In a crowded field, no issue more spectacularly illustrates the failures of our political system than climate change. We are hurtling toward catastrophes that threaten the very existence of humankind, yet the matter is almost totally absent from political discourse. Donald Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address didn’t mention it. Neither did the official Democratic response. There are no fights being waged on climate policy in Congress; no government shutdowns based on it; no think pieces wondering whether Democrats should emphasize the environment over identity politics.

The reason for this is depressingly simple: polls show that the environment is a very low priority for most voters. And persuading them to care more is devilishly hard. Climate change is finely calibrated to thwart human psychology: the worst consequences—biblical flooding, widespread heat death, famine, unbreathable air—won’t be felt for decades, but avoiding them requires taking radical, society-altering actions right now. A stream of ever-more harrowing reports from scientists and journalists doesn’t seem to have jolted Americans out of their complacency, and we’re running out of time.

But what if persuasion is the wrong way of looking at it? What if the crux of the matter is not the people who don’t care enough, but the ones who already do?

In late 2013, a Democratic political operative named Nathaniel Stinnett noticed something odd about public opinion on the environment. Fresh off of managing a campaign to a painfully close loss in that year’s Boston mayoral election, Stinnett was looking over some polls that ranked political issues—the economy, national security, and so on—according to what percent of voters listed them as their highest priority. There were two rankings: one for all registered voters, and one for the subset who were likely to vote in the 2014 midterms.

As a seasoned campaign hand, Stinnett knew that politicians obsessively study opinion polls—but they care almost exclusively about likely voters. That’s why he was so struck by what he saw: the environment ranked much lower on the likely-voter poll, unlike other issues like immigration or abortion. That meant that people who listed it number one made up a smaller share of likely voters than of registered voters overall. They were, in other words, less likely than average to vote—up to 50 percent less likely, as Stinnett would later discover. He dug through other public opinion surveys and saw the same pattern. The stereotype of an environmentalist is someone deeply engaged in politics: the young Greenpeace volunteer gathering signatures on the sidewalk, the Birkenstock-wearing Baby Boomer who never misses a town hall meeting. But when it comes to voting, the stereotype is backward.

That may seem like yet another depressing data point. But to Stinnett, himself an environmentalist, it was actually great news, because it’s a lot easier to get someone to vote than to make them care about an Antarctic ice shelf. And it gave him an idea. If there were all these registered voters out there who already prioritized the environment, and simply weren’t voting, then the problem wasn’t really about persuasion; it was about turnout. The size of the gap between the two polls suggested that a potentially huge number of environmental voters, perhaps millions, were routinely sitting out elections. If he could find these people and get them to vote, Stinnett reasoned, they would start getting picked up in models of likely voters in future elections. The environment would climb higher in those likely-voter issue priority polls. Climb high enough, and politicians would start feeling that they can’t win without catering to environmentalists.

At the time, Stinnett and his wife were expecting their first child, and thinking hard about what kind of world she would grow up in. So Stinnett spent the next two years laying the groundwork for an organization that would take on the environmental turnout problem. In October 2015, he launched a nonprofit, the Environmental Voter Project (EVP). Traditional environmental activism includes turnout, but it centers around advocacy: coordinating rallies, lobbying elected officials, endorsing candidates, and the like. Stinnett wouldn’t bother with any of that. His organization would have exactly one objective: push environmentalists into the electorate, and trust politicians to respond in their own rational self-interest.

“There’s one thing you can always depend upon: politicians want to get reelected,” he says. “They will respond to the demand in the marketplace—just like if we drive 5,000 coffee drinkers to the door of Starbucks, they’re going to make more coffee.”

Electorally speaking, there are three main types of people in America: those who aren’t registered to vote; those who are registered and vote regularly; and those who are registered but don’t vote. The political process pays a good deal of attention to the first group—liberal and nonpartisan organizations spend millions of dollars every election cycle on voter registration drives and on lobbying to make registration easier. And both parties obsess over the second group, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on persuasion, messaging, and opinion research.

But the third group—the registered nonvoter—is largely ignored. Turnout is overwhelmingly the province of campaigns, and unless your campaign is especially well funded, contacting someone who is unlikely to vote is a risky use of limited resources.

“I’m not going talk to someone who occasionally votes,” says Dane Strother, a Democratic communication strategist, summarizing the attitude of a typical campaign. “I don’t have the time or the money. If you don’t vote, you don’t have a voice, and if you don’t have a voice, then we don’t care.”

Campaigns are built around winning the next election—not changing the electorate in the long term. But changing the long-term shape of the electorate is all Stinnett is focused on, and to do it, he’s bucking one of the most enduring features of U.S. politics. The system is set up to cater to people who voted in the last few elections. Unlikely voters are nearly invisible.

But, if Stinnett is right, they may be the key to saving the world.

What is an environmentalist?

I’m going to use Stinnett’s idiosyncratic definition: someone for whom the environment or climate change is a top political priority. This is important, because there’s a world of difference between preferences and priorities. Most Americans are already convinced that climate change is a problem. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll last summer, 72 percent said they want government to take aggressive action to stop global warming. But politically speaking, what Americans “think” doesn’t matter. The only opinions that count are the ones that drive voting decisions, and for most of that 72 percent, climate change simply doesn’t. “I would always work with great environmental candidates,” Stinnett says. “But it would have been malpractice if I told them to talk about an issue that voters didn’t care about.”

To change politicians’ incentives, Stinnett needed to flood the electorate not just with people who care about the environment, but with people who care about it more than just about anything else. (There’s some terminological fuzziness here, because not everyone who picks “the environment” on a poll means climate change—some people really care about pesticides or manatees. But there’s enough overlap that it makes sense to lump them together.) The first step was to come up with a way to identify every nonvoting environmentalist in a given state. The nonvoting part is standard practice among modern political practitioners. Your voting history is a matter of public record—not whom you vote for, but which elections you vote in. That history, plus other basic facts about you, has a lot of predictive power in future elections: if you voted in the 2014 midterms, you’ll probably vote in 2018 as well.

To figure out the environmentalist part, Stinnett hired Clarity Campaign Labs, a Democratic-leaning analytics firm, to build a predictive model, beginning in Massachusetts. They conducted thousands of phone surveys, asking people to rate their political priorities. Once they had a big enough sample of people who prioritized the environment, they matched it to a voter file—a list of names, addresses, and voting histories—that itself had been matched up with demographic and consumer data. That revealed correlations between personal information—like your age, what magazines you subscribe to, what stores you shop at—and political priorities. It’s akin to the way online advertisers use our browsing histories to figure out what we’re likely to buy.

Because the data sample is so big, the correlations have tremendous predictive value. The model, which is built anew for each state that the Environmental Voter Project expands into, assigns each registered voter a score from 0 to 100, representing the probability that they would pick environmental issues as a top priority. This allows Stinnett to isolate likely environmentalists, which he defines as people who score at least two and a half times higher than the average registered voter in their state. Then he zeroes in on the ones who are unlikely to vote in the next election. That’s his target group. (Technically, the EVP builds two models per state, using two different measurements of voter priorities, and combines the results to generate the target populations.)

Here’s what he has found. According to the model, environmentalists make up around 10 percent of registered voters nationwide—which tracks with recent public polling numbers. In any given election, however, their turnout rate lags between 10 and 20 points below the national average. Take November 2016, when there were 200 million registered voters nationwide and about 70 percent of them turned out. According to the model, there were 20.1 million registered environmentalists—but only half voted. If they had matched the overall turnout rate, they would have cast two million more ballots. The story was similar in the 2014 midterms. Turnout of registered voters was 44 percent, but among environmentalists it was only 21 percent. That meant more than fifteen million of them stayed home.

We can also zoom in on the swing states where the EVP has built state-level models from scratch. (The EVP expanded operations to five new states last year: Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, Colorado, and Nevada.) In Florida, about 547,000 registered environmentalists stayed home in 2016. Donald Trump’s margin of victory there was about 112,000 votes. In Pennsylvania, just under 300,000 environmentalists sat the election out; Trump won there by just over 44,000 votes. Both states have gubernatorial and senatorial elections this year, and because turnout is lower in midterms, the number of targets will be much higher than in 2016.

The failure of our government to deal with climate change is, of course, driven by the lunacy and cupidity of the Republican Party, which caters to funders like the Kochs and the Mercers by denying, as a matter of party orthodoxy, that the issue even exists. But while Stinnett’s background is in progressive politics, the EVP is rigidly nonpartisan. The group doesn’t endorse or criticize any particular candidate; it doesn’t tell people whom to vote for. “We’re not changing who makes the policy,” Stinnett says. “We’re just changing who votes, and trusting that politicians are going to continue to want to get reelected.”

This gives him two ways to win. In the short run, success most likely means helping Democrats win more elections in close races. (Predictably, environmentalists are much more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.) In the long run, it means convincing more Republicans that their best chance to beat Democrats is by appealing to environmental voters—just as many Democrats have long felt pressure to cater to the small but highly engaged bloc of pro-gun voters. In that sense, the EVP is the NRA of saving the environment.

No straw, please.”

This comment, directed to a waiter at an upscale pub in downtown Boston, is one of very few outward hints that Stinnett is an environmental nut. (It prompts a long conversation about the wastefulness of disposable straws.) Stinnett, who cut short a career as a professional opera singer to go to law school and get involved in politics, speaks in a warm, crisply enunciated baritone, a vestige of his stage training. Before launching the Environmental Voter Project, he had a day job as a land use attorney in Boston. In his spare time, he worked as a high-level volunteer for Democratic campaigns, including as treasurer for Martha Coakley’s 2010 U.S. Senate run campaign. With a gleaming shaved head and well-fitting business-casual clothes, he looks more like a management consultant than a tree hugger.

In fact, environmentalists generally don’t fit the stereotypes. Stinnett has found, for instance, that black, Hispanic, and Asian people are all more likely than white people to prioritize the environment. “I would go so far as to say that a Latina grandmother in Phoenix or a young African American man in Miami are now more likely to care about environmental issues than white hipsters in Portland,” he says. Some of the predictive factors are things you’d expect, like having a college degree. But others are head-scratchers. Are you a pro-basketball fan living in Massachusetts with an AOL email address, a fourteen-year-old kid, and no landline? Congratulations: you’re probably an environmentalist.

What Stinnett has not figured out is why so many environmentalists don’t vote. There’s no obvious demographic overlap that explains it. Within any given population slice, environmentalists almost always have a below-average turnout rate. When Stinnett surveyed a few hundred of them on a battery of civic participation–related questions, the always-voters and the never-voters gave identical answers.

For now, Stinnett says, he has “embraced the black box.” Ultimately, all that matters is pushing these people into the system. And to do that, it’s more important to know what makes people vote than what makes them not vote.

American elections present two puzzles of human behavior. The first puzzle, given our low participation rates compared to other wealthy democracies, is why so few people vote. But the second puzzle is why so many vote. In all but the smallest elections, you are a statistical lock to never affect the outcome. So why bother?

Early academic attempts to answer this question, in the 1950s, applied an economic framework called rational choice theory: the benefit of voting equals the probability of deciding the outcome, multiplied by its importance, minus the cost of voting. (Or, in English, you vote only when the prospect of tipping the election outweighs the hassle.) The obvious problem with that model is that the expected benefit will always be negative—you will never vote—because you’re generally more likely to get hit by a bus on the way to the polls than to cast the deciding ballot. How could the possibility of being the pivotal vote ever outweigh the cost?

A more satisfying explanation comes from more recent research applying the insights of behavioral psychology, particularly by a pair of political scientists named Alan Gerber and Donald Green. The biggest driver of voting, they have found, may be the pressure that comes from social norms. It’s about identity, not outcomes. Call it the “everyone else does it” theory of civic participation. In a study published in 2008, Gerber and Green sent letters to people in Michigan warning that whether they voted or not would be publicized to their neighbors. That led to dramatically higher turnout than the control group, blowing any other direct mail–based get-out-the-vote techniques out of the water. Another group was told that the researchers would be sending them—but not their neighbors—an updated chart of their voting history after the election. They didn’t vote at quite the same rate as the public-shaming group, but still showed a huge increase. Perhaps this was because they wanted to reassure the researchers that they were good people. Or perhaps they wanted to reassure themselves.

To most people, the postcard from the Environmental Voter Project would have looked unremarkable—a generic reminder that an election was coming up. But Amy Bucher is a behavioral psychologist. Her day job is to nudge people to develop better habits. When the card showed up last summer in her mailbox in Boston, Bucher recognized the work of a fellow practitioner.

The mailer used “textbook” behavioral psychology tactics to encourage voting, Bucher wrote on her blog. One nice touch: the recipient’s name was handwritten onto the card. In this case, the recipient was her husband, who, unlike Bucher, doesn’t always vote in nonpresidential elections. The back of the card mentioned “critical issues facing our environment.” Here was a bit of luck, Bucher thought: the environment just so happened to be a top priority for her and for her husband, who works in clean energy.

Of course, luck had nothing to do with it. The EVP had targeted her husband because he was an infrequent voter and its model said he prioritized the environment. But otherwise, Bucher was right. Stinnett and his team harness behavioral psychology, especially voting-related research, to run their GOTV operations—the heart of what they do day to day.

When I visited their offices in downtown Boston last October—a few desks in a no-frills coworking space, plus one tiny windowless office for Stinnett—the three-person team crowded around Stinnett’s desk to discuss a study of two different direct mail scripts. (Direct mail is one of several techniques they use, along with phone banking, in-person canvassing, texting, and targeted online video ads.) Both mailers included language declaring that turnout was expected to be above average in the upcoming election.

“Isn’t it dishonest to say every election’s turnout will be above average?” I asked.

There was a pause. Stinnett looked me in the eye.

“Yes,” he said, as the room broke into laughter. But it’s probably an effective lie. In another experiment, Alan Gerber and a colleague told one group of voters that turnout in an upcoming election was expected to be low, and another group that turnout was expected to be high. Then they asked them whether they intended to vote. Rational choice theory would predict the first group to say yes more than the second: the fewer other people participate, the higher your chances of making a difference. But the researchers found the opposite: the voters who were told turnout would be high ended up being much more likely to say they intended to vote, and this effect was most pronounced among infrequent voters. It was social pressure at work. The lesson: if you want to get unlikely voters to vote, tell them everyone else is doing it.

I spent one morning tagging along with Kate Donaghue, one of the EVP’s volunteers in Boston, knocking on doors in the Charlestown neighborhood ahead of the November citywide vote. It was a quiet election, in which turnout was expected to be low and the incumbent mayor, Marty Walsh, was assured a lopsided victory. That made it a perfect environment for the EVP. In a low-turnout race, there are by definition more unlikely voters to target. And getting someone to participate in one is the best way to get them included in future likely voter models. From a campaign’s perspective, the people who vote when everyone else stays home are the surest bets to turn out in the next election.

It was a weekday, so at most addresses Donaghue just left a flyer like the one Bucher got in the mail. But some people came to the door, like Peter Nowak, a retired university administrator wearing a Boston Latin sweatshirt. Donaghue began by asking if he was planning to vote. “Yes, absolutely,” he said, just like the other dozen or so people we spoke to that day—even though we knew, from their voting histories, that this was almost surely not true.

But Donaghue maintained complete ingenuousness. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” she said, holding out the flyer. “Would you be willing to sign this pledge card? It just says what you just told me—that you’re going to vote.”

Here was the trap. If Nowak signed the pledge in front of Donaghue, he would be publicly committing himself to voting. And the EVP would mail him the pledge card back shortly before the election to remind him of his promise. The card itself included a reminder that one’s voting history is a matter of public record. It was all designed to leverage social pressure. Each step of commitment dramatically raised the likelihood of eventually voting. The EVP sets aside a control group in every election: nonvoting environmentalists who don’t get contacted. This limits the potential turnout bump—which is why a campaign would never do it—but is essential for figuring out what works and what doesn’t. So far, they’ve found that people who sign a pledge card are 21 percent likelier to vote than the control group, compared to 14 percent for people who say they will vote but don’t sign.

(The EVP doesn’t go so far as to threaten to out nonvoters to their neighbors, which risks a backlash. But most of its direct mail includes a not-so-subtle warning: “We may follow up with you after the election to ask about your experience at the polls.”)

Nowak, like almost everyone Donaghue talked to, signed the card. (I later learned that Donaghue is a superstar canvasser. Other volunteers had a lower hit rate.) “Thank you for being a good voter,” Donaghue said before turning to go—a deliberate appeal to a sense of identity. A few weeks later, I called Nowak. Curious whether the EVP’s model was working, and without mentioning the environment or climate change, I asked him to name the political issue most important to him.

“I feel very strongly about the environment,” he replied. “I have adult children. I’m worried about, what kind of a world are they going to live in if the environment continues to get worse and worse?”

Then I asked about his voting habits. He said he “just about always” votes, but then admitted that that’s not so true in off-year elections—and that he might not have voted in the mayoral race if Donaghue hadn’t reminded him.

In January, Stinnett sent me results from the EVP’s work in last November’s elections. Unsurprisingly, the numbers were strongest in the Boston area, where the EVP combined remote outreach with in-person canvassing; nothing beats face-to-face interactions for boosting turnout. In Boston, turnout among the treatment group was 6.3 percent higher than the control. That may not sound like much, but in the world of get-out-the-vote it’s massive. It translates to 2,683 more environmental voters than would otherwise have voted, in a race in which total turnout was about 109,000—which means, if their numbers are correct, that the EVP was responsible for one out of every forty votes cast.

Elsewhere, where the EVP’s efforts didn’t include in-person canvassing, the results varied. In St. Petersburg, Florida, which had a contested mayoral race, the treatment group saw a 4.5 percent bump—a striking result for an operation done entirely remotely. (Alan Gerber, the political scientist, has written that a “typical non-partisan mailer increases turnout by less than 0.5 percentage points.”) In Atlanta’s hotly contested mayoral race, meanwhile, the EVP raised turnout by a more modest 2.8 percent. But even that meant adding 955 voters to the electorate. In December, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms would go on to win the runoff by only 821 votes.

What excites Stinnett more than the results of any one election is what may be happening to the treatment groups over time. The EVP tracked one group of targeted environmentalists in Massachusetts for four elections over the course of a year. By the end, the group was turning out a full 12 percent more than the control group. Stinnett hypothesizes that this cumulative effect is the result of campaigns spotting new likely voters and adding them to their GOTV efforts. Once the EVP nudges someone to vote in an election, especially a low-turnout one, that person goes from being invisible to campaigns to having the equivalent of a flashing sign next to their name in the voter file. Whatever the exact mechanism, the results align with another study by Gerber and a colleague that found that “voting in one election substantially increases the likelihood of voting in the future.”

Twelve percent of the environmentalists who didn’t turn out in 2016 would have been more than a million votes. But that’s a long way from where the EVP is now. In 2018, Stinnett says, the organization has identified 3.05 million environmentalists in six states who are very unlikely to vote, and will be targeting about 2.4 million of them. (The rest go into control groups.) Most of that will be through direct mail, online ads, and texting, because door-to-door canvassing, which requires boots on the ground, is much harder and more expensive to scale up. Extrapolating from his 2017 results, Stinnett expects to add “anywhere from 67,000 to 108,000 new environmental voters to the electorate,” depending on whether the results are more like Atlanta or more like St. Petersburg.

Eventually, Stinnett hopes to expand to all the states in which there are currently enough nonvoting environmentalists to make a real difference—probably just under half of states.

“The ultimate goal is to put ourselves out of business,” he says. “If our data shows that there’s no longer a significant environmental voter problem, well—the world doesn’t need another environmental lobbying organization or another endorsement group.”

Stinnett’s plan to save the world from climate change depends on a somewhat stylized theory of policymaking. Likely voters tell pollsters what their top issues are; pollsters tell politicians; and politicians respond to that revealed demand by supplying or emphasizing policies that cater to it.

This account leaves out other ways in which politicians take the temperature of their base. Republican legislators have to keep up with Fox News and talk radio. Officials from both parties pay attention to what they hear from constituents who show up to town hall meetings and protests.

More importantly, Stinnett’s plan seems to ignore two other drivers of politician behavior: money and ideology. Policy formation is far from a perfectly efficient market. Lawmakers cater to the desires of major donors and lobbyists, and they also enter office with ideological commitments—things they actually believe in. Both these factors were on high-profile display last year, as congressional Republicans voted for a deeply unpopular tax bill, and almost passed an even more unpopular Obamacare repeal.

Stinnett isn’t really so naive. In fact, his worldview could be described as idealistic cynicism: he believes politicians will so predictably try to maximize their chances of reelection that they will inevitably take action on climate change if they believe their seat depends on it. He’s not trying to fix the system; he’s trying to exploit it.

“Politicians go where the votes are,” he says. “We can always depend on politicians to poll likely voters, and nothing motivates a politician more than the prospect of winning an election.” The health care and tax cut votes were remarkable precisely because of how unusual it is to see lawmakers vote against their own apparent self-interest. “Yes, donors drive policy. But the only thing that money buys is votes.” The way to neutralize the power of big money is to convince politicians that there are more votes to be gained by defying donors than by obeying them.

And while ideology is real, there is no end to the examples of high-profile politicians reversing themselves on major issues when enough votes appear to be on the line. Recall Barack Obama on gay marriage, Hillary Clinton on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Mitt Romney on pretty much everything. Veteran politicians change long-held positions all the time to survive.

Those who don’t tend to end up like Bob Inglis. Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, lost his seat to a primary challenge from Trey Gowdy during the Tea Party wave of 2010. His departures from right-wing orthodoxy had been several—supporting comprehensive immigration reform, voting for the bank bailout—but his “most enduring heresy,” as he puts it, “was saying climate change is real and let’s do something about it.” Today, he runs republicEn, a nonprofit that advocates for free-market solutions to climate change.

I recently asked Inglis to describe the role that issue polls play for members of Congress. “You go to a Republican conference meeting,” he said, “and there’s a good pollster there who’s telling you what the top issues are” among likely voters—especially likely primary voters. That helps the members decide what issues to emphasize.

“Campaign cash is helpful, but the most important thing is the level of the tide,” Inglis continued. In the 1970s, for instance, a candidate could have made Taiwan a central campaign issue, “because there was a high tide of fear about the red scare and Communists. But if you’re running in 2018, I’d tell you it is dead low tide on Taiwan. The Kochs and the Mercers could give you all the money you wanted; you couldn’t win on Taiwan.”

What Stinnett is trying to do, then, is raise the tide on the environment—at worst, to make it safe for politicians to talk about it, and at best, to make it dangerous for them to ignore it.

“If you flood the electorate with a bunch of people who really care about environmental issues, that will drive policy,” he says. “Or the politicians won’t get reelected. It is that simple.”

We understand much more clearly today why people vote than we did back in the days of rational choice theory. But the thing about behavioral psychology explanations is that they still don’t explain how voting can be rational. “Everyone else does it” may describe our unconscious motivation, but, as parents throughout history have reminded their teenage children, it’s not very logical.

There actually is a rational, self-interested reason to vote—it’s just not the one the rational choice theorists imagined. We tend to assume that voting is purely transactional: we cast a ballot to pick the winner. Stinnett’s insight is that voting is not merely, or even meaningfully, a transaction. It’s more like a dialogue. When you vote, you declare that you’re likely to vote again in the future, which increases the chances of future candidates paying attention to your opinions and priorities. That, not the infinitesimal chance of affecting the outcome of the election, is the rational, self-interested reason to vote.

And it applies to every election. If voting were just a transaction, then in our winner-take-all system, your vote would be wasted whether the final margin was fifty votes or 50,000. But from the perspective of joining the political conversation, your vote always has marginal value. No matter how small or uncompetitive an election is, you are adding to the aggregate demand for action on the things you care about.

“That person who never misses an election, they drive policy in this country,” Stinnett says. “Obviously, it’s important who wins. But regardless of who wins—even if you go into the polling booth and write your dog’s name—simply by announcing that you’re a regular voter, you become part of a very small and select group that policymakers care about.”

The failure of our national leaders to take climate change seriously may be both cause and consequence of environmentalists’ low voting rates: if neither candidate talks about the issue you care most about, you may see less reason to participate. But if you don’t participate, then candidates will see less reason to talk about your issue.

It’s a vicious cycle, but it’s up to voters, not politicians, to break it. Someone who sits out the democratic process because leaders have the wrong priorities is drawing the exact wrong conclusion.

“At a very deep level, many Americans obviously have a very cynical approach to politics,” Stinnett says. “But they never internalize it to a point where they realize that politicians follow more than they lead. Take your cynicism one step further.”

It’s fair to have contempt for politicians who take their cues from opinion polling rather than what’s best for the country. But since we know they do, there’s no excuse for not using it to our advantage. Our political life is besieged by anti-democratic distortions—big money, gerrymandering, nihilistically partisan right-wing media—that threaten to swallow the system whole. But they haven’t yet, quite. On climate change, as with so many other issues that bedevil us, votes are still the most powerful weapon we’ve got.

The post Planet Earth Gets a Ground Game appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A few weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration, while most Democrats were still reeling from the 2016 election, David Reid was preparing to run for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates. It was his first foray into politics. The district had gone for Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama before her, but the Republican incumbent had kept his seat since 2009.

Reid, a defense contractor and retired U.S. Navy officer, was born into poverty in the mountains of western Virginia. But he had come a long way since then. Virginia House District 32 sits in Loudoun County, a sprawling Washington, D.C., exurb that for the past ten years has had the highest median income in the nation. When Reid looked around at the district he sought to represent, a few things stood out. One was nightmarish traffic, the result of a recent population boom. (Transportation would feature prominently among Reid’s campaign issues.) Another was a stunning demographic shift. Loudoun County’s growth over the past three decades has been driven in part by Asian Americans, who have flocked there to work for AOL and other tech companies that have set up shop in the area. Today 18 percent of the district’s residents are Asian American. Nearly half of those are Indian American; between 1990 and 2010, the number of Indian Americans in the county grew by a factor of fifty. Drive past a park on a summer evening, and you’ll see cricket matches under way—the Loudoun County Cricket League has forty-eight teams and more than 1,200 players.

Reid realized that he would need to win over Asian American voters to carry the district—as he eventually did, part of a 2017 blue wave that was bolstered by higher-than-expected Asian turnout statewide. He visited the local Sikh gurdwara, ate iftar dinner at the mosque, and had an Indian friend join him canvassing Asian American households. During this time, he started noticing a strange pattern: an unusual number of these voters were former Republicans. “Going door to door,” he said, “I met an Indian woman who said, ‘I used to vote Republican, but I can’t anymore. I’m voting for you.’ And then I went two or three doors down and, talking to a Pakistani gentleman, he told me almost the same thing.”

Reid had stumbled upon one of the most overlooked transformations in American politics: the overwhelming leftward shift of Asian American voters. In 1992, the first year that exit polls specifically tracked Asian Americans—an umbrella term referring to anyone with ancestry from East Asia, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent—55 percent of them supported George H. W. Bush over Bill Clinton. Eight years later, Al Gore became the first Democrat to win a majority of Asian American votes, and by 2012, the group favored Obama over Mitt Romney by almost 75 to 25. And the trend seems to be accelerating. More than a quarter of Asian American Republicans have abandoned the GOP since 2011, by far the largest shift of any demographic group. At the same time, the Asian American share of the population has doubled since 1990 to 6 percent overall.

The GOP’s increased nativism after 9/11 has long been a turnoff for Asian Americans, even before Donald Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower in June 2015. Trump has spent the better part of three years fear-mongering about undocumented immigrants—one out of six of whom is Asian. Asian Americans are the biggest beneficiaries of family reunification policies, which Trump and other prominent Republicans have taken to bashing as “chain migration.” (Family reunification is how nearly all Vietnamese and Bangladeshi immigrants have come to America.) Asian Americans might not be the direct target of Trump’s disdain as often as Hispanics, but the modern Republican Party’s increasingly overt hostility to nonwhite immigration can’t help but push them away.

All of which is good news for Democrats. But here’s the problem: Asian Americans have among the lowest voting rates of any racial group in America—49 percent of eligible voters, in 2016, compared to 65 percent among white people and 60 percent among black people. Not coincidentally, they also are less likely to be contacted by parties and campaigns. “Democrats are leaving a lot of votes on the table,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and an expert in political demography. “They don’t need 100 percent Asian turnout, but if Asians could come close to what whites vote at, or even blacks, it could have a big difference.”

True, Asian Americans still make up only 4 percent of eligible voters. But they are the fastest-growing racial group in the country and increasingly vote as a Democratic bloc. In other words, Democrats’ failure to mobilize them has been a major missed opportunity for the party. As the Asian American population booms, and as state and national elections continue to be decided by the slimmest of margins, correcting that failure will only become more urgent.

Until not too long ago, Asian Americans were a negligible slice of the electorate that both parties could ignore with virtually no electoral consequences. Chinese laborers flocked to California in the mid-1800s for grueling, low-wage jobs laying down railroad tracks. These migrants were scapegoated for a souring economy—seventeen Chinese Americans were shot and lynched in Los Angeles in 1871—and in 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the country’s first restriction on immigration. Eighty years later, Asians were just half of 1 percent of all Americans.

Then, as the civil rights movement surged, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, ending long-standing immigration quotas that had favored Europeans and severely limited the number of Asian immigrants. In the 1960s, the number of Asian Americans shot past one million. Today, there are more than twenty-one million.

Most of these immigrants initially flocked to the coasts. In 1990, 60 percent of Asian Americans lived in just three states: California, New York, and Hawaii. But this extreme geographic clustering is changing. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of Asian Americans grew by 72 percent, far more than any other racial group, and the areas with the fastest growth are also some of the most important battleground states for Democrats. The three states with the fastest-growing Asian American populations are Nevada, Arizona, and North Carolina, swing states that are trending Democratic, with urban and suburban congressional districts ripe for Democrats to pick up on the way to a House majority. Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida have all seen their Asian American populations grow by more than 80 percent since 2010.

Of course, it’s crucial for Democrats to turn out Latinos, especially in places like Florida and Arizona. But while there are far more Latinos nationwide, Asian Americans nearly match them in a number of swing states—Michigan and Ohio, for example—and reddish-purple states like Missouri and Georgia. There were hardly any Asian Americans in Cincinnati when my parents, Indian immigrants, settled there in 1991. But in 2016, bolstered by a strong community of Asian Americans, a young lawyer of Tibetan and Indian descent named Aftab Pureval became the first Democratic clerk of Hamilton County in more than 100 years. Now he’s running a promising campaign to unseat U.S. Representative Steve Chabot, the Republican incumbent.

Still, Asian Americans’ democratic participation badly lags behind their rising demographic presence. In North Carolina, for example, the number of Asian Americans registered to vote increased 130 percent between 2006 and 2014. But in the 2014 midterms, just 27 percent of those registered Asian Americans voted. The problem of low Asian voter turnout is deeply entrenched. Since voting-eligible Asian Americans are disproportionately immigrants, they tend to be less tuned in to American politics than your average voter and less plugged in to the broader community. For some new citizens who fled countries with an unsavory authoritarian past, voting and democracy itself can be foreign.

Compounding the problem is the fact that campaigns generally aren’t doing the work to engage with Asian voters. According to a survey following the 2016 campaign, only 29 percent of Asian Americans said that they had been contacted by a political party, compared to 44 percent of whites. This is not illogical—campaigns must devote resources to people who are more likely to reward them by actually voting—but it sacrifices long-term party building for short-term success. “If you’re not on the voter rolls, and you’ve never participated before, you don’t even get a door knock,” said Shekar Narasimhan, an Indian immigrant and the founder of the AAPI Victory Fund, the first Super PAC for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. “Asian Americans rarely are approached.” And while Asian Americans lean left overall, a Democratic campaign will still be apprehensive about engaging with individuals who don’t have a voting history. (The very last thing a campaign wants is to activate someone who ultimately supports the opponent.) The end result is a vicious cycle in which non-voting Asian Americans rarely receive the nudge that could push them to the ballot box on election day. Low voting rates beget low voting rates.

Engaging with Asian Americans is bound to be more logistically complicated than for other groups. A third of Asian American voters have limited English proficiency, a major barrier to voting and engagement. And while no racial group is monolithic, the category “Asian American” is absurdly broad. There are eleven countries in Southeast Asia alone, and dozens more across East and South Asia. Asian Americans speak at least forty different languages. As a whole, they are the wealthiest and most highly educated racial group, but that masks jarring differences. While 70 percent of Indian Americans hold a bachelor’s degree, for example, Cambodians and Laotians have lower high school graduation rates than African Americans and Latinos. Any term that applies equally to someone from Seoul or Islamabad is going to paper over major differences.

Yet despite that cultural heterogeneity, what is most politically striking about Asian American subgroups is their similarity to each other. South Asians—Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis—lean more Democratic than East and Southeast Asians, but, in 2016, every Asian American subgroup preferred Clinton to Trump. (Pacific Islanders, another demographic that often gets grouped with Asian Americans, also lean Democratic. There are about 1.3 million Pacific Islanders in the U.S.) On the issues, Asian Americans are especially united behind liberal economic positions such as tax increases for the rich and a more activist government. Even Vietnamese Americans, who were once bound to the GOP by a shared anticommunism, now favor the Democrats.

Democrats are belatedly realizing the importance of Asian American voters. Hillary Clinton’s campaign had dedicated political directors focused on engaging with Asian Americans. In Las Vegas, the campaign brought in celebrities like actress Constance Wu and comedian Margaret Cho to help register voters. Clinton won the Asian vote by nearly as wide of a margin as Obama did in 2012, even as blacks and Latinos peeled away from the Democratic coalition in 2016. Nine members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus spoke at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, the first time a group of Asian American elected officials spoke at a party’s national convention.

Ahead of 2018, the Democratic National Committee has a team of staffers focused on engaging with Asian Americans, and New York Congresswoman Grace Meng, a party vice chair, is leading efforts to beef up get-out-the-vote initiatives in key states. In last year’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, the DNC hired organizers who specifically targeted potential Asian American voters. “The plan now is to scale that, and to ramp up our engagement efforts everywhere,” said Vedant Patel, a DNC spokesman.

Outside organizations are also pitching in. The nonprofit Asian Pacific Islander American Vote, or APIAVote, has twenty regional trainings planned across the country to teach volunteers and community leaders how to engage with Asian Americans. “We teach everything from voter registration to get-out-the-vote to electoral protections,” said Christine Chen, the group’s executive director. “Basically, how to engage an AAPI voter—it’s different for Hmong voters in Minnesota versus Filipinos in Nevada.”

Democrats hoping to increase the rate of Asian American turnout would be wise to pay attention to the one state that seems to have it figured out. Nevada and Virginia are the two battleground states with enough Asian Americans to have already gotten politicians’ attention. But while just 44 percent of eligible Asian voters turned out in Nevada in 2016, a full 70 percent voted in Virginia, by far the most nationwide, and double the rate in New York.

Between 2008 and 2015, the number of eligible Asian American and Pacific Islander voters in Virginia grew by 176 percent, helping drive the state’s leftward shift. These voters are clustered in the northern part of Virginia, in D.C. suburbs like Loudoun County—where David Reid won his state house race in November—and bordering Fairfax County, where a third of the state’s Asian Americans live.

The effort to turn out Asian American progressives in Virginia ultimately comes back to one group: the Democratic Asian Americans of Virginia (DAAV). “We focus on three things,” said Dewita Soeharjono, the organization’s chair. “Educating Asian voters about the political process, empowering them to run for office, and electing Democrats.”

Democratic campaigns provide DAAV, which became an arm of the Virginia Democratic Party in 2013, with lists of eligible Asian American voters. Then the group, with a phalanx of hundreds of volunteers speaking a variety of languages, targets those voters by phone banking and campaigning door to door. “One of my friends who tags along with me speaks Vietnamese, but doesn’t like to door-knock himself,” said Soeharjono, who immigrated from Indonesia. “There are times when he has to speak. It’s much easier to connect with someone who can speak your language.”

Northern Virginia, where DAAV focuses its efforts, has a substantial number of older voters with limited English proficiency. So the group prepares sample ballots and pamphlets in multiple languages, and has volunteers pass them out at community festivals, such as the annual Korean festival each autumn in Chantilly, Virginia, which attracted 30,000 people last year. Weeks before the November 2017 election, DAAV organized a Diwali celebration for gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam, and helped him court voters by writing op-eds in Asian American newspapers. Northam would go on to win in a landslide, buoyed by higher-than-expected turnout among minorities, including Asians.

“In the beginning, Democrats in Virginia didn’t really care about Asian voters,” Soeharjono said. “But then, as the demographics have changed, they see it now. We really have power to mobilize the community.”

The biggest mistake Democrats can make, as Asian Americans shift to the left, is to take them for granted. Their partisan attachment is still precarious. Seven in ten Asian Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, but just 36 percent identify as Democrats, compared to 70 percent of blacks and 47 percent of Latinos.

“Democrats have worked for women, for blacks, for Hispanics,” said Shien Biau Woo, the former Democratic lieutenant governor of Delaware. Woo, who immigrated from China in the 1950s, has made a habit of talking bluntly of the need for Asians to vote as a bloc. “But Democrats have never worked for Asian Americans.” They may come to regret it. The Republican National Committee has a group of staffers across the country focused on targeting Asian Americans and has hosted training sessions in battleground states. Republicans have been eager to weaponize the “model minority” stereotype to win over Asian voters on wedge issues like affirmative action. In California, a bill to end the state’s affirmative action ban was scrapped after conservatives joined forces with riled-up Asian American activists, who see affirmative action as anti-Asian discrimination. The announcement by Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department last year that it would investigate Harvard’s use of race in admissions could be similarly calculated to curry favor with Asian voters.

Meanwhile, a crop of new Republican groups is hoping to draw Asian Americans back to the party. A few weeks before the presidential election, Trump headed to Edison, New Jersey, for a rally with Indian Americans hosted by the Republican Hindu Coalition, a group founded by GOP mega-donor Shalabh Kumar and chaired by Newt Gingrich. The event featured B-list Bollywood actors performing a dance in which they mimed being attacked by jihadis and saved by Navy SEALs. It culminated with Trump—perhaps intoxicated by the wafting aroma of samosas—gleefully announcing that he’s “a big fan of Hindu.”

Examples like this suggest that the Asian American vote is Democrats’ to lose. And they could see the results of cultivating it as early as this November. “Midterms have not been great for Asian American turnout,” said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy professor at UC Riverside who studies the political preferences of Asian Americans. “If Democrats are banking on higher-than-usual turnout, they’re going to have to invest more in these communities.” Nowhere is this clearer than in California, where any viable path for Democrats to win the House must begin. The seat of retiring Congressman Ed Royce, in Orange County—the historical hotbed of genteel West Coast conservatism—has been dominated by Republicans for decades. The district, 30 percent Asian American, is a prime target for Democrats. Congresswoman Mimi Walters’s nearby district is a quarter Asian American, while Dana Rohrabacher’s is nearly 20 percent. Both are highly vulnerable. Even in Georgia, Karen Handel, who edged Democrat Jon Ossoff in a special election last June, is in the hot seat again this fall, and her constituency is more than 10 percent Asian American. Asian turnout could also prove critical in Senate races in Nevada, Arizona, and Texas, where Democrats’ long-shot battle to steal back control of the Senate will likely be decided.

The reason to invest in Asian American turnout isn’t just for electoral gains in 2018 (or even 2020). The Democratic Party desperately needs to be thinking beyond the prospect of unseating Trump, to building the type of durable coalition that will deliver victories a decade or even a generation from now. In Virginia, Asian Americans will make up 15 percent of the state’s eligible voters when today’s high school freshmen reach middle age. Peek at the social science and you’ll quickly learn that voting is habit-forming—vote once, and you’re about 50 percent more likely to vote again. And voters’ partisan allegiance tends to cement in early adulthood. It’s easy to ignore Asian Americans—they’re still a relatively small part of the electorate and can be hard to reach—but the work that Democrats put in now to turn nonvoting Asian Americans into a reliable part of the Democratic coalition could pay dividends for decades.

“If Democrats show up, and Asian Americans get to know the party and have contacts with the party, that’ll pay off over the longer run for sure,” said Ruy Teixeira, the political scientist. “But you can’t reap that harvest unless you’re there at the beginning of the growing season.”

The post The Untapped Potential of the Asian Voter appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Obamacare has taken a licking but keeps on ticking. The prospect of repeal died on the Senate floor. Republican efforts to roll it back continue, but the bulk of the program is still in place and unlikely to go anywhere. Virginia appears, as of this writing, on the way to expanding Medicaid, and other states will likely follow. Thanks mostly to the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, some eighteen million more people have health insurance today than when Obamacare went into effect, cutting the uninsured population nearly in half.

But while progress has been made on expanding access, another problem keeps getting worse: the soaring cost of health care for those who get their insurance through their employers. For these folks—who make up the majority of middle-class, working-age Americans—the ever-rising costs of premiums, deductibles, and co-pays has turned into a full-blown crisis.

Take a median-income family of four whose members are covered by a standard employer-sponsored plan. Last year, the amount that hospitals, doctors, and other providers charged to treat such a family reached an average of $26,944, according to the Milliman Medical Index—nearly $9,000 higher than in 2010, when the ACA was enacted. Families typically paid about a fifth of that difference directly in the form of increased premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. Who exactly paid how much of the rest is not certain, but it’s axiomatic among economists that employees bear most if not all of the cost of employer-sponsored health care. To employers, health insurance is just a form of employee compensation. When the cost goes up, they typically respond by cutting back on raises and other benefits.

To put this in perspective, the hit to middle-class families with employer-sponsored insurance has been roughly the same as if the government had imposed a 4.5 percent payroll tax increase beginning in 2010. No wonder, then, that four in ten adults with health insurance now say they have difficulty meeting the cost of their premiums and deductibles, according to Kaiser Family Foundation tracking polls, and another 31 percent say they have difficulty covering the cost of co-payments.

Obamacare didn’t cause this crisis—in fact, relative to wages, the rate of medical inflation in the employer-provided market was substantially higher before the law. Nor is the rising cost of employer-provided health insurance the result of Obamacare forcing hospitals and other providers to shift costs on to nongovernmental, or commercial, payers, as some Republicans assert. Instead, as we shall see, it’s mostly the result of monopolistic hospitals engaging in price discrimination as they exploit their increasing market power over private purchasers of health care.

But it’s easy to understand why many people with commercial insurance feel that the law has made them worse off. In their experience, Congress passed the ACA and now they pay much more for health care. Adding to the grievance of many middle-class Americans is the fact that, even as their own costs have gone up and their choice of doctors has narrowed, millions more lower-income people are now paying little or nothing thanks to the expansion of Medicaid.

Fortunately, there’s a straightforward way to attack this middle-class affordability problem. The Affordable Care Act dramatically tightened existing price controls on health care purchased by the federal government. It did so by setting fee schedules for how much doctors and hospitals can charge Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health care programs for performing specific services or, in some cases, treating specific conditions. Similar price controls apply to Medicare Advantage Plans, under which private insurers are allowed to contract with providers at Medicare prices.

These cost controls save the government roughly enough money each year to fund the entire Defense Department. At a time when the price of health care paid for by commercial insurance has been increasing two to three times faster than the wages earned by most Americans, the price of health services delivered through the federal programs—which account for 37 percent of all health care bills—has actually been declining relative to the average wage.

The answer to the most pressing aspect of our health care crisis is simply to apply these cost controls to commercial plans as well. For a typical middle-class family, such a move, if enacted today, would drop the total price of health care by about a third in the first year, without having to pass any new taxes and without forcing anyone to change their health care plan. Proof of concept comes from the fact that we already do this for everyone covered by Medicare and Medicaid. You’ve heard of single-payer. This is the case for single-price.

To show why direct cost controls are the best fix for our broken health care system, we need to get straight on what’s causing the crisis.

You might assume that Americans are just getting older and sicker—but that’s not it. The increasing number of old people has accounted for only about a tenth of the rise in health care spending since the late 1990s, according to consensus estimates. And while risk factors like obesity and opioid abuse have gotten more prevalent, their effect on spending has been more than offset by other trends, especially the dramatic decline in smoking and related heart disease.

Another theory is that Americans consume too much health care. But we actually don’t see more doctors, or receive more scans or surgeries, than our counterparts in other advanced countries. We spend dramatically fewer days in hospitals than we used to, and seek out less routine preventive care, thanks to the rise of high-deductible plans and narrower provider networks. Overall, the typical American’s utilization of health care has been flat since the mid-1990s.

So what’s driving the relentless increase in health care spending? In the words of a seminal 2003 research paper published in Health Affairs, “It’s the Prices, Stupid.” Study after study has found that the biggest reason Americans pay more per person for care than the residents of any other advanced country is simply that the same pill or treatment costs dramatically more in the United States.

Most people are well aware of the inflated price of prescription drugs in the U.S. But drugs account for only about 10 percent of health care spending. By far the largest source of medical inflation is the increasing cost of medical services. A report by the International Federation of Health Plans shows, for example, that in Australia, hospital and physician charges for an appendectomy typically came to around $3,800 in 2015; in the U.S., the same operation cost $16,000 on average, and often far more. Giving birth will cost you around $2,000 in Spain, but a normal delivery in the U.S. costs an average of $11,000—and more than $18,000 in the most expensive hospitals.

For people with commercial insurance, it keeps getting worse. On the current course, by 2024, the increase in price for a typical middle-class family of four with employer coverage will be equivalent to another increase in the payroll tax—this time of 4.8 percent. That’s on top of the 4.5 percent of wage income lost to medical inflation during the Obama years, and the 7.3 percent lost under George W. Bush. By 2028, the total annual health care hit will come to $44,000 per family.

How did this happen?

A major, underappreciated reason is that in most markets, medical providers have merged with each other to the point that they effectively operate as local monopolies. According to the standard metric used by the Federal Trade Commission, not a single “highly competitive” hospital market remains in any region of the United States. A full 40 percent of all hospital stays now occur in areas where a single entity controls all hospitals. Another 20 percent occur in regions where only two competitors remain. The result is that when an insurer or employer wants to create a health care plan, they have to negotiate with providers who dictate their own prices.

Where health care consolidation is strongest, hospital prices run roughly 20 percent higher than in markets where some real competition remains. Since we first wrote about the phenomenon in these pages (“After Obamacare,” January/February 2014), a vast literature has grown up confirming that monopoly in health care is a major factor pushing up prices for Americans not covered by Medicare or Medicaid.

What would happen if we just took the single measure of applying Medicare prices to all commercial health insurance—and did nothing else? According to a study by the Congressional Budget Office, the price for a one-day hospital stay is 89 percent higher when charged to commercial insurance plans and their customers than when a Medicare patient stays in the same bed for the same amount of time. Overall, the discounts Medicare and Medicaid receive are in the 20 to 40 percent range. Thus, if done at a stroke, the first-order effect of imposing Medicare prices universally would be to reduce the price of the health care received by a typical family by about one-third. That would translate into annual savings of about $9,000 today, and much more over time. The savings would still be substantial even if we implemented the plan in phases to ease the transition.

Wouldn’t “Medicare prices for all” cause massive disruption across the health care sector? Yes, but in a good way. Importantly, hospitals that disproportionately serve low-income and elderly patients—typically found in rural or poor, urban locations—would be the least affected. That’s because they already know how to break even or even earn a surplus at Medicare and Medicaid prices. Unable to pass inflated costs along to patients with commercial insurance, they’ve had to learn to be more efficient.

The same is true more generally of hospitals that lack monopoly power. Studies show that hospitals with real competition in their local markets have found ways to lower costs to the point that they can get by on Medicare prices. These hospitals might even welcome a move to universal Medicare prices because it would help level the playing field with monopolistic competitors when it comes to recruiting and retaining doctors.

It would be a different story, though, for hospital systems that have been living high off their ability to extract monopoly prices from commercially insured patients. These hospitals will scream that they are already losing money on every Medicare and Medicaid patient, and that unless they are able to inflate the prices they charge commercial payers, they will go broke. But the reason they lose money on Medicare and Medicaid patients is that their costs are too high. And the reason their costs are too high is that they don’t need to cut them so long as they can gouge commercial payers—which, as monopolies or near monopolies, they can. The majority of these hospitals are classified as nonprofits, so the revenue from their high prices doesn’t even have to go back to shareholders. Instead, it turns into inflated salaries for administrators, lucrative contracts for specialists, and, often, giant building projects. In order to survive on Medicare prices, they would have to become much more efficient and cost conscious.

Meanwhile, going to a “Medicare prices for all” system would also help to structure the market for health insurance in ways that promote the public interest. For one, once you eliminate all the haggling and gamesmanship involved in setting different complicated fee schedules for patients on different plans, much of the administrative cost in health care vanishes. For another, since all employers would pay the same amount for health care, eliminating price discrimination would shrink the advantage large employers have when it comes to attracting workers by offering generous plans.

Moreover, large insurance companies would no longer have any advantage over smaller ones in negotiating contracts with providers. That, in turn, would encourage new companies to enter the health insurance business and actually compete over who can deliver the most value at a given price. This would mean developing plans that optimize choice, easy access, integrated care, and expanded benefits like gym memberships and discounted drug prices. These perks are already commonly offered under Medicare Advantage Plans, which all pay the same prices for care and must therefore find more creative ways to compete for customers.

Could we be sure that all these savings would get passed on to average Americans? Provisions in the Affordable Care Act already require insurers to spend 80 to 85 percent of premium dollars on medical care, thus ensuring that the lower prices couldn’t be turned into higher profits and salaries for insurance companies and their executives. That leaves open the question of whether employers would pass along savings to employees. In a truly competitive labor market, there is no reason to believe they wouldn’t. But, of course, labor markets today are often noncompetitive, due to factors ranging from industry consolidation to the fading power of unions. To make sure that employers shared the savings with employees, a new law might include a requirement that existing employer-sponsored plans cut premiums, deductibles, and co-pays in line with the reductions in health care prices.

In normal markets, price controls are seldom a good idea. But health care is not a normal market. Purchasers, whether consumers, insurers, or employers, have a hard time evaluating the quality of medical services, for example. There are also all kinds of agency problems involved with so much care being purchased with other people’s money, and a moral problem involved with the fact that a large and increasing share of the population can’t afford to pay the price of their own health care. And that’s all before you get to the problem of industry consolidation. In highly concentrated, opaque health care markets, administered prices are the only real alternative to prices dictated by the fiat of monopolists.

These are the reasons why literally every other developed country in the world uses administered prices in health care, including countries that rely on privately owned hospitals and entrepreneurial doctors. And it’s why their use in the Medicare and Medicaid programs has been successful in containing cost inflation while predatory pricing prevails everywhere else in the increasingly cartelized U.S. health care sector.

Getting legislation passed to allow the federal government to set prices directly may sound far-fetched, but it’s likely more politically doable than you might think. Just as Obamacare made it through Congress in part because key sectors of the health care industry came to see it as advantageous, so too with a single-price system.

Ending price discrimination would liberate insurers, employers, and other large purchasers of health care from the growing monopoly power of their “suppliers.” It would also establish new opportunities for insurers to expand into local markets and take on entrenched incumbent players, including both monopolistic providers and monopolistic insurers. The single-price plan also preserves a role for a private health insurance industry, albeit one more like those found in France and Germany, where the government sets the prices and private-sector insurers compete over who can provide the best service.

Meanwhile, hospitals that have already learned how to reduce costs enough to make a living on Medicare prices would have reason to support the idea. They would stand a better chance of attracting and retaining doctors if they didn’t have to match the inflated pay scales offered by monopolistic institutions living off inflated commercial prices A major political benefit of the single-price system is that it could split the interests of providers, isolating price-gouging, monopolistic networks from smaller, community-minded hospitals and doctors. At the same time, by preserving a role for commercial insurance, it spares health care reformers from being pitted against the entire medical industrial complex. (See “How Big Medicine Can Ruin Medicare for All,” November/December 2017.)

The idea of applying Medicare and Medicaid prices across the board is so compelling that it has started getting serious attention from influential policy wonks. On the conservative side, the Council for Affordable Health Coverage recently issued a white paper that calls for the expansion of Medicare prices to commercial plans. On the liberal side, Princeton’s Paul Starr broached the idea in an article in the American Prospect in January. More recently, the Center of American Progress has included the idea in a policy paper.

The Starr and CAP Medicare price proposals were, however, just one small part of broader plans to achieve universal coverage—by expanding eligibility to the existing Medicare program or creating a brand-new, very expensive entitlement that would require big tax increases. Administered prices of some kind would also be a part of any single-payer plan.

But there are very strong reasons to believe that starting with price controls alone is a better idea than trying to achieve them and universal coverage in one shot. To see why, we first have to look at the potential pitfalls of more far-reaching proposals.

The most ambitious plan so far, of course, is Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” bill, which would shift every American onto Medicare, as the name suggests, over the course of four years. While the bill has gained momentum among prominent Democrats, it has two widely remarked-upon shortcomings. First, people who are currently satisfied with their insurance might balk at being forced into a different plan. Second, it would be terrifically expensive, requiring a major tax increase to pay for it. The Urban Institute estimated that the plan Sanders proposed during the last presidential election would increase federal spending on health care by 232 percent, or a cumulative $32 trillion by 2026. Sanders says his more recent plan could be paid for with a 7.5 percent payroll tax on employers plus a 4 percent income tax surcharge on individuals.

Medicare for All advocates make the case that, despite the sticker price, the plan will actually bring down overall health care spending by imposing lower prices on providers and saving on administration. But here’s the problem: almost all of those savings will come from money that voters don’t know they’re currently spending. More than 150 million Americans have employer-sponsored group health care plans. They can see what they are forking out directly for premiums, deductibles, and co-pays, and they don’t like it. But they are largely innocent of the far greater amounts they pay in lost wages. In a typical employer-sponsored family plan, two-thirds of the premiums are nominally paid by the employer, who in turn shifts much if not all of that cost to employees by reducing other forms of compensation. Yet few employees are aware of this reality. So selling a single-payer system involves promising to save people money on costs they don’t know they pay, while at the same time telling them that they’ll have to share more of their paycheck with Uncle Sam. Not easy.

Some Democrats have been trying to finesse this political reality by proposing what might be called “single-payer lite” plans. The Center for American Progress’s “Medicare Extra for All” proposal is an example. Under this plan, everyone can choose between buying into Medicare or keeping their current insurance. And because the plan would impose Medicare prices universally, the price of private insurance would go down.

But that is just a part of the proposal. It would also establish a new federal health program offering enhanced benefits, including dental, vision, hearing, and maybe even coverage for long-term nursing home stays, which Medicare and standard commercial health insurance currently don’t cover. Premiums would be free for people living in poverty and would be capped at no more than 10 percent of income for anyone else who wanted to join. Deductibles and co-pays would likewise be eliminated for low-income people and reduced for everyone else.

Sounds pretty good, but who would pay for it? CAP doesn’t specify. Instead, it merely says that “Medicare Extra would be financed by a combination of health care savings and tax revenue options,” adding that it “intends to engage an independent third party to conduct modeling simulation to determine how best to set the numerical values of the parameters.”

Whatever numerical values come back, they’ll be substantial and controversial. Even if the CAP plan was financed in good measure by new taxes on the super-rich, it would still involve large transfers from middle-income people, who will be at least partially financing their own benefits, to people with lower incomes, who would be paying nothing for the health care they receive.

A plan based purely on Medicare prices for all would avoid these political land mines. Ending price discrimination against people with employer-provided or other commercial insurance in one fell swoop would address the biggest concern of the largest group of voters—crucially, without asking them to make any sacrifices in the form of higher taxes. This would raise the chances of the party that passed it actually being rewarded for health care reform, rather than punished, as the Democrats were for Obamacare. Voters would quickly feel the benefits in lower premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. And that, in turn, should make them more open to efforts to extend health coverage to those that lack it.

So why not just keep it simple, at least to start? A “Medicare prices for all” plan doesn’t require tax increases or involve transfers paid for by the middle class. It doesn’t require Americans to give up their current health care plans. And it doesn’t repeal or replace the popular features of the Affordable Care Act. But it does directly attack the middle-class affordability crisis using a proven approach that the great majority of Americans might actually support.

The post The Case for Single-Price Health Care appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Why is it so hard to lower the cost of prescription drugs?

Consider the fate of an utterly modest, tentative attempt in the waning days of the Obama administration. In 2016, under a little-known provision of the Affordable Care Act, the Department of Health and Human Services proposed a plan to study one aspect of the problem: the amount Medicare pays for drugs administered in physician offices, which had more than doubled in just eight years. Under the existing practice, physicians who administer medicines in-office, usually for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, or eye disease, are reimbursed for the average cost of the drugs plus 6 percent of those costs. It’s a classic case of perverse incentives: the higher the cost of the treatment, the more the doctor gets paid. Several studies confirm what common sense predicts: the approach causes physicians to prescribe more expensive drugs than they otherwise would. The proposed five-year experiment would change the physician reimbursement to a flat fee plus 2.5 percent of the drug cost. The costs to Medicare would be compared with a control group still reimbursed at the 6 percent rate. If costs dropped under the new reimbursement plan, Medicare would consider switching to it permanently.

At first glance, reactions to the proposal were predictable. Consumer groups, including the AARP, liked it. Physician groups and pharmaceutical companies, both of which stood to lose substantial income from a switch, opposed it. More surprising was the addition of some powerful allies speaking out on the side of physicians and Big Pharma: patient advocacy organizations. One hundred and forty-seven such groups—with names like the Epilepsy Foundation, the Kidney Cancer Association, and the Lung Cancer Alliance—signed a letter to Congress and the Obama administration insisting that the plan would “represent a major step back for patients and people with disabilities.” Lawmakers from both parties, including Democrat Nancy Pelosi and Republican Tom Price, the future secretary (and now ex-secretary) of HHS, started echoing the patient groups’ objections, overwhelmingly opposing the experiment. In December 2016, the Obama administration withdrew the proposal.

Why would groups representing medical patients, who rely on prescription drugs, oppose an attempt to make those drugs less expensive? There’s no doubt that they held honest concerns about potential unintended consequences. But there was another variable at work, too. Patient groups face their own perverse incentive: drug industry money. A study by the advocacy group Public Citizen found that three-quarters of the patient groups that publicly opposed the Medicare experiment received funding from the pharmaceutical industry. That is almost surely an undercount, since the groups are not required to disclose their donors.

Patient advocacy groups have a sterling reputation among the public and lawmakers alike. They provide patient and family education, counseling, and even financial assistance during difficult times, along with advocacy for increased awareness and prevention strategies. But when it comes to drug pricing, their reliance on pharmaceutical industry funding, along with a natural desire not to imperil development of new treatments, typically puts patient groups on the side of the industry.

And that is a problem, because the industry is the driver of the prescription drug pricing crisis. Over the past forty years, pharmaceutical companies have relentlessly pushed for federal policy to keep prices high, arguing that huge profits are essential to stimulate investment into new medicines. Thanks especially to laws and trade agreements giving drug companies lucrative patent protections, the industry has become one of the most profitable sectors in history. And it has used those profits to build substantial political clout, employing more than twice as many lobbyists in Washington, D.C., alone as there are members of Congress.

While dramatic price increases like the 450 percent hike in the cost of EpiPens and the 5,000 percent overnight increase for Daraprim—the latter overseen by the notorious “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli—have earned the headlines, an astonishing 90 percent of brand-name drugs have more than doubled in price over the past decade. A 2016 study found that one out of every five Americans reported not filling a prescription because they couldn’t afford it.

There are plenty of ideas out there for bringing drug prices under control. Lawmakers have introduced dozens of such proposals in Congress and state legislatures. Many would reshape the industry far more radically than a mere Medicare reimbursement adjustment would have. But the failure of the proposed Obama administration tweak to Medicare Part B shows that real change is unlikely to occur as long as patient groups are standing in the way. It wasn’t long ago that patient activists were at the forefront of lowering the cost of live-saving medication. To solve today’s prescription drug crisis, they’ll have to find their voice again.

The end of the twentieth century saw a major breakthrough in treating HIV/AIDS. The discovery of antiretrovirals, or ARVs, turned a virus thought to be a death sentence into a chronic but manageable disease—for those who could afford the medicine. But, despite the fact that government-supported scientists played the key roles in developing it, the miracle drug was protected by monopoly patents held by multinational pharmaceutical companies. That meant the companies were free to charge exorbitant prices for the treatment—which they did.

Indeed, the rising cost of prescription drugs has gone hand in hand with industry efforts to expand its monopoly control over drug patents. The industry’s first big win was the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed private pharmaceutical companies to claim patents on drugs developed through U.S. government–funded research. Its second policy victory came in 1995, with the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement. That deal forced the global community to adopt U.S.-style patent protections, starting with a baseline twenty-year monopoly, which is routinely extended by clever corporate legal maneuvering.

In the context of ARVs, the existence of these patent monopolies put corporate profits ahead of human lives. Even though the medicine could be produced at barely over $1 a dose, the price established by the patent holders was over $1,000 per month. For low-income countries, the cost was an impossible burden. At the turn of the century, just one of every 1,000 Africans infected with HIV had access to the medicine. Meanwhile, more than two million people in Africa were dying from AIDS each year.

The conventional wisdom in the global health community was that it was just not going to be possible to treat HIV in the developing world. A prominent article in the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet argued that officials in poor countries should resist the “political appeal” of providing AIDS treatment, and focus their limited dollars on prevention instead. “It’s so politically incorrect to say, but we may have to sit by and just see these millions of people die,” an unnamed global health official told the Washington Post in early 2001.

But people living with HIV took a different view. In 1998, a group of South African patients with connections to the anti-apartheid movement and the earlier, successful AIDS treatment movement in the U.S. formed the Treatment Action Campaign. TAC launched a campaign of civil disobedience, illegally but openly importing a generic version of the AIDS medicine fluconazole, which cost less than 10 percent of the price charged in South Africa by the patent holder, Pfizer. TAC’s demonstrations steadily grew larger and more insistent, filling the streets with thousands of singing, chanting demonstrators. Activists conducted “die-ins,” and filed charges of culpable homicide against the minister of health.

Stung by the negative publicity, pharmaceutical companies decided to go on the offensive, suing to block a South African law that opened the door for importation of generic medicines. The U.S. Trade Representative backed the industry, accusing South Africa’s government of violating international intellectual property law.

But TAC and other activists knew how to play hardball, too. In the U.S., Al Gore, then a presidential candidate, had supported the industry’s tactics in resisting access to generic ARVs. So activists relentlessly heckled him at his public appearances. They even interrupted his official campaign announcement, chanting “Gore’s Greed Kills” and passing out fliers saying “Vice President Gore Doing Drug Company Dirty Work.”

The common thread running through all this activism was that patients were in the lead, demanding that the issue move from an abstract discussion of intellectual property laws to a question of human rights. As one HIV-positive TAC activist said at a protest, “You are denying me drugs. Look me in the face and tell me to die.” TAC’s cofounder Zackie Achmat refused to take ARVs until they were widely available to the poor of the country. He suffered through life-threatening lung infections, but stuck to his vow, even after South African President Nelson Mandela personally begged him to take the drugs.

Eventually, reportedly at the urging of Gore, President Clinton gave in, issuing an executive order in May 2000 pledging not to interfere with African nations’ efforts to obtain cheaper AIDS medicines. The activists now focused their attention on the corporations. On March 5, 2001, the day that oral arguments began on the drug companies’ South African lawsuit, TAC led a “Global Day of Action” against the corporations. Marchers in major cities carried signs saying “Stop Medical Apartheid.” Others convened mock court hearings in front of the offices of GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol-Myers Squibb, finding the companies guilty of murder.

The drug companies blinked. Six weeks after the Global Day of Action, they dropped their lawsuit, even agreeing to pay the South African government’s legal fees. With the barriers to generics dropped, ARV prices fell by as much as 99 percent. The United Nations created the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in 2002, and U.S. President George W. Bush announced in 2003 the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

In 1999, just 20,000 South Africans were on ARVs. More than three million are today. Globally, PEPFAR and the Global Fund provide antiretroviral treatment for more than nineteen million people. After the pharmaceutical industry dropped its South African lawsuit, TAC leader Zackie Achmat told a cheering crowd outside the courtroom, “We have made the mightiest industry in the world shake in its boots.”

The industry learned from its defeat, and has been spending millions to court patient groups ever since. A recent New England Journal of Medicine report revealed that at least 83 percent of the largest nonprofit disease and patient advocacy groups accept pharmaceutical industry donations. (Again, that’s an undercount, because the groups don’t have to disclose their donors.) Most organizations do not report the specific amount of donations, but the available information suggests that a majority of industry donations were likely $1 million or more annually. The American Diabetes Association, for instance, received $2.5 million from the Eli Lilly Foundation in 2015—and then refused to take a position in favor of last year’s Lilly-opposed Nevada legislation to lower insulin prices. Many patient organizations’ governing boards even include drug industry executives. “The ‘patient’ voice is speaking with a pharma accent,” the study’s lead scientist, Matthew McCoy, told Kaiser Health News.

The minority of patient groups that refuse to be bought off face a core challenge, says David Mitchell, a multiple myeloma patient and founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs, which refuses to take any industry money. “Take me, for example: I have an incurable cancer that finds its way around the existing drugs, so I need there to be new drugs discovered,” Mitchell says. “And the drug companies know a lot of people are like me or have loved ones like me, so they say they need these prices to find the new drugs. It is like extortion: Give me your money or I am going to pull the trigger.”

The pharmaceutical industry marketing is a bit subtler than that, but it does center on the notion that high drug prices are justified by the research the companies conduct. There’s one big problem with that argument: a huge proportion of that research is actually paid for by the government.

The basic research that makes up the front end of the drug development process is time-consuming, expensive, and often frustrating. Corporations are wary of investing in research that may not yield a profitable drug. So they turn to governments, especially the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its $32 billion annual budget for medical research, to assume the risk. A study of drugs receiving the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) priority review status—a designation given to the drugs most likely to have a major impact—from 1988 to 2005 showed that two-thirds of them traced their roots back to government-funded research. U.S. funding contributed to the science underlying every one of the 210 new drugs approved between 2010 and 2016. Groundbreaking drugs to treat cancer and mental health, along with vaccines, all owe their existence to taxpayer-funded research.

That direct government research funding is supplemented by pharma industry tax credits that can reach as high as 50 percent of research costs, plus the government’s role as the bulk purchaser of its products. Altogether, some analysts calculate, the private sector only pays for a third of U.S. biomedical research, and much of that is focused on so-called “me too” drugs, which provide no new therapeutic benefit compared to products already available. This helps explain why the industry spends far more on advertising and sales than on research and development.

Beyond this taxpayer-pays-twice equation, there is growing evidence undermining the very premise of awarding monopoly patents—that they are needed to spur innovation. Until the latter third of the twentieth century, most countries forbid or limited patent protection of drugs. This reflected the widely held belief that medicines were a public good. The inventors of insulin won a 1923 Nobel Prize for their efforts, but sold their patents for a dollar each so that the medicine could be widely distributed. “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world,” the lead inventor Frederick Banting explained. A recent paper by NYU professor Petra Moser found that countries without patent laws have produced more than their share of inventions, including innovative new medicines.

Current proposals to reform the U.S. medicine system range from requiring corporate transparency on research costs and profits to treating the pharmaceutical industry as a public utility. Multiple pending bills in Congress would legalize importation of cheaper medicines from Canada. More ambitious proposals would move toward a patent-free, nonprofit system of drug development. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has estimated that if the U.S. provided medicines without the artificial price markup imposed by monopoly patents—a markup that funds the industry’s windfall profits, high executive salaries, and tens of billions of dollars in annual marketing costs—the savings could fund the replacement of all private industry research and development several times over.

Of course, the pharmaceutical industry sees that kind of reform as an existential challenge, and will resist it with all of the substantial resources at its disposal. The history of social change suggests that the only way to overcome that resistance will be a movement led by those most affected by the drug pricing crisis. World-changing campaigns like the U.S. civil rights movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement all benefited from sympathetic allies. But at the front lines were always people who were themselves victimized by the targeted injustice. “There is always an important role for the expert, the policy researcher, for those gathering evidence,” says Diarmaid McDonald of the Just Treatment campaign in the U.K. “But there will be very little change if you don’t have direct patient advocacy to decisionmakers.”

There are signs of hope for this kind of patient advocacy again taking center stage. David Mitchell’s group, Patients for Affordable Drugs, has gathered thousands of patient stories and played a role in successful state-level drug pricing transparency pushes in Maryland and California. In 2016, cancer patients Zahara Heckscher and Hannah Lyon committed high-profile civil disobedience when they occupied the lobby of the Washington building that houses the pharmaceutical industry lobbying group and protested the monopoly patent extensions of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. (Heckscher, who had breast cancer, died from the disease earlier this year.)

In South Africa, the Treatment Action Campaign builds on its HIV/AIDS treatment legacy to argue for access to breast cancer treatment that is unaffordable to most women in the country. Activists in India and Thailand have successfully pushed for greater access to generic cancer drugs. The Union for Affordable Cancer Treatment, led by breast cancer patient Manon Ress, is leading the fight for U.S. generic manufacturing of the chemotherapy drug paclitaxel and helped push down the price of a breast cancer drug in the U.K.

Last year, when Nevada legislators considered a bill requiring transparency on insulin pricing, and the established diabetes patient groups who had received pharma funding refused to take a position, other patients stepped into the breach. T1International, a new type 1 diabetes patient group that refuses industry funding, helped to organize an all-volunteer online campaign supporting the Nevada bill, using the group’s signature hashtag #insulin4all. It also called out the larger patient groups for their timidity on drug pricing and organized a “Stop Price Gouging” patient demonstration outside insulin manufacturer Eli Lilly’s headquarters in September. (Disclosure: I am part of an organization that cosponsored that event.)

T1International’s director Elizabeth Rowley says she understands other patient groups’ decisions to take industry money and put it to good non-advocacy use. But she and her colleagues at T1International are determined to avoid those compromises, even if it means their organization is woefully underfunded compared to the bigger diabetes patient groups. “It’s just so important for the public to hear from the patients who are struggling, because they are the ones who know best,” she says.

That was the lesson of the HIV/AIDS drug pricing movement, and it is one David Mitchell agrees with, too. “Meaningful change will not occur without an independent, focused patient voice,” he says. “In the absence of that voice, pharma companies and pharma benefit managers will fill that void with, if you will pardon my French, bullshit.”

The post Their Own Medicine appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In a sign of the times, investor George Soros devoted the bulk of his hour-long speech this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to excoriating Facebook and Google. In a blistering attack, Soros blasted the two internet giants, characterizing them as a “menace” to society and “obstacles to innovation.”

Facebook and Google may still be popular with the broad public, but a growing chorus of critics now charge these “platform monopolies” with a long bill of indictments. These range from compromising the integrity of elections by peddling “fake news,” to unfairly crowding out competitors and suppressing entrepreneurship by acquiring new start-ups, to fostering internet addiction. The threats all stem from these platforms having grown incredibly quickly from small start-ups to digital monopolies, in the near-total absence of government regulation.

Facebook, which now has two billion global users, is much more than a social network. It is a media platform that reaches an audience greater than any U.S. or European television network, any newspaper or magazine, and any other online news outlet. Facebook is fast replacing television as the most dominant news and entertainment medium and has become one of the most valued companies in the world.

This slow-dawning reality has led to a number of proposals to contain the growing power of these Frankenstein companies. Some critics have proposed regulating the platform monopolies as utilities. Others want to make them responsible for the truth or falsity of content posted by their users; Germany recently passed what is being called a “Facebook law,” which allows fines of large social-media platforms that don’t remove hate speech from their platform in a timely manner. Another camp wants governments to use antitrust prosecutions to bust up the monopolies into smaller, less threatening entities.

But here’s the rub. Yes, there’s a lot we can do to contain the power of platform monopolies, just as previous generations used political interventions to contain Standard Oil and other corporate giants of the Gilded Age. However, governments can’t regulate monopolies and other rogue actors unless they have the power to deny them access to their domestic markets. Car makers, whether headquartered domestically or abroad, could just ignore U.S. auto safety standards if we had no way to prevent them from selling unsafe cars within our borders. Airlines would have no reason to comply with Federal Aviation Administration regulations if the FAA lacked the power to bar them from serving U.S. airports.

When it comes to web-based platforms, enforcing that kind of sovereignty is much harder. As you fire up a Google map or search on your smartphone, it makes no difference if the server running the algorithm is physically within the borders of the U.S. or not. The Department of Justice might one day win an antitrust judgment against Google that commands the company to spin off its search engine and advertising businesses into separate entities. But if Google didn’t feel like complying, it could just move its headquarters to, say, Ireland, and its computer servers to Iceland, and continue doing business as usual in the U.S.

Similarly, if Facebook didn’t like being told by the U.S. to do a better job of regulating Russian bots or protecting users’ privacy, it could just relocate its facilities to another country, or even to an artificial island somewhere in international waters. A predatory social media or e-commerce platform based in China or North Korea has no reason to follow U.S. law if there’s no way to deny them access to our digital markets. That’s radically different from how traditional brick-and-mortar companies operate. They must obtain licenses and permits, and follow the associated conditions if they want to avoid fines and stay in business.

So here’s a proposal. Just as the U.S. has always required licenses and permits for traditional companies, regulators need to create “digital licenses” for internet-based companies. The digital license would make clear the rules and conditions required for market access. Companies above a certain size would have to follow certain regulations and provisions that support safety, transparency, competition, and democracy.

To make digital licenses work, governments will need the power to shut out companies that violate their terms. In other words, just as countries need to enforce physical borders to maintain control over their domestic markets, so too must they have the technological ability and legal framework to enforce their digital borders. That means the power to digitally evict a company that refuses to play by the rules.

Evict Google or Facebook? Is this even technically possible? Internet gurus once promised that governments would be powerless to control digital information flowing across their borders. In 1993, computer scientist John Gilmore told Time magazine something that would become conventional wisdom among the first generation of digital natives: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

But times have changed. Many countries use technology to effectively control access to their online populations. China and Iran, for example, guard their digital frontiers using a number of interventions, such as IP address blocking, packet filtering, and domain name system redirection to block websites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Even countries that are not all that technologically advanced, such as Eritrea, Tajikistan, and Pakistan, have deployed such techniques. The UK also has blocked a number of websites.

Civil libertarians and open-internet proponents will understandably raise red flags, saying that most of these countries are repressive regimes deploying these tactics for reasons of censorship and political persecution. But that doesn’t mean that democratically accountable governments can’t use these same tools for better reasons.

Liberal democracies like the U.S., Germany, or Canada have different values than China, Iran, or Pakistan. Democracies can block access as a means of enforcing legitimate laws and regulations that uphold democratic values. The U.S. government already constrains access to communication infrastructure, and structures communication markets in all sorts of ways without anyone confusing that with censorship. For example, we don’t let any entities, domestic or foreign, operate television and radio stations without a license, and we don’t allow printed material to be imported into the country without clearing customs.

Some may worry that digitally evicting a company like Facebook or Google wouldn’t be worth the loss of the company’s services. But actual eviction would be unlikely; even a credible threat of it would be sufficient to motivate companies to reform their processes. And, if not, ending their monopoly status would allow for the quick emergence of scrappy new replacements. That’s what happened in Austin, Texas, when Uber and Lyft withdrew in protest of a local law requiring stronger background checks for its drivers. In that vacuum, four new ridesharing companies launched. In China, the eviction of companies like Google and Facebook has led to homegrown versions like Baidu and Tencent.

Moreover, platform monopolies already threaten democracy and free speech by distorting the marketplace of ideas with fake news and “engagement algorithms” that steer users into hyper-partisan information ghettos. They also erode the economic foundation of an independent press: Facebook and Google account for 61 percent of all global online advertising revenue, and 84 percent outside of China, according to recent estimates. This dominance starves other media outlets of the advertising revenue they rely on to survive.

Ultimately, no government can tell Facebook, Google, or any other platform monopoly what to do unless it can credibly enforce a digital license by threatening to deny access to its markets. So what criteria should we use to decide whom to exclude from our digital borders?

An overall framework already exists. It’s the same one sovereign nations use to manage global trade. International free trade agreements negotiate various rules and regulations in return for lowering trade barriers between nations. Break the rules, and the barriers go back up. In effect, these massive online companies—the biggest of which have market capitalizations the size of some national economies—would be treated as if they were nations themselves.

We already accept that nations should have the right to dictate the terms by which companies operate within their physical borders. So if a digital goliath refuses to follow the law, or facilitates lawbreaking by others (as Airbnb does for thousands of illegal hosts), or even creates products that threaten our way of life, why shouldn’t we be able to deny that company the privilege of doing business within our digital borders? We are at the outset of figuring out how to monitor and regulate these platform monopolies. Issuing digital licenses and enforcing digital borders would be important steps toward taming the technological forces that threaten to undermine democratic values and the rule of law.

The post To Tame the Tech Giants, We Need to Secure Our Digital Borders appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Among liberals, few topics are as hotly debated as gentrification. The issue is often presented in moralistic terms: privileged white people are pushing poor black and Hispanic people out of their neighborhoods.

The truth is a little more complicated. Booms in places like New York City and Washington, D.C., have both positive and negative effects—including for the poor. They have revitalized previously dangerous and economically depressed neighborhoods, bringing better jobs, safer streets, and, for homeowners, rising property values. The rapid pace of change and rising rents also raise the danger, however, of too many spoils going to the white and wealthy, leaving the poor and minorities behind.

Chris Leinberger, a real estate developer and chair of the Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis at the George Washington University School of Business, spoke with the Washington Monthly at the Wharf, the new waterfront development in Southwest D.C., about the underlying policy choices that have led to urban housing unaffordability, and how to change those policies to make sure urban renewal doesn’t just benefit the rich.

(This interview has been edited and condensed.)

WM: What do you worry about with these booming towns, like D.C.—who is potentially getting hurt by development?

CL: The folks who get hurt the most are existing renters. They’ll not only see their rents go up; they’ll be moved out completely, if their building gets rehabbed.

Now, a development like [the Wharf], of course, nobody was living here, so there’s no displacement, which happens quite a bit in our formerly abandoned cities.

WM: So maybe a better example of this in D.C. would be a neighborhood like Shaw or Williamsburg in New York?

CL: Exactly. But the interesting thing is, Federal Reserve research shows that neighborhoods which are gentrifying  (a) make up a very small fraction of city neighborhoods—as in 5 percent—and (b) actually have less movement than poor neighborhoods do. The primary reason is that people will try their hardest just to stay there, because it’s getting better. All of a sudden you have options like a supermarket, and crime is going down, and there are more public amenities. You would want to stay if at all possible. In a poor neighborhood, there’s much more spin.

WM: You’re saying the research on gentrification shows that some of our concern about the victims of gentrification may be misplaced?

CL: If it’s a moderate to poor neighborhood, the people who have lived in the neighborhood for decades and own their own house will have a much larger net worth than if gentrification didn’t happen.
It may be what pays for their retirement.

WM: But in an urban area, isn’t there usually a very high proportion of people who rent and don’t own?

CL: Suburbs are 75-25 ownership versus rental, urban areas will be closer to 50-50. In New York City, it’s closer to 33 percent ownership and 67 percent renter—which is why I mentioned that the main concern is for renters. But the other key point is that those low-income households—and I’m talking about households earning less than 50 percent of the metropolitan area median income—are far better off living in a revitalized, walkable urban place. Yes, the housing prices may be higher as a percentage of their household income, but the transportation costs are much lower, and transportation is the second-highest household spending category. That offsets those higher housing prices. And they have accessibility to three, four, five times more jobs than they would have if they were in a low-income drivable suburb.

WM: But even if there’s less individual displacement than people think, over time a certain class of people is going to be priced out of moving into that neighborhood, right?

CL: Yes. When you combine the pent-up demand for this kind of place—walkable urban, safe, lots of exciting things happening—with the fact that there’s not enough land that’s zoned for that kind of activity to take place, the land that is zoned for it gets bid up to ridiculous levels. And that’s the major reason for gentrification and making mixed-income development hard to do.

WM: You used the term “walkable urban.” What does that mean?

CL: There are two ways to build a metropolitan region. One is “drivable suburban,” which is very low-density development that segregates land by type of use, meaning offices are separate from residential is separate from retail, and so on. It relies on one transportation system: cars and trucks. The other way is “walkable urban,” which is much more dense, mixed use, and historically more mixed income. We built only walkable urban cities for the 7,000 to 8,000 years we’ve been building cities, until drivable suburban was introduced in the mid-twentieth century.

WM: And much of what we think of as “cities” in the United States, or metropolitan areas, counts as drivable suburban, right?

CL: Yes. The metropolitan Washington region is only 2 percent walkable urban land; the other 98 percent is low-density drivable suburban. The most important criterion in building walkable urban is higher density, but the other issue is, do you have multiple transportation options to get to work, shopping, school, so you’re not just forced to use the car?

WM: And your argument is that we have too many places where you have to drive everywhere, and not enough of the other kind—walkable urban. And that this is what makes walkable urban so expensive.

CL: Right. It is almost entirely the high land price in walkable urban places that causes gentrification. Increase the land in metro Washington that’s zoned for walkable urban development from 2 percent to 4 percent, and most of this price premium goes away.

WM: How do you know there’s unmet demand for walkable urban? Because you might think, well, if people want it, then the market will supply it.

CL: One way is by doing consumer research. Depending on the poll, somewhere between 35 and 50 percent of us want to live and work in walkable urban areas. Whereas only 5 to 20 percent actually can, depending on the metro area. So there’s a gap, known as pent-up demand.

WM: How did we end up in the situation where there’s not enough walkable urban?

CL: Zoning. It’s illegal to build walkable urban development in 98 percent of metropolitan Washington, and that’s why the market cannot supply enough—and what the market does deliver is at a high price. It’s not just D.C., of course. We put in place zoning in the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, that mandated a separation of land uses. You could not have retail underneath rental apartments. That was illegal. It is illegal to have auxiliary housing units in a single-family neighborhood, sometimes called “granny flats,” which is a great form of affordable housing. And 95 to 98 percent of the metropolitan zoning in this country is the same way. It’s been in place for half a century, or more, and it’s a bitch to change.

WM: And is the key problem that it suppresses density, or that it rules out mixed use?

CL: Both. It’s a web of restrictions that makes walkable urban development impossible: height limits, restrictions on mixed use, setbacks. And it also demands a very high amount of parking. The only way to meet those high parking ratios is to build low density with surface parking lots.

WM: What are some problems with this, besides the effect on rental prices?

CL: Number one, drivable suburban development is the U.S.’s biggest contributor to climate change. The built environment—our buildings and the transportation system we use to move between them—represents about 73 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in this country. You move a household from Potomac or McLean [D.C. suburbs] to Dupont [a D.C. urban neighborhood], you’re going to cut your greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 80 percent.

WM: So how do we go about fixing this market inefficiency?

CL: It’s a very simple thing conceptually: allow for more walkable urban land. The reason we are only building luxury walkable urban right now is because each unit has to justify between $300,000 and $1 million, maybe more, of land value. And that’s stupid. We have an artificial constraint on the market. As I mentioned, if you make 4 percent of the land walkable urban, the affordability problem gets a lot easier to solve.

WM: I think a lot of people would be skeptical that the kind of development we’re sitting in now is going to help with housing affordability.

CL: Additional supply, even just at the top of the market, does mean rents will begin to fall. But it’s too slow. The better way is to build middle-income housing, which we know how to do. This is not rocket science. You don’t have to have gold-plated faucets. But you need land that costs $50,000 to $100,000 per unit, not $300,000 per unit.

WM: So how do we break this resistance that we find in zoning laws all over the country, making land artificially scarce?

CL: The main keepers of the status quo are neighborhood organizations—the “not in my backyard” people. It’s actually rational. If building more supply makes housing prices go down, then the existing homeowners have something to lose. Also, existing homeowners are afraid this might bring “undesirables” to their neighborhood. And it’s very easy to stop things. Saying no to something is a whole lot easier than building something.

WM: Thinking about some of the older neighborhoods in D.C.—those row houses have a lot of charm to them. And if someone wanted to come in and knock them down and build higher-density housing, that might have good secondary consequences, but folks might also say they like the way the neighborhood looks now.

CL: We don’t have to knock down anything. Again, 2 percent of the total land in the D.C. metro area is walkable urban. There is plenty of unused land, especially in the suburbs. The urbanization of the suburbs is where much of this market demand is being satisfied, though it requires great effort to change zoning.

WM: What about transportation?

CL: Transportation drives development. A good example here is the Purple Line. [The Purple Line is a new rail line that will allow travel between D.C. suburbs without having to go in and out of the city center.] It will drive more development around those suburban stations, but only within walking distance. So now all of a sudden you can live in, say, New Carrollton [a Maryland suburb]. You’ll at least be able to get rid of one car in your household, which greatly increases your mortgage capacity. The average American family spends 18 percent of their household income on transportation, almost all for cars. Dropping one car out of a household budget on average increases the mortgage capacity by $150,000.

WM: But if you put mass transit into a poor or working-class neighborhood, won’t that bring in a flood of wealthier people and more upscale development and the people who were living there before won’t benefit as much?

CL: The key is for the new transit to go hand in hand with new high-density housing. New transit won’t drive up land prices if we add more housing at the same time. Generally speaking, these walkable urban places see an explosion in population density. As an example, if an existing neighborhood had 50 percent of the housing occupied by lower-income households, the new development of market rate housing at a higher density might reduce the low-income household percentage to, say, 20 percent without people actually getting displaced.

WM: When most people think about urban development, they think “urban,” so they’re going to picture stuff in the city center. We’re talking a lot about the metro area. So what role do the suburbs play?

CL: A minimum of 50 percent of the demand for walkable urban will be satisfied in the suburbs—places like Silver Spring, Maryland, or Evanston, Illinois. We built the bulk of existing walkable urbanism before 1930. In 1930, we had forty million households in this country, twenty-two million of which were in our metropolitan areas. So those twenty-two million units, whether they be flats or townhouses or single-family homes in tight densities, they’re the heart of the walkable urban stock that we have. Well, today we have 123 million household units in metropolitan areas. So a very small percentage of the total housing stock is walkable urban, and it’s all the old stuff, the focus of gentrification.

WM: What role does federal policy play in helping fix this?

CL: The biggest way the federal government can help is by making its balance sheet available to local governments. Places like Los Angeles, Washington, Denver are in a mad rush to build more rail transit. In Los Angeles, they voted last November to tax themselves an additional $120 billion to build rail transit. The feds should be loaning money up front to municipalities and states to build mass transit, repaid by the local tax funds it generates. That would allow these places to get moving right now and pay the money back using the local tax obligations.

WM: If we were to get this right, what would happen to the people who are currently living in drivable suburbs who don’t intend to move?

CL: Those property values, based on the market right now, are flat or going down. Many are still under water from the 2008 housing debacle, where the bulk of lost value was in drivable suburban housing. Our big social challenge is that a lot of drivable suburban places, particularly in low-income suburbs, are where the next slums will be.

WM: And this is related to what people worry about when it comes to gentrification: residents being pushed from the convenient neighborhood closer to the city center, being pushed out to places that are less convenient.

CL: One thing we have not discussed is that we need to have a very aggressive affordable housing program at the walkable urban place level. That’s another part of the answer.

WM: What would that look like?

CL: This would be part of the work of the “place manager.” Right now, just as we have growth of neighborhood groups, we have growth of place management in this country. It tends to take the form of business or community improvement districts. The government passes legislation that allows property owners to come together and form these districts through voluntary taxes. So the property owners say, for example, “We’re going to increase our taxes and provide services to this 300-acre place in downtown D.C. It’s going to be cleaner, it’s going to be safer, we’re going to put flowers out, we’re going to run festivals and promote economic development.”

Going forward, place managers need to be responsible not just for economic development, but also for social equity and for providing the affordable housing. So people who work in downtown D.C. can also live in downtown D.C., if they so choose.

WM: But how do you force a business improvement district to make sure there’s enough affordable housing?

CL: Every few years, a business improvement district or community improvement district has to go back to the city council to be reauthorized. So it would be very simple: the city council says, “In addition to the economic development work that you’re doing, you also have to take on affordable housing.”

WM: What is the purpose of devolving the responsibility over affordable housing from the city-wide level to this more micro level?

CL: Because the cities have generally failed to provide enough affordable housing. Not all—New York City has built a remarkable amount of affordable housing that works as well as anyplace. But after fifty years of relying on the feds and the cities to provide affordable housing, there’s just not enough of it—and what does exist is usually pretty bad. But place management organizations have proven themselves to be effective, and they are closest to the issue.

WM: In other words, given their success at economic development, why not entrust them with this other difficult task?

CL: Exactly. And I’m not going to guarantee that they’re going to succeed. But I was involved personally with, in essence, a place manager, which was the University of California at Irvine. Irvine, one of the largest universities in the country, was having a massive affordable housing problem for faculty and staff. We came up with an idea to set up a nonprofit development corporation and transfer some of the university land to it. We borrowed $2 million of working capital from the UC Board of Regents, which was paid back within three years. We built 1,500 housing units, most of them for sale. We sold them to the faculty and staff at 60 percent of market price. Today the price is still 60 percent of market because we set up resale controls. Households can’t sell at the market rate and have a windfall profit, because it would deprive the next generation of affordable housing. And it worked.

The post The Monthly Interview: A Conversation with Christopher B. Leinberger appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Ever since the Freedom Riders risked their lives to register black voters in the South, increasing voter registration has been an abiding liberal cause. The first great victory was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which eliminated blatantly racist barriers such as poll taxes and literacy tests. But many other banal obstacles long remained. Well into the 1990s, if you wanted to sign up to vote in many parts of the country, you had to go to the county election commission office, present one or more forms of ID, fill out a form, and have it stamped by a notary public.

These bureaucratic hurdles disproportionately depressed registration by the poor, the young, and minorities—groups that generally favor the Democratic Party. Eager to boost participation by these groups, and to stem a general decline in turnout, in 1993 the Democratic-controlled Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Dubbed the “motor voter” law, it mandated, among other things, that states offer citizens a chance to register by mail or whenever they go to the DMV or other government agencies.

Despite a certain amount of foot dragging by some states, the NVRA generally worked. The share of voting-age citizens registered to vote rose from less than 75 percent in 1994 to more than 85 percent in 2012. Most states now let residents register online. Some state GOP election officials tried to roll back the law’s gains by, for instance, aggressively purging names from the registration rolls on the pretext of fighting voter fraud. But the courts have consistently blocked their actions as violations of the NVRA. (A key case involving voter purges in Ohio is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.) Today, it has never been easier in America to register to vote, and there have never been more Americans registered.

But if the ultimate aim was to boost the number of citizens who actually cast ballots, it’s hard to say that the law has been a big success. Numerous studies have tried to measure the effect of the NVRA on turnout. Few have found any clear impact. That doesn’t mean there has been none; turnout declines might have been worse without the NVRA, and in any event data limitations make it hard to prove causal connections. But based on the evidence so far, the law seems mostly to have added to the substantial pool of citizens who are registered but don’t bother to vote.

This fact has not dimmed enthusiasm for voter registration among funders, activists, and operatives on the left. A few weeks before the 2016 elections TargetSmart, a Democratic political data firm, released a report showing that fifty million more Americans were registered to vote than eight years earlier, a whopping 33 percent increase during the presidency of organizer in chief Barack Obama, himself a big proponent of voter registration. The data showed that the newest voters leaned heavily Democratic.

It goes without saying that these new voters didn’t show up in sufficient numbers, or in the right places, to give Hillary Clinton a victory. In fact, an analysis recently published in the New York Times found that some four million voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 simply failed to vote at all in 2016. What doomed Clinton was not a lack of registered voters, but a lack of turnout.

Nevertheless, since 2016, electoral reform advocacy groups have doubled down on voter registration efforts. To their credit, the two main fixes being pushed are important ones. Election-day registration allows citizens to register or update their information when they show up at the polling place, and automatic voter registration makes state governments, not individuals, responsible for registering voters. Both reforms solve lingering flaws in the registration process and have been shown by studies to lift turnout.

But if the chief goal is helping the Democrats win, then concentrating on unregistered voters makes little sense. Consider the arithmetic. There are approximately fifty million Americans who are eligible to vote but aren’t registered. But there are far more “episodic voters”—citizens who are registered but often don’t show up. More than 100 million registered voters didn’t cast ballots in the 2014 midterms. About 145 million didn’t vote in the primaries.

These episodic voters are not only far more numerous than unregistered voters, they are also much likelier to change their behavior. It turns out that a great deal of the remaining unregistered voters are that way by choice. A 2016 Pew survey asked people to explain why they don’t vote. Compared to those who were registered-but-infrequent voters, unregistered voters were nearly twice as likely to say that they dislike politics and don’t believe voting makes a difference. Registered-but-infrequent voters, meanwhile, were more than twice as likely to say that they don’t vote because they are not informed enough about the issues or candidates to make a good decision. If you were designing a system to maximize the Democrats’ electoral chances, you’d want it to be primarily focused on educating and mobilizing these episodic voters.

But that is the opposite of the system we have. Unlike with unregistered voters, few liberal-leaning advocacy groups make it their mission to target episodic voters. That task is mostly left to individual campaigns and to Democratic Party organizations. But the primary goal of these enterprises is to win the next election. To do that, they concentrate their limited time and resources—internal polling, direct mail, campaign appearances, get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts—on persuading more likely voters to turn out. Only when races are especially tight and campaign funds are in great abundance do campaigns seriously reach out to episodic, or unlikely, voters, and those occasions are relatively rare.

Episodic voters are the orphans of American politics, ignored and unloved. But they are also the lost continent of American politics, just waiting to be developed.

A few progressive groups are beginning to explore that continent. One such organization, profiled in this issue by Gilad Edelman (see “Planet Earth Gets a Ground Game”), is the Boston-based Environmental Voter Project, headed by a former campaign operative and committed environmentalist named Nathaniel Stinnett. Mulling over polling data a few years ago, Stinnett noticed a curious disparity: registered voters who most prioritize the environment cast ballots at unusually low rates. They are, in other words, episodic voters. Stinnett reasoned that if he could prod these laggards to vote, especially in low-turnout elections, campaigns would flag them as “likely voters” and start engaging with them. And once their priorities, like action on climate change, became known to the campaigns, politicians would cater to them or risk losing the next election.

Stinnett and his colleagues apply behavioral psychology techniques to get-out-the-vote drives targeted specifically at episodic voters who are likely to prioritize environmental issues. The results so far have been impressive. In citywide elections in Boston last fall, turnout among episodic environmental voters targeted with door-to-door canvassing and other techniques was 6.3 percent higher than among a control group who weren’t contacted. In a recent mayoral race in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the EVP used only remote techniques like mailers and text messages, voting by the targeted group rose 4.5 percent above the control. That’s a huge increase, considering that the average mail-based GOTV effort reaps only about a .5 percentage point bump.

Elsewhere in this issue, Saahil Desai looks at efforts to engage Asian American voters, the fastest-growing minority group in the country (see “The Untapped Potential of the Asian Voter”). The Asian American population rose by 72 percent between 2000 and 2015, with some of the biggest growth in battleground states like Nevada, Arizona, and North Carolina. In several swing states, like Ohio and Michigan, the number of Asian Americans now matches or exceeds that of Latinos. Asian Americans are also abandoning the GOP in record numbers. While 55 percent of Asian Americans supported George H. W. Bush over Bill Clinton in 1992, Hillary Clinton won nearly 70 percent of their vote in 2016.

The challenge for Democrats is getting them to actually vote. In North Carolina, for instance, voter registration among Asian Americans grew by 130 percent between 2006 and 2014, but only 27 percent of those registered Asian Americans voted, compared to 44 percent among registered voters in the state overall.

The situation is very different in Virginia, where a group called Democratic Asian Americans of Virginia has made a determined effort to mobilize Asian Americans—using everything from door-to-door canvassing to passing out sample ballots in multiple languages at Asian street festivals. Thanks to efforts like these, 70 percent of eligible Asian Americans in Virginia voted in 2016, giving Hillary Clinton a narrow win in that state. High Asian American turnout also helped fuel Democrat Ralph Northam’s landslide victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race in 2017.

The Democratic Party and its allies should be devoting significant resources toward supporting targeted efforts like these. But they also need to press for electoral reforms that can turn out episodic voters more broadly. One such reform is universal vote by mail, otherwise known as vote at home. With vote at home, polling places disappear. Instead, every registered voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail several weeks prior to an election, which they fill out at their leisure and either mail back or drop off at a secure site. As Washington Monthly contributing editor Phil Keisling has documented in these pages, turnout rates in the three states where the system has been implemented statewide—Oregon, Washington, and Colorado—are among the highest in the country. In Colorado, which launched its vote by mail regime in 2014, overall turnout grew by 3.3 percentage points, and by even more among young and low-propensity voters.

If Democrats were smart, they’d be funding ballot initiatives in at least a dozen states in 2018 to implement universal vote by mail. Instead, nearly all of the available money is being spent on drives to pass election-day and automatic voter registration at the state level. Again, these are worthy reforms, and they will do some good. But betting the farm on registering new voters while ignoring the far larger and easier-to-mobilize population of episodic voters is utter folly.

The post Voter Registration Won’t Save the Democrats appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In the spring of 1963, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin—then only a few months into his freshman term—reached out to President John F. Kennedy’s aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and to my father, then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, with an idea: the president should do a speaking tour of western states on the theme of conservation.

Nelson knew that my uncle, an avid sailor, had a special relationship with nature, an almost mystic appreciation for the winds and tides. And my father, who loved the outdoors, was a good choice to be intermediary. Some of my first memories are of walking in Rock Creek Park, near our house in Georgetown, where once he even built a raft to float down. When I was growing up, we went on rafting trips—down the Yampa and Green rivers in Utah, the Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho, the Colorado. Once we even went on a camping trip with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

The president quickly agreed to do the speaking tour, at least in part because it would be a way to test the waters ahead of his 1964 reelection campaign. Though the trip was billed as “nonpolitical”—a reminder of how different times were back then, when campaigning a year before an election was considered unseemly—everyone understood that it was a campaign tour in all but name, a measure of Kennedy’s appeal in deep Goldwater country, states he had lost in 1960. “Kennedy Tour Is Test for ’64,” read a headline in the New York Times. The article, like many reports about the trip, put “nonpolitical” in quotes.

But that’s not how Senator Nelson saw it. In letters to the president, he described the tour as a way to finally draw attention to what he saw as a crisis of declining natural resources—“water pollution, soil erosion, wildlife, habitat destruction, vanishing open spaces, shortage of parks etc.” Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had been published the previous year, and Nelson was convinced that the American people were passionately interested in the issue of conservation. What was missing, he told the president, was leadership. “This is a political issue to be settled at the political level but strangely politicians seldom talk about it,” he wrote. JFK’s leadership would be the spark that could ignite a movement.

Or so Nelson thought. JFK set out for the trip in September, and it didn’t take long for Nelson to notice that the crowds that greeted him exhibited little enthusiasm for talk of wilderness protection. They were “unresponsive and restless,” as one of the trip’s organizers lamented at the time. Reporters lambasted Kennedy’s first few speeches as being beneath his usual standard for eloquence and charisma. “Seldom in his nearly three years of office had his performance been so lackluster,” the Times reported. But as any politician will tell you, it’s hard to give a rousing speech to a crowd that’s not interested in the topic.

The turning point came a few days in, during a stop in Billings, Montana. Senator Mike Mansfield introduced the president to the crowd, and Kennedy began his remarks by thanking Mansfield for his work on the nuclear test ban treaty, which the Senate had ratified the day before Kennedy’s trip began. Kennedy was stunned as the previously staid crowd broke into rapturous cheers and applause.

Kennedy then ditched his prepared remarks on the environment, continuing instead to riff extemporaneously about the test ban treaty. At each stop of the trip, arms control continued to send crowds into a frenzy. As the historian Thurston Clarke recounts in JFK’s Last Hundred Days, the president had “a talent for recognizing and profiting from revelatory moments like this one.” The speech was “an exercise in political discovery,” in the words of NBC political correspondent Sander Vanocur—a moment in which Kennedy discovered that nuclear arms reduction could be a winning campaign issue.

It was a moment of discovery, too, for Gaylord Nelson, as he explained to me years later when he was the senior council to the Wilderness Society, on whose board I was serving. For him, the lesson was that even a politician as gifted as Kennedy couldn’t lead on an issue if the public wasn’t ready. Nelson had misjudged the public’s appetite for environmental leadership. What he needed to do, he realized, was get to work building up the environmental movement to create the conditions where leadership could be effective.

This was the insight that led Nelson to spend the next seven years elevating awareness of environmental issues—an effort that culminated in the first Earth Day, in April 1970, when some twenty million Americans joined in demonstrations. It’s easy to forget now, but that first wave of the environmental movement had dramatic results: by December 1970, Congress had authorized the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, giving rise to the federal environmental regulatory apparatus that many take for granted today.

Kennedy understood that while a great leader can light a spark that has remained dormant, even the best leaders can’t take the public further on an issue than they’re willing to go. He had the politician’s instinct for recognizing where those limits are—and a true leader’s gift of sensing when the public is ready to blow past them. In 1963, he sensed that Americans weren’t ready to throw their energy behind a push to protect the environment. But he saw with equal acuity that the people were desperately ready for leadership on reducing the threat of nuclear war. In 1963, fresh off the Cuban missile crisis, that threat was palpable, existential, in a way that environmental degradation wasn’t yet.

Today, climate change is such a threat. The danger it poses to our planet far surpasses even what Gaylord Nelson had in mind in the 1960s, when he urged JFK that “this is America’s last chance.” And public awareness of the problem, and the need to do something about it, increases by the day, as the evidence—from melting ice sheets to extra-turbulent weather—grows. That doesn’t mean, however, that voters are eager for major action immediately. As Gilad Edelman notes in this issue, a major impediment to action is that citizens who prioritize the environment the most tend not to vote (see “Planet Earth Gets a Ground Game,” page 33). Still, there will come a moment when that demand for action on climate change builds up just as it did for arms control in 1963. We won’t know it until a skilled leader realizes that the issue is finally ripe. The question is whether, at the moment of ripeness, we will have such a leader.

The post JFK and the Paradox of Leadership appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Alex Tabarrok is no one’s idea of a big-government liberal. A libertarian economist at George Mason University, he’s best known for cofounding Marginal Revolution, one of the most popular economics blogs on the internet. A deep skeptic of government bureaucracies, he has written favorably of private prisons, private airports, and even private cities.

That’s why a study he co-published earlier this year is so noteworthy. When Tabarrok and his former grad student Nathan Goldschlag set out to measure how federal regulations impact business growth, they were sure they’d find proof that regulations were dragging down the economy. But they didn’t. No matter how they sliced the data, they could find no evidence that federal regulation was bad for business.

Economists—like politicians, arguing spouses, and, yes, journalists—tend to interpret evidence in a way that corroborates their existing worldview. And the dynamics of academia weigh against publishing findings that fail to support a researcher’s original hypothesis. But Tabarrok published his study anyway. That makes him something of a rarity.

Tabarrok came by his libertarianism early. When he was growing up in Toronto, his family would debate political and ethical issues over dinner every night. One evening the Tabarroks were debating the moral value of rock and roll. “I said, ‘Well, look at this band, Rush: they even quote this philosopher Ayn Rand in their songs,’ ” he recalled recently. “My mother said, ‘Oh yeah, you’d probably like her,’ and I felt embarrassed because I was using this in an argument and I actually hadn’t read any Ayn Rand before.” Tabarrok thinks his mother probably regrets her suggestion to this day.

Tabarrok made his way to the U.S. for graduate studies at George Mason, returning there as a professor in 2002. He now directs its Center for Study of Public Choice and is the economics chair at GMU’s Mercatus Center, a research institute heavily funded by Charles Koch and cofounded by Richard Fink, a former Koch Industries executive. The center, which boasts ties to prominent right-wing groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, funds research to promote free-market policy solutions and the rollback of regulations. (Mercatus is Latin for “market.”) The Wall Street Journal has called Mercatus “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of.”

A few years ago, Tabarrok got a new toy to play with. Until recently, there was never great data available for researchers who wanted to empirically study the effects of regulation. But, in 2014, two other Mercatus Center research fellows developed a new public-use database called RegData, which captures everything published in the Code of Federal Regulations each year. Measuring regulation has always been surprisingly tricky, because when an agency puts out a rule, it can contain any number of new individual legal requirements. RegData addresses that problem by scrubbing the Code for key words such as “shall,” “required,” and “may not.” The theory is that this more accurately measures the number of regulations than simply counting the total number of pages in the Code, as past studies tended to do. RegData also uses artificial intelligence techniques to predict which industry each regulation will affect. The upshot is that, for the first time, economists could more confidently measure federal regulations over time and by industry. In theory, that would make it easier to build the case that regulations were hurting the economy.

For his first paper using the database, Tabarrok decided to analyze the effect of federal regulation on “economic dynamism”—a catch-all term referring to the rate at which new businesses launch and grow, and at which people switch jobs, lose jobs, or migrate for work. There has been a notable and somewhat mysterious decline in dynamism over the last few decades. The rate at which start-ups form is half of what it was forty years ago, the fraction of workers who bounce from one job to another—a sign of competitive labor markets—has plunged, productivity has slowed, and adult employment remains well below its early-2000 peak.

Armed with RegData, Tabarrok and Goldschlag set out to show that regulations were at least partly to blame. But they couldn’t. There was simply no correlation, they found, between the degree of federal regulation and the decline of business dynamism. The decline was seen across many different industries, including those that are heavily regulated and those that are not. They tried two other independent tests that didn’t rely on RegData, and came to the same conclusion: an increase in federal regulation just could not explain what was going on.

“I was pretty surprised that we just kept coming up with nothing,” Tabarrok told me. “I’m a free-market type of person, so it wouldn’t have at all surprised me to find that government regulation is causing decline in dynamism. Ideologically, it fits my priors of the way I would see the world, so, yes, I was expecting to find something.”

Tara Sinclair, an economist at George Washington University who studies labor market issues and didn’t have any connection to Tabarrok and Goldschlag’s study, said she would rank their paper as one of the most important to emerge thus far around regulation and dynamism. “In this space, in this research, there are a lot of advocates—and they can really make the data say lots of different things if you cherry-pick,” she said. “That they chose to report a result that was against their priors is really commendable.”

Indeed, the new paper undermines one of the most deeply held convictions of the American right, one that unites libertarians like Tabarrok with mainstream conservatives: that regulations inevitably impose “deadweight loss” on the economy and are therefore an enemy of economic growth. This idea has been a mainstay of Republican politics since the Reagan era, and the Trump administration has taken to deregulation with missionary zeal. In fact, it’s probably the policy objective that the administration has pursued most successfully—rolling back the Clean Power Plan, repealing net neutrality, freezing the fiduciary rule, and on and on.

The premise that regulations come at the expense of economic activity—that we must always make trade-offs between safety and jobs—is so pervasive that even the American left tends to accept it, defending regulations as necessary evils to promote other social goods. Yet there has never been strong evidence that these trade-offs actually exist. To the contrary, federal regulations have often driven growth and innovation, whether it’s fuel standards spurring new electric cars and solar energy, or the Dodd-Frank law causing an entirely new industry—financial technology—to appear out of whole cloth. (See Anne Kim, “Deconstricting the Administrative State,” June/July/August 2017.)

Not that Tabarrok himself has become a booster for regulation. He doesn’t think much of government’s ability to spark innovation through setting standards; the first thing he did when he last bought a new shower head, he said, was remove its federally mandated flow restrictor. Nevertheless, his research has convinced him that Trump’s aggressive deregulatory agenda is unlikely to reverse the trend of declining dynamism.

If federal regulation isn’t behind the dynamism die-off, then what is? Tabarrok’s paper suggests that economists need to look elsewhere. Eli Lehrer, head of the pro-deregulation think tank R Street Institute, argues that some of the most burdensome regulations are state and local—zoning, building codes, occupational licensing, and the like. Tabarrok and Goldschlag agree that more attention should be paid to the potential effects of non-federal regulations.

But a more likely explanation—one that has been gaining purchase among both think tanks and elected Democrats—is rising corporate concentration. (See Gilad Edelman, “The Democrats Confront Monopoly,” November/December 2017.) The trend of declining dynamism since 1980—along with wage stagnation, rising inequality, and a host of other ills—has tracked a parallel rise in monopolization, as the economy becomes increasingly consolidated in the hands of a few giant businesses. As New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter put it recently, “By allowing an ecosystem of gargantuan companies to develop, all but dominating the markets they served, the American economy shut out disruption. And thus it shut out change.”

This hasn’t happened by accident, but is, rather, the result of deliberate decisionmaking, beginning under Reagan, to dial down the enforcement of antitrust law. In other words, it is a consequence of deregulation, not overregulation.

Tabarrok said he’s open to the theory that consolidation has hurt dynamism, but deeply skeptical that antitrust enforcement can fix it. So he may not become a liberal lion anytime soon—and that’s all right. He deserves praise for his willingness to publish findings that go against his priors and, if not his ideological agenda, then at least the agenda of the people who help pay his salary. These debates get tough because it so often feels like there are warring studies on each side. If more people are willing to stand by research findings that go against their own camp, debating public policy will be a lot more worthwhile.

The post The Libertarian Who Accidentally Helped Make the Case for Regulation appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It often seems as if conservatives have been fretting about the “decline of the West” for as long as there has been a West to fret about. From Edmund Burke panicking about the French Revolution to Allan Bloom worrying about the effect of Mick Jagger’s hip gyrations on the morals of 1980s undergraduates, the right is often defined more by the cultural changes it opposes than the principles it supports. In a 2006 essay explaining his departure from the conservative movement, outgoing National Review director Austin Bramwell issued a plea against those who “carry on the Cold War obsession with the so-called ‘crisis of the West.’ Convinced that history at some point took a wrong turn, they pore over ancient texts in search of some Hermetic insight into the fatal error.” In Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg believes he has finally found that fatal error.

The flavor of Goldberg’s argument can be gleaned from the book’s subtitle. It is a work about decline, one that identifies “nationalism, populism, and tribalism” as the principle enemies of order. To the extent that it can be easily summarized, Goldberg’s argument is roughly as follows: Human nature is brutal and uncivilized, and for thousands of years our species divided its time between hunting, gathering, raping, and killing. But, around 300 years ago, a Miracle occurred (the capital M is his): the English, with a bit of help from the Dutch, stumbled upon a winning formula for human life—liberal capitalist democracy. Despite a few regrettable hiccups, such as the transatlantic slave trade and the extinction of a number of native populations, this formula created unprecedented growth, prosperity, and peace.

Yet these days many people are ungrateful for the Miracle. They believe that it has created injustices. These people, Goldberg writes, are the intellectual heirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They are Romantics who think civilization is bad and celebrate an imagined ideal of the noble savage. This Romanticism brought us fascism and progressivism, ideologies that produced a broad range of evils, from death camps to the IRS. The Romantics have infected our popular culture, making us celebrate outlaws and iconoclasts like Breaking Bad’s Walter White. (His example.) They have also convinced us to value our feelings and emotions too much, leading to the breakdown of the nuclear family. And they have encouraged a “tribal” mind-set, which finds its political voice in populist and nationalist movements of the right and left, such as identity politics. Donald Trump represents the triumph of primitive instinct over ideas. If we do not reject this primitivism, and adhere to the ideas of John Locke instead of Rousseau, we are endangering the Miracle and will destroy the West.

Isay this is “to the extent” the argument can be summarized because Suicide of the West is a sprawling treatise that offers Goldberg’s reflections on a broad array of different subjects. His 2008 book Liberal Fascism had the virtue of simplicity: say what you will about its level of nuance, but the thesis (“actually, it’s liberals who are the real Nazis”) was readily graspable. Over the 450 pages of Suicide of the West, we are treated to, among other observations: Goldberg’s theory of human nature, an explication of the moral framework of The Godfather, a history of Venetian nobility, and Goldberg’s verdicts on films and television shows from Pleasantville (“execrable”) to Mr. Robot (“brilliant”) to Fight Club (“egregious”). Goldberg spends an entire page summarizing the plot of Dead Poets Society, in an effort to prove that Robin Williams’s Mr. Keating was actually not a good teacher and that “the headmaster was right.”

There are also enough caveats and qualifications to the central argument that one must be very careful in trying to sum it up, for fear of being accused of misrepresentation. (Liberal Fascism employed a similar trick: “I didn’t say that liberals were fascists,” you can imagine Goldberg insisting. “I said that liberals were the intellectual heirs of fascist theories of government, which is very different. Clearly you didn’t read the book . . .”) Goldberg’s opposition to “nationalism, populism, and tribalism” is not absolute. He admits that he is, in fact, something of a nationalist himself. “I have always argued that a little nationalism is essential to the American project,” he says; just not too much, lest it “become statism or some form of socialism.” Populism, meanwhile, horrifies Goldberg when it speaks on behalf of the 99 percent against the 1 percent, but he fully supported the Tea Party, which “married populism to the principles of the Founding.” Tribalism, too, has its virtues. Goldberg argues that “the only solution to our woes is for the West to re-embrace the core ideas that made the Miracle possible, not just as a set of policies, but as a tribal attachment, a dogmatic commitment.” All told, Goldberg somehow manages to endorse three out of the four things the book’s subtitle assures us are destroying American democracy. 

Goldberg’s posture toward Donald Trump is similarly puzzling. Goldberg, a senior editor of the National Review and a prominent anti-Trump conservative, professes to be horrified by the way our forty-fifth president has eroded the office’s dignity. Yet, even though Goldberg insists that Trump is bringing us to the brink of civilizational suicide, it is sometimes difficult to see what he actually takes issue with. In many ways, Trump’s policy proposals have been indistinguishable from the Tea Party Republicanism that Goldberg champions: slashing environmental regulations, killing Obamacare, banning transgender soldiers, handing out guns to middle school teachers. Beyond the cancellation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, what is there for Goldberg to dislike?

Throughout the book, Goldberg appears to approve of the bulk of the Trump administration’s actual policies. The corporate beneficiaries of Trump’s tax cuts are the “wealth creators” to whom we have been insufficiently grateful. Anti-immigration attitudes among Trump supporters are a rational response to demographic and cultural changes. After all, he writes, “[i]n ethnically or culturally homogenous communities, there is more social trust and more social capital. . . . [S]hared culture builds trust, which is essential to democracy and economic growth.” There’s a legitimate interest, then, in keeping a community ethnically pure; Goldberg says democracy itself may depend on it.

When it comes down to it, Goldberg dislikes Trump because of who he is, rather than what he has done. When he comes to list his specific grievances, they are that Trump “is boorish and crude,” “freely admits his greed, his whining, and his deceptions,” “is only civil when civility redounds to his benefit,” and “respects the law only when he can use it as a weapon.” It’s telling that “boorish” is the number one complaint. Goldberg wouldn’t mind a president who attacked transgender people and immigrants, threatened nuclear war, and offered broad new tax giveaways to corporations; his problem is that Trump does these things with such crass disregard for propriety. It’s bad manners, not bad policies, that implicate Trump in the “suicide of the West.”

The populism and tribalism of the left, however, are a much deeper problem. Goldberg intends Suicide of the West to be a work of serious political philosophy, but much of it is simply a lengthy rehash of long-standing conservative complaints about how Hollywood has poisoned our value system and the politically correct left are a bunch of humorless totalitarian thought police. The “social justice warriors” are engaging in a “jihad against ‘hate speech’ ” and “practitioners of identity politics and their coalitional allies have leached off the inherent decency of this country and the constitutional order to press their advantages.” They worship diversity for its own sake, act like “Mao’s Red Guard,” and think everything is “white male privilege.” In doing this, the young Rousseauians on college campuses are waging war on civilization itself.

Some parts of Goldberg’s brief against leftist cultural corrosion are downright bizarre. The fact that the “youths” in Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods decide not to save the world shows how morally apathetic millennials are. Absent black fathers are the reason that there aren’t more black baseball players, because there is nobody around to teach kids how to hold a glove properly. A section on “rock and roll” reads like an anti-Elvis diatribe from a 1950s Pentecostal preacher. Every imaginable cliché about liberals appears somewhere in the text.

It’s not worth responding to these charges in much detail, because Goldberg isn’t interested in hearing the other side. He distorts feminists and “social justice warriors” to make them sound as absurd as possible and to avoid engaging with their arguments. Citing a feminist book that says gender equality can be measured by “the degree to which men and women have similar kinds or degrees of power, status, autonomy, and authority,” he concludes that the “real aim” of feminists is “power, not policy.” Thus he implies that feminists want as much power as possible, when the quote makes clear that feminism is about ensuring that women have “similar” degrees of power. Goldberg likewise attacks “identity politics” as consisting of the view that “[m]y tribe deserves more than your tribe.” But those who condemn the black-white wealth gap, for example, aren’t saying that black people should have ten times as much as white people; they’re saying it’s unfair that white people have ten times as much as black people. Goldberg doesn’t care to listen to this. He responds to Van Jones, who thought Republicans’ embrace of “colorblindness” rhetoric represented a racial “blind spot,” by quoting (of course) Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, instead of making a good-faith effort to find out what Van Jones actually meant.

Sometimes Goldberg’s reasoning is so slapdash as to be comical. Here is how he describes, and responds to, the progressive claim that the top 1 percent have too much wealth:

Today, there’s a low-simmering Jacobin fever aimed at the so-called one percent. This bland description of economic elites is logically ludicrous, given that it is a fact of math that there will always be a top one percent. A Bernie Sanders of a Stalinist bent could, in theory, liquidate the ranks of the top one percent and, in that very act, create an entirely new top one percent. Remove the top floor of a building and the next floor down becomes the top floor. The only way to ensure there is no top is to tear down the whole structure to the foundation.

The left’s critique, of course, is not that a distribution of wealth or income exists, but rather that far too much money is concentrated in the hands of the super-rich. The 1 percent today control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. It defies no fact of math to insist that they should have less.

Suicide of the West is, in fact, in large part simply a defense of the existing economic order. “To fret about political, social, or economic inequality in a free society is to fret about the problem of freedom itself, for in the presence of freedom there will always be inequality of some kind,” Goldberg writes. He is openly in favor of aristocracy. Human beings have a “natural instinct for authority and hierarchy” and “inevitably become ruled by an elite few,” so there is “nothing inherently bad about an elite.”

The idea that elitism is good because it is natural runs contrary to one of Goldberg’s other main points, which is that capitalism is good precisely because it is unnatural and overrides our inherent tendencies toward tribalism and cooperation. He shows at tedious length that the growth of capitalism caused an explosion of productivity, that a lot of horrors have disappeared, and that we live longer now than we once did. (“Would you entrust your teeth to ‘dentists’ in medieval England?”) He argues that efforts by populists to spurn this Miracle and create a better system will inevitably bring us Venezuela and the gulag. But none of this responds to the actual arguments being made by economic progressives, very few of whom are proposing the elimination of money or property rights. The serious question is why, in a country so prosperous, there should still be so many people with low wages, poor health care, and limited access to education, and why the United States lags so far behind other developed countries in the provision of certain basic goods. This is not a question you can answer by displaying a chart showing that things were worse 100 years ago, but that’s how Goldberg chooses to prove that left-wing populists are driving civilization off a cliff.

There is much more to Suicide of the West, including a great deal of unfalsifiable speculation on human nature, and far more mentions of John Locke than are in any way necessary. But the theses aren’t original enough to spend much time on. We’ve heard all these complaints before, from every right-wing relative who has ever gone on a rant about teen mothers or campus activists, though at least Goldberg has done us the favor of piling it all in one place and adding references to Hobbes and St. Augustine.

Suicide of the West is nevertheless illuminating, because it reveals the underlying character of many “Never Trump” conservatives. Liberals who are tempted to make common cause with people like Goldberg need to understand what the conservative objections to Trump actually are. Goldberg does not oppose nationalism, xenophobia, tribalism, or prejudice—indeed, he advocates or defends all of them in the book. Rather, Donald Trump is objectionable because he fails to show, in Goldberg’s words, “ideas” and “good character.” Trump does not attempt to make Western civilization look rational, noble, and elevated. Instead, he shows it to be brutal, cruel, and self-interested. (Recall that Goldberg criticizes Trump not for being greedy, but for admitting it.) The Never Trumpers do not want to excise these tendencies; they merely want to disguise them through civility and “ideas,” which seems to mean name-dropping Enlightenment political theorists. The real enemy in this book is not Trump, but rather the leftists and “identity politics” practitioners who threaten the “aristocrats” Goldberg so steadfastly defends. If Trump poses a threat to conservatism, it is not because he advocates much that the Never Trumpers oppose; he does not. It is because he so brazenly exposes the inhumanity of right-wing policies that he may well be the most formidable recruiting tool the left has ever had.

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