This Catherine Lucey article doesn’t tell us what exactly the “loyal opposition” faction of the Philly GOP thinks it could do to become more competitive at the city level, but I have some ideas!
The problem with city level politics is that they’re uncompetitive. And they’re uncompetitive because the national party brands map poorly onto the issue space at the local level.
The only reason federal elections are competitive at all is that voters are able to use the party labels as a shortcut to understand roughly where candidates are going to come down on the federal issues.
That all breaks down at the local level. The national party labels tell us next to nothing about candidates’ positions on municipal issues.
What’s more, the Democratic registration advantage is so huge that even if the Republicans did develop a popular platform on municipal issues, it would still be very hard for them to win given the preponderance of low-information “Michigan voters”.
What you really need for competitive city elections then is either:
1) completely different political parties, or
2) fusion voting.
The actual ideological divisions in the municipal issue space can mostly be boiled down to insider-outsider politics in land use and business policy. A few examples would be:
Developers and future housing consumers vs. incumbent landowners;
Future business owners vs. incumbent business owners;
Future taxi drivers vs. incumbent taxi drivers;
Mobile vendors vs. incumbent food sellers;
What you really need is a Growth and Development Party (GDP!) that’s for breaking down barriers to entry in the land market, and favoring new entrants in business and labor markets.
On the other side, you’d have something like a NIMBY Party to aggregate the interests of the sundry incumbents and rent-seekers out to maintain the status quo.
Currently you find the would-be members of the GDP and NIMBY parties fairly evenly represented among the Democratic and Republican politicians in local government, so these issues don’t get polarized along party lines. But somebody should polarize them!
The more promising way to make local elections more competitive would be for Harrisburg to legalize fusion voting.
Fusion voting is when a single candidate can appear on multiple ballot lines, allowing minor parties to endorse major party candidates.
So for instance, in a city council election with fusion voting, you’d have a Democratic ballot line, a Republican ballot line, a Growth and Development Party ballot line and a NIMBY ballot line. The Dems would run some candidates and the GOP would run some candidates, and then the GDP and the NIMBYs would choose which major party candidates best line up with their issue positions, and put them on their ballot lines.
Then people could vote a straight GDP ticket or a straight NIMBY ticket, selecting a mix of Democrats and Republicans who can be expected to vote their issue preferences once in office. Fusion voting turns party competition into interest group competition, which tends to be quite potent even in a “one party town.”
In Philadelphia, the competition is all in the primary election season. Not that I want to see the so-called Loyal Opposition do this, but they could run as conservative Democrats and just shed the Repiblican Party. They’d have more effect at the local level an would be rid of the larger national GOP that has undercut this nation.
Wouldn’t really do anything about the problem I mentioned, which is that low-info voters don’t have a shorthand way to tell what “conservative” or “liberal” even means on local issues. In national politics they rely on party labels.
Pingback: Massachusetts Mass 5/25 Morning Buzz | Massachusetts Mass
What we need is a REAL choice.
I have to disagree that your theory will actually “FIX” anything in this heyday of the horrific and absolutely crazy “Citizen’s United” legislation.
We need to abandon the 2 major bought and paid for parties – not combine them.
Alternate party options like the Green Party and the National Atheist Party that have the agenda of their constituents’ and citizens of their community, not corporate interests.
PA needs to support actual fair and free elections and get behind Ballot Access reform. http://www.paballotaccess.org/
Third party reformers should be getting behind fusion voting and ranked choice voting. I’m mostly with the Democrats, but I’d like to see more competition from people with more heterodox views.
But until there is fusion voting, the power for change is still in the Democratic primaries. I’m not going ro waste a vote on someone who has no chance of winning as a Green, but may have a chance if he ran as a Democrat. All to often, I’m reminded how Ralph Nader elected George W. Bush.
Absolutely right. Voting third parties is terrible under first-past-the-post. Only difference might be in municipal elections, since the turnout is low, but even then it’s a bad idea.