Ask Me Anything—October 2024, Part 2
I answer questions about my views of capital punishment, the Electoral College, and whether I’m concerned about a crackdown on free speech from the left.
No audio version of today’s post. It’s quite long, and my voice is ragged from teaching. No one would want to listen to it, believe me.
John Haas
What is the best argument for keeping the Electoral College, and is it good enough to convince us to stick with it?
The best argument for keeping the Electoral College is that the name of our country is “The United States of America.”
Are we a union of 50 separate self-governing polities, as the name suggests? Or are we one single polity of roughly 330 million people with no significant local or regional government standing as an intermediary between the individual and the nation as a whole? If it’s the latter, then we should by all means dump the Electoral College, institute truly national presidential elections, and rename the country “America the Great,” or something similar that makes no reference to states uniting to form a whole. While we’re at it, we might as well abolish the Senate, since it, too, gives us state-based representation.
More seriously, while I wouldn’t recommend any democratizing country to adopt our Electoral College, ours dates back to a time when people mainly identified with their states and viewed a higher-level government above the individual states with intense suspicion. The idea was that presidential candidates should be forced to make their pitches broadly, to several states and regions of the country with distinct interests and outlooks, not just to a handful of population centers (the biggest cities, with the most votes), while ignoring the rest.
It's also important to maintain perspective about our Electoral College woes. The U.S. has been conducting presidential elections for 236 years. Only a handful of times has the national popular-vote winner failed to win the Electoral College. The problem is that it’s happened twice in the last quarter century, it nearly happened a third time four years ago, and it could well happen again three weeks from now. This is a function of the shape of the two parties’ electoral coalitions at the present moment: Donald Trump has helped to make the GOP’s coalition highly efficient, with the party winning (on average) more low-population states by narrower margins and the Democrats winning (on average) fewer high-population states by wider margins (which means with more “wasted” votes).
That Republican efficiency and advantage in the Electoral College won’t last forever. In fact, Nate Cohn (the New York Times’ data guru) thinks it might noticeably wane in the ongoing presidential election, as Trump begins to win (and waste) more votes in high-population “blue” states (like New York). That could help to compensate for the fact that Kamala Harris is likely to win deep-blue California by huge margins, with millions of wasted votes.
In any event, this whole discussion is moot at the moment, since the Electoral College can only be abolished with a constitutional amendment, and to pass one of those, lots of Republicans would need to join Democrats in supporting it—and that’s not going to happen while Republicans are benefitting so decisively from the current system.
Patti Frey
Which are the most critical elections for Senate & House?
When elections are close—like the fight for majority control of both the Senate and the House this year—every race is critical. I say that in part to deflect from this question, which I don’t really feel qualified to answer. I mainly focus on and analyze the national level of American politics, which means the presidential race. For state and local races, Matthew Yglesias is much better. Here’s a post of his from last month that highlights numerous important contests and suggests where monetary donations could make the most difference. I hope Matt does a better job of answering your question than I can.
John Davis
Trump seems to have a solid 47 percent of the voting public. I understand, more or less, the hardcore MAGA, cult-minded portion and the Christian nationalists. But do all those groups really add up to 47 percent of the voting public? I can see them at maybe a third, total, but who are the remaining 15 percent, and why are they still with Trump if they're not in one of those two groups?
I’ve laid out my view of this in a few posts and in my most recent conversation with Chris Cillizza, but I’m happy to walk you through it again.
I think the best rough estimate of Trump support is the polling we saw in the months just before and just after the start of the Republican primaries of 2024. Roughly 50 percent of the GOP supported Trump before any votes were cast, despite the fact that there were lots of other candidates to choose from, ranging from would-be right-populist Trump successors like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to oldline Reaganites like former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and others. That 50-something percent are Trump’s base: in your terms, members of the MAGA cult and Christian nationalists.
Then there’s the 25-30 percent of the Republican electorate that originally preferred one of the non-Trump options but then very quickly migrated over to Trump once it became obvious that he would win the primaries in a walk, ultimately giving him margins of victory in the primaries of around 75 to 80 percent. These people don’t love Trump, but they prefer him to pretty much any Democrat and they hope and assume a second Trump administration will follow the first in doing lots of normal Republican stuff, like cutting taxes and regulations and appointing conservative judges.
Finally, there is the roughly 20 percent of the Republican electorate that stuck with former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley through the primaries, long past her formal withdrawal from the race. These voters dislike Trump so much that they would strongly prefer another option; some will hold their noses to vote for Trump, but others will stay home and not vote at all, or write-in an alternative, or even hold their noses and vote for Kamala Harris.
That’s a total of a lot of Republicans voting for Trump, and with the GOP currently sitting on “its first durable lead in party identification in more than three decades,” it could be enough to deliver a Republican victory on November 5. But not without the help of one more bloc of voters—Republican-leaning independents. They are the voters who will likely push Trump up into the 46 to 47 percent range, and possibly a bit higher if he’s managed to convert a few indy voters to his side for the first time. Why might these voters break for Trump? I have no idea, other than to point out that they tend to be the least engaged and informed voters in the country, so the reason could really be anything at all.
Michelle Tugot
Trump recently told Hugh Hewitt that if someone at one of his rallies admitted they would be voting for Harris, they’d get hurt. What do you think will happen if Harris ekes out a narrow electoral college victory?
In that situation, I’m sure Trump himself would make a big stink and try to foment rage among his most passionate supporters. He might also try and get a handful of Republican-controlled state legislatures to hold off on certifying a Harris victory while he tries to strong-arm Republicans in Congress into backing a challenge to a Harris win. None of that will be good.
But I don’t anticipate it rising to the level of danger we had in the aftermath of the 2020 election. That’s because the White House is in Democratic control, making a hand-off to a victorious Democratic successor pretty close to inevitable, no matter how much of a stink Trump is making. With Trump holding the powers of the presidency four years ago, there was some uncertainty about whether he would vacate the White House by noon on January 20, 2021—and if he refused, how those in powerful positions (in Congress, in the Pentagon) would respond to such a flagrantly unconstitutional power grab.
In the end, Trump relinquished power and Joe Biden ascended to the presidency upon taking the oath of office. This time, Trump may well be throwing a temper tantrum in response to losing yet another election. But he’ll be doing it from outside the halls of power, which means we should be ok.
Kevin Bowe
I’d like to revisit your argument for not indicting / prosecuting Trump. I interpreted your argument to be “politics in the end must triumph over the rule of law.” That we needed this to be played out in a political arena, which is the ultimate forum for public debate, over the principles of the rule of law. If my interpretation is correct, it raises the question: What kind of politics will we have if we do not confine our politics within the rule of law?
The rule of law is important, obviously. But the rule of law isn’t automatic. It isn’t a machine operating dispassionately and entirely apart from or above politics. Prosecutors evaluate evidence of crimes and make judgment calls about which alleged violations are worthy of prosecution, and judges oversee trials and the application of the law. Those prosecutors and judges are either elected through the political process or appointed by those elected through the political process.
It’s bad that Trump did so many things that appear to be violations of federal and state laws.
It’s bad that he ran for high office again while facing prosecution, trial, and possible conviction in multiple jurisdictions.
It’s bad that many of the prosecutors and judges overseeing these trials are or were appointed by Democrats when Trump is a Republican seeking to defeat a Democratic opponent.
It’s bad that Trump won the nomination of his party and has been close to tied in his latest race for the White House while facing so much legal jeopardy and repeatedly asserting that the prosecutions are politically motivated.
It’s bad that a Supreme Court majority decided that preventing future politically motivated prosecutions of ex-presidents required giving all presidents very broad immunity for acts that in any other context would be recognized as criminal.
I could go on. My point is this: Trump is a cancer on liberal-democratic government, including its commitment to the rule of law, because Trump and his most devoted followers deny the possibility of legal impartiality. There’s always an angle, always an interest. Every effort to demonstrate one’s own elevation above politics is a con designed to win a bigger political victory.
One can respond to this by doubling down on one’s commitment to the rule of law, but that won’t protect the rule of law. In fact, it might weaken it further, by convincing a larger share of the citizenry that those who claim most loudly and piously to place law above politics do so primarily in order to win a political victory by alternative means—that those who portray themselves as the most idealistic among us are actually the most ruthlessly cynical.
I think that’s exactly where we’ve ended up, with American voters very close to elevating Trump to the presidency once again, despite (or perhaps, perversely, because of?) all his legal troubles.
Tanner Matthews
Do you have a stance on capital punishment?
I do not support capital punishment, because I don’t trust the criminal-justice system not to make mistakes, and the prospect of the government killing a citizen in error fills me with dread. Being locked up for life is pretty bad, and, for me, sufficiently bad to serve as a fitting punishment for the worst crimes. And in the case of a mistaken prosecution and conviction, the unjust imprisonment can be halted and undone.
Nonetheless, I understand that Americans tend to prefer harsher punishments than I do, and also harsher than the citizens of most other liberal democracies. On this as in many other areas of public policy, I’m pretty ruthlessly pragmatic. If supporting capital punishment will help Democrats win elections in certain places, they should do so. I don’t think the Constitution’s stricture against “cruel and unusual punishment” applies to capital punishment. As in most areas of politics and policy, public opinion should guide us, even if it fails to give me outcomes I think are best in some respects.
Anonymous
I really appreciated your essay “Losing My Religion,” and I would love to hear more about your response Paul's statement in Romans: “The good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice” (7:19). This verse came up in the comments to that essay, where you acknowledged the importance of Paul’s thinking but did not elaborate. Could you say more?
I will say very little more on this topic, if only because it’s too complex and important to be dealt with justly in this kind of setting.
The Socratic view I outlined in the post boils down to an assertion (justified in numerous Platonic dialogues) that when human beings act, they do so thinking that the act is good (worthwhile). So if I refrain from stealing something when I could get away with it, this shows that at the moment I act I think abiding by the law against stealing is better than possessing the item. If, on the other hand, I do steal the item, this shows that at the moment I act I think possessing the item is better than abiding by the law against stealing. If I commit this crime, this implies that I’ve made a mistake in this judgment and should be “punished” by education in the errors of my ways. I should be taught why it is in fact better to abide by the law against stealing than to take something I want.
This Socratic-Platonic insight has pretty explosive implications for ordinary moral opinion and on what we can reasonably hope for from God or gods. Among other things, it implies that no wise deity would grant rewards or impose punishments (as commonly understood) for our acts.
In my view, the most powerful challenge to this view of things is found in the passage of Romans where Paul indicates that it’s possible to know what’s good and deliberately choose to do the opposite, out of a kind of sinful perversity. One finds versions of this alternative position in Augustine, Martin Luther, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Heidegger, all of whom insist that human beings can choose to do things that (at the moment they act) they realize are not good.
This latter view will seem obviously correct to many, but I’m not persuaded by it.
1-800-cry-baby
What do you make of the claims of censorship made against Democrats, most vociferously advanced by Elon Musk, Matt Taibbi, Chris Rufo, The Free Press, and to a lesser extent, Andrew Sullivan and some of your regular commentors? Is there anything to these claims?
I think “censorship” means the government restricting what people can legally say. By that definition, there is next-to-no censorship of speech in the United States. (If you doubt it, compare the American situation to the one in the United Kingdom, where people are regularly brought up on charges for posting unacceptable statements on social media.) During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were cases of public-health authorities under the Trump and Biden administration attempting to get private entities (social-media companies) to “shadow ban” accounts spreading what these authorities considered “disinformation” about the disease, vaccine safety and effectiveness, and so forth. That’s something short of full censorship.
I nonetheless think these efforts were heavy-handed and rarely justified. Predictably, some of the people and statements these authorities targeted turned out to be spreading truth, or at least appropriate forms of skepticism, rather than dangerous lies. On the other hand, we were living through the deadliest pandemic in a century. Well over a million people died from a communicable disease. That some of the people empowered to keep the American people safe went too far in their vigilance is hardly surprising. It’s also understandable. (Wait until you hear what the Lincoln administration did to curtail civil liberties during the Civil War.)
That doesn’t mean their actions were smart and should be repeated the next time the country confronts a public-health (or some other kind of) emergency. A liberal society needs to allow the free exchange of information, as well as the free making and criticizing of arguments. Moves by credentialized experts in positions of power to constrain the boundaries of free debate are driven by the fact that the online world is awash in actors operating in bad faith and/or engaging in motivated reasoning. This is true and very concerning. But the solution can’t be an effort to limit or control who is allowed to say what in public.
In a world of viral deep fakes and rampant unverified and unfalsifiable conspiracies, simply allowing the marketplace of ideas to continue functioning unimpeded might not be a solution either. But it’s better than attempting to tamp down on the free exchange of ideas, thereby providing factual confirmation of an elite effort at thought control. That will only end up empowering those sowing distrust of all authorities and thereby tearing down those who bring valuable expertise to important and pressing questions of public dispute. The cure can indeed be worse than the disease, and this is a pretty good illustration of that old adage.
Greg Stewart
I'm continuously overwhelmed by the lack of imagination displayed, it seems to me, on the left and center, but not on the right. For example, the left would never put together something like Project 2025. For another, Trump said in 2019: “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad,” yet the media and Congress itself were entirely unprepared for January 6. Then last year when Trump refers to a “bloodbath” while clearly talking about the economy, the whole media jumps like lemmings off that cliff. Do you agree that there is something about the contemporary center and the left that makes them unimaginative followers—quick to jump on the bandwagon of the trend of the moment, but rarely seeing around corners?
Honestly, I think what you’re decrying in your question is that fact that the center and left generally have trust in American institutions and are generally content with existing public authorities, while the right is increasingly dominated by civic pyromaniacs who just want to watch the world burn. It’s not especially surprising that the latter frequently do and say shocking, unpredictable things, while the former are caught off guard by it. I’m all in favor of the center and left expanding their conception of what their opponents on the right are capable of. But I don’t at all want them to try and compete with the right in trying to shock people. “We’re the responsible ones” might not always be a winning slogan, but it has real value when the other side is saying, in effect, “Vote for us and we’ll intentionally tear our public institutions to shreds.”
Kevin Donohue
Do you buy the idea that there’s an increase in international turmoil because of the end of the “Pax Americana?” This is a point hit repeatedly by Ross Douthat. I don’t accept the premise that turmoil really is elevated. There wasn’t ever really a Pax Americana, that’s just nostalgia.
I think it’s true that the world is more unstable today than it was four years ago. Russia invaded Ukraine. China is flexing its muscles in the Taiwan Straits. And Israel is at war with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the mullahs in Iran.
Is this evidence of elevated turmoil? Yes, relative to the late 2010s. But in a broader historical perspective? Perhaps not. Though I do think it’s undeniable that American primacy—our status as a global hegemon—is waning. You don’t have to call that the end of a Pax Americana to see that rival regional powers are doing what they wish with less regard for the United States than has been typical since the end of the Cold War. It was one thing for stateless terrorists to challenge us 23 years ago. It’s quite another for rising powers to ignore our preferences and even call our bluffs. That’s what we’re seeing more of—and it’s good that Ross Douthat is focusing our attention on the change, because there’s probably going to be more of it going forward, and we need to think through how to respond to and manage our decline relative to rival powers on the world stage.
On the Electoral College - It seems to me that the major problem with the Electoral College is that it was created before the advent of major political parties and thus without the understanding of what that would do to the College. The original idea was that each state would select a group of responsible citizens (the electors) who would then look at the candidates and vote on which one they felt to be the best choice. The idea was that the electors would be independent, each one able to vote his (since at the time no women would become electors) conscience. Clearly that is no longer the case. Our ossified binary party system has resulted in party loyalty becoming superior to independent thought. If we could find a way to return the Electoral College system to its original design and function, it might actually strengthen our presidential elections by removing from them excesses of passion, prejudice, and parochialism. I must admit that I’m unsure how that could be accomplished; electors would have to be chosen outside partisan political influence. What that conundrum makes clear is that our real problem is that ossified binary party system. Indeed, the Founders recognized that danger, publicly eschewing the idea of ‘factionalism’. But of course they then succumbed to it, creating the initial system themselves although it did not become the divisive juggernaut it has until the 1830’s. Having done so, it has now trapped us into and ‘us and them’ mode that has increasingly polarized us.
The Electoral College is not the problem. We are.
I spent about 10 years working in microbiology and immunology research and I find the shadow banning around Covid very concerning. Many of the ideas that were suppressed were either within the scientific mainstream or likely the majority opinion among scientists. In some cases, a claim that was labeled misinformation in the US was the official position of other rich countries’ ministries of health. Trying to suppress scientific evidence and debate during a public health crisis is very dangerous.
I am very angry that in many cases these decisions about what is misinformation and what is accurate information is being made by people who don’t have a background in science. In some cases these errors were obvious to someone with only a basic understanding of the subject. It’s possible that in some cases (remember when natural immunity was a dangerous idea), misinformation experts knew that the so-called misinformation was truw but said it was false because they thought saying it was false would make people more likely to follow public health guidelines, but that’s even worse. The last thing we need is for accurate scientific information To be suppressed to get people to follow government recommendations.