Two political parties fighting over a BALLOON? Welcome to the Winner Take All circus

The perverse incentives of the “winner take all” electoral system drive pointlessly adversarial politics

Winnie the Pooh Sino balloon

It has been said before that Washington DC politicians are full of hot air. Certainly for many of them, that’s true. Most recently, so too are many of the things that Republicans and Democrats like to argue about. I’m sure many DemocracySOS readers are tired of hearing about – what shall we call it, the China (Balloon) Syndrome, Chinatown Floating, SinoBalloon-gate? Comedians have been having a field day. A military “general” on Saturday Night Live announced that the balloon – which was 200 feet tall, taller than the Statue of Liberty -- somehow slipped past America’s West coast anti-balloon defense system, i.e. the Seattle space needle. Oh, and the killing of this Sinoballoon? That was – wait for it -- Joe Biden’s Osama bin Laden moment.

As ridiculous as it all unfolded, it was consequential enough to kick off the most banal tribal sniping. No good partisan was going to waste this splendid helium-inflated opportunity to call their opponent “soft on national security/foreigners/China.” Various right-wing electeds tweeted that this was yet another example of President Joe Biden being too slow, too old, too soft, to protect the homeland from a Chinese “invasion.” My God, Biden waited four days to pull the trigger! 

Some Republicans posted photos of themselves holding guns and gazing skyward, as if prepared to shoot down the balloon themselves. Here’s Ohio Senator J.D. Vance looking beyond ridiculous hoisting a semi-automatic. Someone should have informed the good Senator that a bullet fired skyward from his rifle would have come about 10 miles short of reaching the balloon, which was floating at 60,000 feet, twice as high as civilian air traffic.

The Democrats couldn’t resist getting in a few digs too, as the late night comedians continued yucking it up. A “senior defense official” told the media that, during the “prior administration,” at least three times balloons had transited the continental United States. Aha, touché! Donald Trump was soft on Sinoballoons too!

Trump of course responded on Fox News, saying a Sinoballoon invasion “never happened with us under the Trump administration and if it did, we would have shot it down immediately.”

Check, Democrats, your move.

A “senior Biden administration official” went for the jugular, telling Fox that Trump didn’t know about the balloons because his unprofessional national security team was so incompetent that it never detected them. The far-right media then tacked to far-out right, whipping up a story about the Deep State operatives who committed “treason” against Trump and America by not telling Trump, during his term, about the Sinoballoons flying over the country like giant dinosaur eggs in the sky. As the debate in the world’s greatest democracy shifted from comi-tragic into the stranger realm of commedia dell'arte farce, no doubt the GOP-controlled House will soon be holding hearings to get to the bottom of this latest conspiracy of the Deep (Blue) State.

Welcome to the fractured Land of Winner Take All

Unfortunately we’ve seen this movie before. Countless times, in fact. In a democracy founded on the shaky Mianus Bridge of the "winner take all" electoral system, these sorts of episodes of pointlessly adversarial politics are regular occurrences. Indeed we should expect them, because the incentives of Winner Take All perversely drive these dynamics.

Winner Take All elections, for the most part, result in a two-party system, since smaller parties almost never reach the high percentages of votes typically needed to win seats that are elected one at a time. Only one side, one viewpoint, can win, and the winner usually needs at minimum a majority of the vote though often the winner needs far more than a majority, since most legislative seats at both federal and state levels are won by landslides. By definition, a minority perspective, whether a geographic, partisan or racial minority, does not normally win that high of a percentage of votes.

As a result, we are stuck with a two-party system, but even that’s misleading. It turns out that most legislative districts, indeed entire states, are dominated by one party or the other. The only real “choice” that most voters have is to ratify the candidate of the party that dominates their district and state. That’s not much better than the choice that the Russian electorate had under the old Soviet Politburo system.

Under Winner Take All’s two-choice menu, voters, candidates and legislators are all confronted by a relentless series of polarizing dilemmas and zero-sum decisions for which there are no easy resolutions. Here are the operative principles:

        If you win…                                                          I lose

        If you have representation…                                I don’t

        If I vote for my favorite candidate…                    it may help elect my least favorite

        If we drive voters from their candidate…          the only choice left is our candidate

        If I run to the center to attract swing voters…     I will alienate my base

        If I appeal to my base...                                       I’ll drive away swing voters

These daunting dilemmas are a by-product of our two-choice system, and it reveals so much about the underlying dynamics of what frustrates our politics today. In an election where only one of the two choices can win, everything is at stake. That’s why it’s called “winner take ALL.” It increases the intensity, the fury of politics, whether during campaigns, between campaigns or during the legislative sessions.

On a whole host of issues it is painfully obvious that the overriding agenda of both major parties is not policy, principle or ideology, but that each side stake out short-term positions contrary to the other side in their efforts to win the next election.

Ha, Chinese balloons? Select a Speaker of the House? Tangle over the debt ceiling? Over gay marriage and reproductive choice? If Democrats say right, Republicans say left, if Republicans say up, Democrats say down. These are the incentives of a two-choice system where it's you against me; the way for me to win is to drive voters away from you, because then there is only one choice left – me. It’s like a board game, and these are the rules and incentives for how you win.

This presents political parties, candidates and voters with conflicting options. For political parties, they must always mediate between different constituencies, whether swing or base voters, trying to calculate which ones will help their side win the next election. For candidates, they must present themselves as the brand that is distinctly different from the other brand, much like a business would advertise different types of laundry soap or toothpaste. For voters, you must often decide whether to vote for your favorite candidate/brand or to hold your nose and pick the unpleasant lesser-evil candidate/brand, your enthusiasm dimming for this whole sordid game. All the actors in this uneasy drama proceed according to a script determined by the demands of Winner Take All.

Winner Take All makes most of us losers

Politicians and their political consultants have figured something out:  in a two-choice field, the last candidate standing wins. Winning does not require positions on a broad range of issues, because if the goal in Winner Take All is to win more votes than your lone opponent, you can do that as easily by driving voters away from your opponent as by attracting voters to yourself.

In fact, it’s easier…all you have to do is find a good wedge issue or two, or selectively strip-mine your opponent’s legislative record for votes on taxes, crime or child pornography, or dig up some youthful indiscretion or inflated sex scandal that you can distort out of all recognition. Then use that information to target slickly-prepared campaign messages at the undecided swing voters who often determine the outcome in a close race. In a one-on-one, mano a mano campaign, the mudslinging dynamic inescapably boils down to a zero-sum choice: “if you lose, I win.”

This is especially effective whenever the field has been reduced to two candidates; that’s when the absurdity of the system is maximized. Going negative on one’s opponent is an effective campaign tactic, as accusations fly and nuance and middle ground get eroded. Modern campaign technologies -- polling, focus groups, 30-second TV spots, direct mail and digital media ads and data harvesting -- are uniquely tailored to this task of spin, hype, mudslinging and targeting. We can expect that these features will always be centrally important under the intense competitive pressures of the “two choice” system.

Despite all the national disgust over the state of US politics, there has been surprisingly little discussion by political scientists and pundits about how the two-choice, Winner Take All system substantially drives attack-style tactics. In fact, it is malignantly suited for it. While the surface structure for electing representatives under Winner Take All appears simple -- deceptively so, what could be more simple than “highest vote-getter wins”? -- the underlying mechanics and dynamics unleashed by the two-choice system render it extremely complex, vexing and unfair.

Remedies for Winner Take All

The most profound fix to this would be to get rid of single-seat, Winner Take All elections and change the method for electing all our legislatures to proportional representation. With PR, as it is often called, if a political party wins 20 percent of the popular vote, it wins 20 percent of the seats instead of nothing; if another party wins 60 percent of the vote it wins 60 percent of the seats, instead of everything. Voters win representation based on what they think, instead of where they live (though there are different configurations, including hybrids like in Germany that allow both geographic and ideological representation).

With PR methods, multiple parties can win representation in the legislature, including minor parties. With a range of viable political parties from a wide ideological spectrum to choose from, there is more choice, more competition and higher voter turnout because all voters become swing voters. Everyone has a candidate or party to vote for that has a chance of winning. Partisanship doesn’t disappear but it finds a softer voice, both during and between campaigns. Politics has a better chance of finding a win-win common ground among the different political forces.

FairVote has worked with allied Congress members on legislation called the Fair Representation Act, which would create a uniquely American form of proportional representation that is candidate- rather than party-based, using ranked choice voting in multi-seat districts. Every part of the US would be competitive for both major parties, and monopoly representation by one party in a particular region or state would be a thing of the past.

Well-organized minor parties and independents also would have new opportunities for winning representation and holding the major parties accountable. They would play the role of being the “laboratories for new ideas.” Parties would not be so beholden to their own fringe extremes, and the ideological diversity within each party would not get strangled by scheming, unscrupulous party leaders.

As the Balloon-gate parade slowly floats away and disappears over the horizon of the 24 hour news cycle, we are left contemplating the riddle of “when is a balloon not a balloon.” Answer: when it gets caught up in the whirlwind of a Winner Take All tornado, and then it becomes a stand-in for something else entirely.

The American electoral system undermines the crucial goals of civil dialogue and cross-partisan bridge-building among the different partisan tribes. It increases polarization and nasty mudslinging campaigns, and undermines legislative majorities and government's legitimacy. The rules of how to win under Winner Take All are toxic and destructive toward a healthy democracy. We continue using them at our peril.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776