Some quick thoughts on the midterms

A good night for Democrats, the rule of law, and maybe deficit reduction.

Happy Wednesday! Americans went to the polls last night, and I’m feeling pretty good about the results.

The case for a narrowly-divided Congress

I was happy that Trump lost in 2020, but I was also happy that Democrats won only a narrow majority in Congress. The Democratic Party moved dramatically to the left during the Trump years, and so I’m glad that the 50/50 Senate gave Joe Manchin the ability to block some of their more ill-considered ideas.

In particular, I think Manchin did Democrats a favor when he torpedoed the Democrats’ massive Build Back Better package in favor of the much smaller and more focused Inflation Reduction Act. If the larger package had passed, inflation would have surged even higher.

As I write this on Wednesday afternoon, it’s looking most likely that Democrats will hold the Senate while Republicans take the House. I think this configuration would be good for the country and perhaps good for the political fortunes of Joe Biden too.

Democratic control of the Senate means that Biden will be able to staff his administration and fill open seats in the judiciary.

On the other hand, it would be helpful for Congress to cut the deficit to help get inflation under control, and that’s more likely to happen with a Republican House. Indeed, it would probably helpful to Joe Biden politically to have Republicans “force” him to accept spending cuts and share some of the blame.

There’s a risk that House Republicans will use the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip the way they did in 2011, essentially threatening to cause a default on the national debt if Biden doesn’t agree to big spending cuts. The danger is that they could miscalculate, cause an actual default, and trigger a massive financial crisis. To prevent this, Democrats should use the upcoming lame-duck session to suspend the debt ceiling until at least 2025, but they probably won’t.

Still, I’m not too worried about a repeat of the 2011 debt ceiling crisis because fiscal conservatism isn’t as central to the Republican brand as it was 12 years ago. Opposition to excessive government spending was probably the most important issue for Republicans in the 2010 campaign. Republicans today still criticize Biden for excessive spending, of course, but for many Republicans fiscal conservatism has taken a back seat to culture-war issues like immigration, COVID, and the teaching of race and gender issues in schools.

So it is not obvious to me that Republican members of Congress will feel as much pressure to cut the deficit in 2023 that they did in 2011. Meanwhile, Biden may be perfectly willing to sign a deficit reduction deal to help bring inflation down. So while I certainly expect some budget drama in 2023, I’m optimistic they’ll be able to reach a compromise without the degree of brinksmanship we saw in 2011.

Nevada may switch to the Alaska model for elections

I’m rooting for the success of Nevada’s ballot initiative to switch to an Alaska-style system of ranked-choice voting. In this system, all voters participate in a single open primary, then the top four (in Alaska) or five (in Nevada) candidates advance to the general election. In the general election, voters rank candidates from one to five. When votes are counted, the votes of lower-ranked candidates get automatically re-allocated to higher-ranked candidates.

This reform eliminates one of the most pernicious aspects of the conventional primary process: as politics has become more polarized, winning a primary has increasingly required pandering to a party’s base. And this has made it more and more difficult for moderate senators like West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin or Maine Republican Susan Collins to win re-election.

That makes it harder for Congress to serve as an independent check on the president as the founders intended. We saw this in 2018 with the retirement of Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake. Flake didn’t like Donald Trump, but he knew that openly criticizing Trump would make it impossible to win the Republican nomination in his home state of Arizona. He made a principled choice to criticize Trump and then leave Congress. But it would have been better if he didn’t have to make this choice.

If Arizona was using the Alaskan voting model in 2018, Flake would have easily qualified for the general-election ballot. Then he likely could have won the general election by picking up support from voters on the left and right who list him as their second choice.

It’s not a coincidence that Alaska Sen. Lisa Murksowski was one of the few Republicans to vote to convict Donald Trump in the 2021 impeachment trial. She didn’t have to worry about losing her seat to a right-wing primary challenger the way Flake did.

While I’ve used Republicans in my example, the case for this reform is thoroughly bipartisan. If you’re worried about current or future Democratic presidents abusing their power, then you should prefer a system where Democratic members of Congress don’t have to worry that opposing a Democratic president would end their careers.

As I write this, Nevada’s reform has 51.5 percent of the vote with 77 percent of votes counted. Voters will need to approve it again in 2024 for it to become law. I hope it does, and I hope other states follow Nevada’s lead in the future.