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Map: CNN
On Stupor Bowl Sunday–two days before Super Tuesday–I expected interruptions from political pitches and push polls, but no one called. Maybe they were all watching the game, too. But I don’t think so. Compared to my Iowa neighbors who were inundated with media ads and phone calls in the days leading up their caucuses, the situation here is Minnesota is downright depressing.
Even though my wife and I have served as state delegates, precinct chairs and various other offices, we have logged only three phone calls in the past month from any of the campaigns–two from Barack Obama and one from Hillary Clinton. Last night I finally saw the first television ad for a Presidential candidate–Obama. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul scheduled last-minute visits to the state, which had the local media positively swooning like some high school wall flower who has been asked to dance by the big man on campus.
If the local media were ecstatic they finally had a chance to cover the candidates, the national media have shown about as much enthusiasm for Minnesota as the sports press did the year we had the Stupor Bowl in a stadium named for Hubert Humphrey. I had to do a lot of scrolling on Google to find anything from the national press about our caucuses. Maybe those reporters read my blog post a few days ago about our 40 below wind chill or tomorrow’s winter storm warning.
I caught something on National Public Radio the other day, but the traffic was so bad I couldn’t pay attention. I finally found the prefect soundbite in a New York Times story. Lawrence Jacobs, a political scientist in Minnesota, describes as an eerie sense of isolation in all the Super Tuesday hoopla:
Like people waiting for the marching band that never comes.
There have been a variety of explanations advanced as to why no one seems to care about Minnesota, but it all comes down to the fact that on Super Tuesday, our caucus does not matter when placed against the primaries in states like California and New York with many more delegates at stake. As Iowans find out every four years, the rest of the country thinks the whole caucus things is ridiculous. “Just let me punch my ballot and go home,” they say, “But don’t make me stand up in front of my next-door neighbors and tell them I am a closet Ron Paul supporter.”
Like Iowa, our final delegates do not get chosen until the caucus process works its way up to the state level, which here involves attending a district caucus then state. At each stage, the amount of support for a candidate can vary. You can bet those folks who do end up being state delegates will have THEIR phones ringing off the hook.
If only Minnesota’s irrelevancy were just a simple matter of getting rid of caucuses and having a primary. Unfortunately, our irrelevancy is a signal to the rest of the country that something has gone drastically wrong with the democratic process. Part of that something goes back to the days of the Constitutional convention when the fabled big states vs. little state battles took place. Back then, none of the founders could imagine a time when a state the size of Minnesota would be virtually overlooked by Presidential candidates from both parties.
To start with there are officially 4,049 delegates for the Democratic national convention of which 796 are so-called “super delegates” who essentially represent the party bigwigs. That leaves 3,253. On Super Tuesday Minnesota will only have 45 district delegates in play due to the caucus system. Leaving out the so-called “unpledged” super delegates, Illinois will have 153 delegates in play, California 370, New York 232, and New Jersey 107. [See the Green Papers web site for explanation--which I will give a plug as the best on the net for this coverage] My handy calculator says that totals 862 delegates for those four states, or 26% of all the delegates who are not super delegates. If this is what you think the folks who wrote the Constitution had in mind then those of us in Minnesota might as well stay home Tuesday.
This math also provides convincing evidence that anyone who wants a national primary is crazy! Besides favoring the candidate with the most money to buy TV time (because that is the only way you can cover that many states at once) it also will eliminate any of the smaller states. You will see campaigns stick to the big states with the most delegates.
But, isn’t Minnesota a “purple” state that could go either way next November, so why aren’t the candidates targeting it? You will hear the network swelled heads pontificating yet again about red and blue states on Tuesday, but the candidates and their campaign staffs will be snickering at every mention because red and blue states are as relevant to a modern election as a horse and buggy is to a 747. The reason is a statistical technique known as clustering; the in-word among marketing people is micro-targeting.
The best explanation I ever heard of clustering was from a marketing person who once told me, “If I know your zip code, I know more about you than you think.” That was almost fifteen years ago. Today he would say, “If I know your address, I can probably tell you who you voted for and what issues you favor.” Rather than try to explain all the details of clustering, let me refer you to a web site that will actually give a cluster analysis of your own zip code.
Micro-targeting has exerted a tremendous influence on campaign management. The ads you see, the speeches you hear, the sound bites that make the news, the literature you get in the mail (or whether you get any at all), the evening phone calls all owe a considerable debt to clustering. Once strategists have identified their target clusters, the rest of us might as well be anonymous or just turned off. Fall into the wrong cluster and you might as well be invisible or as uncomfortable as a monster pickup ad on Oprah. And if you are invisible or don’t see the issues you care about discussed in any of the ads you are probably going to think about not voting.
If clustering is helping to lower the voting percentage, that is bad enough, but what should really have us all worried, is that not only does clustering help shape campaigns it shapes the very map of our politics. It is no coincidence that the rise of clustering parallels the rise in the number of safe seats. Clustering allows politicians to draw electoral districts favorable to their point of view with incredible precision, making it a lot easier now than it was 10 or 20 years ago to create districts you KNOW will vote not only for your party but also your programs. Fair Vote reports in its 2005 study Dubious Democracy:
In each of the four national elections since 1996, more than 98% of incumbents have won, and more than 90% of all races have been won by non-competitive margins of more than 10%. These measurements clearly indicate that the problem of lack of voter choice is getting worse, not better.
The use of clustering parallels the rise of the relatively homogeneous suburbs. Government policies that created tight communities of like-minded people suddenly made it possible to corral voters who for all practical purposes resembled sheep in statistical holding pens. They could then be led to large concrete boxes that painlessly relieved them of their votes and allowed them to emerge as transformed as if from a shearing. In essence the suburbanization with its geographic sorting of races, income levels and tastes intersected with the rise of the computers that make cluster analysis possible.
So what Super Tuesday is really about are two ominous developments that would have James Madison very worried. In the famous Federalist Ten, James Madison wrote about the evils of faction and of a majority riding roughshod over minorities. He could not imagine a technology like clustering which enables political parties to put together Congressional majorities based on gerrymandered voting districts of citizens so alike they might as well be clones. Nor could he have imagined a Presidential campaign in which four states controlled a quarter of the delegates.
You may remember the most famous sentences from Federalist Ten:
No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time.
Later on Madison uncannily describes what is happening to America:
When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens.
Those of us who vote or caucus on Super Tuesday will probably be thinking about the economy or Iraq, but there is another issue no one talks much about that may well have a larger impact that what the winning candidate does about either of those–how do we deal with the evil of faction in this new millennium? It may be too much to hope for another Madison, instead we need to place out hopes the same place Madison did–ourselves.
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