9UNP0209SD_Barry_Burden_WordPress

- Thanks, everybody for coming this evening. I'm Margaret Lewis, executive director of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. And we're delighted that you could all join us today. We're going to do something a little different. We're so pleased that you can be here with us for the final event in our fall series, "Getting to Purple: Beyond the Red and Blue of Partisan Politics." And Dr. Barry Burden is here with us. He'll share "The Voter and the 2008 Presidential Election Campaign," and talk a little bit about a tool kit for reform. But before we get started, we will be honoring some very special winners of some cartoon contests. 

Our mission is to bring people and ideas together for a better Wisconsin. And bringing some of our leading thinkers are sometimes our artists and our cartoonists. We try to offer the very best knowledge available in a respectful, civil environment. Outside this room, you can pick up information about the Wisconsin Academy. And we sure hope you will all consider becoming a member. The best way to do that is to just go to our Web site: WisconsinAcademy.org Very important, we want to hear from you. We want to hear your evaluation of these programs. You've all received an evaluation form, that I hope you will fill out. It helps us in our grant making process, to be able to communicate to our sponsors what you think about, and your recommendations for future programs. I hope you'll really take time to do that. 

I'd also like you to join me in thanking our program sponsors for which we could not present these programs free to the public without. The Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation; Kathleen White and the board of the Madison Community Foundation; The Evjue Foundation, the charitable arm of the Capital Times; the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation; the UW-Madison Chancellor's office and the Wisconsin Idea Project; M&I Foundation; The John and Sally Mielke Family Fund; the University Bookstore; and many, many donors like you. We also have some special in-kind contributors as part of this series. And Jeff Mayers, president of WisPolitics.com I know is here. Jeff, do you want to raise your hand? There he is over here. Jeff and WisPolitics did all the counting for our cartoon contests, and have been a very wonderful media sponsor. Thank you to Jeff and the Wisconsin Newspapers Association, and the other media partners that are listed here behind me. As part of our "Getting to Purple" series, we invited you to participate in our political cartoon drawing and political cartoon caption contests. 

And I thank Eve for her assistance with this project. Eve, I think you're there. Wave your hand. I'm also pleased to introduce to you the judges for the cartoon competition, as well as our winners. The professional political cartoonists, who served as our judges are, and I think as they come up, you'll see a cartoon representative of their work. Stuart Carlson, Stuart can you come up, with the Universal Press Syndicate, and formerly with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Phil Hands, with the Wisconsin State Journal. Brian Strasburg, of Madison's own Isthmus Magazine. Help me thank them for their judging of our political cartoon contests. 
(applause)

 Joe Heller was also one of our judges. And unfortunately, his editor gave him an assignment and he wasn't able to join us tonight. What we'd like to do is now recognize the artists who drew winning political cartoons, and present them with their awards. Honorable Mention is Linda Massey, of Cottage Grove, who can't be here with us tonight. The Third Place winner is Marc Gannon, of Madison. And Brian Strasburg will present him a little appreciation from us. 
(applause)
 Second Place is Sean Stewart, of Cross Plains. 
(applause)
 And First Place, I think some of you may have seen this in the Wisconsin State Journal on Sunday. 

It's Bill Fitzsimmons, of Fort Atkinson. 
(applause)
 Congratulations. 
- Thank you. 
- Thank you very much. We thank them all for their contributions to our "Getting to Purple" contests. And because of the gracious donation of Stuart Carlson, who drew us a political cartoon, which needed a caption, we received, really, hundreds of responses to this caption contest. We are here tonight to announce the winner of the caption contest. Are we ready? Yes, we are. 

You know who it is. Rick Reyer, of Wausau, who came all the way down from Wausau. 
(applause)
 Thank you so much. And Rick will receive, I think also, a signed copy of the cartoon from Stuart Carlson. And we just appreciate so much, their participation and bringing a little of the humor and civility, as they identify hypocrisies, but also expose us to such a wide range of viewpoints, which is the only way that we'll get to purple, is by considering all of those. So thank you so much to all of our participants and winners. 
(applause)
 Thank you very much. So thank you all for voting and participating in this process. 

I'd now like to introduce Laurie Dies, who will introduce our main course tonight, Dr. Barry Burden. Laurie? 
- Thank you, Margaret. And thank you everyone for being here tonight. Regarding tonight's program, there will be time for questions. So you can think about your questions while you're listening. Dr. Barry Burden is a professor and associate chair in the Department of Political Science at UW-Madison. He is the author or editor of several books, including, "Why Americans Split Their Tickets," "Uncertainty in American Politics," and "Personal Roots of Representation." 

He has written about partisanship, third party campaigns, political attitudes toward political leaders, Congressional politics, candidate strategies, and voter turnout. He has also published many articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, and Electoral Studies. Before returning to his native Midwest, he's from Ohio. We won't tell you where he graduated, but watch out for that football game! Before returning to his native Midwest, Burden was on the faculty at Harvard University for seven years. We are so glad to have Barry with us this evening. It is my great pleasure to welcome Dr. Barry Burden. 
(applause)

- Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here tonight, as the final speaker in what really has been a wonderful series. Having come only a few blocks down from Bascom Hill, I didn't have to travel as far as David Broder, or James Conant, but I'm just as pleased to take part. My sincere thanks to Laurie, Margaret and the Wisconsin Academy staff for their invitation. Before we get to our topic, I want to just mention some work I'm doing briefly, with the state, on election administration here in Wisconsin. This year, I'm leading a team of faculty and students at the UW-Madison in Political Science, as part of a collaboration with the state's government accountability board. We're hoping to make further improvements to the election system this fall and into future elections. The partnership in my mind, is a wonderful example of what's been called the Wisconsin Idea, the cooperation of the university and the state. I've also learned a tremendous amount about how elections operate here, which is quite unusual among the states. In case you weren't aware, Wisconsin is the most de-centralized of all the states, in terms of how elections are administered. 

There are about, just to give you a sense, there are about 9,000 local election officials in this country. Two thousand of those are in Wisconsin alone. 
(laughter)
 This makes for what I would say is and interesting approach to election administration. Although I can't discuss the ongoing lawsuit that involves Attorney General Van Hollen and the Government Accountability Board, I would be happy to talk about other aspects of election administration after the talk tonight. But let us get on with the business, and that's the theme of this series, "Getting to Purple." It's an intriguing idea, that asked us to find ways to overcome the red/blue dichotomy that's become so prevalent in our discussion of national politics. The red/blue map, by the way, only became salient after the 2000 presidential election, when USA Today published a colored version of the electoral college results. If you remember that map, the states won by the democrat Al Gore were colored blue. The states won by George Bush, the republican, were red. 

And the striking thing about the map was the geographic polarization. Blues were concentrated on the coasts, maybe even our northern coast. And reds in the middle of the country. And there were folks who joked, you could get in your car in Washington, DC, and drive west, assuming you skirt around the bottom of Illinois, and not hit another blue state until you got to California. The closeness and controversy of that election reminded voters just how important winning is, even if it's by a small number of votes. Out of a hundred million votes cast, it was in the end, just 538 votes in Florida that led to George W. Bush's election that year. Now, many Americans are torn when forced to choose between the candidates. And most states are, in fact, a healthy mix of red and blue. But the hard truth is that election results are dichotomous. 

We can be as subtle and sophisticated as we like as voters, but in the end, someone will win and someone will lose. The winner take all aspect of US elections means that a 50-50 election, as the last two have nearly been, leaves half of the voters unhappy. It means that half of the voters have supported the losing candidate in those instances. And this system also forces us to think more crudely than we otherwise would about one another. It leads to stereotypes about what red and blue voters are like. You sometimes see them in the editorial cartoons from the artists here tonight. As Jeffrey Numberg's best seller from a couple years ago put it, "Liberals are viewed as tax-raising, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body piercing, Hollywood-loving, left wing freak shows." 
(laughter)
 I'm not sure if it was liberals or conservatives who bought that book. If I had to come up with an equivalently nasty description for conservatives, they might be stereotyped as gun-toting, Bible-thumping, WalMart-shopping, NASCAR-watching, truck driving, tax-cutting, right wing zealots. 

Just to be fair. 
(laughter)
 If these deep cultural divisions between blue and red voters are even close to accurate, it's amazing that we somehow manage to live together peacefully. Needless to say, there simply aren't many Americans who fit squarely into one of those caricatures. It's true that the American public is deeply divided on some important public issues, but that doesn't necessarily make these portrayals helpful. So our task is to figure out how to get past the blue and red stereotypes that so often structure political discourse in this country. This is the point of the Wisconsin Academy series. But I want to put some boundaries on this mission tonight. If getting to purple means abandoning our partisan loyalties, or giving up the give and take of real politics, or pretending the conflict doesn't exist, then I'm against it. If it instead means engaging real public concerns, avoiding artificial polarization, and encouraging compromise when it's necessary to reach real policy solutions, we're compelled to do it. 

Unfortunately, it's harder to get to purple this way, because it asks something of you. Demonizing the other side is easy. Figuring out how to hold fast to your political values while appreciating what both sides have to offer is no easy task. To paraphrase Texan Jim Hightower, "There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and roadkill." 
(laughter)
 Let's be frank about this. Too often, people who say they are undecided, or just don't like either of the parties, are really taking the easy way out. Like it or not, in the end, voters do need to make a partisan choice. To avoid taking a side is to abdicate your responsibility as a citizen. This is not to say that you need to be a latte drinker to vote for Barack Obama. 

It may help. Or that you need to be a NASCAR watcher to vote for John McCain this November, though that may help. But we do need to accept our democratic duties to engage in politics, without unnecessarily forcing ourselves to think in terms of merely blue or red. Just how accurate is the ubiquitous red and blue map at describing our political views? Here's the simple truth from political science research. Most states, including Wisconsin, are purple. And many people are purple. But when you get to voters, most of us in fact are not. It's true that Wisconsin hasn't voted for a republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan's landslide in 1984, 24 years ago. But that doesn't exactly mean we're a blue state. 

John Kerry won this state in 2004 by 11,000 votes. That's less than half a percentage point. Wisconsin was in fact, the purplest of all the states in 2004, despite all the attention given to Ohio and Florida. But the purple comes from mixing different kinds of voters. And this is troubling, because there aren't really any purple candidates. But here's the surprise. There aren't that many purple voters either. People who think of themselves as purple aren't exactly the ones who are engaged in the political process. In fact, the longer you're involved in politics, the more partisan you become. That's a fact of the data. 

There's a mythology in America of the independent minded voter. It's a popular one. And the myth persists because we Americans like to think of ourselves as free agents, independent, unique. We can't be fenced in. But frankly, life is too complicated to approach every decision this way. We need shortcuts. Most of our daily lives are, in fact, governed by routines or scripts. Think about your actions as a consumer in the marketplace. You probably purchase the same brand of cereal every week in the grocery store. You don't do extensive research about the price, and the nutritional value of the many brands of cereal that are available, or become available, while you're consuming. 

And likewise, you probably vote for the same party most of the time. In academic surveys, we often ask people why they vote the way they do. We frequently get respondents saying something to the effect of, I always vote for the person, not the party. But every time, they just happen to be democrats. 
(laughter)
 My point is that there's nothing inherently wrong with being partisan. In surveys, most people, about two-thirds of us, admit that we are in fact, democrats or republicans. And if we ask those who initially tell us they're independents, which way they lean, would you consider yourself to be more of a republican or more of a democrat, most of them are willing to pick a party. And in the end, only about ten percent of Americans are truly pure independents. In fact, the people who admit to us they lean to one party or another, we call "closet partisans," because their behavior in the polling place is just as partisan as those who admit at first blush, that they're democrats or republicans. 

Being a partisan doesn't mean that one must agree with everything the parties say and do. In fact, there's a nice analogy between party identification and religious affiliation. People who report to us that they are Catholic don't necessarily mean that they agree with all the church doctrines, or that they even go to Mass or donate to the church. But it does represent a kind of psychological identity for them. It means that those are my people. The same goes for parties. People with these kinds of partisan feelings turn out to often be better citizens than people who call themselves independents. People who say they're partisan are more knowledgeable about current affairs, are more supportive and trusting of the political system, and are more likely, by far, to participate in politics, whether it's voting, making campaign contributions, or volunteering their time. As an example, over 90% of the people who tell us that they are strong democrats or strong republicans voted in 2004. That's 20 points higher than the rate for pure independents. 

Just the way a Cubs fan is more likely to know about baseball because he has a team to root for, a democrat or republican is more likely to be an engaged citizen, because they have a political team to root for. The question is how to get people to engage if they aren't rooting. And just as difficult, how to get those of us who are rooting, to set aside our team loyalties when it's appropriate. So I want to encourage us to get to purple constructively. And this means different things for different people, depending on where you come from politically. The independents need to emulate their partisan brethren, by fully participating in politics. Democrats and republicans among us may be better citizens than independents, but we need to learn to tolerate candidates and policies who don't exactly fit our world views. The independents need to take responsibility and become part of the system, rather than avoiding it, and be honest with themselves about why they're not fully participating. Partisans sometimes need to accept approaches that aren't their own. I'll have more to say about what you and I should do in a moment. 

But first, you may be thinking that the problem with politics today is not with us, but with them. It's not with us voters, it's with the politicians and the system they created in support. That was the message in the David Broder and Jim Conant talks the last couple of weeks. And I wholeheartedly agree. The system is need of serious repair. So let's spend just a moment thinking about changes to the system that might help us improve the political process. There are some obvious reforms that I think we all could agree would make politics more productive. But there are also some that I think are red herrings, that are really excuses for other things we might be doing. For example, I don't believe that putting term limits on members of Congress, or adopting a balanced budget amendment, or many versions of campaign finance reform would do much to improve our democracy. They might actually do more harm than good. 

But yes, there's plenty of need for reform. In particular, I would like to see us do the following things. Move towards a non-partisan approach to legislative redistricting. So the Congressional and state legislative elections are more competitive. Make our ballot access laws fairer, and more uniform across the states, so that other parties besides the democrats and republicans at least have a chance to win votes. Overhaul, completely, the presidential nomination process, so that our presidential campaigns are shorter, less expensive and more rational. 
(laughter and applause)
 Make voter registration easier, if not automatic and universal. 
(applause)
 And finally, modify the electoral college, either by encouraging states to divide their electoral votes in a proportional way, or doing away with it altogether. 

(applause)
 I'd be happy to talk about these or any other reforms in the Q&A. But frankly, I don't think they should be our immediate focus tonight. There are good government groups, such as the League of Women Voters here in Wisconsin, working hard on these issues. And I'd encourage you to join up with their efforts. But improving the political process, the system, takes time. You can do your part tonight much more immediately. And getting our electorate in good health, is probably a prerequisite to improving the system anyway. It's easy to complain about how politics is no good, and to say I'm not going to participate. But as Robert Putnam's research on social capital has shown, it's participation that can make politics good. 

So here are the recommendations I have to offer to you. And many of you have probably already taken these steps. After all, here you are on a Wednesday night to hear me talk about politics. But I'm a college professor. And part of my job is to assign homework. 
(laughter)
 This is yours. Number one, inform yourself. It's a cliche that knowledge is power. But it's true. 

It gives you the power to wade through an information environment that surrounds campaigns. It gives you the power to identify the things that matter to you. It give you the power to find out the truth about those things. Unequal knowledge in the electorate means unequal influence in the political process. Unfortunately, surveys show that the American public is less informed than we would like. Pollsters have a lot of fun demonstrating just how little political knowledge is out there. It jumps out of our academic surveys, as well. As one famous early study by political scientist Phil Converse pointed out, "The two simplest truths I know about the distribution of political information in modern electorates is that the mean is low, and the variance is high." The 2004 national election study, one of our academic surveys, shows that at that time, 15% of the public did not know what job Dick Cheney held. That was after four years in office. 

Ninety percent could not name the speaker of the House. The answer was Dennis Hastert, at the time. And 56%, only 56%, even knew which party was in control of Congress. And keep in mind, that half of the people would get that question right by guessing alone. 
(laughter)
 How can we expect the public to understand more technical issues, such as a cap and trade system for dealing with carbon emissions, or the difference between Shiite and Sunni Muslims? Some researchers believe that voters can get by without much political knowledge, that they can use shortcuts to make decisions when they need to. For example, knowing that a candidate is endorsed by a particular group may be a way to summarize his or her positions without actually knowing those positions or studying the issues. I admit that sometimes those shortcuts are helpful. But I am skeptical that they're a real substitute for the facts. 

The news environment is so dense and multifaceted today that you need the knowledge to filter out distractions. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as identifying which news outlets are good and which are bad. Take blogs as an example. There aren't many purple blogs out there. I've looked. 
(laughter)
 Most of them are fiercely partisan. But they're also really useful for picking up news items that have been dropped by the mainstream press. When the mainstream press runs to cover the latest celebrity crisis, the blogs are still there. Likewise, cable news can provide more depth than other TV outlets, but it can also be mindless when it tries to fill many hours of programming without much in the way of new content. 

You would be doing well if you read a good national newspaper every day, like the New York Times. If you picked up a weekly news magazine like Time or US News, those aren't bad, either. The truth is you probably have to monitor more than one source to get a reasonable portrayal of what's happening. All of that is step one of the homework. Step two, participate. This obviously means voting. Wisconsin is always near the top in terms of voter turnout. Second only to our rivals in Minnesota. Part of the reason is we have election day registration. But we also have very competitive campaigns, because we're a swing state. 

I also think we're just good people. However, the national standard of about 60% in presidential elections, in terms of turnout; 40% in Congressional elections; and much lower than that in local elections and primaries is disappointing. Turnout in European elections is often 20-25 points higher than in the US. Moreover, those who do vote, have different and often more extreme views than those who don't. But participation also goes beyond voting. Volunteer on a campaign. Donate to a cause. Work to put a candidate on the ballot. Americans are more active in community service than citizens in other democracies. That's something to be proud of. 

But our participation in electoral politics lags behind. When turnout falls, the people who keep voting tend to be the ones with the most extreme views. High levels of participation, in contrast, ensure that the most ideological rigid among us aren't the ones who are dominating the conversation. That's piece of homework number two. Number three, be a good citizen. And by good, I mean a responsible citizen. This is not just voting, which is where most civics courses in high school stop. I'm asking you to be a watchful, vigilant consumer of public affairs. Too many people think this means complaining about politics. That's not what I'm asking. 

Complaining is easy and it's dismissive. It allows you to justify not taking part. In addition to offering healthy criticism of our politics, you should be compliant and tolerant. You should pay your taxes. You should give groups you don't like the same right to the marketplace of ideas and the public airwaves that you have. This is how democracy works. It's what political scientists called 40 years ago, the "civic culture." Number four, I ask that you have principles and a world view. It's difficult to understand politics and decide where you stand if you don't have a rough philosophy of some kind to rely on. As I mentioned earlier, people with coherent ideologies and party affiliations tend to be better citizens. 

The discourse in Washington after all, is framed by partisanship and ideology. So if you don't understand the world in these ways, you won't make much sense of that news. That's one of the reasons why political scientists like parties so much. They are a means for connecting us to our government. But having principles is more than this. It allows you to decide what issues should be important, and which don't matter much. Too often, party politics uses what are called wedge issues to divide us. Not because the issues are inherently important, but because they can be used as weapons to mobilize one side of the spectrum. Last year, a group called Unity '08 formed a non-partisan political movement. They helped to hold an online political convention, and nominate a bipartisan ticket for president and vice-president. 

Although their effort failed, after McCain and Obama became the nominees, I appreciated the fact that they were trying to remind the major parties of the important issues, not the small stuff. They conducted surveys showing that Americans wanted politics to be about big things. The tax structure, healthcare, energy, the environment, Iraq, Terrorism. Sometimes, the parties get bogged down in unproductive debates about issues such as gun control, abortion, and same-sex marriage, as a way to rev up their base voters. This works. Political science research shows that people are more likely to conflict with their party's positions on these issues, on things like abortion, school prayer, and gay marriage. We call these cross pressures. A voter who feels pulled in two ways at the same time. In contrast, there's not much discrepancy between our views on the big issues, and the parties' positions on these things. That includes the Iraq War, government regulation, Social Security, the top items. 

If we as a citizenry know what's important to us, and act on those views, the parties will need to respond. Finally, item five in the homework, is I'm asking you to be open to purpleness. This is the most difficult part of the homework. And it takes a little explaining. If you do the other things I recommend, be informed, attentive, tolerant, open-minded, it's possible your views will change. What do you do when this happens? As Shakespeare first told us, sometimes the misery of politics makes for strange bed fellows, and you should be open to that happening. Primary election voters who demand nothing less than ideological purity from their party's nominees, don't allow for much cooperation across party lines. And as I mentioned, low turnout in primaries and elsewhere, only makes the influence of these dogmatic voters greater. Reading much of the political commentary out there, you wouldn't know that purple is even a possibility. 

People like Sean Hannity on the right, and even academics like Paul -- on the left, frankly aren't very helpful at getting at the truth in the middle. They do provide red meat to the true believers. And they crank up ratings and readership. Stereotyping the opposition as the devil works, whether it's done by an opinionated cable news personality or a candidate's television ad. Political science research has shown that two emotions in particular have the biggest effect on mobilizing voters to action. These two emotions are enthusiasm and anxiety. One positive. One negative. Elites have learned how to make us enthusiastic or anxious for their own purposes. Politicians and journalists alike don't have much incentive to provide a reasoned analysis, since that doesn't turn people out to vote, or get readers, or raise money. 

For many of us, our world views already coincide quite nicely with one of the major political parties. That's partly why self-described democrats and republicans are often better citizens than independents. They found a natural home on the ballot. But even if you're a purple person, you still need to make a choice on election day. Here's where politics gets hard. Let's consider some cases where your views, and those of the major parties don't quite line up. If you are a latte-drinking liberal, what do you do when democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean suggests that the Second Amendment protects gun ownership rights? Or when Barack Obama supports some offshore oil drilling? Or what if the democratic party came out in favor of private school vouchers? If you're a NASCAR-watching conservative, how do you react when President Bush wants to spend federal money to address the AIDS epidemic in Africa? 

Or when John McCain pursues a moderate immigration policy that would permit undocumented workers to stay in the country? Or when conservative Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee says he believes in using tax money to support the arts? If you are a democrat, are you willing to appreciate that as governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney did manage to get most people health insurance? If you are a republican, how can you not give Bill Clinton at least some credit for balancing the federal budget at the end of his presidency? Here's an example of how our partisan blinders deceive us. In the 1988 national election study, an academic survey, we asked respondents about objective economic conditions and how they had changed during the 1980s. So these are questions that have a right and wrong answer in theory. Without even mentioning Ronald Reagan's name, who was leaving office that year, we asked them whether they thought unemployment and inflation had gotten better or worse during his eight years in office. Just a factual matter. Only one in ten democrats thought that both unemployment and inflation had gotten better. 

But about a third to maybe 40% of republicans thought so. How can both be right? Partisanship is helpful when it filters out the noise, not when it filters out the truth. Electoral politics in this campaign season maybe about combat between competing campaigns. But policy making after the election requires compromise across party lines. That's how the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. That's how the federal budget was balanced in the late '90s. The loss of moderates in national politics, and the state legislature right here in Madison, makes these kinds of compromises awkward and irregular. Change, the theme of change, is clearly in the air this year. Only about one in five Americans says that America is on the right track at the moment. 

That's the lowest rating we've ever gotten to that particular question. Both McCain and Obama are trying to be the candidates of change. You are fortunate to be in a purple swing state, where your vote actually matters. I hope you'll take full advantage of the opportunity. Thank you. 
(applause)
 
- Thank you, Barry. We'll let you catch your breath. He gave two lectures today, as well, so I'm sure his voice is still holding out. 

I invite the audience to ask questions of Professor Burden. There's a microphone right down here. Please don't be shy. Lots of food for thought, and we invite you to ask the professor. 
- It's a little difficult to move to election administration after your eloquence and going to purple. But over the last year and a half, there's been a lot of anecdotal reports of longtime, regular voters, going to their polling places and being startled to find they're not on the polling list. It was a front page story in the Wisconsin State Journal about a week ago. I was at a lecture last week by one of your associates. And of about 25 people there, there were three people who had stories of this happening to them. I wonder if something like this would fit into your data collection project. 

The government accountability board would say that most of these people were able to register on election day, because we have election day registration. Or perhaps their file was missing some data. But neither of these gives them an excuse to take voters off the poll list illegally. So would it be feasible for poll workers to record these incidents and for you to collect that data as part of your data collection project? 
- I missed parts of that question. It may be the acoustics in here. But my sense is you're asking about the government accountability board, voter registration and ineligible voters. The controversy that's been in the air for the last week or two, is that right? 
- No, there seems to be a mysterious pattern of longtime voters being dropped from the poll list when they get to their polling place. They haven't changed their polling place in years. 

They've never missed an election. And no one seems to be looking into it deep enough to find out the answer why. 
- The short answer is, I think if you have a concern, I'd express it to the government accountability board. They do have open hearings, and I think would be receptive to that. The larger point is about Wisconsin elections, and how they're administered. Prior to the 2000 election, Wisconsin essentially did its own thing, as did many states. In fact, in three-quarters of the communities in Wisconsin, there was no voter registration at all. Most of our communities are small. Over 90% of them have fewer than 5,000 people. And yet, each one of them has their own municipal clerk who handles election duties. 

In one case, there's a community small enough that they have three voters. In the last election, I think one of those was absentee. Two were in person. And one clerk to manage it. So we're talking about local administration. But after the 2000 election, Congress and the president passed the Help America Vote Act. One of the things that mandated was that each state have a voter registration database. Wisconsin has had ups and downs in implementing that database. And I think just this year, we're seeing it up and running, at least in a trial version, for the first time. And there are issues along the way, is what I would say there. 

It's new for us. 
- You mentioned that several of the European governments have substantially higher participation in their electoral decisions than the United States has. One of the things that occurred to me while you were saying that is that many, if not all of those European countries have multi-party parliamentary systems. We don't have a parliament. We don't have a multi-party system. It seems to me we have these two long-established parties that over time, changed their spots. One is not always blue. And one's not always red, because they, you have to -- democrats, for example. My question to you as a scholar, yourself as a scholar and as a follower of voting behavior, do you and your colleagues in your niche of political science foresee that America will always have these two parties for us to choose from? Or do you see at some distant point that we will have more choice? 

- That's a good question. The first part of your statement has to do with voter turnout and the number of parties. There actually is good research showing that in countries that have multiple parties, turnout is higher in proportional systems due just to the proportionality itself. The other thing that's going on, and the difference between European turnout and here, is that in a couple of countries, places like Belgium, turnout is compulsory. You're required to show up at the polls. Now, that does create some perverse consequences. You have voters showing up and delivering blank ballots, simply to avoid being fined. But it tends to produce higher turnouts. Also, voter registration is not an issue in most of the rest of the world. Voters are automatically registered. 

And as one of my friends in England says, he would have to work not to be registered. It's difficult to get out of it. So here, the burden is on the voter much more. And that does depress turnout. Do I expect that the two-party system is likely to go away anytime soon? No. It's a product of our electoral system, of having districts that elect one person. It's not the system used in most of the world. But there's good theory in political science, now 50 years old, documenting that a system like that tends to produce two parties, whereas a proportional system that you see in western Europe produces multiple parties. It's possible that a new party could emerge and supplant one of the major parties, as the republicans did with the Whigs in the 1860s. 

But now these two parties have been in existence. Really, the democrats are the longest lasting, active political party in the world, having been created in the 1820s. So I don't expect any changes in the near future, at least. 
- Professor, your very first suggestion to move us away from partisanship towards purple was reforming gerrymandering. My question is, how do we get to the situation where there's less gerrymandering? For example, in Iowa, they took the power away from the elected partisan politicians and put it in the hand of more neutral judges and retired officials. My question is, if you want to get there, what way do you suggest we advocate to make it happen? 
- Just some background on the question of gerrymandering. It's named after Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts in the early 1800s. We are the only country on the planet that allows politicians to draw the district lines for other politicians, and many for themselves, in fact. 

If you're in the state legislature, in most parts of the country, you're drawing your own legislative boundaries. In most places around the world, it's either a non-partisan commission, a multi-party commission, an insulated bureaucratic agency, a blue ribbon commission of some kind, some independent entity that we think is not under the control of one party or another. The Iowa model is one we could look at. There are a few states around the country that have decided to leave partisanship behind. Iowa has a non-partisan commission. They end up producing relatively competitive, balanced congressional districts. Maybe that's an artifact of Iowa culture, or the way people are divided there. But it also seems to happen in Arizona and other places that have these systems. There was a movement a couple years ago to put legislative redistricting reform on the ballot in a number of states, California, Massachusetts, Ohio, other places. It failed in everyone of those states it was on the ballot. 

A lot of that I think is miseducation, and which sides were lined up in spending money for and against the ballot initiatives. But in my mind, that's how you have to get there. You've got to put something on the ballot to go around the state legislature, to say we're simply doing this. We're going to move to a system where it's not parties who are involved in drawing the lines, but it's non-partisan or bi-partisan committees. 
- You stated that there are aspects of campaign finance reform, which can do more harm than good. Could you elaborate on that a little bit, please? 
- Which aspects of campaign finance reform would do more harm than good. Let me start with the things that would do good, because I think those are easier to see. Public financing would be one. The trouble with public financing is it's not very popular. 

Most Americans don't want their tax dollars being spent on campaigns. You know the check box on your IRS form that asks whether or not you want the government to set aside a dollar or three dollars on your behalf for a presidential election campaign fund? Fewer and fewer people are checking that box. And that doesn't cost the individual taxpayer a cent. That particular taxpayer. It's contributing to a larger fund. So it's a set-aside. I don't know whether that's a viable system. It does exist in a few states. Wisconsin is one. 

But the support that the public provides to candidates who request the support is so low that it's not particularly useful. I think the kinds of reforms I worry about are those that try to squeeze all the money out of politics. There's an argument in the legal literature that there's a kind of hydraulics at work here, that you try to push the money out of one place, and it appears someplace else. So the McCain-Feingold legislation of a few years ago, tried to squeeze out soft money. And where does it show up in the '04 election? It's in 527 groups. The next reform will be to push 527 groups down. The money will appear someplace else. There are funders looking for places to spend their money. And there are First Amendment issues that may prevent us from stopping that. 

So in my mind, reforms have to think about where you want the money to go, because it's going to exist. And public financing is one attempt at maybe pushing private funds out, or diminishing their influence. But my guess is you can't entirely get rid of them. So that I think is something of a wild goose chase. 
- I know something about the electoral college. I know something about its history. But it does seem to me, an extraordinary way to elect a president in this day and age. You mentioned the electoral college early on. Could you say something more about it? 
- The electoral college. 

It's in the Constitution. So to change it, we'd have to amend the Constitution. Not an easy task, but it's happened, 17 times in the last 200 years. We could move in that direction. It's problematic, because it doesn't weight each vote equally, which in my mind, is an unconstitutional idea to begin with. So it feels to me as if there's a contradiction there. The electoral college is going to give some states more influence than others. Small states, in particular, are going to get representation. Places like Wyoming are going have three electoral votes. Places like New Hampshire are going to get four, regardless of their small populations. 

The larger states get penalized. We happen to benefit in Wisconsin, because we're a swing state. In the '04 election, I think it was only six states, Wisconsin among them, that got 60% of the campaign advertising, and got about two-thirds of the candidates' personal appearances. So the electoral college also creates these massive inequalities in the attention, or the importance, that voters get on election day, and the days leading up to it. One easy reform that is one step short of changing the constitution, is simply to request that states divide their electors proportionally, rather than winner take all. There's nothing in the Constitution, just a matter of state law. We in Wisconsin, could decide to give all eight of our electors to the candidate who wins the most votes in November. That's what we're going to do. In the next cycle, we could decide to divide our ten electors, that is, proportionally, to give six to one candidate and four to another, depending on what the breakdown of the vote is. Two states already do that. 

And they've been doing it for a while. They turn out not to be states that are very important in the grand scheme of things. Nebraska and Maine, which are both small states, and which tend to be republican states. But that would be an easy approach. The trouble is it requires states to act unilaterally, without knowing that other states are going to come along. This might be beneficial in a place like California, which right now gets no attention from the campaigns. It's a solidly democratic state, so the Obama campaign need not spend time or money there. The McCain campaign figures it's a waste to spend time or money there. California, if it were to divide it's electors proportionally, would now get attention, because it has 55 of those electors to give out. And it would be wonderful, even for a losing campaign in that state, to get 20 or 25 of those. 

There's a partisan element to this. In California, the democrats would like not to go to that system, because they lose their lock on those 55 electoral votes. The opposite would be true in a place like Texas. So you've got to get all the states to agree to take a step forward at the same time. And there are some efforts out there. There's a group called FairVote.org that's trying to develop a compact among the states that would allow them all to take that step simultaneously. This requires 50 state legislatures to pass laws at about the same time, and the governors to sign them into law. It's going to be a challenge. There are a few states that have passed them. As I said, there's two states doing it already. 

That, in my mind, as difficult as it sounds, is actually the one that's more likely. 
- Do you feel that my generation of voters will become more partisan, less partisan, or the same? 
- The tendency over time has been for new generations to be less partisan than their parents and their grandparents. So my guess is on average, you and your cohort are less partisan than your parents, and so on. All of us become more partisan with age. That's one of the striking regularities that jumps out of the data. The older you are, the more likely you are to participate. Voter turnout rises dramatically. And the more likely you are to think of yourself as being a very strong this or that. The last couple years have been a little different. 

Some of that is the Obama campaign that's drawing young people in. But I think it predates that, actually. It probably goes back to a discontent with the Iraq War in '05 and '06. It probably goes back to the Howard Dean campaign and the use of the Internet as a way to organize, and using social networks on the Web in '04. Maybe the roots are earlier than that, some time after 9/11. So there's a possibility for change there. At the moment, young people are still least likely to participate, in partisan, even with those improvements made. So it's going to take us a decade, I think, to see what happens. 
- Hello, I really enjoyed the lecture. But I'm curious as to where this purple ground is, and what I'm supposed to be moving toward. 

I'm a little democrat, I will say that. So on the Obama side, I see lots of issues like healthcare and the environment, ending the war. And on the McCain side, I haven't seen or heard issues. I've seen a lot of spin. And I don't know where I'm supposed to go. I want to find consensus. But what is there to agree or disagree with? 
(laughter)
 I haven't seen it yet. But I can't find anything I can disagree with McCain on, because he hasn't proposed anything yet. 

- Remember, my homework was multifaceted. 
(laughter)
 One facet was you need to make a choice in 40-some days from now. And it sounds like you have settled on one. And my guess is that gets reinforced over the coming weeks. Not a lot of uncertainty in your mind. But after the election, one of these guys is going to be president. He'll be sworn in. And if it's your guy, he's going to do some things that make you mad, because you'll feel like they aren't the things he promised he would do, for good democrats during the campaign. And if it's the other guy, you'll be mad, because it seems like he's doing lots of things that you don't like, but occasionally makes an overture in your direction. 

And your tendency, my guess is, is to reject it as a political ploy, throwing a bone to the middle. Think of the cases, just during the Bush years. Faith-based initiatives. No child left behind. The Patriot Act. Things that may not be popular in Madison, but were actually bipartisan initiatives, many of them. Some of them failed. Some of them succeeded. But I think you've got to be open to those kinds of things. There was just a story in the papers today, Bill Clinton has been launching his global initiative. 

And he's been lauding the Bush administration for the money it's put into African poverty and the spread of AIDS. The dollars there I think have quadrupled during the Bush administration. So for all the things you may dislike about what's happening with the current president, I'm just asking you to be open to those times when purpleness can happen. That's it. But you do need to make a choice in November, so that's fine. 
- I was curious as to your views about primary elections and open versus closed primaries. Also, the use of caucuses and how that relates to ballot access issues. And then, as a separate thing, just to follow up on the electoral college question, if there were ever any actual movement toward something in the electoral college, such as we've heard where state legislatures would agree that if other state legislatures would give their electors to-- anything that relied on the winner of the national popular vote, the fact that nothing has ever relied on the winner of the national popular vote, so what we have then would actually be a conglomeration of potentially 50 Florida's of 2000, or Ohio. It's never been an official question who won the national popular vote. If it became that, what would then become of election night, basically? 

But I'm also interested in your view of primaries, open and closed. 
- That's a lot of ground to cover. Let me try. Let me start with the last question first. One reform I didn't talk about that could be implemented in the electoral college is to ask all states to throw their electors to whoever wins the popular vote. So all states would have unanimous electoral college vote, in favor of the person who won the most votes nationally. So for example, in the 2000 election, because Al Gore won half a million more votes than George Bush, all of the states, even states where Bush won, would've thrown their electoral votes to Gore, in a kind of symbolic way, which would've chosen him president. Again, it requires some states to take those steps, either to do it jointly, or for some states to be out front. And both of those things are difficult to do. But I appreciate you bringing that possibility up. 

So primaries and caucuses, these are the places where nominees for office are chosen. These are the hotbeds, or the soup that candidates come out of. And yet, they're the places where fewer of us, the fewest of us, are participating, particularly in caucuses. It's a proud tradition in Iowa, but frankly, it's not very many people participating. It's asking folks to come out on a cold night and spend about the amount of time you're spending tonight listening to me, to show their preferences, and negotiate with one another a little bit, and make some compromises. And you know, that's something not a lot of people are willing to commit to. Who does show up on a night like that, with a snow storm and a college football game on, as was the case this year, they tend to be the strongest supporters, the most extreme folks. I remember talking to Joe Trippy, who was Howard Dean's campaign manager. And I was asking him, you know, isn't Iowa a swing state. It's this moderate place of nice people. 

They pay attention to politics. It's a proud tradition. They're informed. They're participatory. He said yeah, but the democrats who vote in the caucus there are to the left of Walter Mondale. And you've simply got to make them happy if you want to win the caucus that night. And part of it is about mobilizing people, and so on. But the point is, it's not a representative process. And even an open primary, that allows people to move back and forth across the ballot, encourages participation, those participation rates are so low that you've got to worry that this is the place that the candidates are selected. Where did we get Obama and McCain, or anyone else who's running for office this year? 

It's in the nomination stage. And as was pointed out last week, when you've got congressional districts, or legislative districts that are gerrymandered to favor one party or the other, the general election not's very interesting. Where does the competition happen? It gets pushed back to the primary. Unfortunately, it's a very small number of people, maybe 10% or 20% who are showing up for the primary to make those decisions. So in effect, it's delegating responsibility to a smaller and smaller, and less representative group of voters. So again, it's part of the American process we're proud of, but something we're not fully participating in. 
- Early in your presentation, you floated the idea of shortening the presidential campaign. Would you elaborate on that, please? 
- There was a speech that Hilary Clinton gave while she was on the campaign trail. 

It was in October of last year, so they'd been at this for a while and yet, not a single primary or caucus vote had been cast. And she said, you know, when I look back at my husband's campaign, he declared he was running for president at this time, October of 1991, just before the 1992 election. I've been at this for nine months already. I could've had a child in that time. 
(laughter)
 Of course, she was the only candidate who was female in the race, so she's the only one who could've said that. But I think the point was fair. These are presidential campaigns that are at least two years long. And that's due, in part, to states front-loading, moving the primaries and the caucuses earlier and earlier in the process to try to get more attention. And that process has been a unidirectional march towards earlier events since at least the 1970s, when primaries and caucuses really became an important way to win the nomination. 

This year, we were talking about the Iowa caucuses being held January 3. So it's in the election year, just barely, by a couple of days. It's problematic. It means that when the nomination is settled, you've got a long general election, at least on the republican side this time. It means that voters suffer a kind of fatigue that after six months, nine months, 12 months of this, we're ready to get on with our lives. In most electoral systems, campaigns are 30 days long, 20 days long, 12 days long, in some cases, ten days long. The government calls an election, a week or two later, you have a leader. Now it's true, the parties are positioning themselves, and selecting candidates in advance, because we don't know when it's going to happen. But the truth is, the amount of money spent on the campaign is much less, and the amount of fatigue is much less. It may not be a surprise, voter turnout in those countries is often higher. 

It's possible the states will take care of this themselves. I think we saw, in the democratic nomination this time, that front-loading didn't work. Wisconsin decided not to go along, for example. We were happy keeping our primary in February. And what happened? We got lots of attention. There were other states that decided to hang back in April or May. They, too, got lots of attention because the candidates were still going at it. In places like Pennsylvania, they saw six weeks of nothing but campaigning, because there were no other primaries or caucuses happening. So it may be that the calculus that party leaders have used, and state officials have used in these states have used to jump to the head of the line has been mistaken, and you'll see some push back on that in the next cycle. 

- I waited until I was 21 years old to vote. And at that time, that was supposedly the legal age. And then along came the Vietnam War. Of course, I've been telling myself this all along. The Vietnam War, and we needed more cannon fodder, so then I think the older people thought well, gee, we need to reward these people, so what we ought to do is lower not only the voting age, but also the drinking age. And I think it was because you talked about strange bed fellows, the libertarians, and people who wanted cannon fodder, and of course, you tell young people that they can drink, they're all for it. But in other words, I think what happened is perhaps is this is why young people could vote, is because they enjoyed drinking, legally, and then of course, they don't want to reverse it and go back to a legal age of 21. This also, of course, ties in with the use of automobiles and the amount of people that get killed right out of high school, because they're driving. All these things go together. What I'm wondering, is do you think that we'll ever get a legal age of 21? 

- Do I think the legal age will change to 21? I don't know, frankly. I appreciate you bringing up this point though, because the lowering of the voting age to 18, right before the 1972 election, was done by Constitutional amendment, which suggests it's not impossible for the Constitution to be changed. And if we wanted to reform the electoral college, or anything else, to nationalize the administration of elections, that possibility at least is open. But it does take sort of these strange bed fellows, often, to make those things happen. 
- I'd like to comment about two things. One is caucusing. And the other is about citizenship. I grew up in Iowa, although I have ancestors from Wisconsin and I've lived in Wisconsin for 15 years. But while in Iowa, I was on my county democratic committee. 

I was on the state rules committee. And I think there are a lot of misconceptions about the caucus system, which I think is enormously democratic. The main thing about caucuses, and I was involved. I was a chairman on my county rules committee for five years, six I guess. The dividing up and assigning to candidates, whatever votes we had based on who voted democratic in previous years, was a very small part of our caucus. And the greatest part of the caucus was like a town meeting. We discussed platform. And all kinds of people came to bring up what they thought should be the democratic platform. I can't speak for republicans, but that was probably the most democratic process I've ever known. And to hear it discussed in media terms, as the people just show up and you know, make deals, and decide who their votes for a candidate would be, are just very unjust. 

And I think some of that may have come from the huge, the swelling turnouts in the last caucus. But that does not at all represent what the Iowa caucuses were about. They're very democratic. They start at the township. And I think that's the heart of the democratic process. Second of all, the citizenship. I think it's so important to see that a lot of decision making is moving to administrative channels, and out of even our legislatures. Am I not correct, with some of the latest, even the economic stuff that's come up within the last week. It seems to disempower legislators and citizens. And I think that's an area of tremendous concern to the kind of conscientious people who are here tonight, that want to make a good choice, and want to vote. 

And yet, our voting means less and less. And then Bush's friends, you know, make the electronic voting happen. So we're all looking that who can register and who can't, when there could be a real, you know, stealing of an election through some kind of computer thing. Citizenship is key. And that's why I'm here tonight. But it's just so important to not believe everything you hear in the media. 
(applause)
 
- Thank you. 
- Well, thank you, Barry, very much.
(applause)

And thank you everyone, for joining our "Getting to Purple" series. Our future Academy Evenings include this Friday at Northland College, if any of you are heading north this weekend. And on Tuesday, October 7, at UW-Fox Valley, with Jeremi Suri. Our next local Academy Evening will be on Tuesday, October 14, with Dr. Jeff Johnson, at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, speaking about "Alzheimer's and More, Halting the Progression of Neurological Diseases." We hope you'll consider joining us at future events. Please check out our schedule at: WisconsinAcademy.org And of course, don't forget to drop off your survey or your door prize card. Thanks everyone, for joining us, and have a good evening. 
(applause)