Winner Take All relies almost exclusively on (1) geographic representation and/or (2) a two-choice/two-party political duopoly. And our eighteenth-century Winner Take All system is at the root of the problem.
PART ONE Geography Is Destiny
CHAPTER ONE
A House Divided…”
In the 2000 presidential election they split 50-50, with the suburbs casting over 40 percent of the total vote. In Kansas, Democrats were similarly swept, winning 39 percent of the presidential vote but only 25 percent of the House seats.
CHAPTER TWO Ex Uno Plures
There were also flaws in the Winner Take All method we used to elect the president. Furthermore, the Winner Take All Electoral College structure completely denied the votes of millions of racial minority voters.
CHAPTER THREE
The Technology of Democracy
When this happens, you know you are in the haughty presence of the almighty Winner Take All conundrum. The zero sum game defines Winner Take All; it's the sign of the Winner Take All puzzle at work.
PART TWO
The People’s Congress?
CHAPTER FOUR The People’s House
Do the current residents of the People's House really think like the people or do they act as the people wish? Once the main chambers of the House are full and the debate begins, other observations emerge. These voting demographics are one of the unmistakable contours, the shape of this place, as it teeters toward post-democracy.
But gun control is hardly the only issue where the current occupants of the People's House are badly out of touch with The People. As a result, Unsoeld "came out" as a champion of the NRA during the campaign, which shocked many liberal supporters. She won a relatively easy victory, only to lose her seat in the 1994 Republican overthrow of the House.
House races, with a whopping 40 percent of state legislative races typically being uncontested by one of the two major parties;. Always having to choose between the lesser of two evils is very corrosive to the democratic spirit.
CHAPTER FIVE Behind Closed Doors
In fact, contrary to all reason - except the type of reason that has been steeped in the defense of the status quo - the lines are usually redrawn by none other than the politicians themselves. The place erupted, barely avoiding the type of brawl you'd expect to see in the seventh game of the World Series. But if the curtain were pulled back on the Wizards, what the public would see are some of the most unflattering moments in our Winner Take All ritual.
But the created realities of the map are complicated by how these partisan demographics cycle through the Winner Take All system during single-seat redistricting. Many of the goals sought by proponents of term limits are solved by legislative redistricting…. For the voters, all the happenings in the back room happen like a cyclone descending from the gods above.
The shenanigans that occur during redistricting are only part of the symptoms, because ultimately the problem is Winner Take All itself, and its use of single-seat districts. One of the most corrosive effects of Winner Take All and the gerrymandering of legislative districts is its understated impact on voters' psyches, and whether each individual voter is imbued with an internalized sense that their vote is powerful.
CHAPTER SIX The Gravity of the Prize
It was a financial strategy borrowed from the playbook of Washington lobbyists: Give to curry favor with policymakers — in this case, state lawmakers redrew congressional districts. It's Republicans from affluent parts of the country -- the suburbs around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia -- who control the General Assembly. But gambling and distortions of the winner-take-all system have allowed one side of the political divide to usurp an astonishing degree of power.
Here, then, was another zero-sum game in the Winner Take All conundrum: you could win more black or Latino faces in the legislatures, but apparently at the cost of electing more Republicans and more Republican-controlled legislatures. Under the new paradigm, where money will matter most is in the party primaries for the party that dominates each district. The DCCC and its GOP counterpart were the centers of action in the battle for the House, modern-day equivalents of the old-fashioned political machine.
Such political crooks, rightly targeted for soft money abuse reform by the McCain-Feingold legislation, are entirely a byproduct of the geographic Winner Take All system, and the dynamics unleashed by that system. This is particularly pronounced in the balkanized regions of Bushland and New Goreia, which in turn affects whether the adopted policy corresponds to the "will of the majority".
CHAPTER SEVEN Worse Than Winner Take All
On the other hand, only 7 percent of the total population of the United States lives in the seventeen least popular states and is. Given current demographic and migration trends, by 2050 as few as 5 percent of the population may hold majority power in the Senate. Journalists, legal scholars, and political scientists have generally ignored the implications of the Great Compromise and equal representation of states in the Senate.”11.
The issue threatened to fragment the Constitutional Convention and the formation of the new nation. The considerable warts of the Senate's structure were thus early apparent to some of the most brilliant minds at the Constitutional Convention. Thus, in several important ways, the constitutional designs of the Framers never achieved their stated goals.
Dahl and others have identified several defects of the Electoral College as it has come to us today. Advocates of the Electoral College method insist that this Winner Take All padding gives the winner a mandate to govern.
PART THREE The Death of Discourse
CHAPTER EIGHT
Of Pollster-geists and Consultants The Mad Science Of Winner Take All Campaigns
Yet there has been almost no analysis of how the peculiar incentives of the two-choice, Winner Take All system create this hideous brand of sensationalist Jerry Springer Show politics. Campaigns offer serial opportunities for Winner Take All games, and curiously, at the center of the game were the mad scientists of Winner Take All campaigns, a peculiar species known today as "political consultant". The zero sum of the Winner Take All conundrum inevitably devolves into a permanent negative campaign of partisan brinkmanship.
To some extent, focus groups can be attributed to the Republican Party's takeover of Congress in 1994. This, tragically, seems to be the trajectory of our Winner Take All campaigns, especially in the gaming environment that seeks to challenge the party's idiosyncrasies to manipulate and exploit. two-choice, geographically based system. Much of the new technology is about targeting your message, and direct mail and phone messaging are the most effective and precise ways to do this.
The immediate and long-term prospects for Winner Take All campaigns are worrying as the internal logic of the system will continue to exacerbate existing trends. No, the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be refilled.
CHAPTER NINE
The Wizards behind the Curtain
Clinton used all the techniques of polling, focus groups, gauge groups, thirty-two TV spots, and then some. In President Clinton's first year alone, his pollster conducted more focus groups than were conducted in all four years of Bush's presidency. In the heat of the campaign, he backed away from his earlier aggressive anti-gun stance because it hurt him with voters and union members in key states.
Al From, head of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), said in 2000 that "there's a big debate about who the swing voters are." Indeed, the Bush campaign's use of modern technologies was so cynical and hypocritical that the very theme of ignoring polls and focus groups seemed to be derived from polls and focus groups. In 2004, could we see the candidates marching to the same classrooms and the same toxic waste dumps, uttering slightly different versions of the same soundbites from the 1996 Clinton campaign and the 2000 Bush campaign.
The toughest topics of the day were debated head-on without waffle or evasive rhetoric. Furthermore, due to the way they now conduct Winner Take All campaigns, the two major parties have lost the ability to articulate real conflicts of interest in society.
CHAPTER TEN
The Winner Take All Media The Fourth Estate Sells Out
The railroading of articulate and highly qualified candidates like Benjamin, Miller and Howell is a typical result of the Winner Take All media's knee-jerk allegiance to the duopoly. It is clear that the American electoral and political system badly needs some kind of perestroika - an "opening" - of the Winner Take All media. Ross Perot would not have qualified in 1992, despite ultimately winning 19 percent of the popular vote after being included in the televised debates.
Politics gets a healthy injection of enthusiasm and energy from alternative candidates for both parties – yet in most cases TV news producers and Winner Take All media editors decide if and when these candidates will be heard. But once our analysis extends beyond the vagueness about "freedom of the press," we see some troubling qualities of the exclusionary practices of the Winner Take All media. In addition to the omnipresent conclusion, what are the ethos and values of Winner Take All media.
An unlikely coalition consisting of the industrial business lobby National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the non-profit organization. It's not that others can't talk, it's just that we can't hear them. Their speech is ineffective compared to the booming speech of the Winner Take All media.