Primer 2020

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

POLITICAL

REVIEW Special Issue 2020 | wupr.org

Table of Contents 4

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International

What's At Stake in 2020? Our Planet Grethe Andersen Electability: Democrats Need Inspiration in 2020 Josh Deluca End Felon Disenfranchisement Rohan Palacios

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Location, Location, Location Jane Gormley

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American Poll-itics Eddie Ives

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Free Standing Art Merry May Ma

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Top 2020 Candidates' Political Scandals Explained Jaden Lanza

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Has the Iowa Caucus lost its Viability?

Andrew Leung

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Biollionaires Bidding for the Nomination Vaibav Nandeesh

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Voting Rights and Democracy on the Balot Lizzie Obrand

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Will Bernie's Medicare For All Plan Really Help Americans?

Ayelet Spertus

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The Case for Medicare for All Connor Smyth

Editor's Note Executive Director Ishaan Shah Editors-in-Chief Hanna Khalil Sophie Attie Design Director Catherine Ju Staff Editors Jaden Lanza Max Lichtenstein Christian Monzon Rohan Palacios Features Editors Nick Massenburg Megan Orlanski Assistant Design Directors Leslie Liu Jinny Park Programming Director Liza Sivriver Treasurer Clare Grindinger Web Editor Adler Bowman Web Assistant Editor Yanny Liang Front Cover Shonali Palacios

Dear Reader, For a lot of people, “politics” conjures unpleasant memories of tense dinner tables and awkward conversations with friends. Yet, politics should not intimidate, it should inspire. Being informed is not an unattainable goal reserved for poli-sci majors and future lawyers. It can be as simple as diversifying who you follow on Twitter, engaging with friends, and, most importantly, making an effort to read.

As the Democratic Primary unfolds, we at the Washington University Political Review wanted to provide one such way to engage through this 2020 Election Primer. Our monthly publication usually encourages you to find the political in unexpected places, through themes such as Growth and Age. However, as the race for the 2020 election gears up, we believe it is important to extend that lens into the electoral process as well.

Politics is not just about following the intricacies of impeachment proceedings or understanding game theory. Those are fine things to explore, but too often we treat politics as a game, obscuring the real implications of elections on people’s lives.

Who you predict might win an election matters less than why you think someone should.

In this Primer, our writers have engaged with the subjects at the center of this election cycle with nuance and complexity. Written by students for you, their peers, they seek to inform, inspire reflection, and spark debate. Wondering what Medicare for All actually means? Ayelet Spertus and Conor Smyth offer contrasting analyses of the policy and its alternatives. Worried about the effects of climate change?

Grethe Andersen explains what it means to support impactful climate policy.

Curious about how the next president could take on homelessness and rising rents?

Jane Gormley explores the most effective ways to provide our people with housing.

These articles are meant to be accessible and shared, and we hope they inspire further conversation.

We will all, in some way or another, feel the consequences of this primary and the subsequent general election in our lives. At WUPR, we believe that everything is political. I hope that this helps demonstrate how everybody can, and should, get involved. And if you are reading this, then you are already engaging with politics.

Sincerely, Rohan Palacios Staff Editor

WU Political Review

What’s at Stake in 2020?

Our Planet Grethe Andersen, staff writer

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limate change has finally taken a place on the center stage of global politics, largely thanks to the mobilization of young climate activists like Greta Thunberg, Isra Hirsi, Autumn Peltier, and Vic Barrett. But while these activists inspire change, they can only do so much without holding political office. The power to create legislation and enact policies that can address the root of the issue ultimately rests in the hands of politicians, which has resulted in an unprecedented spotlight on climate change policy in the 2020 presidential race. While the subject hasn’t been adequately addressed in the Democratic presidential debates, several news outlets like MSNBC and CNN dedicated airtime for town halls that allowed candidates to discuss their views and policies on climate change, and the rise of climate activism has made it impossible for any Democrat running to do so without a proposal on climate change.

It is critical that voters understand the different candidates’ views on climate change as the winner of the 2020 election will occupy the office for the next four years, which will bring us even closer to the end of the 12 year period that the UN warned was our last chance to keep global warming below 1.5°C. Climate change is among the most universally pressing issues we face and we must understand exactly how the president that we elect in 2020 can help or hinder the fight against climate change and the movement towards a greener future.

To begin, let’s examine the differences between the Democratic and Republican parties on the subject. While climate change should not be partisan as it affects every single person regardless of their political leanings, each party takes a significantly different stance on the subject. For example, each party has a webpage outlining their stance on issues pertaining to the environment; the following quotes are the last sentence taken from each

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party’s page. The Democratic party states that “it will take all of us acting together—workers and entrepreneurs, scientists and citizens, the public and the private sector—to address the challenge of climate change and seize our cleanenergy future.” The Republican party, on the other hand, “firmly believe[s] environmental problems are best solved by giving incentives for human ingenuity and the development of new technologies, not through top-down, command-and-control regulations that stifle economic growth and cost thousands of jobs.”

The Democratic party clearly shows a belief in collaboration and action, but the Republican party’s official stance, while recognizing that there are “environmental problems,” does not offer active solutions and instead seems to be relying on the hope that new technologies will come to the rescue. I feel obligated to use the Republican phrasing of “environmental problems” because the phrase “climate change” only shows up three times in the entirety of the Republican party’s platform on agriculture, energy, and the environment. The only time when climate change is mentioned as an issue, and not just included in the name of a UN body, is when the Republican party declares that “climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue” and shows “the triumph of extremism over common sense.” The radically different party stances on climate change are also evident in the proposed climate policies of the presidential candidates for the 2020 election.

It’s clear that Donald Trump, like his party, does not prioritize environmental conservation. His highly publicized removal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accord made the US one of only three countries to leave the agreement.

He labeled it as unfair, but his statement on the issue showed a fundamental misunderstanding of what climate change is. In Trump’s official statement on the Paris Climate Accord, Trump

told people not to worry, as “the United States, under the Trump administration, will continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on Earth. We’ll be the cleanest. We’re going to have the cleanest air.

We’re going to have the cleanest water.”

Not only is the United States not the most environmentally friendly country on Earth (according to the 2018 Environmental Performance Index, that honor goes to Switzerland; the United States is ranked as 27), but clean water and clean air are only part of the problem. Having clean air and clean water does not mean that the Greenland ice sheet isn’t melting, or that carbon emissions are no longer an issue. Having clean air and clean water also does not mean that Trump can ignore climate science and continue his work expanding offshore oil and gas drilling and bragging about ending, as he calls it, “the previous administration’s war on coal.”

Trump has worked to systematically repeal and relax environmental protections. For instance, in 2019 he repealed Obama’s Clean Power Plan and replaced it with the Affordable Emission Act. On the surface, it seems harmless, even beneficial; the act relies on heat rate improvement, which would incentivize fossil-fuel based power plants to extract more energy from the same amount of fuel. However, Environmental Research Letters published a study that predicted that 28% of the power plants modeled in their study would end up producing more carbon dioxide by 2030 because this rule incentivizes burning more fuels like coal and natural gas.

In yet another shocking move—especially if animal-suffering pulls at your heartstrings more than the thought of burning coal—Trump revised the Endangered Species Act. The government will now consider economic factors when determining whether a species should be

2020 Election Primer

considered as “threatened” or “endangered,” even though the importance of biodiversity should not be reduced to an economic calculation. Furthermore, species listed as “threatened” will no longer receive the same protections as endangered species, even though the difference between the two categories is very slight. These are only a few of the actions that Trump has taken to further the degradation of our environment, which ultimately jeopardizes the future of the American people.

However, there is still time for Trump to learn from his mistakes and perhaps become more educated on the subject before his potential reelection. In fact, Vox news recently reported that Trump added a book about environmental policy to his reading list. The book in question?

Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero (I really wish this was a joke, but unfortunately it is not).

All of the Democratic candidates differ quite significantly from Trump on their positions on climate change, primarily in the fact that they all believe in climate change, have put forth detailed proposals on the matter, and have vocalized their desire to take immediate action upon entering office. The candidates all highlight climate change policy as an important part of their platform; every candidate’s stance on climate change is easily accessible on their website. Senator Sanders has one of the most detailed and debated policy ideas with his Green New Deal Proposal. Sanders’ proposal shares the same name and is written in the spirit of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, but it goes much deeper into the specific timelines and required steps to reduce America’s environmental footprint. Although Sanders’ Green New Deal depends on a $16 trillion investment, it is a holistic plan that would address climate change and its accompanying socioeconomic issues. For instance, an interesting part of his proposal is the Climate

Current and future generations of Americans need and deserve a president who understands the urgency of the climate emergency.

Justice Resiliency Fund, which would provide vulnerable communities with the funds needed to prepare for climate emergencies such as severe weather and droughts. Sanders’ Green New Deal leaves no one behind in his desire to move America forward into a greener future.

Sanders’ plan seems to set the standard for the other policies put forth by Democratic candidates, but all have detailed policies that show that they understand the urgency of the issue at hand. For instance, all the candidates still in the race want to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords. The Democratic candidates also show that they understand the complexity of the issue, as weach candidate has unique ideas to accompany the broader goals of rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and reducing carbon emissions. For instance, Elizabeth Warren has proposed a Blue New Deal to protect America’s oceans and inland waterways, and she has also incorporated climate change policy in a number of her other proposals on subjects like the military, trade, and public lands. Pete Buttigieg has an entire plan prioritizing leadership to mobilize Americans to fight climate change on both a global and local level. Amy Klobuchar highlights

her proposal to end the Trump administration’s censorship of climate science, noting the removal of the words “climate change” from reports as counterproductive and dangerous to the issue at hand. Joe Biden hopes to permanently protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and prioritize reforestation efforts. These are only some of the highlights of each candidate’s climate policies, and by no means does this short list encompass the policy depth and detail that can be found on each candidate’s website.

In 2020, every vote can make a difference.

Nobody should underestimate the importance of voter participation, especially when the stakes are so high. The next president will take office at a critical time for our planet’s future, and current and future generations of Americans need and deserve a president who understands the urgency of the climate emergency. While the issue of climate change may take a backseat in the midst of media coverage of other policy debates, keep it at the forefront of your mind when you head to the polls.

Grethe Andersen ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at grethe.andersen@ wustl.edu.

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WU Political Review

Electability: Democrats Need Inspiration in 2020 Josh Deluca

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uring President Barack Obama’s farewell address to the nation, supporters gathered in Chicago hopelessly begged for “Four More Years!” Obama, who still polls as the most popular Democrat in the country, was a uniting figure for the party. A charismatic, principled leader, Obama had the exceptional ability to inspire a diverse coalition of Americans behind both of his successful bids for the presidency.

However, in the years since Obama exited the political stage, Democrats have struggled to find an heir to the president and a unifying vision for the party’s future. There is significant disagreement within the party as to the right path forward even as Democrats are careful to steer clear of criticizing the work of the Obama Administration. Progressive factions of the party have argued the right path forward is to move left, proposing a bold, progressive Democratic platform with major reforms in healthcare and education in particular.

Establishment figures, however, feel it would be a mistake to move the party too far to the left, arguing instead that Democrats should build on Obama’s work with liberal but practical policies.

In the years since the 2016 election, the quest for the future vision of the Democratic Party has merged with another, more pressing goal: keeping Donald Trump from four more years of his own. Despite fairly substantial policy disagreements within the party, polling suggests that most registered voters have indicated that they’d rather nominate someone who can beat Trump than someone who aligns with them perfectly on policy positions.

In their closing arguments, two major “theories of the case” have emerged among the top candidates. More moderate, establishment Democrats are proposing a more traditional electability case: run on a platform of liberal, but sensible policies in a hope to appeal to moderate midwestern voters, independents, and moderate Republicans dissatisfied with Trump. On the

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surface, this appears to be a compelling case to take on Donald Trump and win in November.

Take Vice President Joe Biden, for instance—the race’s long-presumed frontrunner ever since he announced his candidacy. Democrats have long argued that Trump lacks the experience and judgment to serve as Commander-inChief. The counter to that? Biden, a man who has spent his adult life in public service representing Delaware in the Senate for 36 years and then serving as Obama’s right-hand man for eight. After the key rustbelt states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania cost them the election four years ago, Democrats are desperate to win them back in 2020. Who can achieve this feat in 2020? Biden argues that his working-class roots in Scranton, Pennsylvania and his longstanding ties with blue-collar labor unions will help him recapture the rustbelt.

Worried about appealing to suburban moderates and dissatisfied Republicans? Biden proposes more moderate policies that he hopes will have more widespread appeal and will be more difficult for Republicans to deride as socialist. Concerned with rebuilding the Obama coalition of 2008 and 2012? Who better to take up the mantle than Obama’s Vice President? With frequent “Barack and I” quips in his stump speech, as well as deep-rooted ties with the African American community, Biden sees himself as the natural choice to continue the work of his former boss.

Moderate Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar has a similar argument: she’s an affable Midwesterner, who might appeal to demographic groups that are key for Democratic electoral success. She points to her past successes in Republican districts, as well as her Senate record demonstrating her ability to work across the aisle and “get things done.” Plus, to ease any concerns voters may have about electing a man in his late-70s, Klobuchar is a spry 59. On paper, Biden and Klobuchar appear to have strong cases, as they believe they will

be able to connect to a wide array of voters, especially those that matter most in the Electoral College. Being able to answer the “can they win where it matters?” question in the affirmative, either candidate seems to be a safe choice for Democrats. There is something subconsciously reassuring about nominating candidates that seem to check all of the obvious boxes. If there ever was a “must-win” election, this is it. Now is not the time to get too cute. Let’s play it safe.

While it may be reassuring to nominate a traditionally “electable” candidate — someone that can check all of the boxes — in the back of your mind, it may feel as if you’ve seen this script before. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was the candidate with the experience, the candidate with the broad appeal, the candidate that could win the key demographics. She was our “best chance.”

If we dare go back a bit further, Democratic nominee John Kerry had served in the U.S. Senate for nearly 20 years and was a decorated war veteran, when he lost in 2004. In 2000, Al Gore was the sitting Vice President when he lost to George W. Bush. In the last two decades, nominating the “experience” candidate has not generally worked out well for the Democrats.

On the flip side, let us look at the last three Democrats to reach the Oval Office. When he launched his campaign for the presidency in 2007, Barack Obama was a young, first-term U.S. Senator with a background in the Illinois State Legislature and in community organizing.

What he lacked in experience, Obama made up for in charisma, inspiration, and soaring rhetoric. When people heard him speak, they were invigorated by his vision for the country.

Likewise, when Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton launched his campaign for the presidency, he was considered a long shot. Like Obama, he was a skilled orator, someone who inspired young people all across the country. Jimmy Carter was also a little known but likeable Georgia peanut farmer before he won the White House in 1976.

2020 Election Primer

Let’s look into all-too-recent history as I offer one more cautionary tale of the traditionally “electable” candidate: Donald Trump was considered the longest of long shots to reach the White House. In a field of 16 other Republican candidates, many of them current or former Senators or Governors, it was Trump that captured the attention of Republican voters. He did so not by touting his years of government experience or by checking all the proverbial boxes. What he did do, was inspire, invigorate, and energize. From a grassroots level, Americans across the country — even those who had never voted before — were excited to go to the polls and cast their ballots for Trump.

I do not mean this as a knock on Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, or any other traditionally “electable” candidate. They are both exceptionally qualified and would do a fine job as Commander-in-Chief.

However, recent history suggests that Americans are hungry for something more than experience.

Remember, both Obama and Trump were once considered longshots for the presidency. As mentioned above, neither one of them could tout years of government experience, nor “check the boxes” of someone one typically considered a viable candidate. Perhaps the American people, for better or for worse, just want someone who inspires them, sparks their imaginations and desire for change, and excites them about the future that they see for the country.

Over the last five years, self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders has proven time and time again that he can inspire swarms of Americans across the country to get involved in his campaign and come out to vote. The strength of his grassroots movement is quite clear. To a somewhat lesser extent, Elizabeth Warren has done the same. Touting a “bold” new vision for the country, Warren makes a fiery case for “big, structural change.” Both Sanders and Warren have shown to be candidates whose visions for the country inspire many to get involved in the political process for the first time.

Perhaps, the American people, for better or for worse, just want someone who inspires them, sparks their imaginations and desire for change, and excites them about the future that they see for the country.

Personally, I don’t want to watch the same script I watched four years ago. If recent history tells us anything, it is that “electable” candidates are not those who have the most experience or who check off the boxes: an electable candidate is someone who excites people to get involved in the political process. Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar are loyal public servants, but they simply do not excite people in the same way that Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg do.

Like many things in politics, these conversations are all merely hypothetical. It is hard to predict how the dynamics of the race will change prior to November. In that vein, it is a debate ripe for second-guessing. Surely, if the Democrats fail to recapture the White House, those on the losing side in the “electability” debate will claim that had they been the nominee, things would’ve been different. However, with the information we have at our disposal right now, it appears it’s time for something different if Democrats want to win the election: Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg have the potential to build inspirational movements that will lead them to the White House.

In what their progressive platforms may lose in moderate voters, Warren and Sanders believe they will make up in young (or young at heart) voters who are inspired to come out to the polls.

Then, there is Pete Buttigieg, who views this moderate/progressive debate as a false dichotomy. The 37-year-old, openly gay former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana has tried to walk the line between appealing to the more traditional “swing” voters and proving himself to be a fresh, new, inspirational face on the national political stage. Buttigieg, a Rhodes Scholar and Navy Veteran, has drawn comparisons to Obama not only for his youth, but for the historic nature of his candidacy. In fact, in a 2016 New Yorker article, Obama mentioned Buttigieg among people he saw to be “gifted” Democratic politicians, who had the potential to be the future of the party.

Josh DeLuca studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at joshdeluca@wustl. edu.

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WU Political Review

End Felon Disenfranchisement Rohan Palacios, staff editor Artwork (right) by Shonali Palacios, staff artist

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n April of 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders caused a minor stir in the Democratic Party when he argued at a town hall and in a subsequent op-ed that American felons should have their voting rights restored. Rivals for the Democratic nomination staked out different positions. Progressive senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both called for former felons to be enfranchised, meaning allowed to exercise their right to vote. However, the same senators called for “more conversation” on the question of whether people serving their sentences should also be enfranchised. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg rejected Sanders’ idea arguing that “part of the punishment...is that you lose certain rights.” Almost a year later, the debate seems to be long-forgotten. Although Sanders never backed down from his position, it has been lost amidst the never-ending primary news cycle. Perhaps because, as Vox’s German Lopez pointed out at the time, “most of the public, Democrats, and the presidential candidates are not on board.”

The roots of felon disenfranchisement itself are unsurprisingly interwoven with our country’s legacy of racist governance. Some state governments did exclude convicts from the vote as early as 1792. However, the practice solidified itself in American law during the aftermath of the Civil War. The 13th amendment contains a loophole allowing the state to enslave those convicted of a crime, and, as author Nathan J. Robinson writes in Current Affairs, “white supremacists gradually reasserted their power by aggressively policing black people in order to deprive them of their rights.”

and birthed a new system of mass incarceration, enslavement, and disfranchisement. Today, felon disenfranchisement is normalized, not just in the former Confederacy, but in 48 American states. The strange thing about the one-sidedness of this debate is that the US is increasingly an outlier among modern democracies.

In fact, even the American states of Maine and Vermont recognize the voting rights of felons.

According to researcher Emmet Sanders, 26 European nations, including Denmark, Ireland, Germany, and Spain, at least partially recognize the right of incarcerated citizens to vote.

Eighteen of those countries maintain prisoners’ right to vote regardless of their offense. In South Africa, prisoners have participated in democracy since 1999 after their Constitutional Court declared that, “the vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood.” In 2002, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that an existing law “denying longer-term inmates the ability to vote was a violation of their rights.”

Since then, all incarcerated Canadians have been able to exercise their voting rights. Of the twelve “most free” countries, as ranked by the nonprofit Freedom House, ten allow all or most felons to vote while incarcerated. However, the United States doesn’t just deny prisoners voting rights.

In 21 states, including Missouri, felons lose their voting rights for the duration of their sentence and for a period after their release. In 11 additional states, they lose their voting rights indefinitely. According to a report from Quartz, the United States, which jails citizens at a higher rate than any country in the world, is also now the only democracy in the world that permanently revokes voting rights for many of its convicts.

Felon disenfranchisement in the United States is, in large part, a legacy of post-Civil War Reconstruction and Jim Crow era laws. Many states of the former Confederacy enacted “black codes,” laws designed to constrain the new freedom of the formerly enslaved. These codes criminalized blackness by creating new crimes, like “disrespect to an employer,” intended to undermine black participation in society and democracy. Lawmakers inserted clauses into the black codes prohibiting felons from voting

There is a strong practical argument for restoring the voting rights to felons. A study of Department of Justice data used a representative sample of 38,624 felons released in 15 states to find that individuals released in states that permanently disenfranchise are “roughly 10% more likely to re-offend than those released in states that restore the franchise post-release.”

The study’s findings suggest that denying felons voting rights might be undermining the criminal justice system’s ability to make us safer.

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University of Cambridge criminologist Mandeep Dhami writes that disenfranchisement “serves to increase the social distance between the offender and the community and reaffirms his/ her feelings of alienation and isolation.” He references a survey which found that “among former arrestees, approximately 27% of the non-voters had been rearrested compared to 12% of the voters.” Dhami refers to voting as part of a “package of prosocial behavior” that helps individuals reintegrate into society.

While significant, the practical reasons for restoring voting rights to felons may be beside the point. Voting is a fundamental right in a democratic society, and progress-minded people should consider the effects of restricting it.

The criminal justice system is racist and classist.

The United States locks up disproportionate numbers of minorities, particularly black people, and sentencing laws are applied unevenly on the basis of race and class. Once incarcerated, American prisoners live in horrendous, sometimes deadly, conditions. After decades of pretending that a harsh approach to incarceration would make Americans safer, Democrats at least appear ready to reevaluate their approach to criminal justice. Does it then make sense to continue defending laws that are the legacies of racist and poorly informed politicians? New York Times columnist Astead Herndon pointed out on Twitter that the “non-Sanders Democratic” candidates are “simultaneously saying, 1. voting is a positive right, 2. the criminal justice system is racist and broken, 3. that racist system should control that positive right.” With that in mind, it makes no sense for Democrats--supposed champions of social justice--to be so divided on the issue.

One rebuttal put forward by various anti-reform figures, from Buttigieg to the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is the vague idea that those who “don’t follow the law should not have a role in making it.” It’s simple but empty logic. This half-baked conception of the American social contract does not withstand scrutiny. Convicted criminals retain their freedoms of religion and speech. Perhaps a compelling government

2020 Election Primer

interest is served by denying them their physical freedom, but what such interest is served by denying them their vote? Why do they lose the right to vote? Anti-reform advocates prefer we not ask, knowing that the question necessitates revisiting the ugly, racist precedents of felon disenfranchisement in the United States.

Another inevitable line of questioning goes something like this: so do you think that [insert notorious criminal] should have the right to vote? Through this argument, skeptics of felon enfranchisement trigger emotions we associate with society’s most evil characters. This is a dishonest framing of the issue given that the vast majority of felons are not terrorists or serial killers. Reasonable debates might be had about whether or not states should adopt laws similar to ones in a couple of European countries that restrict the voting rights for criminals who threatened the “integrity of the state” or “constitutionally protected democratic order.” However, granting felons suffrage regardless of their crimes removes the state’s ability to selectively use the law to disenfranchise certain groups of people. The United States has a shameful record of disenfranchising its own, from Jim Crow to the contested 2013 Supreme Court decision that invalidated a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required lawmakers in states with a history of discriminating against minority voters to get federal permission before changing voting rules. In 2016, 6.1 million voters (2.5% of the adult population!) faced disenfranchisement because of a felony conviction. Due to the racial bias of our criminal justice system, 2016 saw an estimated 7% of all black adults disenfranchised nationwide, a number that climbed past 20% in Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, and Virginia.

Reforms should move our country toward a status quo that is more respectful of the sacred nature of voting rights in a democratic society.

Herndon, the New York Times columnist, acknowledges that a fear of political blowback is keeping Democrats from taking the obvious step on criminal justice reform. It shouldn’t.

Supporting felons’ right to vote may not be the political wrecking ball that some politicians

imagine it to be. Senator Sanders, for example, won elections in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada without compromising on his belief in enfranchising felons. Additionally, at the state level, Democrats have already begun the reform process with minimal backlash. A 2016 California bill restored voting rights to more than 50,000 incarcerated individuals. In 2018, Virginia’s then-governor, Terry McAuliffe restored voting rights to over 172,000 former felons through executive order. He argued that “the whole genesis of what we’re talking about here today goes to the core of racism in this country.”

In 2019, newly elected governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear, signed a similar executive order restoring voting rights to 140,000 people citing similar logic. Voters appear to agree, Virginia Democrats had one of their most successful election cycles ever in 2018 and Beshear had just defeated a Republican incumbent who took a strong anti-reform stance. Also that year, 61% of Florida voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that would restore voting rights to over a million former felons.

These are steps in the right direction that will nonetheless face massive obstacles. Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is engaged in a legal battle to overrule voters on that amendment. Opposition to felon enfranchisement from

Republicans, conservative Democrats, and the prison industry (yes, such a thing exists) will be fierce. Since our justice system locks up so many people, the electoral implications of enfranchising felons are serious. Without felon disenfranchisement, Al Gore would likely have defeated George W. Bush in 2001. The effect would be even more pronounced in local and state-wide races. This is enough for some politicians to overlook the health of American democracy. The status quo suits them and so nothing changes.

The people that suffer most are prisoners, stripped of their civil rights without recourse to advocate for themselves. In concluding his study, Dhami notes that “enfranchising prisoners could stimulate debate on penal reform, as well as demonstrate a commitment to human and civil rights and democratic reform.” Treating felons as full participants in our democracy would help push for needed criminal justice reforms and strengthen the validity of American elections. It would begin to reverse the systemic and anti-democratic exclusion of black voters.

Enfranchising felons is therefore not a “radical” idea, it represents a crucial step forward in the constant fight to realize the unfulfilled promise of American democracy.

Rohan Palacios ’21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at rpalacios@wustl.edu.

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WU Political Review

Location, Location, Location Jane Gormley

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ousing isn’t a sexy issue. On a national stage, talk of housing markets, vouchers, and zoning doesn’t seem to get people going the way immigration, healthcare, and climate change does. It’s hard to make it feel as urgent, as life or death, even if it is an incredibly foundational issue. Therefore, it may be a bit of a longshot to make an argument for the complication of our discussion on housing.

It’s hard to complicate something we barely talk about in the first place.

However, this argument becomes less farfetched when considering a phrase long associated with the sexiness of housing stock: location, location, location. This idea not only hints at the de jure segregation and discriminatory housing policy of our nation’s past (and present) by emphasizing the impact of a home’s location on its property values, but it points to a hole in the national discussion around housing today that needs addressing.

It’s one thing to say we need more affordable housing, and another to talk about where it should go. Calls for inclusionary zoning and Yes in My Backyard (as opposed to Not in My Backyard) movements across the country indicate that many progressives believe it should go in affluent areas. This approach is important in the way it strives to create communities with socio-economic diversity, but it cannot be the only way we think about providing affordable housing. It does not address the roots of why there is a crisis to begin with, and does not emphasize investing in existing communities of color harmed by redlining and other discriminatory practices.

Policy like this is grounded in the same philosophy as the findings of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) study conducted throughout the 1990s.

This HUD-funded social experiment was intended to test the effect of housing vouchers on families currently living in high-poverty neighborhoods. Just over 4,500 participants in five different cities were placed into three groups: one group which received Section 8

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housing vouchers for use only in neighborhoods with less than 10 percent poverty (along with mobility assistance in achieving this), one group which received traditional Section 8 housing vouchers (with no mobility assistance), and one control group which received no assistance.

The experiment began in 1994 and while 10-15 year results found no significant effects on economic self-sufficiency, statistically significant effects on mental health, physical health, perceived safety, and other markers made the study incredibly impactful. It also provided support for the argument that children growing up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty fair worse in adulthood than children growing up in affluent neighborhoods and that moving children in poor neighborhoods into affluent ones interrupts cycles of intergenerational poverty.

Researchers do acknowledge that moving is a disruptive process and found this idea supported through slightly negative adult outcomes for children who moved after the age of 13.

The study recognizes that this is not a comprehensive strategy but places a strong emphasis on how, according to a MTO policy brief by Poverty Action Lab, “concentrated poverty is directly and negatively affecting the well-being of the poor,” and “that moving out of concentrated poverty improves lives.” In other words, the study argues for moving families away from poverty as a means of escaping it.

Since its publication, the study has been criticized by many, including Douglas Massey, co-author of the acclaimed book on housing and race, American Apartheid, for ignoring the importance of place-based social networks in facilitating successful affordable housing options. Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin and John Goering further this criticism in their 2010 ethnography, Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty where they find that few MTO families reported close ties to their new communities, impeding them from fully benefiting from the

It’s one thing to say we need more affordable housing, and another to talk about where it should go. social resources of a new location.

The very name of the study, Moving to Opportunity, implies the old neighborhoods of voucher-holding participants were too impoverished and poverty-ridden to contain opportunity themselves.

Despite these concerns, the influence of MTO is felt in much of our nation’s housing policy today. This pattern of looking to move people to opportunities instead of investing in their communities plays out in the way progressive federal policy, such as the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) mandate, is often adhered to.

Since its passing in 1968, the Fair Housing Act has included a legal obligation for federal agencies and grantees to “affirmatively further fair housing.” This obligation requires relevant organizations to take “meaningful actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination.”

George Romney, Mitt Romney’s father, was Nixon’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the early implementation of this obligation. His “Open Communities” initiative, in which he instructed HUD officials to reject water, sewer, and highway projects from cities with segregated housing, was shut down for being an act of “forced integration” and eventually resulted in Nixon driving him out of the Cabinet.

Since Nixon set the standard in the early 70s, it took until 2015 for this aspect of FHA to

2020 Election Primer

regain teeth again and become enforceable.

The Obama Administration’s AFFH rule was implemented in 2015, soon after the Supreme Court ruled that FHA protected against disparate impact in addition to explicit discrimination. This new mandate provided explicit guidelines for communities to report their analysis of current racial bias in local housing and their goals for addressing segregation as well as a mapping tool for analyzing housing trends. Julián Castro, whose campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination ended in January, was Obama’s HUD secretary at the time this rule was facing major pushback from those who saw its tools as insufficient and its existence as top-down social engineering.

The mandate provided important incentive for local governments to address both historical and present-day racial biases in their housing policy and was an important step in the right direction.

In allowing communities to set their own goals, the mandate provided a lot of freedom to “affirmatively further” housing as localities saw fit. According to journalist Tavni Misra in CityLab, “that could mean preserving affordable housing in gentrifying areas, or investing in infrastructure in distressed area, or providing more vouchers, depending on the context.” The rule as it stood supported policy that sought to both bring opportunity to people and people to opportunity, although housing experts argue that the latter was a more popular option.

Then, in 2018, HUD secretary Ben Carson effectively nullified AFFH for the foreseeable future, removing the requirement for reporting adherence to the 2015 mandate until the 2020s.

The argument was that the provided tool was too difficult to use and that, according to Secretary Carson, the rule was "suffocating investment in some of our most distressed neighborhoods that need our investment the most."

However, according to Misra, housing experts say this comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the mandate. It was not prescriptive and was not limiting; if anything, it needed more requirements to better encourage

Biden remains the only major candidate to not release a housing plan. investment in existing communities. Reinstating AFFH with a focus on bringing opportunities to existing communities as opposed to moving people to opportunities elsewhere could be a powerful tool for addressing the roots of the affordable housing crisis.

Even with all the recent activity on housing from the Trump administration, the Democratic candidates remain relatively quiet on the issue.

That’s not to say many of them don’t have plans for addressing it; they simply don’t have the incentive from the American public to discuss it at length on a national stage. This was made abundantly clear in the failure of Former Housing Secretary Castro’s campaign, which made housing a central issue.

policy, candidates must be pressed for how their ideas are different. It is not enough to be grateful that housing is being discussed at all, considering it is often completely overlooked in federal elections. It is an incredibly foundational issue that impacts all aspects of our lives.

Even though, in a 2019 Gallup Poll, housing didn’t rank in the top 16 issues U.S. adults deemed “extremely important” in influencing their vote for president, topics that stem from housing such as race relations, income and wealth distribution, and education all rank in the top 12. Addressing housing means addressing the root causes of many of these other, sexier issues. Therefore, not talking about it and acknowledging its racist past, present, and foreseeable future means housing policy will continue to limit the ability for change across all social spheres.

Castro now endorses Senator Warren, whose housing plan is deemed one of the most comprehensive of the current candidates, despite not addressing vouchers. Touching on many similar issues, Senator Sanders’ “Housing for All” plan comprehensively outlines steps for addressing segregation, affordable housing, and tenants’ rights. Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer, and Warren have stated plans to increase funding for affordable housing. Bloomberg, Sanders, and Warren have all commented on plans to reinstate AFFH with Klobuchar, Sanders, and Warren outlining explicit plans for addressing gentrification and segregation. Biden remains the only major candidate to not release a housing plan.

It’s important these plans are out there, but they must be discussed at greater length. With the history of an unenforceable “affirmatively furthering” fair housing mandate and the context of MTO which encourages one form of housing

Jane Gormley studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at jane.gormley@wustl. edu.

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WU Political Review

American Poll-itics Eddie Ives

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n February 1st, CNN was scheduled to host a primetime show featuring their most high-profile anchors around the release of a single poll: the last Des Moines Register/CNN/Selzer & Co. poll of Iowa before the first-in-the-nation caucus. Although the poll’s release (and the subsequent news show) was canceled due to a potential error in the way the poll was conducted, the whole incident highlighted how deeply ingrained polling has become in modern media coverage of electoral politics. Despite the perception that polling “failed” in the 2016 election and the rising costs of polling due to fewer people answering their phone, news coverage of the 2020 Democratic Primary tells a very different story about the health of the polling industry.

Over the past year, the release of major polls has largely determined the media narrative surrounding individual candidates as they all vie for the Democratic Party’s nomination.

While polling was originally intended as a way of reflecting public opinion, it has evolved dramatically to the point where polls can actually shape voter preferences. Voters can use polling to quickly understand who is popular and viable, while candidates use favorable polls, often outliers, to rally support, fundraise, and set their own campaign narrative.

In addition to asking respondents which candidate they prefer, pollsters often ask dozens of questions regarding the race, gender, age, education, and income of their respondents, as well as their likelihood to vote, voting history, who their second choice might be, and what issues matter most to them. While media reports of polls often center around the total support of the top few candidates, pollsters typically release reports of the full results of every question, broken down by demographics, that are often dozens of pages long.

Buried within these documents are data that have directly influenced how we view each candidate’s strengths, weaknesses, and viability.

For example, hypothetical general-election matchups have been used to justify Joe Biden’s case for being the most “electable” candidate,

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demographic data from polls have highlighted Pete Buttigieg’s lack of support from Black voters, and voters’ second choices can help portend final results in Caucus states where voters can switch to their second choice if their first choice does not receive enough support. While many would agree broadly that polling data is more useful and reliable than anecdotes from political pundits, it can still be manipulated and skewed to fit one’s self interest. Selective use of outlier data and blind deference to the ethos of statistics leads to misleading headlines and suspect analysis from those who are ignorant, willfully or not, of the inherent statistical uncertainty and methodological variance in political polling.

they are asked, among other things, if they are registered to vote. All respondents who say they are not registered have their data thrown out of the sample. The other main method of gathering an RV sample is through RegistrationBased Sampling (RBS). This consists of taking a list of registered voters and randomly dialing phone numbers from that list. RBS can save time and money because nearly every phone number is an active number (unlike RDD) and there is no need to verify that each respondent is registered. Prominent pollsters such as Monmouth University, Gallup, Marist College, and Quinnipiac University regularly report results from registered voter sample frames.

Pollsters make a series of decisions about their poll that will inherently affect its outcome. Some of these choices include how big the sample should be, whether they should use landlines, cell phones, or online surveys, whether or not to weight the sample for education level, and perhaps most importantly, whether to consider all adults, all registered voters, or only likely voters. This last decision, what the sampling frame will be, is often indicative of the purpose of the poll.

While RV samples typically provide a solid estimate of voter behavior, many pollsters are less concerned with those who are registered to vote and only care about those who will actually turn out in the given election. Using a variety of methods, pollsters attempt to determine who is likeliest to vote. Some surveys ask registered voters if they plan to vote and only include the responses of those who say yes. However, according to Gallup, “on a routine basis, about 90% of registered voters will tell an interviewer that they are very likely to vote on Election Day.”

Polls of all adults are typically gathered to demonstrate public opinion but are less useful for monitoring the status of an election. Pew Research Center, one of the most well-known opinion surveyors, gathers American attitudes on topics like religion, the economy, celebrities, political issues, and more. For the vast majority of their surveys, election polls excluded, they survey all adults. There is no practical reason to exclude adults who aren’t registered from answering a question about, say, their churchgoing habits. In fact, by including non-voters, analysts can get a better idea of what traits or beliefs may be correlated with voting behavior.

However, the vast majority of 2020 election polls are conducted with registered or likely voters. Registered Voter (RV) polls are typically gathered in one of two ways. In the first, pollsters randomly dial phone numbers (called Random Digit Dialing, or RDD) using computer programs and when someone completes the survey,

In 2016, 85% of registered voters actually voted, but that fraction includes people who registered on the same day as the election, meaning that even fewer than 85% of those who indicated they were registered in a pre-election poll actually turned out.

Nate Cohn, polling expert for the New York Times’ “The Upshot” noted that “Mrs. Clinton’s supporters were likelier than Mr. Trump’s supporters to stay home after indicating their intention to vote”—one of the reasons why most major polls showed Hillary Clinton farther ahead than she actually was.

To account for errant self-reporting, many pollsters instead ask voters questions like how closely they have been following the election, how often they have voted in the past, and if they know where they will go to vote on election day, among other things. Gallup (and other pollsters)

2020 Election Primer

uses answers to these peripheral questions to assign each person a score that determines how likely they are to vote. This voter likelihood score is a better predictor of turnout than a person’s word.

Tom Rosentiel, former Director of Survey Research for Pew, articulates when Likely Voter screens are more useful. “In the three most recent presidential elections, Pew Research Center surveys conducted in September and October found little difference between election estimates based on all registered voters and those we identified as most likely to vote.

On the eve of the election, the surveys found a much wider difference.” Because of these trends, Likely Voter (LV) sample polls are typically better regarded than Registered Voter sample polls, particularly as the election nears. Some of the common themes that contribute to differences between RV and LV polls are that older, richer, and better-educated people tend to vote more than other demographics. However, these rates vary from election to election. Trying to predict turnout based on previous elections is difficult because every election is unique and there is no guarantee that recent patterns won’t reverse or disappear in response to different criteria.

In the context of the 2020 democratic primary, the effects of LV and RV samples can be seen quite clearly. The ABC News/Washington Post national poll released January 26 showed their results with each of the 3 samples. When all adults were included, Joe Biden held a 4 point lead over Bernie Sanders. When including only registered voters, this lead jumped to 9 points.

After applying their likely voter model, Biden’s lead increased further to 12 points. Projecting national turnout when states vote sequentially as in a primary adds another level of uncertainty to these projections. Because of this, national polls in January and February have been split, with about half using RV samples and a half using LV samples. In Iowa and New Hampshire, nearly every single poll used a likely voter sample, a testament to the increasing accuracy

of likely voter models over time in predicting individual elections.

A practical example of the impact of LV/RV is the use of polling to determine who qualifies for the Democratic debates. For example, Representative Tulsi Gabbard failed to reach the debate stage in January despite meeting the DNC’s donor threshold and earning enough support in two qualifying polls. She came within 2% of the threshold in two other polls. Perhaps, if these pollsters had used a different likely voter model, Gabbard would have qualified for the debate. What would have happened beyond that is impossible to say, but it is worth noting how such minuscule differences in assumptions about voter behavior could affect the outcome of the election for the highest elected office in the free world.

Countless cautionary tales exist that stress how opinion polls are not simply neutral data points.

Candidates and parties have strong incentives to frame their candidacy in the most positive and optimistic terms.

Political science literature tells us that candidates seen as “surging” are more likely to attract support from undecided voters and the reverse is true for candidates seen as declining in support. Elections that are perceived to be very tight receive higher turnout than elections projected to be a blowout. Because non-partisan pollsters don’t always show flattering results for every candidate, campaigns often commission and release their own polls.

On February 18th, only 4 days before the Nevada Caucus, Tom Steyer’s campaign released a poll that they commissioned, showing Steyer at 18% support. Not a single poll of Nevada done by a reputable non-partisan pollster shows Steyer above 12% in the state.

This seems to be a transparent attempt at portraying Mr. Steyer as “surging” in a very close election right before election day in the hopes that undecided voters could be attracted by his momentum and feel that their vote for Mr. Steyer could make the difference. This tactic

is quite manipulative and abuses the lack of regulations on opinion polling in order to try and win support by misleading voters, rather than through genuine campaigning.

At the end of the day, opinion polls are still the best proxy for understanding the state of a race before election day; other metrics like fundraising, endorsements, and media coverage can all provide useful context, but none correlate nearly as strongly with election performance. In an era of fake news and social media, any metric of support is subject to manipulation, polling included, but steps can and should be taken to protect its integrity. In a 2012 study from the University of Hong Kong, 38 of 83 countries surveyed had some form of a “polling blackout” in the days or weeks before an election, including France, Mexico, and Canada.

A handful of the countries with these blackouts cited “protecting the democratic process” as a reason for the blackout. While a it may seem to be an attractive option, the effect of a polling blackout is not fully understood and 1st amendment concerns make it highly unlikely that the United States will implement one anytime in the near future. However, it may still be worthwhile to explore regulations that could prevent deliberate misinformation from partisan/campaign sponsored pollsters. Such misinformation with the intent to influence voters could potentially be classified as electoral fraud.

In the meantime, greater emphasis should be placed on polling literacy to enable voters to choose candidates free of extraneous influence.

This responsibility is incumbent on those who conduct and release polls as well as those who share and cite them. As we near one of the most consequential elections in recent memory, the rising relevance of opinion polling forces us to reconcile its various flaws and uncertainties with its ability to provide tailored insights deeper than ever before to pundits, campaigns, and likely voters, however you may define them.

Eddie Ives ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at eddieives@wustl.edu.

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Artwork by Merry May Ma, staff artist

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2020 Election Primer

Top 2020 Candidates’ Political Scandals Explained

Jaden Lanza, staff editor Artwork (page 17) by Shonali Palacios, staff artist

D

espite the importance of Democratic candidates’ policy positions, their scandals often dominate the news cycle and contain the juiciest coverage. Optics and personality play a huge role in voters’ choices, which give certain scandals a potentially devastating impact—while some, of course, barely make a ripple in the public sphere. What makes something scandalous?

It’s vital to sift through what personal mistakes or bad policy positions can be overlooked and what shouldn’t be. What don’t we consider scandalous that we should? Most often, political scandals involve issues of blatant personal immorality or misconduct but are not limited to as much. Scandalous actions can be important to questioning whether the candidate is capable and deserving of public office, especially when the act(s) are criminal, but there’s often been grey areas in how such scandals are interpreted in the public.

There are numerous unethical and disturbing acts politicians can commit that aren’t illegal yet should still be rightfully considered in any decisions about who to vote for. I’ll examine some of the scandals of the top five remaining Democratic presidential candidates: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Michael Bloomberg, and Elizabeth Warren. This article isn’t intended to be an entirely comprehensive or necessarily “objective” account of every scandal but instead is meant to encourage further research into each candidate’s shortcomings.

It’s obviously highly important to understand the judgement and character of whoever occupies the Oval Office, and a politician’s worst flaws can often say more about them than their best achievements.

The critical question is not if they can capably execute daily duties when elected, but if they

can be trusted to do what they say and be of sound moral judgement. The latter has long been neglected but can be a looking glass into what someone will actually do when they’re sitting behind the Resolute desk.

rhetoric against the whims of the rich, calling for higher taxes and saying billionaires shouldn’t even exist, his defense to the New York Times feels somehow dissatisfying: “I wrote a bestselling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

Bernie Sanders Bernard Sanders is subject to a lot of incredulity because of his extremely ambitious goals and different style of politics. While enjoying the status of being considered the most honest politician in America in 2016 and again in 2020, voters and the media still regularly scrutinize him.

Last month, Bernie Sanders was caught in the crossfire of accusations by Elizabeth Warren that he told her in a private meeting that “a woman could not win” the presidency in 2020.

Sanders vehemently denied saying as much to CNN, calling it ludicrous: “What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist, and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020?

Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016."

In the end, the event is hearsay and we’ll never know precisely what Sanders and Warren discussed at the meeting, which they both truly may remember differently. Sanders, though, sincerely expressed the belief that a woman could be President to a classroom in a 1990 tape, most likely would not have even run for president in 2016 if Elizabeth Warren had decided to, and endorsed Hillary Clinton later that year.

One of Bernie’s most disappointing shortcomings is his estimated $2 million net worth. To his supporters’ chagrin, Sanders is a millionaire largely because of a $795,000 advance for writing a book, a fact revealed in his 2019 tax return. Given Bernie Sanders’ strong line of

Admittedly, Sanders has never said millionaires should not exist and by all indications pays his fair share of taxes. Sanders is not actually particularly wealthy for a veteran United States Senator; according to Quartz, the median net worth of a US Senator in 2015 was $3.2 million, making Bernie’s money feel contradictory only in spirit. Regardless, it certainly isn’t a good look for the campaign and invites attacks from Republicans alleging personal greed.

Michael Bloomberg It’s difficult to know where to start with Michael R. Bloomberg. Forget being a Republican decades ago like Sen. Warren—Bloomberg was just actually a Republican in public office and has since then passed his time as the ninth richest man in the world. Even so, he now pursues the Democratic nomination for president.

From the perspective of Democrats, Bloomberg should be regarded as negatively as Donald Trump. Much like the incumbent himself, he’s a conservative billionaire who vacillated between the two major parties throughout his life. As mayor of New York City, he oversaw devastating policies that have been characterized as a reign of terror over minority communities. He was a robust defender of stop and frisk, encouraged programs that specifically targeted Muslim communities and mosques post-9/11, and also has an atrocious record on women’s rights and sexual violence. He vetoed a bill in 2003 making it easier for rape victims to get access to emergency contraception.

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Beyond policy, Bloomberg is the target of sexual harassment claims by more women than Trump is. He’s been recorded making appalling remarks objectifying women, saying of one employee of his, “I’d do her.” On other occasions he, among other comments, insulted the same woman’s appearance, saying of her fiancé, “What, is the guy dumb and blind?”

The former Republican mayor also has many past statements that are difficult to call anything other than explicitly racist. Bloomberg has tried desperately to defend policing practices in New York under his leadership, saying in 2013, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” There’s no mistaking Bloomberg as anything but a plutocrat with a half-hearted commitment to Democratic policy goals who has spent a recording breaking $350 million just to be competitive. Anyone that wasn’t as obscenely, incorrigibly rich as Michael Bloomberg would be nowhere near as close to the nomination with his record and personality.

It’s certainly not his experience as mayor of New York City that attracts his support—current mayor Bill de Blasio’s vanity run for president crashed and burned in September!

Is Bloomberg really who the Democratic Party wants to be the face of their movement? A billionaire coastal elite that is twenty times richer than Donald Trump that has made similarly racist and misogynist remarks, even making some of them while standing next to Trump on his reality TV show? A man who thought police didn’t racially profile minorities enough for searches and arrests? Mike Bloomberg’s campaign has a litany of scandals they must overcome that many Democratic voters will find difficult to stomach.

Joe Biden Joseph R. Biden has considerable political baggage and his very long career couldn’t possibly be adequately condensed here. What’s important to criticize is his longstanding complicity in architecting mass incarceration, cooperating in the Senate with prominent segregationists, and his support for the Iraq War. It would be one thing if Biden apologized or walked back the decisions and rhetoric of his past, but he’s virtually never done so. He’s instead argued that he was at the forefront of civil rights, falsely claims he didn’t support

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the Iraq War, and is tone-deaf to the modern electorate, saying he has “no empathy” for struggling millennials.

Biden’s heinous political decisions seem more scandalous than his dubious personal behavior—which isn’t to say his behavior should be ignored. There are seemingly never-ending clips of Joe Biden touching young women and girls in the oddest settings. Biden released a video publicly apologizing for such behavior by saying he’s just a “very touchy person” but that he will try to respect people’s public space more. Regardless of his promise, there are still the same occasional incidents, with the former Vice President awkwardly touching prospective voters at rallies. Does this behavior cross the line? Does Biden have malicious intent? It’s possible he genuinely doesn’t, but his continued behavior indicates he has an almost oblivious sense of other people’s personal space that should understandably cause trepidation with voters.

Pete Buttigieg Peter Montgomery Buttigieg was born in South Bend, Indiana and is the youngest candidate in the race at 37 years old. Despite his relative youth and otherwise sterling set of credentials, the Harvard-educated former Mayor has his own collection of scandals. Mr. Buttigieg’s deepest-cutting criticisms revolve around his handling of race relations during his mayoralty of South Bend. Multiple incidents demonstrated Buttigieg’s poor cognizance of racism within the South Bend Police Department.

He sparked outrage among the city’s black community within three months of taking office in 2012 when he demoted his town’s black police chief Darryl Boykins because Boykins illegally recorded white police officers using racist rhetoric. Meanwhile, the officers taped using racist language remained employed, and some later got promotions. Buttigieg is, at best, tone-deaf in his participation in the whole affair, and at worst blatantly ignorant of racism within his city’s police department.

Allegations of ignoring systemic racism in South Bend continued to dog Buttigieg into 2019.

Many black city officials or police officers sued the young Mayor and won weighty settlements from the city. There’s even speculation that the police are neglecting to protect black members

of the community, with the Guardian reporting, “Community figures and the family of Eric Logan, a black man killed by white officers in South Bend in March, are questioning why the city’s police and fire departments aren’t conducting a criminal investigation into two separate incidents in which cars belonging to Logan’s mother caught fire.” Even if there’s ultimately nothing to their fears of foul play, it’s reasonable to suspect it when their police force is 90% white in a city with a population that is 27% black and 15% Latinx.

Accusations of foul play also surround Pete Buttigieg’s time working for the consulting firm McKinsey, a company infamous for its uncouth work under cover of secrecy. McKinsey’s clients range from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Saudi government. According to Duff McDonald, “McKinsey has done nothing less than set the course of American capitalism.”

Others describe McKinsey as “Capital’s Willing Executioners.” They are known recently for their work recommending ICE cut spending on food for migrants in detention centers.

Though much of his time there is still shrouded in uncertainty, Buttigieg is known to have been personally involved with health insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield and Toronto grocery store Loblaw in a consultancy role. The former chose to cut about 1,000 jobs two years later and the latter was involved a bread price fixing scandal.

Did Pete contribute to these outcomes, or was he involved in any way? Should we believe him that he “wasn’t aware” of any wrongdoing at any of the companies he consulted for? Buttigieg’s insistence of ignorance is suspect, making accusations that he personally participated in malicious acts while at McKinsey difficult for him to disprove.

Elizabeth Warren Regarded as a firebrand of the progressive left, Elizabeth Warren is not free from her own considerable political baggage. Though she brilliantly led the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that helped protect everyday consumers for years, her failure to endorse Bernie Sanders in 2016 against Hillary Clinton has led some progressives to question her true devotion to transforming the status quo.

2020 Election Primer

“I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

Add in the fact that Elizabeth Warren was registered in the Republican Party until 1996 and worked as a corporate lawyer defending companies against consumer lawsuits—ironic, considering she later did literally the precise opposite as boss of the CFPB. Warren has downplayed her past work, instead representing herself as always having fought for consumers.

Though she did indeed switch party affiliations and has campaigned for Democratic causes, leaving those on the left to have reason to mistrust Warren.Which isn’t even to mention, of course, Senator Warren’s dubious claims to Native American ancestry. Warren’s personal authenticity and honesty have become an issue as questions arise about her identity. Donald Trump blusters the racist and vile “Pocahontas” epithet to disparage Warren on a regular basis, but while horrifying, that doesn’t erase the fact that Elizabeth Warren is wrong to continue defending her symbolic identity. Elizabeth Warren is white.

She indicated as much on legal forms for decades, beginning to identify as Native American in the late eighties on education directories at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, notably teaching at Harvard Law at a time when the law school was under fire for a lack of staff diversity. Briahna Gray at the Intercept reported that Warren was used as a defense of Harvard’s lack of diversity: “Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the Law School faculty includes no minority women, [Harvard Spokesman] Chmura said Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren is Native American.”

Rather than walk back her claims to native ancestry, Warren went further than before— revealing a DNA test to confirm her professed ‘family heritage’ learned from her grandparents.

The test revealed she had between 1/64 and

1/1024 native ancestry, which is a miniscule percentage that countless white Americans could similarly claim. It’s worth pointing out that DNA test results are bogus, and that it also has no bearing on how ethnicity actually works.

Elizabeth Warren, though, has lived her whole life identifying as white, possessing none of the characteristics constructing what it means to be part of a certain ethnicity and culture.In short, it’s simply offensive to continue to identify as Native American as a very powerful white woman. To her credit, however, the story of unique or exotic ancestry by one’s family is a relatively common

feature in many white families’ upbringing—it’s believable that she genuinely (but mistakenly) believed her partial Native American heritage is correct—which only makes it more disappointing that Warren has not educated herself about why it isn’t right and retracted her attachment to native ancestry.

Jaden A. Lanza ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at jadenlanza@wustl. edu.

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WU Political Review

Has the Iowa Caucus lost its viability?

Andrew Leung, staff writer

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he 2020 presidential election has already invoked a lack of transparency, a sense of frustration for voters, and an apparent failure in the democratic process. But it’s not even November, so why are so many people clashing over vote totals and delegates? Before the general election can occur, the Democratic Party needs to come to a consensus in selecting a candidate to run against incumbent Donald Trump. The Democratic field is still crowded, voters are scratching their heads in confusion, and the Republican party seems to not mind having the negative attention diverted from their side. In previous election cycles, a front-runner emerges from a mostly smooth round of early-state primaries. Instead, all eyes are directed towards the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) as they fumble arguably the most consequential election night of the nomination process: the Iowa caucuses.

Well...how does a caucus even work?

A caucus, as opposed to a primary, consists of multiple rounds of voting and a unique set of voting procedures. Iowa consists of 1,637 precincts, or districts, and each precinct has a caucus location, such as a school gymnasium or community center. Caucus-goers arrive at the caucus location by 7 P.M. CT and move into a room where the first vote will take place. The room is divided into areas for each candidate, and caucus-goers can move to that designated area for their candidate, where the precinct captain for that candidate is waiting. After the attendees move to the allocated area, the first “alignment” or roll call takes place, where the number of people are counted for each candidate. This is where the “viability threshold” takes effect; a candidate is considered “viable” if they have at least 15% of the caucus-goers. If the candidate clears 15% after the first alignment, they are guaranteed to be viable and those voters must stay with their candidate.

Groups that do not meet the threshold after the first round now can move in order to be a part

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of a viable group. While some supporters may move to the existing viable candidates, there are some strategies employed by caucus-goers.

Supporters of lower-tier candidates can help another group reach the 15% by joining them or vice-versa. They can also join an uncommitted category in order to deny viable candidates more delegates.

Once the second round ends, the final roll call takes place, the viable candidates are given their final tallies, and county delegates are awarded to them proportional to their vote. For example, say 100 people attend a caucus that has four county delegates. In the final roll call, 50 people vote for Senator Sanders, 25 vote for Mayor Buttigieg, and 25 vote for Senator Warren. Out of the four county delegates, two would go to Sanders and one would go to Buttigieg and Warren each.

Once all the precincts are accounted for, there would be over 11,000 county delegates, which is way too many individuals to participate in a convention to award the 41 national delegates.

So, a second set of calculations is put in place to convert the over 11,000 county delegates into a more manageable number of state delegates that would participate in the convention. Each of the 99 counties in Iowa would be allocated a certain number of state delegates to send to the convention, and those state delegate allocations are determined by the proportion of county delegates each candidate receives in that county.

However, these numbers will not be rounded if they don’t divide perfectly, so the term “state delegate equivalent” is used to describe this number. The state delegate equivalents from the 99 counties are then combined, rounded, and converted to national delegates, the ones that go to the national convention to eventually pick the democratic nominee. That’s how the caucuses would be held in Iowa, and by 9 P.M. CT the results of the caucuses should be reported by the IDP to the public, allowing candidates to give either victory speeches or stump speeches to move on to New Hampshire.

By about 10 P.M. CT, reporters and analysts realized something was wrong. Multiple precinct captains were reporting that the mobile app implemented this year to report alignment and delegate numbers was not working, and the IDP was starting to receive calls from them to report the results. By midnight, the IDP was swamped with hundreds of phone calls from precincts to report three sets of numbers: the first alignment vote, the final alignment vote, and the number of delegates allotted to candidates.

At this time, the IDP was not releasing any of the results, much to the chagrin of viewers across the nation. The IDP made a statement claiming they were checking every report to make sure the results are verified and accurate, as well as stating that the app was working. Precinct captains, on the other hand, were upset with the app not working from their end and having to wait hours for the IDP to answer their calls for reporting the caucus results The most prominent moment of the night, in my opinion, was when a captain reported to CNN that he has been on hold to report to the IDP for hours. Around the end of the CNN interview, the line picks up from the IDP, but they hang up before he could switch lines.

The IDP released about 60% of the results the next day at around 4 P.M., and the data slowly trickled out to the public showing a dead heat between Senator Sanders and Mayor Buttigieg.

However, the final delegate count has still not been confirmed by the IDP due to inconsistencies in the data, so the prospects of a clear winner from Iowa may not happen until after the early states vote.

So, what went wrong with the Iowa caucuses?

The first set of errors may be attributed in part to the myriad data recording calculations necessary to complete the caucus procedures, leading to human error and ultimately discrepancies in the numbers. While some caucus-goers may be

2020 Election Primer

All eyes are directed towards the Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) as they fumble arguably the most consequential election night of the nomination process: the Iowa caucuses. well versed in the rules and procedures, there have been multiple reports that certain precincts contained tallying errors that would go against caucus rules; some caucus-goers reportedly left viable candidates after the first round, as well as more voters being reported in the final alignment than in the initial alignment even though no one is allowed to enter after the caucuses begin. These errors have left members of the IDP confused, and several candidates have even called for a recount in Iowa.

The calculation for awarding delegates also slightly favors precincts with smaller populations, which leads to the small possibility that a candidate who earned fewer total votes can earn more delegates — sounds a lot like the 2016 presidential election where Trump earned more electoral votes with fewer popular votes. This unlikely possibility became a reality as Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who trailed behind Senator Bernie Sanders in total votes, actually won more state delegates and may ride a momentum boost with a win in Iowa.

The Iowa caucuses also disadvantages candidates who are polling around or below the viability threshold due to the Caucus procedure. Once the dust settled and the results eventually came in, I believe there were two candidates who lost the most from the caucus system.

The first would be former Vice President Joseph Biden. Biden’s polling indicated he would finish second behind Sanders, collecting about 20% of the popular vote. On caucus day, he underperformed and received 14.9% of the vote after the first alignment. This meant that in a significant number of precincts he was not a viable candidate, and his numbers dipped to 13.7% in the final alignment. He still wound up with 6 pledged delegates out of the 41, but the

viability threshold did seem to hurt his campaign as they head to New Hampshire, which seems to be locked in a race between Senator Sanders, Mayor Buttigieg, and Senator Warren.

The candidate who took the biggest hit in Iowa was entrepreneur Andrew Yang. His team has a large online presence and ran a well-funded ad campaign in Iowa, but caucus-goers seemed to be moved more by the ground-game, which Pete Buttigieg established very well to propel him into first place. Yang still earned almost 9,000 votes in the first alignment, or roughly 5%. His significant yet low percentage in Iowa meant that he was not viable in a majority of precincts. The final tally put Yang at less than 2,000 votes, or roughly 1%. His loss of votes was comparable to Buttigieg’s gain in votes, raising questions over how this mechanism of voting represents a true democratic process, since voters are forced to change their preferences drastically after observing viability.

Overall, a lot of importance is given to Iowa for being the first state to vote for a presidential nominee; the election usually solidifies the “toptier” candidates and is often the signal for struggling campaigns to call it quits. Sometimes a candidate may only need to give off the perception of winning Iowa in order to secure the nomination. In the 2012 Republican primary, then former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was declared the winner of Iowa by a margin of eight votes. Weeks later, a recount revealed that former Senator Rick Santorum was the winner of the popular vote; but Romney had already won the momentum in the early states and eventually clinched the nomination. Of course, there are notable exceptions like Bill Clinton’s poor showing in the 1992 Iowa caucus, but for the most part the front-runners coming out of Iowa will win enough delegates to make their case at

the national convention.

The title of “first in the nation” was given to the Iowa caucus in 1972, when the demographics of the state did not diverge very far from the national statistics. Almost fifty years later, the numbers tell a different story; while the national racial composition stands around 61% white, 18% Hispanic, 14% Black, and 5% Asian, Iowa has hovered around 86% white, 6% Hispanic, 3% Black, and 3% Asian. Iowa is not representative of diversity in America, as well as some of the issues that many minority communities face.

For example, a state like Illinois has a racial demographic almost identical to the national numbers. However, using race as the sole justification for a primary election’s significance in the election cycle isn’t fair either. Some critics have argued that the caucuses prevent certain voter bases from turning out, including many blue-collar workers who don’t have the ability to miss work to caucus on a Monday night, or families who can’t leave their children unattended.

The turnout of blue-collar workers should at least have the attention of the Democratic Party, where strong numbers for Trump under this demographic helped him break the “blue wall” in Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to win the 2016 election.

In any case, this year’s Iowa caucuses has given many lines of evidence that it may be important to reflect on how political parties should run their elections. While each reason alone may not warrant much concern, the combination of errors and issues regarding the Iowa caucuses may have pushed this form of bellwether testing out of viability.

Andrew Leung ‘22 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at andrew.leung@wustl. edu.

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WU Political Review

Billionaires Bidding for the Nomination Vaibav Nandeesh

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ne of the main trends among the campaigns of the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary candidates is the rejection of large campaign donations from PACs (political action committees) and SuperPACs. This disdain for corporate money is nothing new. In the 2008 Presidential election cycle, then-candidate Barack Obama made a point of rejecting corporate PAC donations.

More recently in the 2016 Democratic primaries, Bernie Sanders rejected corporate donations and criticized his opponent Hillary Clinton for taking such donations. Despite these pledges among today’s Democratic candidates, the influence of big money remains significant due to the campaigns of two billionaires, former hedge fund manager, Tom Steyer, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Due to the Supreme Court case Buckley v.

Valeo (1976), which ruled in a 6-2 decision that government limits on personal expenditures by candidates are unconstitutional, Steyer and Bloomberg can spend as much money as they please. According to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), as of January 31, 2020, only 47% (roughly $641 million) of the nearly $1.4 billion raised for the Democratic candidates came from individual donors. Around $735 million came from the personal contributions of Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, who have each raised around $270 million and $460 million respectively. To put Bloomberg and Steyer’s spending into perspective, at the end of January the candidate with the next highest money, Bernie Sanders, had raised $120 million from individual contributions. Pete Buttigieg’s $82 million and Elizabeth Warren’s $81 million are the next highest figures.

The advantages of Steyer and Bloomberg’s abundant spending are evident in the polling and the qualifications for the Democratic debates. According to RealClearPolitics’s polling aggregate from late February Bloomberg is polling 15.3% nationally after being in the race

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for only three months. Pete Buttigieg, who has been campaigning since April 2019, is only polling at 10%. With Bloomberg spending over $400 million in campaign advertisements as of early January, less wealthy Democratic candidates such as Buttigieg face an uphill battle in getting needed publicity.

Tom Steyer’s $15.2 million spent in the state of South Carolina alone has resulted in a boost in polls of that state, allowing for him to qualify for the January Democratic debate through the early state polling criterion. Meanwhile, Andrew Yang, who was outpolling Steyer in national aggregates as well as outdoing him in individual donations, was unable to make the cut as he couldn’t get qualifying early state polls.

It is a depressing reality that extremely qualified candidates such as Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Cory Booker, and Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro dropped out after months of campaigning due to insufficient donations and low polling numbers while Bloomberg is surging in the polls due to his personal wealth providing an endless stream of money for numerous campaign advertisements.

In a way, Bloomberg and Steyer have effortlessly compensated several months of no campaigning and their lack of grassroots support by spending hundreds of millions of dollars from their personal funds. The money guzzling campaigns of Bloomberg and Steyer are creating frustration among Democratic Party activists, who believe that the money could be put to better use.

Indeed, winning the presidency isn’t the only goal for Democrats this year. They have to gain strong majorities in the House and Senate to implement major proposals such as Medicare for All and amnesty for some undocumented immigrants. According to Catherine Vaughan, co-founder of the progressive political group Swing Left, which focuses on getting Democrats elected in swing legislative seats, “There are a lot of other races on the map that are as or even more important, including all these state

"More billionaires seeking more political power surely isn't the change America needs." legislative races that will control the future of how districts are drawn in this country.” To make things worse, Bloomberg's presidential run is actively hurting local campaigns by taking political talent away from these races.

Bloomberg’s campaign has dealt many downballot grassroots campaigns significant setbacks as campaign workers are poached to work for Bloomberg with high paying job offers. In an interview with The Intercept, Milwaukee County Executive candidate Chris Larson complained about his loss of a junior staffer, who is now “running … ragged for $6k/month” for the Bloomberg campaign and that “other campaigns for county exec lost a field coordinator and another lost his campaign manager.” Even incumbent Democratic politicians who already hold office have expressed discontent with the lack of attention to state legislative races.

Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) responded to Steyer’s campaign announcement last summer with the statement, “I would rather that he spend his money taking back the Virginia House, the Virginia Senate and supporting people who can win.”

On the other hand, there is a case to be made that Steyer and Bloomberg’s abundant spending could be an asset to the Democratic Party.

Both are taking on Trump’s over $200 million re- election war chest. By vastly outspending Trump, Bloomberg and Steyer will be able to indirectly shift attention and coverage to the

2020 Election Primer

Democratic Party through their own welladvertised campaigns. After all, the biggest challenge that the President could face is a lack of media coverage, of which he got $5 billion worth during the last presidential election cycle.

Even though media coverage of him was mostly negative, negative attention is still attention.

With abundant coverage of him on all the major news networks throughout the 2016 presidential election cycle, Trump was able to easily clinch the Republican nomination as he had superior name recognition than his primary opponents.

The campaigns of Bloomberg and Steyer also raise the growing divide within the Democratic Party on its attitude to billionaires. A party focusing on building a working-class grassroots coalition is at odds with the uber-wealthy backgrounds of the two candidates. With Elizabeth Warren’s proposal of a wealth tax on the richest people in the country and Bernie Sanders’ frequent criticism of billionaire donors, it is clear that Steyer and Bloomberg don’t come from the ideal economic background for winning the trust of working-class voters.

Furthermore, the presidency of Donald Trump has sparked doubt among Democrats about having a billionaire in office, as it has become clear that Trump’s experience as a businessman does not translate well into leading the country.

In response to Bloomberg’s announcement of his presidential run, Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager Faiz Shakir commented that “More billionaires seeking more political power surely isn't the change America needs.”

A significant aspect where Bloomberg and Steyer differ is their loyalty to the Democratic Party. Steyer has expressed support for Democratic Party candidates such as John Kerry in 2004 and fundraised for Barack Obama in 2012. Additionally, Tom Steyer’s strong record on combatting climate change is appealing to the average Democratic voter. In 2012, Steyer

“There are a lot of other races on the map that are as or even more important, including all these state legislative races that will control the future of how districts are drawn in this country.” mounted opposition against the Keystone Pipeline, an oil pipeline that risks causing water contamination, devastating oil spills, and encroachment upon Native American lands, through commercials slamming its construction.

Steyer has additionally made donations to Stanford University for development in clean renewable energy. Bloomberg’s history is more opaque.

While he does share Tom Steyer’s passion for combatting climate change with his promotion of clean energy and numerous donations to environmental causes, his time as a member of the Republican Party, which is not environmentally friendly in the slightest, raises some additional questions. During his tenure as mayor of New York, he promoted right-wing causes such as racially discriminatory profiling, financial deregulation that caused the 2008 recession, Social Security cuts, opposing withdrawal from the Iraq War, and endorsing Republican George W. Bush for re-election in 2004.

Even recently, Bloomberg has been donating to Republican candidates in 2016 and 2018 with over $10 million in donations to Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey’s competitive 2016 re-election campaign that held the balance of the senate as well. He went out of his way to host a fundraiser for New York Republican Congressman Peter King who was defending a swing seat in 2018. Bloomberg’s inconsistent support of the party calls into question his commitment to the Democratic Party’s values and whether or not he will pursue an agenda that is palatable to members of the party.

To cynical voters, Bloomberg’s conservative approach to governance is a stark contrast to the growing left-wing faction of the Democratic Party and could be viewed as an attempt to buck the Democrat’s leftwards trend to protect his immense wealth. If Democrats decide that either Bloomberg or Steyer are the best candidates for the general election, they will be fighting to maintain a system that they have been denouncing for the past several years.

The small-donor grassroots campaign that was seemingly the future of the Democratic Party in 2008 and the early stages of this primary season, would cease to exist, and the influence of big money would continue to be a major factor in operating American democracy.

Bloomberg’s rapid rise in the polls reflects the reality that a significant faction of the party is willing to go down this path. If this path triumphs, the New York billionaire that switched back and forth between political parties, employed racially discriminatory practices and used their immense wealth to fund their own successful presidential campaign would not be only a tale of Donald Trump, but also of Michael Bloomberg.

Vaibav Nandeesh ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at vaibavn@wustl.edu.

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WU Political Review

Voting Rights and Democracy on the Ballot Lizzy Obrand Artwork (right) by Merry May Ma, staff artist

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here are so many policy platforms being discussed in the Democratic primary nomination process, but the most important one in my opinion is being overlooked. In the wake of Donald Trump’s impeachment “trial” coming to the conclusion that it did, the most important issue on the ballot in 2020 is protecting our democracy. In the United States, it is easy to think of ourselves as the most democratic nation in the world, yet we are slipping down the rankings in categories such as voting rights, fair districting, and the level of misinformation that is spread.

According to the Electoral Integrity Project, “U.S. elections rank last among all Western democracies,” right behind Lithuania. The lowest category was electoral laws, which according to the Electoral Integrity Worldwide means that laws are “unfair to smaller parties,” “favored the governing party,” and “restricted citizens’ rights.” Protecting and expanding voting rights has become a partisan issue in recent years.

Two examples of this are Republican - dominated state governments in Florida and Missouri attempting to override successful ballot initiatives from 2018 that enhanced voting rights and stopped gerrymandering, respectively. In contrast to this, Senate Democrats released a plan to help expand the electorate by creating automatic voter registration and providing statehood to Washington D.C. The 2020 Democratic primary candidates each recognize that protecting our democracy is a very important issue and they have each put out plans to address numerous facets of the problem. Ideas such as making Election Day a national holiday, automatic voter registration, and more accessible mail-in ballots in every state have been proposed. I am going to do my best to explain the main issues at hand and show which candidates support which policies.

First, all of the leading candidates (Bernie

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The most important issue on the ballot in 2020 is protecting our democracy.

Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Michael Bloomberg, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden) support overturning Citizens United—the court case that said that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend independently in elections.

Citizens United has allowed for the proliferation of Political Action Committees (PACs) that funnel millions and millions of dollars into politics.

Now, not all PACs are bad, but I believe that politics should be funded either by public money or by grassroots donations. Overturning Citizens United would make it impossible for special interest groups to have the amount of power they currently do over politicians.

Another important issue that candidates have mentioned is abolishing the Electoral College.

This is much more controversial than many of the other plans put forward by candidates, and there are questions of whether it is even feasible due to the electoral college's roots in the Constitution.

Mayor Buttigieg, Senator Warren, and Senator Sanders support abolishing the Electoral College in favor of adopting a national popular vote instead. Citizens and representatives from smaller states are more likely to disapprove because the Electoral College provides them with a greater voice than they would receive through a popular vote.

Making Election Day a national holiday in order to ensure that work is not a barrier for voters has been advocated for by all candidates except Vice

President Biden and Mayor Bloomberg.

All candidates support legislation that would make voter registration automatic on a citizen’s eighteenth birthday. This would eliminate yet another barrier for voters, especially if their state does not allow same day voter registration, like Missouri. Voter registration can be a burdensome process for citizens, especially in states that have robust voter ID laws or for citizens whose first language is not English. Creating automatic voter registration would simply remove one of the burdens that people are subject to in order to vote.

Not only is it important that people are registered to vote and have time off work, it is also important to expand the electorate to people in Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. All candidates support statehood for D.C., and a majority of the candidates (except Bloomberg who says that they should automatically become a state and is not for holding a referendum) support a plan for Puerto Ricans to be able to decide their voting status for themselves.

All of the top candidates are also in favor of creating non-partisan, independent commissions to redistribute, thus ending the partisan gerrymandering processes that have led to voters feeling as though their votes don’t even matter. Gerrymandering occurs when there is redistricting due to the new population distribution following a census. When the population shifts, the state legislatures have to redraw the lines of the congressional districts for their state.

Oftentimes, the party that controls the state legislature will redraw these lines in their own party’s favor, which can then shape which party gets elected in those districts.

While most of these plans are quite popular within the Democratic Party and among the general electorate itself, it would be nearly impossible to pass some of these legislative

2020 Election Primer

Candidates have proposed using legislation, constitutional amendments, and/or executive orders to be able to achieve their plans. initiatives with the filibuster in the Senate. The filibuster is when senators are able to speak for as long as they would like in order to delay a vote from occurring. The only way to end a filibuster is to have a cloture vote, which requires three fifths of the senate. This means that even if the Democrats win the Senate in 2020, they can still be blocked by Republicans. Two candidates are in favor of eliminating the filibuster: Mayor Buttigieg and Senator Warren. However, even if Democrats win a Senate majority, they may not be able to push through a vote to abolish the filibuster because there is still a significant number of Democratic senators who do not support the removal of the filibuster.

There is consensus within the Democratic Party that something needs to change with regards to American Democracy, and there are many different ways to go about this. Candidates have proposed using legislation, constitutional amendments, and/or executive orders to be able to achieve their plans that are outlined above if they do end up becoming the next President. The real change can begin once everyone has the opportunity to vote and the representatives are listening solely to their voters

rather than the PACs and lobbyists that fund their campaigns. May the best candidate win.

For more detailed information, the Washington Post has a fantastic webpage to visit that outlines each candidate’s stance on these issues and many more issues that are vitally important in 2020.)

Lizzy Obrand ‘21 studies in the College of Arts &

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/

Sciences. She can be reached at ehobrand@wustl.

politics/policy-2020/.

edu.

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WU Political Review

Will Bernie’s Medicare For All Plan Really Help Americans?

Ayelet Spertus

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he United States is facing a healthcare crisis. Our healthcare costs are some of the highest in the world, millions of Americans struggle to pay their expenses, and thousands die each year because they cannot get urgently needed services out of fear of costs. Senator Bernie Sanders, along with 14 co-sponsors, have introduced the Medicare for All Act of 2019 to mitigate the many problems in America’s healthcare system. The “M4A” bill offers innumerable benefits to Americans (as described in Conor’s article), but, like any plan, it does have its trade-offs. As politically active young adults who contribute to our nation’s political discourse, we have a responsibility to understand these trade-offs before we can make informed decisions. By examining this bill’s drawbacks, I am not prescribing an ultimate solution for the American healthcare crisis, nor am I attempting to smooth over the real problems that exist in our healthcare system. Instead, I will point out the flaws in Sanders’ plan and its political obstacles going forward, some of which may very well prevent the Medicare for All bill from ever becoming law.

Problems with the M4A plan Like most other liberal Americans, I believe that some form of universal healthcare should be our ultimate goal, as no individual should have to choose between paying for healthcare and putting food on the table. However, in order to achieve this, it is crucial to determine how the costs of these services will be distributed.

Healthcare currently costs between $3 and $3.5 trillion a year in the U.S., which is almost as large as the country’s $4 trillion budget. Right now, the majority of healthcare costs are being paid for in the private sector through private insurance plans (excluding Medicare and Medicaid), but under the Medicare for All bill, virtually all of these costs would be transferred onto the government, effectively doubling the US budget.

Sanders has offered a relatively simple explanation for how this massive expenditure will be

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financed: raising taxes, closing tax loopholes for corporations and the wealthy, and lowering drug and administrative costs. However, the actual projected cost of M4A varies wildly depending on the ability of the government to achieve cost savings, which means that no one will know the true economic impact of M4A on American households until it is already implemented. As such, it is impossible to project the likelihood of Sanders' tax plan fully covering all of its costs.

Even if the math does work out, there are still a number of things that need to be noted.

Taxes on every American would go up, and for many they would go up significantly. Proponents of M4A make the argument that the average tax increase will be less than the average savings in healthcare costs. While this seems to be true, there are two often overlooked considerations: First, it is projected that the average American will save more in healthcare than their taxes increase, but no one is the average American.

While many tens or hundreds of millions of Americans will become better off, many tens or hundreds of millions of Americans will become worse off. Given the sheer magnitude of people in the losing group, the political implications here are enormous. Even if a majority of voters support a bill (which isn’t the case with M4A in the first place), it is politically untenable to pass anything with such active opposition from such a large group, even if they are in a slight minority.

There is no nation on earth with universal healthcare that doesn’t offer private insurance alongside it in some form.

Representatives are hesitant to vote for bills that threaten their reelection, which would be the case in large swaths of the country.

As for the plan itself, it is unclear in the bill whether individuals will be allowed to purchase supplemental coverage through private contractors, but Sanders has made it clear publicly that he plans to abolish the private insurance industry. Under the current Medicare system, Americans have the option to pay an additional premium to cover co-pays and other fees that may arise, as well as the option to purchase supplemental higher quality coverage through Medicare Advantage plans. More than onethird of all Medicare beneficiaries receive coverage through these plans. These plans have been overwhelmingly popular. In fact, 90% of Medicare Advantage enrollees are happy with their plans, and only 2% think that their traditional Medicare coverage is better. This is hardly surprising, as private insurers virtually always offer higher quality care than government-run programs because “choice increases competition, and competition drives up value”. It follows that abolishing private insurance means Americans will no longer have access to private insurers for these supplemental plans. Freedom of choice matters to Americans, and the polling supports this, as I will show later on.

Additionally, having the option to purchase supplemental insurance especially benefits those with complex or chronic conditions who must frequently see multiple specialists. Because Medicare pays specialists much less than private insurance does (typically around 30 cents on the dollar), most highly specialized doctors often do not take Medicare. Instead, they usually only accept Medicare Advantage Plans.

According to experts at the Healthcare Leadership Council, “Medicare Advantage Plans provide a level of care for special needs patients with chronic health conditions that conventional fee-for-service Medicare can’t match”. If these

2020 Election Primer

plans are no longer offered, most specialists would remain in the private sector, but would become even more unaffordable for most, and those with chronic conditions would suffer from lower quality care as a result.

Supplemental insurance isn’t popular only in the U.S. Other nations with universal healthcare do offer regulated supplemental insurance.

Sanders often argues that we should emulate other countries with universal healthcare, but the fact that there is no nation on earth that doesn’t offer some form of private insurance, undermines his requirement that all non-governmental insurance be abolished.

Why political realities make M4A unlikely I have gone over some of the problems with the M4A plan itself, but an even larger issue exists in the political domain: the bill has no path to law in the near future. Over two-thirds of Democrats in the Senate oppose this bill, and it is safe to assume that it will not garner any Republican support either. As for popular support, polling for Medicare for All as a concept is at 70% nationwide but understanding of the bill’s implications is surprisingly lacking. For example, almost half of Americans wrongly believe they would be able to keep their current plan under Medicare for All. When informed that taxes will be raised under M4A, support plummets to 47%, even though the average American will supposedly end up paying less in the long run.

This is because, politically, American voters do not favor delayed gratification; tax increases are tangible, but long-term savings are more abstract. Furthermore, support drops again to merely 37% when voters discover that private insurance will be abolished. The numbers indicate that M4A has neither the popular nor political support to pass, and unfortunately, even the best healthcare policy helps no one unless it becomes law.

Perhaps most troubling of all is what happens when the administration implementing M4A transitions to the next. Let’s assume for now that the following happens: Sanders is elected into office, Congress flips entirely to the Democrats, Medicare for All is passed into law and implemented smoothly, and the costs work out, so the budget is covered. Then what happens the next time congress turns Republican? To quote Ezra Klein with Vox:

As politically active young adults who contribute to our nation’s political discourse, we have a responsibility to be aware of the tradeoffs involved in any plan before we can make an informed decision. “[Imagine] in 2024, amid a backlash to rising tax rates, Sanders loses reelection to Ohio Sen. Rob Portman. Working with a Republican Congress, Portman restructures Medicare-for-All. Where Sanders included coverage for abortion, Portman bars it totally. Where Sanders designed the program to avoid copays and deductibles, Portman, a believer in health savings accounts, reworks it to frontload the cost-sharing. Where Sanders guaranteed coverage to everyone, including unauthorized immigrants, Portman restricts it to legal residents, and adds a work requirement for able-bodied adults”.

Now, Americans are left pinned to a government plan with restrictive coverage at best, morally degrading at worst, and the inability to switch to any other plan because the private insurance industry has been completely dismantled.

This is a likely scenario. Recall that Republicans were one vote away from repealing Obamacare in 2017, and Wisconsin’s request to add premiums and a work requirement to its Medicaid program was approved by the Trump administration in 2018. As long as there is the potential for alteration at the hands of the opposing party (which is always true given the nature of democracy), the future of Medicare for All has the potential to become disastrous. This is perhaps the greatest reason to leave the private

insurance industry in place. Yes, the insurance industry is costly, bloated, and at times morally questionable, but its presence in and of itself eliminates the potential for the government to hold Americans’ healthcare coverage hostage the second Congress turns red.

What is the best next step?

As a more immediate and politically feasible solution, building upon the Affordable Care Act is likely the best way to go forward in the near future. Although the ACA has had rocky results, it provides a strong foundation for building a universal healthcare system. The ACA was once supposed to offer a public option that would allow Americans to opt into a government-run healthcare plan, but ultimately failed in favor of a system of insurance “marketplaces” where private insurance plans can be purchased.

Actualizing the public option would be both the most popular option publicly and the most feasible one politically. Support for a government-provided public option offered alongside private insurance is at 73%, including a majority of Republicans.

As such, U.S. representatives are far more willing to support reforming the Affordable Care Act to actualize the public option. If Sanders’ goal was to put Medicare For All into mainstream political discourse, then he has succeeded. His anger at our healthcare system’s faults is well warranted, and his spirited calls for reform have brought these issues to the forefront of the political stage.

However, these calls have been misguided. His solution is fundamentally flawed, both in content and in viability. The reason Sanders’ plan is unworkable is that it requires certain conditions to be met, namely that it can be paid for, that there will be popular support, and that there will be political support. But the cost is completely unknowable, and Americans want to keep insurance intact without tax increases. Politically, even most Democrats don’t support M4A when fully informed about its implications, and even if they did, it has no viable path to law. Since evidence shows that none of those conditions are realistic, we have to conclude that the choice is not between enacting M4A or improving the ACA; it’s between having nothing change or improving the ACA, and clearly the latter is the better option.

Ayelet Spertus ‘22 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at aspertus@wustl.edu.

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WU Political Review

The Case for Medicare for All Conor Smyth

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f there’s one thing America’s great at, it’s sucking at healthcare. We spend way more than other developed countries on healthcare and have worse health outcomes.

The last major effort at reforming the healthcare system, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, did somewhat improve access and outcomes, partially sealing the hole in the tub.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump now tweets from the tub, so it’s cracking under an elephant’s pressure. Most consequentially, Trump repealed the individual mandate, a key feature of the ACA, in his 2017 tax bill.

The major accomplishment of the ACA, reducing uninsurance levels (which fell from 46.5 million people in 2010 to 26.7 million in 2016), is slipping away. Since a low in 2016, uninsurance is on the rise again, up to 27.9 million in 2018. Uninsurance disproportionately affects low-income people (most uninsured people have family income below 200% of the federal poverty line). And it costs lives too, by one estimate over 30,000 annually.

With the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries underway, healthcare reform has taken center stage, registering as the top issue of voters and a frequent topic of debate. The major candidates have put forward varied proposals on healthcare reform, which have fallen into two distinct camps. Some sort of public option is the preferred path of the centrists (Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar), while the progressives (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) favor single-payer, although Warren’s commitment to this proposal is questionable.

On the grounds of both policy and politics, there really isn’t much of a competition between these plans; single-payer outranks any public option proposal. But before getting into why singlepayer is better than a public option, what is single-payer and what makes it great?

The most well-known single-payer proposal in the U.S. is Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan, which essentially calls for an upgraded version of Canada’s healthcare system. In short,

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it enrolls all U.S. residents in a single government insurance plan resembling an enhanced version of the current Medicare plan and pretty much eliminates private insurance. Under Medicare for All, there would be no premiums, co-pays, deductibles, or out-of-pocket costs except for a maximum of $200 out of pocket for drugs.

There would also be no networks, so patients would have much more freedom in choosing providers than under the current system.

Medicare for All would mean universal coverage, better health outcomes, less paperwork, greater stability (no insurance churn), and more freedom (whether for workers no longer tied down by employer-based insurance or uninsured people who don’t have to worry about going bankrupt if they get sick). Whatever rationing of care occurs, a problem principally of funding rather than system design, will be based on level of need under single-payer rather than ability to pay as it is now.

The question of “How do you pay for it?” that inevitably attaches itself to seemingly any proposal that would benefit ordinary people actually reveals one of the best parts of Medicare for All. For one, while it would achieve universal coverage, insuring close to 30 million more people than are currently insured, Medicare for All could actually save the country money.

Studies on the economic impact of singlepayer have reached conflicting conclusions, but there’s plenty of reason to think that the many suggesting net cost savings are the most accurate. For instance, while the prospect of increased use of healthcare leads some studies to score single-payer as a net cost to the system, other countries with single-payer have generally seen small or insignificant increases in utilization rates after implementation and unsurprisingly have lower overall healthcare costs than the U.S. In fact, Canada’s single-payer system—the closest international parallel to Medicare for All—achieves universal coverage with about 6% less of GDP than the U.S. spends on healthcare.

Coupled with evidence from past coverage

expansions in the U.S., this data suggests that higher-end estimates of utilization rates under a single-payer system are misguided and net cost savings are quite likely.

On top of the potential system-wide net cost savings, Medicare for All would redistribute the burden of costs upward. Take the case of employer-sponsored insurance, the method by which roughly half of Americans get healthcare coverage.

As Berkeley economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez note, because they are both “quasi-mandatory” by law and essentially necessary, premium payments for employersponsored insurance are like private taxes.

By combining these private healthcare taxes with public taxes, we get a picture of what it would look like if the U.S. funded healthcare through taxes like other developed countries largely do. We also find that the U.S. private/ public tax system is currently quite regressive, with middle-class families paying the most in taxes as a percentage of income (around 40%) and the bottom 10% paying a higher percentage than the richest 400 Americans.

Medicare for All would get rid of private premiums, which effectively constitute a regressive tax called a poll tax, and replace them with formal, highly progressive taxes.

As a result, most people would pay less for healthcare under single-payer than under the current system, with the wealthy shouldering a greater bulk of the burden. This restructuring of healthcare payments alone could cut poverty by over 20%. (If you’re interested in seeing just how effective single-payer’s redistribution of costs could be, TaxJusticeNow.org allows you to model the effects of replacing private premiums with taxes.)

Why is single-payer better than a public option?

“Public option” is a loose term, so there’s not one public option plan to compare with Sanders’s Medicare for All single-payer plan.

The Kaiser Family Foundation, in fact, lists six

2020 Election Primer

different public option-esque plans proposed in the House during the 2019-2020 congressional session. But a few general things can be said about how public option proposals stack up against single-payer on policy grounds. Even the most robust public options would retain some private insurance competing with the public plan.

At best, then, a public option would maintain insurance churn, meaning less stability than single-payer, and would miss out on some of the greater efficiencies of single-payer due to more complex administration. By allowing rich people to opt-out and purchase better coverage, a public option would also lack the equality inherent in having everyone on one plan.

At worst, a public option could fail to guarantee universal coverage or perhaps even barely lower uninsurance levels. Moreover, public option proposals that keep cost-sharing measures in place would offer much less financial freedom than single-payer. If the policy argument for a public option doesn’t hold much weight, what about the political argument? Again, since there are plenty of different public option proposals, with different levels of political viability, the question most worth addressing here is “Why not push for Medicare for All?” Public option advocates point to the difficulty of pushing Medicare for All through a gridlocked, nonprogressive Congress and to the possibility of public backlash due to the disruption that Medicare for All would entail.

Given obstructionist Republicans, the political viability of Medicare for All hinges on sufficient Democratic backing and control of the government. Thus, the first point to note with regard to passing the plan through Congress is that the House version of Sanders’s Medicare for All bill is currently co-sponsored by the majority of House Democrats, meaning it has more than double the co-sponsors of the most popular public option bill. The groundwork for the passage of a public option, therefore, hasn’t been laid in the same way as it has for single-payer.

Electing a president (i.e. Bernie Sanders) who staunchly supports single-payer would put massive pressure on all Democrats to fall in line behind the plan.

It’s worth remembering that the current House version of Medicare for All has about double the Democratic co-sponsors the 2015-2016 congressional session version had, and that’s just after a strong progressive challenge to the establishment candidate in the 2016 presidential primary and a few new progressives winning seats in the House.

A couple more considerations strengthen the case for advocating directly for Medicare for All. First, basic negotiating logic dictates aiming high rather than low. Settling for a public option without first trying for Medicare for All is absurd by this logic. After all, advocacy for Medicare for All has already reoriented the party, making a public option the current compromise position.

Second, Medicare for All, which garners majority public support, would be an excellent central plank of a popular progressive agenda that could secure long-term Democratic control of the government.

The potential public backlash cited as a concern by public option advocates due to hiking taxes and switching people’s insurance plans seems pretty surmountable given that both the status quo and a public option would cost more and deliver less than Medicare for All and, in the long run, cause more people to lose their insurance.

Plus, tax hikes could be fairly minimal if singlepayer cuts costs effectively. Furthermore, the collective buy-in generated through Medicare for All’s universality would likely make the program durably popular and difficult to cut, similar to Social Security and Medicare.

The past electoral success of an economically progressive Democratic platform reinforces the idea that a powerful progressive wing could remedy insufficient near-term Democratic support for single-payer with progressive victories in future elections. Remember,

during the 36 years from FDR through LBJ, before Democrats underwent a neoliberal transformation, the Democratic Party held majorities in Congress for all but four years and the presidency for all but eight. In 2016, after decades of centrist control of the party, Democrats held “fewer elected offices nationwide than at any time since the 1920s,” and promptly lost that year’s presidential election to a clown. If anything, a progressive agenda with Medicare for All at its center would boost Democrats’ public support, facilitating increased Democratic power and better prospects for such an agenda’s passage.

For years, a national health insurance program was, in a sense, the unfinished business of the New Deal. The furthest Democrats made it in the decades following Harry Truman’s failed attempt to pass national health insurance legislation was Medicare and Medicaid. Not long after the passage of these programs, the Democratic Party swung rightward, the New Deal order crumbled, and progressive economic goals were largely removed from the table.

Finally, there’s a popular progressive agenda on offer more sweeping and inclusive than the New Deal itself, with Medicare for All positioned at its heart. With Bernie Sanders, the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, along with a growing number of legislators unapologetically championing this agenda, its chances of passing look better and better. So the question is: Why back down when we have a real shot at winning?

Conor Smyth ‘22 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at c.smyth@wustl.edu.

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