, I definitely did not remember this from the And we'll have to like, we'll have to like I'm like, no, that wasn't in the biography.

SPEAKER_02 29:12

Um and I say it with incredible confidence, right? And I'm quite I am quite confident, although now I I feel like we should double check that that's true. But I'm pretty sure but I'm like pretty confident that that's true.

SPEAKER_03 29:23

Okay, I've learned something new today.

SPEAKER_02 29:24

That he won his first election, like so he was this African-American guy who couldn't get elected in black areas because he was too white. And the way he won his first election was by making it uncontested, by getting not only the woman who had broken her word and joined back in, but also everybody else.

SPEAKER_03 29:41

So why did everybody else forget about this rule, including the longtime incumbent who has presumably done this many times before?

SPEAKER_02 29:47

Because nobody had ever, right?

SPEAKER_03 29:49

No one had ever read the rules or looked that carefully.

SPEAKER_02 29:51

When you in all things, right, it's true in medicine too. Um it's impossible to follow all the rules. It's impossible, right? You can't possibly follow all the rules because you would have to work 36 hours in a 24-hour day.

SPEAKER_03 30:06

And a lot of them are probably conflicting too.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Right. So it's impossible to follow all the rules. Um, because the rules sort of get layered on over time, right? Yes. Um it's so like, it's like um Orthodox Judaism, right? Where the rules just get layered on and layered on and layered on and layered on, and it and it eventually becomes this thing of like that's what Maimonides did in like the twelve in the late 12th century, where there's now like a thousand years of rabbis coming up with all these rules, and it's like, okay, what are the actual rules? And he basically redoes the memo and he's like, let's pair this down so that it's like livable, right? Um that's how legal systems operate. They eventually just like, you know, you build too many rules. Um and so the people who then survive in those systems are people who know which rules to break. And people who, because of who they are and who the people around them will allow them to be, are allowed to break. Like, this is also Donald Trump. Right?

SPEAKER_04 31:02

It is. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 31:02

Right. Because he has learned that he himself can break a lot of the rules and people will let him get away with it. Right? It's the thing Obama says over and over again. He's like, Can you imagine if I did the stuff that he's doing? Can you imagine what people like? No one would have let him do it. Right? So in a if you're a person who society will allow to break the rules, then you can. And when you can break rules, you're freed up to do a whole lot of stuff. Um and so chances are it just hadn't been like a thing that anybody had been paying attention to for a while. And it was just a rule that got forgotten, and it was a rule that like people just like, right?

SPEAKER_03 31:36

I bet that he remembered to put the numbers on his petition the next time he ran for office as well. Well, maybe it wasn't required when he ran for Senate.

SPEAKER_02 31:43

Uh well, he read the rules enough the first time to do it that time. Okay. It was the third time he had run for it. But like he, you know, he had all the Because if people aren't gonna let you get away with stuff, you've got to follow the rules. Which means you've got to be a really, really, really hard worker. Which he very much is.

SPEAKER_04 31:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 31:58

Um, which is how he finds the best people. Um, because they're all also incredibly hard workers. Um why are we uh why am I talking so much?

SPEAKER_03 32:06

How did we get here? So we diverted from regression discontinuity to uh Obama's campaign in 2004, Chicago politics. And machine politics.

SPEAKER_02 32:16

Yeah. And how and how elections are very simple. Identify your pluses and get them to the polls.

SPEAKER_03 32:23

Yes. That's right. Well, at least among the practitioners it's thought to be quite simple. But there is a a very long-running debate, as I mentioned before, about this turnout versus persuasion type argument. But that's for a different conversation.

SPEAKER_02 32:36

What are your other two things?

SPEAKER_03 32:37

Ah, the other two things. Okay. So another thing I spend a lot of time thinking about is the role of press coverage in American elections. Um, about how press coverage shapes whether moderates or extremists get into office, and how much legislators are required to work for their constituency. This is especially important in state legislative races, which are down ballot elections, which means they don't receive as much press coverage and interest as a race like for the 2008.

SPEAKER_02 33:08

They usually just follow the top of the ticket.

SPEAKER_03 33:09

Everybody is just going to vote down a straight ticket line. In fact, in some states there's even a box that says just vote the straight part of the table in most states. In most states. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 33:17

I mean, are there any states that don't do that?

SPEAKER_03 33:18

I've only ever cast my ballot in Wisconsin, so I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_02 33:21

Yeah, they have in Wisconsin. I mean they have in Illinois, and I'm pretty sure they have in California.

SPEAKER_03 33:24

Okay. That's news to me. But it it makes sense then why there's not a lot of press coverage of these down ballot races. So in this paper, I studied kind of this counterfactual question: what would happen to American legislative elections if they received better press coverage? If we're we had some magic wand and we were able to say, you have to cover state legislative elections as much as you cover congressional elections, or we provided some subsidy of down ballot press coverage. This is also a really difficult question to answer for many of the reasons we described before on campaign finance, because the places that receive really good down ballot press coverage are receiving it for some reason. Because the voters want it, because there's economic conditions that support it, because the candidate that's running for that position is really attractive is very easy to follow, or something like that. In this paper, I take advantage of a natural. It's back to Trump.

SPEAKER_02 34:13

Well, it's to Trump. For whatever reason, it attracts like you can pay for all the journalism you want. Right. But people aren't going to read it.

SPEAKER_03 34:22

Yes, of course. So that's a whole nother degree of freedom here that I'm unfortunately just unable to study. But why not? Well, because I I guess it's probably helpful to give you a sense of how I study this first, and then we can decide if we both have a lot of things. Okay, so that's second thing is money.

SPEAKER_02 34:37

What's the third thing?

SPEAKER_03 34:38

Oh, okay. So the third thing that I study is uh think about candidate supply, the set of people that run for office. Oh boy. So um again, kind of in this theme of the changes an entire career. Well, I've I've spent like a year on each of them so far in the PhD.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 34:55

And this is a measurement problem in this case. How do I measure the set of people that are running for office, how their ideology has changed over time.

SPEAKER_01 35:01

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 35:02

And we use a similar process to this machine learning project that I described earlier. And we we get some measure of ideology for everybody that's ever run for a state legislative office. And we can study how that polarization of the candidate has changed over time.

SPEAKER_02 35:15

For like the last 250 years.

SPEAKER_03 35:17

Unfortunately, no. We go back to 2000 and to 1996 in this case, because we're using that campaign finance approach. And campaign finance is not really a thing in state. Yeah, but history is so relevant. It's very relevant.

SPEAKER_02 35:27

I mean, you want to talk about the how the most extreme candidate like wins, how how local press coverage like changes like that's 1774. Of course. Right? Yes. That's the British aren't getting the information for a month, and then they can't send back anything for another month. And in that two months, the people on the ground in the US have been writing these screeds about like, you know, they're doing this and they're doing this, and it's like these specific, these specific, I think George May, but like there's a bunch of different people like specifically guiding this um this very aggressive and not moderate um press cover, like essentially press coverage, and that whips up the entire country. Of course.

SPEAKER_03 36:11

Yes. This was a critical part, and one of the reasons that the American Revolution went the way that it did. Yeah. It's hard to imagine what would have happened without that gap in information. Um unfortunately, just for the cases of this study, I focus only on 1996 to the present because that's where we have this campaign finance data where we can really carefully measure all this ideology. Okay. Before then, what we need is we would need some set of information that applies both to election losers and to winners.

SPEAKER_02 36:35

Yeah. You just you just do their speeches. So you could potentially do some speeches. You would just machine learning their speeches and pull out specific, you know, phrases or like are they using words that are more um is their rhetoric. You just you would just try to you just figure out whether their rhetoric is is extreme or not.

SPEAKER_03 36:51

Aaron Powell So stump speeches are a great idea. Yeah. There is, to the best of my knowledge, no systematic database of stump speeches for congressional candidates or state legislative candidates going back that far. It would be wonderful if somebody could create this, potentially from newspaper coverage or something. My guess is that a lot of it is just unfortunately lost to history. I doubt it. That's a Tico Brahe job.

SPEAKER_02 37:12

What is that? Tico Brahe? Who is that? Uh Galileo. You know Galileo? Yes, of course. Okay, right. You know Galileo, but you don't know Tycho Brahe, right? Galileo fundamentally, and yet it moves, right? Galileo? Yes. Um, but how was Galileo able to do, how is Galileo able to figure out that like things, you know, the movement of celestial bodies in the way that they did. It was because this guy before him, Tycho Brahe, had spent like 30 years outside with his telescope making really, really careful observations and not doing any calcul, like just like not trying to like just making the calculations. And then Galileo took that and was able to um, yeah, he because before you can do the analysis, you've got to create the data set.

SPEAKER_03 37:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 38:00

Yeah, that's a Tico Briar job.

SPEAKER_03 38:01

So I think my example of Tico Briar would be Quad Code. Or Quad is very good at collecting data like this these days. I've spent a lot of work in the last couple of months using these AI tools to collect massive new data sets that we never could before. So I'm collecting a data set now on all the interest group endorsements that have been made in congressional and state legislative uh primary and general elections over the last three decades. This is something that would have required an army of RAs, probably a couple years to do. Yeah. And I can do it uh in a week using these AI tools.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:31

It all is predicated though on having digitized data that the LLMs can parse through and extract. My guess is that a lot of this data is not publicly digitized, including press coverage of a lot of newspapers. But if you could find it for a small sample, it'd be a great idea.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:47

I'll give you an acknowledgement in the paper if I read it someday. Um what was I gonna say? Oh, so the punchline of this last paper is that if we look from 1996 to present state legislative candidates, we see this increasing polarization among the set of people that run for office. So that is, regardless of who wins an election, all this other stuff I study in the dissertation, voters are just faced with an increasingly polarized set of candidates. So whoever they choose, we're gonna get a polarized legislature. So it suggests that one of the reasons and one of the best ways to reduce polarization is to just get a more moderate set of people to run for down ballot office. This is, and last thing I'll say, is really important for state legislatures because 50% of state legislators ultimately, or 50% of members of Congress were state legislators before. So if we get a polarized set of state legislatures, we're even more likely to have a polarized Congress.

SPEAKER_02 39:34

Yeah. So that's the that's the third paper. What's the outcome? So okay. So let's go back through this. So the outcome of the first paper, the the like the what's the So this first paper is studying general election fundraising. But what's the conclusion state?

SPEAKER_03 39:47

What's what what's the conclusion is that donors on average punish extremist primary nominees in the general election. This penalty is about seven percentage points in the general election across my sample. It has declined by about 50% over the last two decades. There's less punishment for donors. It's still a negative penalty. Well, a positive penalty, negative fundraising.

SPEAKER_02 40:11

And the 70% is a fundraising penalty, not a not a voting, not a like an outcome in the election penalty.

SPEAKER_03 40:18

Yes. So in the state legislative case, for an outcome on voting, we find like a four or five percentage point vote share penalty.

SPEAKER_01 40:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 40:24

So it's similar. Um I spent some time in the paper thinking about why this financial penalty has declined. And ultimately what I think holds the most water is that this penalty is driven almost exclusively by corporate PACs who are just really trying to contribute to people who are in office. Corporate PACs are what we call access seeking donors.

SPEAKER_02 40:42

Yeah, they'll they'll contribute on both sides.

SPEAKER_03 40:44

They'll contribute on both sides because they just want to have someone that they can go and talk to after the election is over. And that means that they're going to want to contribute to the most competitive candidate in an election. And what we've seen happen in the last two decades is that extremists have become more competitive over time. And as a result, it's causing these corporate PACs to shift their contributing patterns towards those extremists. Yes. So it's it's really interesting because it's this financial penalty that is intertwined with the electoral penalty, but it has different implications for individual donors and access seeking donors.

SPEAKER_02 41:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:15

And it's a it's a positive feedback loop. It's a positive feedback loop. It continues to spiral down. This penalty will get smaller and smaller until at some point it re-equilibrates. Wow. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 41:26

Okay, so that's the conclusion of the first paper.

SPEAKER_03 41:28

That's the conclusion of the first paper.

SPEAKER_02 41:29

Is there's a decreasing penalty?

SPEAKER_03 41:32

Decreasing financial penalty to extremist nominees in general elections. Yeah. That's the headline finding of that paper.

SPEAKER_02 41:36

What's the headline of the second paper?

SPEAKER_03 41:38

The headline of the second paper is that state legislatures would be more moderate, representative, and work harder for their constituencies if down ballot press coverage were strengthened. So I take a look at things like how much voters, how much roll-off there is in down ballot elections when you receive more or less press coverage, how much state legislators serve on important committees, how much they bring money to their constituencies, and we find that all of these things are augmented by receiving stronger press coverage. And then the last paper, kind of the punchline, is first of all, this increasing polarization of the candidate pool, but also that there remains this electoral penalty to extremist candidates in general elections. And then, as we mentioned at the beginning of the interview, in primary elections, extreme candidates tend to perform slightly better than moderate candidates. But this penalty has remained roughly constant over time. So it paints this picture of uh an American electorate that increasingly rewards extremist candidates in general elections and interacts with this kind of decline, secular decline of press coverage, especially in downbound legislatures, that might exacerbate this increase in polarization in American elections.

SPEAKER_02 42:57

You're gonna hate what I'm gonna say. Uh-oh. Okay. Oh, you're gonna hate this. Um I feel like I already knew that.

SPEAKER_03 43:08

Which part? All of it. The increase in polarization or the electoral returns to moderation.

SPEAKER_02 43:14

The what?

SPEAKER_03 43:16

Or the like how well extreme candidates do in general elections.

SPEAKER_02 43:20

All of it. So that we know that we know that we already know that extreme rhetoric during a primary has consequences in a general, right? Like that's part of the um that's part of it's a sort of standard political thing. Is it if you have a um we're always afraid, like every party, both parties are afraid that if during the primary, that's this the the the the thing of like we want a robust primary, right? Um but then the fear is that you'll end up having to say a bunch of stuff to mobilize your partisan voters that will alienate your General voters.

SPEAKER_03 44:00

Trevor Burrus, this idea that there's a trade-off between nominating an extreme candidate and satisfying my base in the primary and actually getting elected in the general election.

SPEAKER_02 44:19

But any place that's that's moderate, any place that's uh purple, um, that there's consequences. Now, actually measuring the amount of consequence, I wouldn't right, but but it doesn't surprise me that the it seems like sort of right.

SPEAKER_03 44:32

And that's so I'll say given our understanding of how congressional elections work, sure, this is not very surprising.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

So yeah, the idea that that extreme extreme partisan politics in a primary has consequences in a general, right? Like that I could have I would have said, yep. Um uh the idea that um funding is tied to this, right? Um The thing that I'm sort of interested in uh now is this separating access seeking donors from um what's the other the other one is individual donors, just non-access seeking donors, ideological donors. Yeah. Um ideological, interesting. Um they're also seeking access, right? They want they want someone who has their but the access is is not it's not direct and it's not about like I want you to vote this way on this one thing, although it is sort of that, but it's but it's somebody who um will represent what matters to them. Like I want access.

SPEAKER_03 45:43

But I think the word you're looking for there is representation.

SPEAKER_02 45:46

Yeah, perhaps not access. Well, but that's still that's still what the corporate donors are looking for too. They want representation.

SPEAKER_03 45:51

They want representation things. Yes, okay, that's right. But they want that representation through the specific means of me going into your office and saying, here's what I want. Yeah. Here's the text that you should put in the bill.

SPEAKER_02 46:01

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um I'm curious, I'm curious um how this breaks down. How how uh in elections how do I say how do I phrase this question? Um I can say it colloquially. Does it matter? Right? Like um is the is the force of access seeking donors sufficient that um the real game, right? There's that wonderful line from West Wing Alan Alda says. Um I hope you have watched all of season six and seven of The West Wing.

SPEAKER_03 46:40

I have not yet. After I did find my dissertation, I'll add it to my list.

unknown 46:44

Man.

SPEAKER_02 46:45

Season six and seven of The West Wing are probably the best two seasons of television that have ever happened. Um it is astounding um and so wonderful. And in a lot of ways, predicted it happen that that happened in 05-06, so and it predicted Obama. And and and um I believe I read that the writer said they actually modeled the um Jimmy Smith's character on Obama. Um yeah, before it had happened. Um because the his big you know, DNC speech was 04. And I'm pretty sure that it was maybe it was like 04-05 that that that those seasons happened. Um he says if you can't take somebody's money and then vote against them and they'll still like you, then you're in the wrong business. Right? That fundamentally the job is to is to uh convince people who are gonna do the voting that you've got their back and then not have it while you take money from big donors who will let you run the things, right, and do the things.

SPEAKER_03 47:57

Um, the job is to ultimately vote in the direction that you think is best for your constituents.

SPEAKER_02 48:02

False.

SPEAKER_03 48:04

Well, false. You think it's to maximize the amount of money that you raise so you can run the next election?

SPEAKER_02 48:10

Yeah, the job is to stay employed. Because it's great to have power. Otherwise, term limits would have been voted in a long time ago. I mean, I agree with you that that's not ideally what it should be, but but clearly a majority of the people in the position to like vote for term limits aren't gonna do that, or they would have already, because they like their they like being a congressman or a senator and they're not trying to lose that job.

SPEAKER_04 48:38

Yes, right.

SPEAKER_02 48:39

It seems to be that for like maybe when people get started, they actually want to, but like once they're there, it seems to be like a hold on to power is kind of the game.

SPEAKER_03 48:48

But I I think that we can have a world in which representatives are voting against term limits and not a world in which they're beholden to special interest groups as well.

SPEAKER_02 48:58

Well, so then that's my question is what's the percentage of campaign X? What's the percentage of their fundraising that comes from access seeking donors versus the percentage of their funding that comes from um individual donors? And then how does that actually map to their voting record, their likelihood of winning, their likelihood of staying in office? Right. When people have um we know that people who are phenomenally wealthy and can fund their own campaigns without really needing to rely on individual donors, um they they don't historically do all that well. Like Ross Perot did not do well. Um I'm forgetting his name, the guy from Hopkins, who was the mayor of New York. Was he the mayor of New York? Uh the guy from Hopkins who ran in.

SPEAKER_03 49:45

Oh, Bill de Blasio.

SPEAKER_02 49:46

No, no, not de Blasio. It was uh um the big, very rich guy who got who got knocked out by he like stand the standard thing. Um it was this was I think the 2020 campaign. It might have been 2024, might have been 2024. Um Steyr? Mm-mm. Um he got knocked out after like the first debate because standard, like very rich businessman, like thinks he can debate, like pfft. And he got up on the thing and Elizabeth Warren just like brought up some stuff about women and he and he was like and he was out after spending an incredible amount of money.

SPEAKER_03 50:22

It's hard to interpret that though as the effect of money in American politics because it could just be voters being very biased against wealthy people running for office.

SPEAKER_02 50:30

Maybe. Um, but you also see that people who um are able to tap into something. Um this is Mamdani, but also Obama 08, um, who get an incredible number of individual donors, right? Yes. Seem to win. Right?

SPEAKER_03 50:47

Right. Yes. It's difficult to differentiate the correlation and causation in this case. There are like a multitude of papers that have tried to study the effect of campaign fundraising on election outcomes. Yeah. And the fact of the matter is that the set of people that are raising a ton of money are also more likely to be successful absent all of that money because they're very charismatic politicians or they're running in safe districts, they're taking really popular positions. Our best estimate of the effect of $1 raised on an election outcome is like it's $400 for a vote. It's a very noisy estimate, but something like it's $400 to get one vote. So all of this fundraising penalty is actually explaining a very, very small portion of the overall electoral advantage of moderates in American general elections.

SPEAKER_02 51:34

That's money spent, though. That's money spent. I'm talking about money raised.

SPEAKER_03 51:39

Because so you your idea is that I can raise some money and then I can throw it to some other person, I can gain some institutional power. If I contribute to my party, I can get a Trevor Burrus, it wasn't what I was thinking.

SPEAKER_02 51:47

That's what Barack did. Um that's exactly what he did, and it worked really well. Um but no, I'm thinking that money raised is a proxy for charisma. Right? Money raised from individual from individual donors is a proxy for charisma. Yes. Um and that and that so if you had somebody like the percentage of fundraising that is individual donors versus access seeking donors, um, and you'd have to timestamp it, right? Because the later on you get in an election, the more obvious it is somebody's gonna win, the more the access seeking donors are gonna show up.

SPEAKER_03 52:19

Um they almost never contribute in the primary election, for example. Interesting. Yes, like less than 10% of this money is coming in the primary election, and at least in state legislatures in Congress.

SPEAKER_02 52:28

Even in even in districts where the primary is the election, I would think like in Texas, that wouldn't be true.

SPEAKER_03 52:35

In Texas and in some California districts, there'll be a little bit more money spent, but most of the time there's no point in sending the money until you actually know who's going to be in office. If I know that this is a California district and a Democrat's going to win no matter what, why would I send money to one or two of the Democrats when I only have a 50% chance of that Dem being in office? Why don't I just wait for that Dem to win the primary and show up in the general?

SPEAKER_02 52:56

Because they like you more if you help them when they're small. Yeah, but there's somewhat less risk involved. Less money, yeah, but like l, but that's there it is. Like that's all that's like That's part of the game. Yeah, less contributing pack, but higher risk.

SPEAKER_03 53:08

Yes. So maybe it is a little bit surprising. Small amount of money that's spent in these primary campaigns.

SPEAKER_01 53:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 53:13

Yeah, but to your original question about the composition of these donors, we find that like only about 10% of money in American elections are contributed by corporate PACs. Probably even a little bit less than that. The vast majority of money in American elections is contributed by individual donors. In fact, there's this really famous paper that you read in every introduction to American Politics class called Why Is There So Little Money in American Politics? And the punchline is that actually, given the annual budget of the U.S. government, something like $20 trillion, we should expect to see hundreds of times more money spent in American elections than we actually do. This idea that the stakes of getting the right person in office, getting the right policies passed are so important that we should not expect only, I don't know, $12, $15 billion to be spent directly on elections every year. We should expect many times more than that. And the conclusion, at least, of the authors in that paper is that campaign contributions are really among individual donors, just like some expressive action. I'm contributing to a candidate because I support them emotionally, I support them ideologically, but I don't expect anything from them in return. You give a little bit, you get a little bit, in some cases, is what they like to say.

SPEAKER_02 54:27

But all of this comes on comes in in a world where we can't actually track the percentage of fundraising that is dark money, right? I mean, Trump got a a jumbo jet, right? Yes. Which we're gonna which, you know, $400 million to the library. Right? Yeah. Yes. Which is just very straightforwardly like influence peddling. Right.

SPEAKER_03 54:52

And it violates the another clause as well. So many constitutional issues with this.

SPEAKER_02 54:56

And all the stuff with the and all the stuff with the cryptocurrency, like people are just like, sure, we'll buy up a bunch of your cryptocurrency, and essentially we're just directly giving you money, and then you'll pardon us.

SPEAKER_03 55:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 55:05

Right? And it works.

SPEAKER_03 55:07

So I think this is another important thing to consider about campaign finance, is that there's this really small chunk that we can actually observe. It's the stuff that I spend a lot of time studying, but that is just really like maybe 5-10% of all the money spent in American elections. We have to think about these uh contributions that we don't observe, like airplanes to presidents. We have to think about lobbying efforts, in which lobbying firms spend much more money than they do in campaign contributions. And to some extent, we should be considering legal expenses, money in politics as well. Firms spend, I I don't know, it's hard to even know, but hundreds of times probably more money than they do on campaign contributions on litigation. And this is because a firm's best friend is sending something to a lawsuit because they can just slow down the process until a point where it's not relevant anymore. This is money in politics, and the influence is very difficult to quantify there, but it's certainly there to some extent.

SPEAKER_02 56:04

It's in a firm's interest to slow things down.

SPEAKER_03 56:07

In many cases, firms like a lot of regulation because it prevents competitors from coming in.

SPEAKER_02 56:12

Oh, okay. So you're saying uh like corporate corporations. Corporate firms. I see what you're saying. Um yeah, let's let's just let's just slow down the wheels. Let's just slow down the antitrust thing so that it takes six or eight years, and by the time it's actually moving somewhere, the it's possible that the government will have changed and and and it'll all disappear before we even have to deal with it.

SPEAKER_03 56:31

And if not, I've made a good chunk of change in between. Well then.

SPEAKER_02 56:34

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. If we if what I'm spending, yeah, that's the fight club thing. Right.

SPEAKER_03 56:39

Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I think this is like one of the most surprising.

SPEAKER_02 56:43

I love that you got that. That's fantastic.

SPEAKER_03 56:46

I think this is one of the most surprising things about someone that's coming in and studying American politics for the first time, and potentially for listeners as well, is that campaign finance is thought to be just this one little corner of American politics in many cases. It's the things that we all see as voters. But campaign finance and money in politics exists in so many other settings, and it's very difficult to quantify its influence in those cases.

SPEAKER_02 57:09

And it will always be difficult to quantify because the people who are in a position to make it more transparent don't want it transparent.

SPEAKER_03 57:19

Yes, I think that's right. Uh a lot of the campaign finance reforms that we have seen, though, have been initiated by Congress. So the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act in the early 2000s, the McCain Feingold Act, was implemented by two members of the House. Yeah. Um, back when McCain was a maverick. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 57:37

Back before back before he lost to Bush won and decided and like two decades ago.

SPEAKER_03 57:42

Yeah. It's really hard to believe that it was that long ago. And then even back in the 1980s.

SPEAKER_02 57:46

I mean he lost he lost in Bush one to Bush II. He lost in 2000.

SPEAKER_03 57:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 57:52

Yeah. Yeah. And then he like sort of like switched.

unknown 57:56

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 57:56

When did when did McCain Feingold happen?

SPEAKER_03 57:59

Um I think it was in 2000.

SPEAKER_02 58:01

It was that year. I think it was or During the election year.

SPEAKER_03 58:04

2000 or 2004. It was early 2000s. Okay. And then there was also in the 1980s, there was kind of the first big campaign finance reform act that we had, and that was also implemented by Congress. It's just the fact that since that 2000 policy, Congress has really not been able to do a lot, if anything, to regulate campaign finance. And the story of campaign finance regulation in the United States since then has been the Supreme Court still shipping away at these different policies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:34

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_03 58:35

Yes. And it appears as if the Supreme Court is getting ready to rule on a couple of other really important campaign finance reform cases in the next couple of months. What do we got?

SPEAKER_02 58:44

What's coming up?

SPEAKER_03 58:46

So I'm forgetting the name of the case, but there are a couple of in well, at least one on we should spot check this about the what is it? So it's it's something about corporate contributions and how much expenditures you can, the amount of expenditures by corporate PACs. We should check this to be sure. But this seems like just kind of the continual pathway forward in which the Supreme Court takes what we had as regulation implemented by Congress and slowly chips it away such that there might be a world in which there really aren't a ton of restrictions, even on campaign contributions to direct candidate committees.

SPEAKER_02 59:23

Aaron Powell And the argument is always it's an it's an inhibition of free speech, that money is speech and so we can't inhibit it in any way.

SPEAKER_03 59:29

In many cases, yes. There are also, um, so like in Citizens United and Speech Now, there were also cases in which the justification was um corruption and trying to limit the influence, the possibility for corruption.

SPEAKER_02 59:42

And and by striking stuff down?

SPEAKER_03 59:45

No, this is one of the reasons to support these policies. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 59:49

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but that but it didn't win the day.

SPEAKER_03 59:52

It did not in many of these cases, and it continues to not.

unknown 59:55

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 59:56

Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:00

Yes. So yeah, where are we going? What are the answers? Let's make it better.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:06

Campaign finance reform. Yeah. It seems very unlikely to happen in the next couple of years.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:11

Oh no, let's take all of it. Let's take let's take like for all that you've learned about how rhetoric can have benefits in a primary, but then punishment in the general. Rhetoric can um change fundraising.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:30

Um it can impact election outcomes.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:33

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:33

Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:33

Um I I really want to do, like I want to be able to be like, and I want to see like the summaries of all three, right? That's still just the first one.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:41

Yes. So I think that a lot of what this wraps up to is a study of how American elections work when the spotlight is not on them. What happens when we run really important American elections, like state legislative elections, and yet nobody really understands who they're voting for? Yeah. And how does adding press coverage to those elections change election outcomes? How does those elections operate relative to Congress in terms of fundraising and in terms of moderate and extremist candidates doing well? And what I find in this case is that actually these elections tend to function in similar ways to Congress, but not to the extent they're like, we don't have the same fundraising advantage to moderates in state legislatures as we do in Congress. We don't have the same electoral moderation advantage in state legislatures as we do in Congress. And a large part, this is because voters just don't know anything about these town ballot races in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:36

Do you think it's really that's why? Or is it just be or is it because the who they're representing isn't is a narrower, s narrower slice of the populace. So so they don't have to be so moderate wouldn't work as well because you're you're less likely to have a like a balanced electorate. So it's definitely possible.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:58

Yes, I I I could see part of that being the case. Um but actually a lot of these state legislative districts are quite large in many cases.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:06

For Senate. For state.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:08

Yeah. Not necessarily in the House. New Hampshire has 400 members in the state house. New Hampshire? New Hampshire has 400. 400?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:15

And a lot of them are But is there one for every 20 people?

SPEAKER_03 1:02:19

I don't know the exact number. I think it's like every 11,000 or something like that. It's a massive house. The interesting thing about New Hampshire is that.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:26

Isn't that like almost the actual original constitution? Wasn't it one per 10,000?

SPEAKER_03 1:02:31

I think it actually might be smaller than in the original constitution.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:33

I feel like it was one for 13,000 or something. I think it's one for 10. It might be one for I think it's one for 10,000. Maybe it's 13,000.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:40

That would be crazy if that was true.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:41

That they've actually managed to maintain.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:44

But they had to reach some limit at some point. Otherwise, it would have just gotten way too much.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:48

Did they limit it at 400? Did they actually limit it?

SPEAKER_03 1:02:51

But the the funny thing about New Hampshire is that it's a very unprofessionalized legislature. It's a lot of college students that are running the office there, a lot of people running for office, and you only get paid something like, I don't know, it's like a $500 salary per year, and then you get a per diem. So it's a very important thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:07

But it's almost ideal. That's kind of exactly what it should be, right? It's like the citizen legislators. Yeah, because that's like it shouldn't be a professional thing. That's kind of one of the big problems. Like we have professional politicians now.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:19

Okay, so this gets back to our discussion about term limits before. Right. Like one of the stats that I saw recently is that I think it's like 72% of the American public supports term limits on Congress. Um, and like I think at a first level, it makes a lot of sense. These people have been in office for so long, this has become a career for them, they're not responsive to their constituents anymore. Let's say that you can only be in office for four years, and then we'll elect somebody new to take over. This kind of gets back to the like even the ancient Greek roots of how this all worked, where there was a sortition system, and everybody had an equal chance of being voted into office because we just drew some balls out of a basket. Whoever's bat ball was picked up was the legislator for that year. Um I've spent a lot of time thinking about term limits and doing some research, especially in state legislatures, and one of the clear downsides of this is just a loss of institutional knowledge. Legislators spend a ton of time building up seniority, not just within the chamber, but also this knowledge about how the world works. They build policy expertise, they serve on committees that further the interests of their constituents. When you have term limits, you lose that.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:23

There's this huge cost of coming into Congress and learning the ropes and making connections and all of that. And if you turn people out of four years, you're gonna lose it all.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:33

And and there's and there's a huge like I'm I believe his name is Dan Rostinkowski. I don't know why that's I think that's his name, who was a congressman from Illinois. Yeah, as far as I recall, very corrupt. Um, but anytime you would argue, like we should get somebody who's less that, the immediate turnaround was like, he's the chairman of House, Ways and Means and directs like is able to direct a ton of money to Illinois. So shut up. Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:04

But it seems like if that is your critique of people in Congress and the need to have term limits, maybe you just want to reform how committee seats are assigned in Congress instead of just turning terming everyone else. Oh boy. You know, I'm not gonna take any stand on whether we should have term limits or not. I'm just trying to provide both perspectives here.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:21

Good. True academic. Yeah, I like it.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:23

So what's interesting though is that in state legislatures, I think it's now 17 state legislatures that have term limits. Um an interesting stat on this is that I think of all of the states that allow for the initiative process, that is, it allows citizens to provode some policy and for it to be passed on the basis of a popular vote. Yeah. I think all of them except for two have implemented term limits at some point. In a number of those states, they've then been rescinded either by the Supreme Court or by the local, uh the state Supreme Court. But there is just this really strong grassroots support for term limits.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:56

Um I wrote a paper early on in my graduate career on the effect. Of term limits on the set of people that are running for office. And what you find pretty compellingly actually is that once you implement term limits in a state legislature, you see a more extreme set of people that are running for office and winning in the primary and general election. And the way that I I kind of understood these results is that term limits reduce the benefit of office of winning. If I win and I'm not in a term-limited state, I know that there's a pretty good incumbency advantage. It's like five or six percentage points today. The likelihood that I'm able to be re-elected the next cycle is pretty high. And it's worth me investing this like really costly effort to run for office, to spend all the money, to take time off from work, to get childcare, to raise all that money. If I know that I'm going to be elected to the California State House and I'm going to be turned out after a couple of terms, I'm less likely to run for office. And so it's really only the extreme people who have a ton to gain from getting into office in California and switching the status quo to their extreme position that are going to run for office and be successful. Of course, this all works kind of in the limit, where this isn't true for every single moderate and extremist. But on average, we see that the set of people that are running for office are much more extreme.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:09

And you do that based on their rhetoric.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:11

You could do this in the same way.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:16

How do you do the how do you assign extreme versus not extreme?

SPEAKER_03 1:07:20

This is based on their roll call voting record and office. So it's um you can think of this as just being a giant matrix or excess spreadsheet of how similar you are in voting to everybody else. And we apply what it's called the dimension reduction technique where I take this big matrix and it becomes one column. And if you have a positive number, you're very conservative. If you have a negative number, you're very liberal.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:40

Oh, but it's but it's but it's self-referentially defined.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:43

It's defined relative to, yes, how you're voting in the chamber. Right. And there's like no true ideology score.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:49

Right. It's not actually based on the actual bills and like the content of the bills. And it's right. It's like it's like we just see like if so-and-so voted for all of these, then they must be the most extreme, even though we don't really know what they are.

unknown 1:08:03

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:03

Right. It's not pegged to anything in the real world. And this is kind of concerning, I think, from a substantive perspective. But it's the best way to can to construct a measure that's really comparable across legislators within the same chamber.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:18

And the data is very accessible.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:20

So less term term limits makes people more extreme.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:24

They make them um not within legislator. We find pretty so there's this really famous quote in American politics that is legislators die in their ideological boots. So once you're elected to office, you're really not changing your position. No matter if term limits are applied to you or you know, really anything happens, you're staying in that position. The real story is that the set of people that are running for office are changing, and the set of people that were electing to office are changing as well. And that's why we get this more polarized legislature after we pass term limits.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:54

Not that people become more extreme because of it. But that you're more like the people who are more extreme to begin with are more likely to run and therefore and therefore more likely to be elected because there's just the the pool has more of it.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:06

Right. So there's a really interesting natural experiment that happens every 10 years that helps us understand this like the fact that.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:12

The census.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:13

The census is a really important part of it, but it's redistricting. Well, this is happening even more than 10 between every 10 years now, uh, with all the redistricting that's been happening in California and Texas. But this is an interesting case to see when your constituency changes after redistricting, let's say my constituent becomes 15% more democratic, do I vote more democratic in office? Um so this is a paper that I'm just finishing up right now. I study this in Congress and American state legislatures over the past 40 years, and I find that there is some ideological adaptation among re-elected incumbents in office. That is, if I am in office and my district becomes more conservative, I vote more conservatively on average. But this effect is minuscule in comparison to the effect of replacement. That is, if my district becomes 15% more conservative, really what's happening is that I'm just not going to run for office, and someone else is going to run for office that's about 15% or 20% more conservative and then represent that constituency.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:09

So it's not the same. See, I would okay, okay. I'd be super interested to know when that happens while someone is already in office. Does their does their voting record change while they're in office?

SPEAKER_03 1:10:25

There's essentially zero evidence that they change their roll call voting record in office. You could do this even so there's like this really cool fact that when you understand what your new district is going to be, is staggered across legislatures. Like California might pass its new redistricting set of districts in March and Wisconsin in May. And we could compare the roll call voting of these people that know who their new constituency is before that change and after the change. Yeah. Find no evidence of any adaptation. And what's really interesting though, so you have this adaptation effect that's pretty small, you have this replacement effect, which is quite big. Really, what's happening in between there is the strategic decision for me to run for office or to not run for office.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:05

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:05

Right? My constituency changes. I don't want to represent my constituency any different because I was already doing the same.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:10

Do I think I can still win?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:12

Do I think I can still win?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:13

But I find But if I don't think I can still win, I might go even more extreme the other way.

unknown 1:11:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:17

Maybe I start squacking once I'm in office.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:19

Take the chance to like, well, it doesn't matter now. So I'm just gonna vote. I'm not, I'm not even gonna try. I'm just gonna go all the way to as extreme as I Of course.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:26

Yes. But I I think that, like this is a common explanation in the literature. I think it doesn't really hold a ton of water because it assumes that these legislators just really want to assume some really extreme position. And legislators are just like, ideally, like you and me. They take positions that kind of go across the ideological spectrum, and they're not just always pushed to take these extreme positions.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:47

Um, but what I was gonna say about this interesting redistricting example is that you can actually look in state legislatures where you're required to reside in the district that you represent, and that's like 30 of the state legislatures, and the other 20 say you can like pretty much live wherever you want. As long as you're living in the state, it's okay. You can run for office. Um, and you can compare how strategic people are in these two different states in whether they decide to run for re-election. And you find that when you face this like adverse election shock, that is, your district becomes more conservative, you are much less likely to run for office in these sets of districts where you are states where you can you have to reside in your district. But in these other states where you can reside kind of in any place you want that was touching your own district, you can strategically select into running because you can live in some other part of the district, and I can strategically move and like run in this district next door that is much more favorable to me than the district I would have represented otherwise. So that's a lot of words to say that actually we find that after these adverse district shocks, legislators can be pretty strategic in deciding to move to different locations to run in more strategic uh districts that might serve them better.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:04

Okay. Yeah, really fascinating. It's fascinating. And okay, but there's a lot of details there. Like so when you say moved, you mean moved the district they're running for.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:16

With or without moving their home.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:18

So it depends upon the state legislature. In most cases, you'd have to change your domicile, but in some cases there are exceptions after redistricting, where you can live outside of the district you would represent if you were living in the district that you represented before and the district changed. So it's this redistricting loophole. It's built into like four or five different states. And in other cases, there are these rules on the book, but they're really not enforced at all. So you can kind of live where you want and strategically shop for districts.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:45

Aaron Ross Powell Back to the rules that don't get enforced.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:48

Exactly. Yeah, that's right. This is potentially really doesn't get enforced in some states. I do. And in some states it matters a lot.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:54

Until somebody running decides to file suit. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:56

Well the interest, yeah. I'll also say that this is not a rule in Congress at all. You just have to live in your state. There's nothing in the Constitution that says you have to live in your district. And this is why there are oftentimes accusations of people being carpet beggars where they live in different states. That's unconstitutional, but you can live in a different district for sure.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:12

This happened, I my guess is like you can represent any district in any state in the state.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:18

Right. You have to reside in your district.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:20

In the state, but you can represent any district in the state. So you can live in Chicago and represent some rural state in southern Illinois?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:26

It's not going to play well with the voters, but there's nothing constitutionally bad about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:31

Huh.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:32

I was really surprised about this too.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:34

What percentage? Yeah. What percentage of U.S. congressmen do not live in the district they represent?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:41

Aaron Powell So it's really difficult to measure this because members of Congress spend a lot of time in Washington, D.C. But if you just go based on where they're registered to vote, my I looked at this a while ago. I think it was like publicly available voter file data.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:59

Yeah, like do they vote in the district they represent?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:01

Aaron Powell Right. Yes. So I checked this a while ago. Don't quote me on this, but I think it was like 22 to 25.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:08

Don't.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:08

Are living outside of their district and casting votes?

SPEAKER_02 1:15:10

22 to 25 percent. No, number. Oh, totally.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:14

So much smaller percent of Congress. Yes. But there still is a number of them that are doing this.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:19

I mean, this was easy to do. That's a pretty small. That's like what, three, four percent?

SPEAKER_03 1:15:22

Yes. So it's a small percentage of Congress.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:25

That would actually be in a district to vote for a different congressman.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:28

And not vote for the they can't vote for themselves.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:31

Right. Yeah. They could not cast a vote for themselves. That's pretty crazy. It's crazy.

unknown 1:15:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:37

A lot of cases they're like a mile or two off the border of their district. But in some cases they're across the state or something like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:45

And in states where you have Okay. So we have this is so interesting. The um when people are redistricted and they are no longer residing in their district, or their district is now shifted significantly ideologically. In states where there let me see if I got this correct, where there are not term limits.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:15

So I I'm not thinking of term limits now, I'm thinking about these strict requirements of residency. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:21

But I'm back to the resources uh of of whether or not they were gonna w whether or not they would run again.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:26

Ah, yes. Okay. Um the probability that you run again is much higher if you can strategically say move a mile east and get into your old district, or if you're forced to run in the district in which you reside. My house is fixed. Assume that my house is fixed as a legislature, I don't want to move. If the main part of my district moves somewhere else, I'm in this new district, I'm much less likely to run for office if that new district is really politically unfavorable. So I get redistricted and the new district is really conservative and I'm a Democrat. I'm just not gonna run for office in those states.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:59

But in these other states where there's a little bit of room for fudging, I might decide, hey, I'm gonna actually move to my new district and represent them.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:06

I thought the idea of room for fudging was that they didn't have to move. They could represent the other district even though they don't live there.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:12

They could do that or they could move.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:14

Yes. In most cases, I find that they're moving to represent. Um it's it's kind of a bundled treatment because if you were to move to represent this new constituency, you'd have to leave the district that you were prior uh representing before the election in the time that you represent this new district.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:31

Because you have to be continuously in the district. That's the rule is like how long before the election do you have had to live there?

SPEAKER_03 1:17:37

Most of the time it's like six months to a year. So you'd have to be really strategic. I'd have to get elected in like 2020, November of 2020. Yeah. And then jump out of office right after I'm elected to then move to this next district that I represent.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:50

And so when you're when you're redistricting, you can force people out of office just by letting just by not writing in that loophole.

unknown 1:17:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:57

Just like don't pass it until six months before the election and make it that you needed to live there for six months before, like for 12 months before, and you that's literally impossible because the we didn't tell you until it's too late. And oops, you don't get to run anymore. And you've literally just thrown people out of office. Does that happen?

SPEAKER_03 1:18:12

That's right. I don't think, well, I'm sure that they're the redistrictors are very strategic and who they decide to move around. Yeah. If one party is in office, they're going to try to put the people they really don't like in the other party into unfavorable districts and get them voted out.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:24

Um, most of the time when redistricting happens, they don't have the authority to say you have to live in this district for this amount of time to represent this new district. That's built into the constitution. Of the state, yeah. Yeah. Or state statute.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:35

But they but you could do it based on the timing of when you when you pass it. Of course, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:38

So if you pass it in January, there's a ton of room to move around. If it's October, there's not. Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:44

Bigger question.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:47

What leads to better government? Is it is it moderate representatives? Right? Okay. Um or is it representatives that actually match their constituents, which I assume, but it could be incorrect, um are less are are more extreme.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:20

It's a great question. I think it depends upon how you define what is good government.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:25

If you want to measure it in terms of like what share of roll call votes are you casting that your constituency would agree with, yeah. That's one definition. Like, how can I maximize the amount of agreement between my constituency and roll call voting? Yeah. You can imagine something where it's like, actually, I think that the people I'm representing are wrong in their preferences, and this is actually the best for them. Yeah. I represent a poor district, my poor district on average supports a Republican candidate, but I know that if I vote for the Democratic policy and they get socialized medicine or something like that, free education, they're gonna be much better off.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:58

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:59

Um it's difficult as a political scientist to assign weight to either one of those two definitions of quality of representation.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:06

Yeah. But I'm not even thinking about quality of representation, I'm thinking about quality of government, right? Which I'm thinking of as success of a nation over time, success of a state over time, right? Um growth the growth in an economy, the health of the like I I assume I assume that growth in economy and health of constituents are diametrically opposed. That growth, I mean they wouldn't always be, but overall, that like growth in an economy comes from having very lax um environmental uh regulations, um lax um uh wage regulations. That so you can you can you know places where uh people can just like drill baby drill or they or their you know right to work states where there's no unions, right? That the the that the economy will grow more because the businesses will be able to just do what they do. Um I think to an extent, yes. Right? Um and the balance of I guess the the two things that jump to mind are are health and growth of economy. Um that what would like I I think a good government would be a government that balances those things effectively and people are um uh relatively healthy and also um uh well employed and uh right the system can continue to function without being in com non-competitive with international forces, right? Um what's more likely to lead to that? What's more likely to lead to a government that achieves that? Is it is it moderate candidates and moderate representation, or is it extremists and extreme representation, which if it more accurately represents the will of the voters, maybe still is better because the balance is better, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:22:09

Yeah, it's really difficult to answer that question. This is getting so interesting. Yeah. I I actually think that the most important thing is not actually like whether you elect a moderate or an extremist. I think the most important thing is that we have electoral competition, really strong electoral competition. Because in that case, we're gonna see that like the medium voter theorem, which is kind of the foundation of game theory and political science, kicks in. This idea that as there's this electoral competition, candidates are gonna kind of try to converge to the median voter in a district, which we tend to think of as maximizing how well that person in the district, that overall district, is represented. And that medium voter will have the ideology of either the moderate or the extremist, kind of like that ideal position of ideological representation.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:56

I love that.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:57

We see so many violations of this in American politics today. So I just made a figure a couple of days ago about the share of state legislators that win an election just by putting their name on the ballot, which is not really what we were talking about earlier with Barack Obama and his state Senate campaign, but kind of similar.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:15

Assuming that I assuming that I really think yeah, we'll have to fact-check that. Yeah, we've got to fact check that.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:21

But yeah, like this idea that there's a good share, like 15% of state legislators just put their name on the ballot, they automatically win the primary, they automatically win the general election. No one, there's no opportunity. 15%. It's something like that. It's very, very high. Because nobody else is running. 15%.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:35

Because no one else is running. That's gotta be that's gotta be mostly incumbents.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:38

So in many cases, it's incumbents.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:39

Nobody's gonna compete against them because they know the incumbent is gonna win anyway.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:42

Yes, that's right. But in many more cases, it's where it's an open seat race and only one party is going to win this primary election. So you just have to win the primary election.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:52

The party itself decides who they're gonna who they're gonna run.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:55

It could be that, or it could be I have to win this primary election, and then I'm pretty much assured that I'm gonna win the general election because I'm either facing a really weak opponent, or nobody's going to contest me at all. And when that happens, you have less of an incentive to converge to that medium voter, but also less of an incentive to show up and cast roll call votes, to do the hard work of going out and shaking hands, of understanding what your constituency wants. If I was a political scientist, can wave my wand. I think that would be the most important reform to American elections to implement. Some way to increase how competitive state legislative and congressional elections are these days.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:33

Yeah, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:34

Now we're getting someone. Of course, this sounds a lot like redistricting reform because we like to think that redistricting is kind of one of the central evils of American politics and the reason that we're so polarized. It makes sense if we think that redistricting kind of puts Democrats with Democrats and Republicans with Republicans.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:50

Um I I think in that sense it could actually have a really positive impact.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:54

But it's lovely. It's actually very very American. Redistricting? Uh no. Jerry Manager? No. Um competition. Yeah, competition as a source of health.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:06

Yes. It's very American. Well, it's uh this is like the creative destruction of economies. Yeah. This is the way that we get the most powerful and the best and fit firm to succeed. It's the same way, I think, in many cases in American politics. So an example that I think about a lot is the 2024 Democratic primary or lack thereof. Yeah, lack thereof. Right, where Kamala Harris was, of course, yeah, kind of crowned to be the nominee. There was no competition at all. Um, of course, it's impossible to determine what the counterfactual would be had she gone through a rigorous primary process.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:40

But not entirely counterfactual, because she did go through one four years earlier.

unknown 1:25:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:45

And was and was like not right. Yes. And then she was largely selected because Biden made the campaign promise he made.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:53

That's right. But she had a lot of things going for her in 2024. I think if there was a competitive primary process, she probably still would have been the one that succeeded. You think probably because she had the incumbency advantage. Um they would have only had a couple of weeks to facilitate the primary election.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:09

There's a lot of people feeling the burn.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:12

Perhaps. Yeah. Um she had the name recognition as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:16

True. Um and the system and and and having the the the levers of the party is really important.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:21

Yes. Yeah. Of course, it's critical. I mean, it's one of the reasons that Bernie lost in 2016. Yeah. Because that the party was very far in front of the boy. We can talk about that one program. A totally different conversation on that part.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:32

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I love this. Okay, so we wave the magic wand. Make it more competitive.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:38

How do we do it?

SPEAKER_03 1:26:39

Well, so the first thing is perhaps we have proportional representation or something like that, where we don't even have to deal with redistricting and gerrymandering. And we could um make sure that you're just casting a vote for the set of people that you think are going to be the best people to represent you instead of being forced to vote in this really condensed district where it's all just partisans. That's one solution. Another solution is to, I think, yet uh make running for office a more appealing task. Like as we discussed before, it's in many cases not very fun to run for office and very expensive. Um, you have to find someone to take care of your kids. You have to find some source of income to support yourself, you have to fundraise. And that is not appealing to the vast majority of the American public these days.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:25

And there's another thing you you don't mention that I think is not appealing to a lot of people, which is the um state of the press coverage and the and the the sort of how the public discourse has kind of devolved.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:43

And I think there's a lot of people who are, you know, would be good representatives, but don't want to like they want to put up with all the badgering by the same.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:57

You know, the extremist candidate who's gonna make a ton of accusations about. them that aren't true and they're just trying to run a moderate campaign and and it ends up being like parrying all the fire throwing right and it just like it it drags your name through the mud and like why would like why would you why would you want to do that? Um very separate from the the logistical difficulty.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:16

Yes. And so this explains potentially one of the reasons that we don't see a lot of elections contested, especially in down ballot contests. Because it's just not worth me running for office, especially when the chances of me winning are kind of up in the air.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:28

Yeah. Okay. So proportional representation.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:32

This has been something that has been proposed by some people of course it's never going to happen in the American context.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:37

Well I mean when you say proportional what like that's still I mean it already is proportional. What do you like you mean how would that how does that how does that change you mean like the whole state votes?

SPEAKER_03 1:28:45

So the whole state votes and if the Democratic party gets 65% of the vote, the 65 out of 100 people on the Democratic list go in and the 45 others go to Republicans. So there there's no districting involved here. So it's just at-large representation at the state level or even at the congressional the national level.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:04

But then this is only a solution if we think that redistricting is really an important problem and gerrymandering is where we also wouldn't have like but then you run into the problem of of I mean that's back to the original constitution right you run into the problem of population centers. It's like all the people in so I mean I always go back to Illinois because I know it so well, but like all the people in southern Illinois are going to get drowned out by the people in Chicago.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:28

Aaron Ross Powell If we do this at a national level, yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:30

No I mean at the state level if you do it at the state level, right? If you just make Illinois state legislature, right? I would think that I mean how do you do like everybody gets to vote for one person or everybody gets to vote for 10 people and then the top 10 people or you vote for a party. But then who's yeah but then the party decides.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:48

The party decides oh my God.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:49

Trevor Burrus Or there's yeah or you can as we know the parties are very much more interested I mean oh my God.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:55

Trevor Burrus Yeah that seems like a step back in terms of democratic accountability because you're not voting for any specific policy positions of candidates. Yeah. You're just assuming that all these candidates are replaceable.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:03

Trevor Burrus And it and it assumes that that the things that are good for part of a state are good for the whole state, right? Which is not at all true when you have states that have large rural areas and massive population centers than like the things that are right like they don't want the same thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:16

Aaron Ross Powell We think a lot about this electoral connection between a member of Congress and their constituency. And the way that they get re-elected is by really carefully understanding the needs of their specific district and then representing that in Congress. If we switch to this PR system, you could imagine a world in which there's really not any electoral connection to your constituents at all. Right. Because it's just too big of a constituency for me to understand.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:39

Yeah. And then you're just voting then you're then you're voting for people who are they're just supposed they're just saying this is who I am. This is what I want. And I'm gonna and I'm gonna do me and if you like that if you agree with that then you vote for me. Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:55

But I'm just gonna do me okay so how do we increase the quality of government? How do we get better government we increase competitiveness. Increase competitiveness and we do that by compelling for people to run for office.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:07

Yeah so the so more compelling to run for office possibly redistricting.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:11

Possibly redistricting what about money? So yeah this is the next one that's probably on everybody's list. Maybe we institute some form of public financing of elections.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:21

Already have it doesn't work. What do you mean well there's already the public financing of the presidential because you make so much more money you like there's so like a then you have to not take right doesn't work the first person to not take public financing of elections was Obama by the way. Really?

SPEAKER_03 1:31:37

Yes the very first 2008 and nobody since him has really it's because he had this massive ground game and individual fundraising that it didn't make sense. So what we need to do is if we think that this is one of the reasons the American politics is so polarized, we need to make it more appealing for you to take that public financing tent. Say that like if my opponent raises X amount of dollars and I'm in the public fundraising program, the public fundraising give me that much money too. Right now in most states it just caps at a certain amount and if your opponent fundraises you you're just kind of out of luck.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:07

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:08

It's expensive to publicly fundraise and to publicly finance elections but you could also imagine setting a limit on the amount of money spent across all of the elections. The Supreme Court would never let us do that in this day and age quite clearly a constitutional amendment. Yeah. But I think that the demand of fundraising the amount of time that you have to spend even when you're elected to Congress to dial for dollars is absurd.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:31

Yeah. So it's like from day one you have your brand new representative and day one it's like money, money, money, money, money there was this campaign.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:39

Yes. There was this leaked PowerPoint slide like in the early 2010s from the Democratic Party where that like all of the the freshman Democrats were there and they were told here's a model schedule here's your orientation like start the day four hours off Capitol Hill dialing for dollars, go to office, do some votes, uh all that, then come back to this dial center and call for another two, three hours at the end of the day. You're spending like half of your time at least calling donors.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:05

On day one?

SPEAKER_03 1:33:06

On day one. And this is the only way that you can be promoted to receive a higher office. If you give more money to your party leader you're more likely to get a committee assignment.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:16

Wow so it wasn't even about it wasn't even about getting re-elected.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:20

Well it was partially about that but a lot of it was you just have to meet your fundraising quotas. For the national for the national party.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:27

Not for you.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:28

Yes because again a lot of these people are in safe districts they don't really need the fundraising themselves. Wow so all of that money isn't about bringing in money but a good chunk of it is about going to the party leaders to the national party.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:40

And showing that you're a good foot sold a good party foot soldier you have to put into stop it.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:47

Yes and this is um I think concerning as a member of the public if you think that your legislators should be doing other things with their time. Think about what you could do with seven hours if you're a member of Congress and you're not fundraising money but you're thinking about how should I vote on this bill or you're doing constituency outreach, co-sponsoring bills.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:04

All of these different things are limited by the need to fundraise all the things that Washington said that the the that the party's like a two-party system is going to devolve into tribalism. And here we are.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:16

Yes and we've been here for quite a while now yeah yeah we've been doing it. Right. Wow of course it's not entirely clear that Washington was right in this case party labels can be really valuable especially in these downbound elections I think a lot about if I know nothing about two candidates running for office except for their party label most Americans would have a really good idea of who they want to vote for in the first place.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:35

But you could have six parties but you could have six parties of course and as it stands there's you're right like there's a really only two parties. Yes. Yeah yeah that's right and and we've had times in history when parties have imploded and a new party has come up but still it still it forces its way back to a two-party system right like the Whigs died.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:58

Yes and the Republicans took over as did the Federalists and as did all of the parties in between now and today. And even the parties that we know today have really switched over the last century in who they're supporting.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:10

Even over the last 15 years.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:11

Yeah that's right people but that one of the constants of American politics is that we're really a two party system.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:19

How does that happen? How does that stay why what what forces that what's the forcing function that pushes it back to a two-party system?

SPEAKER_03 1:35:27

Aaron Powell So I think a lot of this comes back to the fact that we have what are called first past the post elections. That is it's uh first past the post.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:34

I see yes first past the post.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:36

Yes you know whoever gets the most votes in election is going to be elected. Yes yes um and oftentimes this just means that the top two candidates are going to be the most competitive and that it it's not really possible to support any more competition in a district than to just have those two so if you wanted more competitive elections if you wanted to have more competitive elections.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:58

Would you have to undo the two-party system well that would be one way to achieve it.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:04

It's not necessarily the only way you could also just imagine allowing both parties to really have robust competition in all of the districts that we have that could be another way to get a competitive election.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:13

But it's not in the interest of the parties to facilitate that because as you said at the very beginning the more vociferous the primary fight is there's a punishment in the general yes and their probability of winning the election is just much lower as well so it'll never be in the party's interest to increase competition in elections but I think it's in democracy's interest to have that happening Oh boy. Oh boy is the is the only alternative a parliamentary system because I mean as we've seen parliamentary systems have lots of their own problem I mean they're they're such a mess trying to like they end up having elections at all the time and snap elections the governments fall apart and all these things.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:50

Yes and in these parliamentary systems you're expected as a member of Congress to always are a member of parliament to always vote with your party no matter what there's either it there's really not a huge role as an MP to shape individual policies and to cast your own vote.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:05

Really?

SPEAKER_03 1:37:05

Yeah. So in in our Congress today this is like still happens. There are Democrats that will vote with the Republicans Republicans that will vote for the Democrats. This doesn't happen very often but in critical moments it happens. Yeah. This never happens in Parliament.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:19

Aaron Ross Powell They just don't it's like it's like this block always votes with this they always vote the same one every bill exactly all 10 of them or all 50 of them or whatever. And that's and doing that is what gives them their power. Trevor Burrus That's what gives them a block power as well so they have to have they have to do it.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:34

Yes this is not necessarily the way that a parliament has to work but that's at least how it does work in the UK Wild. Yes yeah I was very surprised by this but it makes sense it's this it's this consistent so okay the thing that I always come back to is the human body right?

SPEAKER_02 1:37:55

Okay oh yeah this makes sense as the model right um because when I was going through medical school um I just started to notice all these parallels right and they're not all that uncommonly right they're not they're pretty straightforward right there's a reason we call major roads arterials right um uh the way FEMA operates could be very easily um mapped to the immune system right these are pretty straightforward metaphors um but it becomes where it becomes interesting there's two metaphors that I I think are the most important that um aren't really metaphors um one is power generation and the other is um flow uh uh uh system systematic flow so um I actually uh drew like drew this out and and and it it's shockingly how ac it's shocking how accurate it is. I looked at a bunch of different airports um and uh surprisingly enough O'Hare was the one that was best uh suited to doing this um as an image um and I know O'Hare incredibly well because of Chicago right um if you look at O'Hare it's a heart it's just a heart it's the shape of a heart and the roads coming in and out map almost exactly the uh arteries and veins the vena c the major arteries and veins coming into the heart um and it even has the same periodicity right there's systole and diastole inhale and exhale right and that maps to circadian rhythm right so at from about 6 a.m you know it increases and then from 6 a.m through maybe 10 p.m with like uh a peak during the middle of the day maybe maybe it's bimodal peak and one at 10 in the morning and one at 6 p.m or something like that but I don't I I haven't mapped it that closely but it's clearly like there's this action where blood comes in right it's expelled and people fly out and fly in and come out right and then there's diastole where the system relaxes and that's night. Yes right and it's just like a heart beating like almost precisely and it and and if you look at it like an actual picture of O'Hare it looks like a heart. Yeah um which is wild.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:43

I had never uh understood that I never realized that I made it up I like I I just I made that up.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:49

So are there other cases in which this holds uh all airports operate like that just right okay right just the image of O'Hare actually is the shape of a heart which is wild. But they all have that systole and diastole I mean so does so does city centers, right? They're systole and diastole in in um traffic. Yes people go into the city and then they go out of the city they go into the city and they go out of the city day and night right um the other best metaphor because it isn't a metaphor at all is power generation um the way the human body generates power and the problems that needed to be solved in order to do it in a way that works for a living system are not metaphorically the same. They are exactly the same as the way we do it at the scale of cities and civilization. The way the body generates energy is ATP synthase, right? So the way that works is um you burn sugar right in a in a controlled way um and you capture what amounts to um hydrogen atoms right uh protons um uh hydrogen hydrogen protons without electrons right and they are they are pumped through the mitochondrial membrane to create a concentration gradient. And then the only way and then there's a natural force of diffusion to push that back through just to balance out the concentration gradient. And the only way back through the mitochondrial membrane is through um the liter it's literally a a a circle um these little chambers um in ATP synthase and every time a hydrogen ion passes through one of the chambers it twists just a little bit and every time it twists a full rotation there's three different pieces on top of it that um in one set in one orientation they open and grab an ADP adenosine diphosphate and they grab a uh another phosphate and then as it turns they'll close right and the the conformation the shape of the enzyme binds the ADP and the P to make ATP right adenosine triphosphate the power plant the like the energy of s of of life right and then it'll and then as it turns further it'll open again and release the ATP and bind another ADP and A and P, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:43:22

It's really a beautiful process.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:23

It's astounding and and it's the exact same process that happens all the way back to bacteria and one of the only and it's the same exact thing and one of the only differences is over the period of evolution you know billion years, two billion right, um it's become more efficient. So bacterial um bacterial mitochondria it's something like 15 hydrogen ions have to pass through to get it to turn once and in human mitochondria it's like eight so it's just much more efficient right we'd have to fact check that specifically but I'm pretty sure that's what it is. Okay. So now you've got a fuel source right of your sugar that you're burning and it's literally burning. I mean it's an I it's it's it's it's a redox reaction right it's oxidation reduction right it's the exact same chemical process as fire. It's fire, right? Wow okay right um in a controlled way to create a concentration gradient that turns a turbine which generates electricity so we're just many power plants all these cells and we did not develop power plants with that knowledge we did not know that when we built power plants right we figured that out on our own this idea of burn coal right initially it was it was I mean the very first ones I think are water wheels where we're cat where we're where we're grinding grain. Yes where we're catching an energy source right to to in a concentr in a controlled way and then directing it to do something specific right then we figure out electromagnetism and we figure out solenoids and we figure out that you can sorry um right uh let me know if if that's not right um if I need to like um do you know how solenoids work? Just very basically uh right coil of wire right and if you move a magnet through the coil of wire because changing magnetic fields induce electrical fields you can create current in the wire right so um you can now create a concentration gradient with steam in a power plant which will turn a turbine right which is essentially the you know it's just like in a car right well it's a little different than that actually but it'll turn a turbine and that generates electricity right so we are now using a fuel source and fire um and heat and capturing it in a way that doesn't destroy that like right and it isn't always safe right right but it's not safe in the body either the mitochondrial DNA is is constantly deteriorating right that's much deteriorates much faster than DNA in other cells in in other parts of the cell that's why mitochondrial DNA like so mitochondrial DNA is actually separate from the nucleus right mitochondria have their own DNA um separate from the nucleus of the cell and the repair mechanisms are like have to be right because because the the they're they're con they're damaged much more because of the intent because of the fire fundament. Right, okay um so you take that and then you think okay what else in a human in in in a civilization sized system right like so this is the best you want to talk about a system of many factors many independent parts that have learned to work together right um blood pressure is a really good example um it is a constant competition right between the lungs and the kidneys the kidneys want higher blood pressure because it's fundamentally a sieve right okay which which operates based on so it's the pressure that the blood comes into the glomerulae and and it's and and that pressure forces um forces the separation of ions from fluid and then it's in the tubules that some ions come back right but you can only but you can only sieve as you can only do as much as you can get out in the first place. Yes. Right? So it wants more pressure. More throughput right and the lungs want less because you have alveoli which are where oxygen um exchange happens and carbon dioxide exchange happens and and those blood vessels have to be incredibly thin in order to get the most efficient exchange which means high pressure breaks them. Oh wow right so so the lungs can't handle high blood pressure I didn't know that this was a concern in the lungs at all it's very specific. Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah the lungs want lower blood pressure right so there's a bunch of different systems in the body to manage blood pressure but one of the big ones is a thing called angiotensin controlling enzyme angiotensin converting enzyme ACE right and many people will be familiar with the blood pressure medicines ACE inhibitors and ARBs the angiotensin and they're they operate at different points in this but it's the same system. And what it is is it's a it's a molecule that is angiotensin so obviously blood pressure right because we just like let's go to the greek right that's literally all it is right like angiotensin convert right converting enzyme right um so angiotensin is a molecule that is as I if I'm remembering my med school correctly it's um made by the kidneys um and then angiotensin converting enzyme is in the lungs so it has to get made by the kidneys and then it gets converted into its active mode in the lungs. So the kidneys and the lungs have to agree right whoa right yeah that's super cool. It's an election well it isn't an election well it's competition.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:53

Yes but it seems like the the lungs are being dictated what to do in this case no the could both are like the lungs have as much control as the kidneys do because the lungs cannot convert the enzyme ah okay right though I mean not that can not the the the enzyme that does the conversion in like is in the lungs.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:11

So the lungs cannot convert angiotensin into its active um shape or modality whatever like they can they cannot activate it. So the kidneys can make all the angiotensin they want and it won't get converted into its into its active modality if the lungs don't do the conversion. Yes. Right? So they're both they both have to agree.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:33

And what happens if there's extra of this substance of the bloodstream that just is wasted?

SPEAKER_02 1:49:38

There's a lot of things in the body that are extra and that are wasted. That's all over the place. Something like something like 90% or 95% of our DNA in every single cell is is um they're called X uh is it introns or ex uh it's non non non transcribed right they don't make any there's no RNA made for yeah there's no RNA made from the majority of your DNA in every single cell, which would just be waste, right? But it's also like this is a very old memo, right? And it's pretty hard to throw stuff out that isn't needed anymore. Because when we try to do that, we end up things like, I mean, at the level of cells, they'd have to just you just sort of like guess and sh stuff happens by accident, right? But at the level of choice, right, like we do things like take a spleen out. Because like we don't know what that does. So like it probably doesn't do anything. Turns out it's a central immunologic organ. And we didn't know that because we didn't know very much about immunology. And people sort of like, like turns out you need that, right? So we stopped taking out spleens quite so readily, right? Yeah, you can't, it's hard to throw away parts of the system because you because you don't necessarily know what is being affected by that that you aren't aware of being affected, right? Like once we start to talk about like, okay, well let's change the districting, right? Oh now wait a second, let's because it's it's what's the interaction? What's the interaction? Like so like, okay, so let's um yeah let's let's uh let's make it more competitive right but then are we gonna get wait we're gonna get more extremists right or let's have term limits. That was it. Let's have term limits. That's an obviously good idea, right? But then we end up with more extreme candidates. Whoa whoa whoa whoa right and then that turns into right so like you have not you have downstream effects that you're not expecting. So it's pretty hard to like right? Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:22

So okay just like the body there are all these interactions it's the same thing in the in politics where there are these unintended consequences of changing policies.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:32

Yeah yeah yeah but fundamentally you think more competition would be healthier.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:38

Of course yes unfortunately there's really no way to actually causally estimate this like it there's no random variation in how competitive a district is unless I guess you could think about redistricting as being a little bit of influencing that but oftentimes the the effect of a redistricting regime change is quite small in the grand scheme of things. But the ideal experiment to run would be to force a candidate to run in some district and see if this district goes from being like a one party district to a competitive district, how does the representation in that district change? My guess is we would see that the representatives are working more for their constituency, they're bringing home more bacon, more earmarks for their district, they're and they have more office hours to assist their constituents with all of their needs. But we'll have to leave that for another day to study.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:29

This is fun this is funny