Democrats are their own worst enemy

Democrats often oppose political reforms that would both empower voters AND help Democrats

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Democratic leaders are rightfully assailing President Donald Trump over his many anti-democratic transgressions. But sometimes they really should look in the mirror. Because on many occasions, Democrats have had a chance to improve and open up our democracy, and make it work better for regular people, but more often than not they have refused to do so. With a toxic form of “minority rule” now allowing Trump and his MAGA Republican faction to wage near-total power, often contrary to the actual “will of the people,” one would think the Democrats might see it to their advantage to unlock the box of “more democracy.” But unfortunately no, as they have demonstrated on too many occasions.

For example, Democrats in “trifecta” blue states (in which they control both legislative houses and the governor’s mansion) for many years refused to enact “automatic voter registration.” The norm in established democracies around the world has long been to register all voters automatically when they reach the age of eligibility. There are no forms to fill out, eligible voters are simply assigned a unique identifier, like a Social Security number, which follows them for life. The governments take responsibility for achieving 100 percent registration. Myself and Rob Richie at FairVote, later joined by the Brennan Center, Demos, Common Cause and others, began calling in the late 1990s for AVR as the right and fair thing to do for our representative democracy. Anywhere from 25% to 30% of eligible voters are unregistered from year-to-year, and that group is composed disproportionally of racial minorities, the poor and young people. Those voters, when registered, are the most reliably Democratic in the country.

Despite AVR being both the right and fair thing to do, and also a reform that advantages Democrats, for years the Democrats did not prioritize enacting AVR. Even in the 12 to 15 trifecta states that Democrats controlled, they sat on their hands. In private conversations, we would say to Democrats, “Hey, these are your kind of voters. Doing the right and fair thing would actually help you as a party. Duh!” (OK, we left off the “duh” part).

In recent years, most of the Democratic trifecta states have passed some kind of a watered-down AVR, but not until after years of dithering and excuses. And they didn’t do it soon enough to help Hilary Clinton defeat Donald Trump in 2016 because they were too timid to try something innovative.

Public financing of campaigns? No-show Democrats

The same with public financing of campaigns. I have never understood why, in those states in which Democrats have monopoly trifecta power, they don’t democratize campaign funding and greatly reduce the power of private money in campaigns. The two most powerful ways to do that would be to create a robust public financing system to fund candidates’ campaigns combined with free media time for candidates. Most established democracies in the world deploy both of these pro-democracy features, so the excuse that “it’s too expensive” or “too complicated” ring hollow. Kamala Harris’s $1.5 billion spent notwithstanding, Democrats have a harder time competing with Republicans, wealthy donors and conservative Super PACs in the money chase game across the thousands of races at state and federal levels. So enacting public financing for campaigns and free media would help Democrats, and would also be immediately beneficial toward overturning one of the most significant factors that prevents good candidates from diverse communities having a chance to run competitively and win.

Public financing could be paid for in ways that don’t hit the public purse too hard: fees charged to political consultants and PACs, sin taxes, and contributions from citizens via tax rebates. Requiring television and radio broadcasters -- which receive the public’s airwaves for free -- to provide free media time has always been a popular idea. Public financing of campaigns is a crucial tool to ensure that voters have enough information about the candidates to make good choices. It improves the quality of debate as well as voter decision-making. Under the current money regime, American voters only hear from the candidates who have raised the most money. This disadvantages Democrats, yet the timid Dems have done next to nothing to enact public financing of campaigns or free media for the many races around the country. This is another missed opportunity.

Anti-democratic Democrats

Another all-too-typical example of Democrats’ short attention span for advantageous democratic reform is playing out right now in Massachusetts. After a lot of hard work by political reform advocates, led by Ranked Choice Boston and Voter Choice Massachusetts, in mid-May the Boston city council passed a measure to adopt ranked choice voting, and a couple of weeks later Mayor Michelle Wu signed off on it. Boston is one of the nation's oldest cities with a storied history going back to colonial times, so this was a major victory for RCV proponents. Right?

Not necessarily, because it comes with a catch. Massachusetts, which has long been dominated by a Democratic Party machine (Democrats currently have a whopping 133-25 majority in the House and 35-5 majority in the Senate), has a “pre-emption rule” that before a political process change like RCV can go into effect at the local level, the state legislature and the governor both must sign off on a “home rule petition” that grants permission to the local jurisdiction. Only then can the city or town hold a popular referendum on whether to use RCV. In California and other states, charter cities have the power to decide democratic process issues like the electoral system on their own without interference from state government. But not in the Bay State.

So the overweening state Democrats can force even a major city like Boston to get on its knees and beg and plead for its home rule petition. Keep in mind, Boston voters have already voted strongly in favor of RCV before. In 2020, a ballot measure to implement RCV statewide in Massachusetts failed to pass, but 62% of Boston voters supported the measure. So the Democrats are really shoving it in the face of Bostonians, including the mayor and city council, arrogantly telling them: “You Boston voters are too stupid to be allowed to have a say over your own electoral future.”

But that’s not all. At this point, seven other Bay State cities and towns (Amherst, Northampton, Concord, Lexington, Arlington, Acton and Brookline) have passed home rule petitions seeking to use RCV to elect their local offices. Some of them passed referendums with over 70% of the vote. But the Democrats in the state legislature are just sitting on these requests as well. No good reasons have been offered for why the top-down leadership is ignoring all these local governments and their voters’ desire to explore another way of voting. Sound familiar? This is the type of authoritarian Trump tactics that are being used to wreck the federal government.

Good Democrats, bad Democrats

Not all Massachusetts Democratic legislators agree with their party leadership. State Senator Becca Rausch has said, quite sensibly, “Ranked choice voting is easy to do. If my kids can do it, the voters can do it also.” In fact, on the Voter Choice Massachusetts website, it lists the Democratic Party leaders who say they support RCV. It looks like a Who’s Who of Massachusetts Democratic Party politics, including Governor Maura Healy, the lieutenant governor, the attorney general, US Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, six of Massachusetts members of the US House, even former Republican Governor William Weld. So what’s the holdup?

The Massachusetts legislature is effectively ruled by the Speaker of the state House of Representatives like it’s his own personal fiefdom. Some Dem leaders have expressed vague concerns over unintended consequences and unforeseen impacts. The latest excuse is that, after Boston election officials made a mistake in a recent election, Secretary of the Commonwealth Bill Galvin has put the city under the oversight of a receiver until 2026. Apparently this situation is being cited by the House leadership for why it is not granting permission to Boston to allow its voters to decide the RCV issue.

But then what’s the Democrats’ excuse for preventing the other seven cities? One has a general sense that the Democratic legislative leadership will find a reason for any Massachusetts city that dares to try to improve its local democracy. Political machines, whether Democratic or Trumpian (or both, see “Trump’s Democrats”), don’t like improvements in democracy that they aren’t sure how to manipulate, and that could threaten their own power.

Keep in mind, Cambridge, Massachusetts has been using RCV (the proportional variety) since 1942. The city of Easthampton MA approved RCV in a referendum in 2019 and had its first use in 2021. Easthampton’s home rule petition was approved by the Massachusetts legislature and governor in 2019, notably pushed through before the current speaker took up his leadership residency. And unlike the pending home rule petitions, that one went through the committee on municipalities rather than the joint committee on elections.

Excuses over unintended consequences are especially puzzling since RCV is being used successfully in dozens of cities, from a megalopolis like New York City to midsize cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis and Portland (both in Oregon and Maine). It’s also used at the state level in Maine and Alaska. It’s probably the most studied reform in modern history, with dozens of research papers and academic studies (though some of those studies are of dubious quality). New York City has used it for three elections now, and in the recent June elections, an exit poll found that:

• 96% of NYC voters say their ballot was simple to complete, including at least 94% of each major racial group.

• 76% say they want to keep or expand RCV to other elections, with only 17% saying RCV should not be used for municipal elections.

• 81% say they understand RCV extremely or very well, with another 16% saying they understand it somewhat well. Only 3% said they do not understand it well.

This poll confirmed that New York voters of all demographics took advantage of RCV. In fact, it has not been widely reported that, since RCV was first used in New York City’s 2021 elections, the number of women-of-color elected to the city council has increased from only a handful out of 51 seats to 26 -- yes, New York has a majority women-of-color city council. And the number of women overall has reached 31 out of 51 (61%). The city council for America’s largest and most dynamic city is one of the most racially and gender diverse in the country.

So Massachusetts Dems, what are you afraid of?

Dum Dum Dems in Washington DC oppose RCV

One of the most egregious examples of Democrats being on the wrong side of history took place recently in Washington DC. The local Democratic Party there fought hard to keep Initiative 83, a ballot measure for RCV, from getting on the ballot by filing a lawsuit. Once the court threw out the lawsuit, the Democrats tried to prevent Initiative 83 from passing. Once it was passed overwhelmingly by the public with 73% of the vote, including supermajority wins in all eight council wards, the Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser tried to torpedo RCV by leaving funding for its implementation out of her proposed budget, the will of nearly three-quarters of voters be damned. Finally the Democratic-dominated city council came to its senses and voted 8-4 to fund implementation of RCV for the next election.

In Minnesota, a few Dem holdouts kill reform

Democratic Governor Tim Walz in Minnesota signed legislation in 2023 that authorized a task force to study using RCV statewide, and in 2024 signed the Minnesota Voting Rights Act, which authorizes proportional RCV as a remedy for voting rights violations. Democratic state lawmakers have introduced pro-RCV bills several times. One bill would have simply allowed certain classifications of local governments to use RCV. But in a closely divided state legislature, a few Democratic holdouts crossed party lines and voted against the RCV measure, causing it to lose by two votes. Another bill that would have implemented RCV for state and federal elections in Minnesota never made it to the floor in either Democratic-controlled chamber.

These are just a few examples out of many in which the timid Democrats have failed to pass and oftentimes even fought against different reforms that would have resulted in fair and better elections, and would have empowered many of the voters that Democrats claim to stand up for. Besides the current 15 trifecta blue states, 12 states have two legislative houses split between Democrats and the GOP. In the past, some Republicans have been willing to support automatic voter registration in return for support of a voter ID (see the Carter-Baker commission proposals). In today’s climate of maximum mistrust, Democrats and civil rights leaders have been understandably fighting to stop GOP attempts to enact voter ID laws. But if those voter IDs were coupled with a unique identifier for every eligible voter, they could be used to implement automatic voter registration. By doing this Democrats would enfranchise millions of minorities, poor people and youth -- far more than the number who would not vote due to a voter ID requirement. This has the makings of a grand bargain that both Democrats and Republicans could get behind, and it’s what most established democracies around the world already do.

Come on Democrats, what are you waiting for?

Democrats like to talk a big game about making the political system fairer, but they mostly only say that when they’re criticizing Donald Trump and previous Republican leaders. Even when the Democrats had a federal trifecta under both Obama and Biden, they sat on their hands and failed to enact any number of political reforms that not only would have been the fair and right thing to do, and better for our country, but would actually have been advantageous for them in their electoral combat against the Republicans.

Certainly there are some great individual Democratic legislators and leaders. I have had the pleasure of working with many of them. But I also have had numerous experiences during the legislative process in which those good and admirable Democratic legislators were stymied by the Democratic duds and do-nothings. I have had personal experience with Democratic leaders, including California governors Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown, vetoing and killing pro-democracy legislation for shallow reasons that made no sense and seemed to reflect that they considered how to empower “we, the people” for all of about two minutes. I have long expected that from Republicans, most of whom have always opposed making our political system more democratic. But when the Democrats do it too, you realize that many of them, especially in the leadership, are also afraid of “the people” they purport to speak on behalf of.

There is plenty of legislative low-hanging fruit that trifecta blue state Democrats could pass, well before the 2026 midterm elections. The best of these proposals would become models for the federal level, in case the mummified Congress ever arises out of the quicksand into which it is sinking. In the blue states, the only obstacle stopping the pro-democracy Democrats is – not Donald Trump, Elon Musk or Fox News – but the anti-democratic Democrats.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776