Congressional moderates could make a party of their own

Congressional moderates could make a party of their own

By Matthew Yglesias

Oct. 26, 2021

Multi-party democracy without election reform

I wrote a brief piece for Bloomberg about rumors that Joe Manchin might leave the Democratic Party that I wanted to expand on here.

He almost certainly won’t leave, both because he’s said the story is “bullshit” and also because leaving the party would be sort of pointless. Obviously, if he flipped to become a Republican that would be a big deal. But Manchin’s spent his whole life not being a Republican. For narrow electoral purposes, the time to flip would have been in advance of his 2018 reelection campaign. But not only did he not flip, but Manchin voted against ACA repeal and Trump’s tax bill. I just don’t see this happening.

And leaving the Democrats without caucusing with the GOP wouldn’t change anything. On substance he’d be the pivotal senator, but he mostly is that already. And politically it wouldn’t help him much. Right now his problem in his home state is that the Democratic Party brand is trash. The good news is that the Joe Manchin brand is decent. But nobody is particularly impressed by the little “I” next to Angus King’s name because, functionally, he’s obviously just a Democrat. Pulling a similar move wouldn’t accomplish anything for Manchin.

But here’s an idea that could work — what if Manchin and Lisa Murkowski quit their parties simultaneously and formed a new centrist party or caucus?

Why Murkowski? Well, she’s already on the outs with the GOP. She lost her reelection primary in 2010, she voted against ACA repeal, she voted against Brett Kavanaugh, and she voted to convict Donald Trump. The only way she’s able to win in Alaska is by getting the votes of lots of Democrats (which she does now because she’s gotten them to adopt an unusual Murkowski-friendly top four open primary system) and pairing them with the votes of some moderate Republicans. Alaska also has a robust tradition of multi-party politics, with the lower house of the state legislature currently controlled by a coalition between 15 Democrats, four independents, and two Coalition Republicans.

A centrist coalition with members from both parties would hold the balance of power and could bargain with both parties over the organization of the Senate (such as who sits on and leads which committees) and control of the floor (which matters come up for a vote and when). In effect, instead of the centrist members allowing the extremes to set the agenda and then editing, a centrist caucus could let them seize the agenda in American politics and really change things.

Duverger’s Fake Law

I am not a huge fan of America’s system of plurality voting.

That said, obsession with electoral reform reflects in part a misperception that this electoral system makes two-party politics inevitable. In reality, you don’t need to look any further than Canada or the UK to find multi-party politics taking place within the context of a plurality voting system. And I think it’s pretty obvious that if Manchin was leading a Center Party in the Senate, it would be kinda suicidal for Democrats to mount a strong challenge to him in 2024. It’s just a hopeless case for them. The Center Party would want to recruit more cross-pressured senators like Jon Tester and Mitt Romney, and in both cases, you’d have the same thing: wise Democrats would not invest in trying to beat those guys. Susan Collins also might be tempted to join, and she might end up in a true three-party race if she went third party, but I bet she’d win.

The reason we don’t see successful third-party politics in America is not “Duverger’s Law” but that under plurality voting, you need a strong geographical base for a successful third party.

West Virginia and Alaska are not close to each other. But if you look at the list of target members for a Center Party, you see that they actually do have a distinctive geography. Because of urban/rural polarization and educational polarization (both largely mediated by racial attitudes), Democrats are increasingly uncompetitive in heavily rural, heavily white areas. These places are overrepresented in our political system, so they loom large.

But even as voters have come to view Democrats as the party for people who live in big cities and care a lot about intersectionality, it’s not as if political disagreement in West Virginia has ceased. The (ultimately successful) West Virginia Teachers Strike in 2018 was a powerful reminder that practical disagreement about policy and governance continues even as culture war politics makes certain places monolithic in the context of two-party politics. It adds up to a clear role for a “Not-The-Republican-Party Party” that is different in both branding and policy from the urban/woke/educated Democratic Party and that exists primarily in rural areas.

More members of a center party

The 50-50 Senate and Murkowski’s uniquely tenuous electoral circumstances make it the logical ground zero for organizing a new party. And I think Tester, Romney, and Collins would all be logical candidates for additional members.

But if a Center Party got off the ground, I think it would attract more adherents.

Jared Golden — who represents the Trumpier, more rural district in Maine — is a very effective politician, but he faces grave electoral danger as the “D” brand has gotten bad in his part of the state and the party no longer seems particularly interested in pandering to low-income rural white people. Golden recently wrote a letter outlining his disagreements with the Biden Build Back Better program that’s thoughtful and worth your time. I think he’s going to end up voting for the bill because the changes he wants are broadly in line with the changes Manchin is going to force. But Golden does a better idea, I think, of articulating what the disagreement is actually about — a lot of progressives have started to take it for granted that the United States should be fundamentally transformed into a more European-style social model, and he doesn’t agree with that. At the same time, he’s not a Republican. He wants fairly modest tax increases to finance a modest-scale (highly means-tested) expansion of the safety net, but not really a bold transformative agenda.

It’s in Golden’s interests to play up his disagreements with Democratic leadership because he’s got a strongly Trump-leaning district. There aren’t a lot more House members like that at the moment, though Liz Cheney, who is now badly at odds with the GOP over Trump’s impeachment, fits the bill. What’s more, if a Center Caucus existed, it would be a natural destination for long-shot challengers in solidly red or blue districts. I think most people understand that gerrymandering and the resultant lack of electoral competition in huge numbers of House districts are fairly dysfunctional. But however you draw district boundaries, there’s always a median voter, and there are also plenty of House districts that are 10 points or more to the left or right of the national average. Democrats could sensibly stand down in those heavily R-leaning districts and Republicans could do likewise in the D-leaning districts, creating openings for Center Party candidates to run.

Similar dynamics, of course, also hold in state legislatures. And a Center Party would be a natural home for rogue groups like the Independents and Coalition Republicans in Alaska or the Independent Democratic Conference that used to hold the balance of power in New York. And while ultimately I agree that multi-party politics requires election reform, I think you actually need the partisanship change before you get institutional reform.

Reforming electoral institutions

Where possible, I’d like to see really big picture reform. Stan Oklobdzija’s dream of seeing big cities adopt multi-member council districts and proportional representation is one that I share.

What’s great about proportional representation is that it lets the political system accommodate two competing demands. On the one hand, there are lots of ideologues who are perennially frustrated with the way the establishment parties seek to practice electoral realism and who really yearn to vote expressively for more ideological parties. Out-and-out leftists and serious libertarians are not large shares of the American public. But in a country of 330 million people, there are still tons of them, and under PR they could vote for the parties of their dreams. But PR usually tends to guarantee that governance is done by centrist coalitions, often with the participation of centrist political parties that tend to hold the pivotal seats.

Unfortunately, outside the context of potential charter reform in some cities, it’s a little hard to see how you get from here to there — especially because you can’t really do proportional representation for the Senate.

Right now, there’s a lot of enthusiasm around reforms that would replace plurality voting for unitary offices with what most people now call Ranked Choice Voting (what used to be called Instant Runoff Voting). This is definitely an improvement over the plurality system, but in practice, it rarely makes a difference. A more promising idea for a Center Party to pursue is approval voting where you vote yes or no on every candidate in the field, and the most widely approved of one wins.

There’s no such thing as a perfect system for running unitary elections (what you ought to do is have parliaments and proportional representation), but for single offices, this is the system that is most likely to help bland moderates win. Or rather, it’s the system under which the only way for a non-moderate candidate to win is for there to be a clear desire for sweeping policy change. You can’t get there simply by mobilizing fear of the opposition and making people feel that they have no choice.

What difference would this actually make?

Of course, if you turn off the politics hype machine, it turns out that America already has a political system dominated by centrist politics.

Today, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are the deciders. In 2017-18, it was Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. Back in 2009, Democrats had huge majorities but the only way they got them was with a huge Blue Dog Caucus in the South and a Senate caucus full of people like Blanche Lincoln. Concurrent majorities are rare, the public backlash against them tends to come quickly. Even when they do exist, the pivotal members tend not to be particularly ideological or extreme.

And I think this is one obvious reason why traditionally centrist members have not been particularly interested in pursuing a third-party strategy. The point of my proposal would be for the people who already hold all the power implicitly to simply do so more formally. But I do think this would have several benefits:

As politics has become more nationalized, voters have become less and less willing to ticket-split. Right now the Senate is mostly running on fumes where people like Manchin and Collins built their local brands in an earlier era. Formally separate parties could help reverse that trend.

Moderates in Congress often complain about their lack of agenda-setting power and assert that if they had it, various bipartisan ideas (like the infrastructure bill from earlier this year) would be forthcoming. I think it’s hard to assess this assertion, but to the extent that people take it seriously, a separate party would be the way to seize the agenda.

I’m struck by the finding that rank-and-file Democrats overestimate how extreme rank-and-file Republicans are, and rank-and-file Republicans overestimate how extreme rank-and-file Democrats are. The reality is that relatively moderate members of Congress who are accountable to relatively moderate members of the electorate generally hold the balance of power. Formalizing that and making it more explicit would help everyone keep things in perspective and would tend to break cycles of procedural extremism.

Last but by no means least, my sense from engaging in the past few years of intra-progressive arguments is that on some level this is the outcome progressives want. Contemporary progressives are simultaneously very alarmed about the prospect of an authoritarian takeover by the GOP and really loath to confront that menace by making concessions toward majority viewpoints. Mainstream Democratic views like banning assault weapons, taxpayer-funded abortions, affirmative action in college admissions, and other topics are out of step with the national public — much less the right-of-center states needed for a Senate majority. Shifting the whole Democratic Party away from the cultural sensibilities of urban college graduates might actually be a more painful step than watching a whole new party rise in parts of the country where big cities and college graduates are scarce.

Is this all a pipe dream?

Relative to other unrealistic schemes I harbor, this one seems very achievable. All it requires is some collective action on the part of a relatively small number of people.

At the same time, I think it’s pretty unlikely. The opportunity for a cross-party group of moderates to seize control of the Senate has arisen repeatedly over the past 20 years and it never happens. I always think back to 2001 when Jim Jeffords decided to stop being a moderate Republican and instead become a standard-issue Democrat. If he’d been able to coordinate with Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Joe Lieberman, the opportunity was right there for a New England Moderates group to control the balance of power.

But moderate members just don’t seem to think along these lines. The habits of partisanship are deeply ingrained, there doesn’t appear to be much trust among members of Congress that would let them hatch schemes amongst themselves, and a lot of Americans are firmly convinced (against the international evidence) that multi-party politics is impossible with our electoral institutions.

So we’ll probably stick with the system of alternating between gridlock and weird policy lurches with everyone paranoid about the opposition for a long, long time.

I should acknowledge that my Niskanen Center colleague Steve Teles has been maintaining that you could accomplish many of the things I’m calling for by having formalized party factions. So the idea here is that the Larry Hogan/Phil Scott/Charlie Baker style of GOP politics could have a proper name and a logo and some actual institutional life (instead of the hollow congressional caucuses), and then we would understand the Republican and Democratic parties as coalitions of multiple factional groupings.

To me, this seems like a harder institutional change than starting a third party, but the basic analysis is similar. In either case, the key question is “What do actual elected officials want to do?” And the key thing, I think, is to urge the moderate members to do something instead of continuing their passivity and whining.