As many liberals were saying "thank God for federalism" in the Trump era, Jake Grumbach saw some different — and disturbing — patterns emerging. He joins us this week to discuss the findings in his forthcoming book, Laboratories Against Democracy.
Over the past generation, the Democratic and Republican parties have each become nationally coordinated political teams. American political institutions, on the other hand, remain highly decentralized.
In his forthcoming book, Laboratories Against Democracy, Jake Grumbach argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments into the engines of American policymaking in areas from health care to climate change. He also traces how national groups are using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself.
Grumbach is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington. He was recently granted tenure. Congratulations, Jake!
Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics
Michael Berkman
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. I'm Michael Berkman.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm Candis Watts Smith.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with Jake Grumbach, who is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, and author of the forthcoming book laboratories against democracy, which will be out from Princeton University Press later this year, and really takes a closer examination at some of the myths surrounding federalism and state politics, two of the topics that we like to talk about on the show, so glad to have Jake with us today to talk more about them.
Candis Watts Smith
I'm especially glad to bring Jake on to congratulate him on the book. And he was recently notified that he would be getting tenure and promotion at the University of Washington. So it's just really fantastic. And we have a sneak peek of the book. And it's so well written, it's clear, it's elucidating, of many of the trends that we're seeing across the United States. And it speaks to that question of whether all politics is local. And I think that Jake does really a good job of pinpointing the ways in which we need to think more critically about that, and how the way that the parties are working right now, in this particular moment, in a Federalist governmental setup, we are perhaps seeing trends that were not intended by the founders, or really, by anybody else, you know, maybe in the past, you know, before 20, or 30 years from now,
Michael Berkman
What Jake's done here that I think is really important, is try to reassess federalism, and state politics, how we think about state politics, in terms of in the context of greater polarization between the parties and what that might mean. And I see in it a tradition of trying to understand federalism at a given point in time, because federalism wall built into the Constitution, obviously. And I'm sure when you teach Introduction to American politics, like when I teach it, it is a prominent part of the course it is the primary sort of constitutional structure for our government, but it changes over time. It changes as political elites tried to do different things and use state national and government in different ways and changes as court decisions reassess the Constitution and particularly the Commerce Clause, in terms of what state and local governments can do. And Candace, I mentioned to you before I came across an article years and years is from 1982, that listed 326, metaphors that had been used in the literature to try to capture federalism at different times. And in different kinds of policy areas, it is an elusive concept. It's a challenging one to get a handle on, I really commend Jake for the work he's done here and trying to get a hold of it. Today, in contemporary politics,
Candis Watts Smith
When I teach my students, you know, we're teaching about like, separation of powers, checks and balances in federalism, all kinds of ways that power and resources are divided across different levels of governance and across different bodies of governance to ensure that power does not get consolidated. Exactly. And what we're seeing actually is that federalism is kind of not doing the thing that people intended for it to do, because of the nationalization of political parties. And they're kind of trickling down from national to state politics rather than what was intended, of a trickle up process where states do a lot of the work and innovation and trying different policies. And then if it works, and we can spread it across the states, and even to the national government. We're not seeing that anymore. We're kind of seeing these other weird trends, states and state level politicians are diving into issues that have little to nothing to do with the well being of their states.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, if I have returned to your framing for a minute, cuz I think it's really important the way you said that federalism separation of powers were established to fragment power. Mm hmm. That was the point of them. They were the great protection actually, in the constitutional design and the compromise that was made was that they were agreeing to a stronger national government with the understanding that that power would be fragmented and would be checked by not only that other branches of government, which everybody knows is a way of fragmenting power, but through federalism as well. And that what is so interesting about some of what Candice has just outlined, and then why Drake goes into in greater detail in the book and a variety of ways is that you're not really seeing this fragmentation. Instead, you're seeing a kind of centralization of power and the centralization is coming through political parties. And this is not unlike discussions that we've had about how the separation of powers has been changed, because of the depolarization of the parties. And the greater homogeneity of the parties were people now sometimes referred to right as a separation of parties as opposed to a separation of powers. Because when one party controls the Congress, and the party controls the presidency, as well, they're not confronting each other as separate branches, but rather cooperating together as the same political party. And that's what we're seeing here, as well. And he's showing it in a whole variety of ways.
Candis Watts Smith
The other thing that I think is important about this book, is that it kind of checks liberals who came to love federalism and stop worrying about states rights. So historically, we think about states rights as racist rhetoric and as racist strategy for conservatives. And when Congress either stop working or is seated more to Republicans, then you know, liberals and Democrats say like, well, at least we have federalism and we can turn to the states. But ultimately, right. The other side of that, is that as you were talking about earlier, my goal is that red Republican control states are actually becoming more illiberal. And blue states are, you know, either kind of staying where they are or trying to become more progressive. So even at the state level, we see polarization in levels of democracy, as well.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. And it really kind of gets to that laboratories against democracy. We will certainly touch on that more, but I think let's go now to the interview with Jake Grumbach.
Jenna Spinelle
Jake Grumbach, welcome to Democracy Works. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Jake Grumbach
Thanks so much for having me.
Jenna Spinelle
Excited to talk with you about your forthcoming book laboratories against democracy. There's a lot to unpack here. But I thought maybe we could just start with a bit of the origin story. And you note in the book that there were a lot of people saying that they were thankful for federalism in the Trump era. But you maybe were skeptical of that, or just you saw some questions there some deeper exploration to be have.
Jake Grumbach
Absolutely. As I was completing grad school in the Trump era, and transitioning to the book, it became clear that federalism was just so central to our current sort of crisis of American democracy, and goes much broader than policy polarization in, for example, health policy between states. That thing you opened with Jenna, I think, is a great question where we saw after the 2016 election, all sorts of commentators from NeverTrump conservatives, to people on the left saying, isn't it great that we have these institutions that decentralize authority in the US federalism that puts, for example, election administration, and all sorts of police powers at the state level, rather than in the White House or in Washington, DC. And I think that's actually quite uncertain. But I think that's the wrong conclusion to draw from this period.
Jenna Spinelle
We'll get into some of the reasons why that is. But I want to pull out one other kind of introductory thing, and that is the difference between federalism and state politics. I think the terms are perhaps used interchangeably, sometimes. So can you help us understand what the difference is there?
Jake Grumbach
I find that so important. So again, in when you study American politics, within political science as a discipline, there are two little organizational fields within it. One is called state politics, and one is called federalism. And they're very related. So the point of federalism in the US Constitution, and overall is that states and the federal government each have separate constitutional authority that they're not meant to encroach on each other. The US also has an especially decentralized form of federalism, even compared to other federal constitutions in Mexico, India, Switzerland, Germany, and elsewhere. The US puts a lot of important authority at the lower level units the state low. So the distinction between I think state politics and federalism scholarship is state Politics on the one hand has been hugely innovative over the past 20 years or so. But it's really focused on applying theories to different states and state governments to be able to compare and contrast and sort of test theories. But what's really happening in the age of the nationalization of the political parties I talked about, is that actually there to more coordinated national partisan teams or networks than before, that really tried to exploit advantages at all levels. So the shift and conservative gains in the states in part comes out of national conservative groups shifting their focus to the state level over recent decades. So that interplay between the national and state levels, as well as across states horizontally, those sorts of feedbacks and interplay, I think, is really crucial, and thinking fundamentally about the collision of now these new nationalized parties with the pre existing decentralized institutions of American federalism. So parties are now national, but our institutions are still very much not.
Jenna Spinelle
That's something new right in the history of American politics. I know you go through like the different eras of Federalist thinkers, the Madisonian era, and of course, the Brandeis era, which is where laboratories of democracy comes from. So walk us through that history of sort of how we got to this place.
Jake Grumbach
In many sort of, we can take the case of us democracy and democratic institutions like voting rights and districting. And, you know, Jim Crow, or even slavery as a sort of area case on this. But it's clear that state and local government, especially state government has been hugely important for shaping policy and democracy. For most of us history was more important as a policymaking level than the national government. And over the long term, policymaking became increasingly done at the national level, out through wars, technological change, and industrialization, so many more reasons. But really clearly, now, we have after over a century and a half of dominant state level, you had the long New Deal and civil rights period of the 1930s through the 1970s, which sort of created national baselines on areas like health policy with Medicare and Medicaid and economic sort of safety net stuff, Social Security, minimum wage, and so many other policies at the national level. Plus, that national government coming in to end Jim Crow through Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, standardizing sort of civil rights policy across the states, no longer would you have this huge divergence between northern and southern states. And that took a long time to end Jim Crow, as Rob Mikis shows in pass out of Dixie, some states really are clinging to Jim Crow racial hierarchy and their elections and things through the 70s. But the point is, that was a long period of standardization. But then as many American politics scholars have shown the national government then polarized Congress, polarized divided government, between the President and Congress became more frequent, and national policymaking really slowed down, important policies came less frequently out of the national government. And what that meant is that people who wanted to see their vision implemented in government, whether on the left or the right, focus their sights, they venue shifted to the state level, put in more resources into the state level. And the effect of that was the divergence in policy between the states. And that's really kicked up in the 2000s, where now, compared to the post Civil Rights period, and after, for example, Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion throughout the country and things like that, we're now seeing a divergence between states that we haven't seen since that sort of pre civil rights period.
Jenna Spinelle
And so that is policies being fundamentally or to some degree different from one state to another. Is that right?
Jake Grumbach
That's exactly right. And you see that in some clear examples, like some states did not expand Medicaid, many Republican states did not expand Medicaid, some states did. That's hugely important for people's ability to have health insurance. And it's caused 10s of 1000s of preventable deaths due to that particular state policy choice, right, as opposed to the implementation of Medicaid following the 1960s where Arizona doesn't establish its own Medicaid program for a long time. But at essentially every other state very quickly gets on Medicaid. This is a different period where the Affordable Care Act by providing Medicaid expansion did not standardize states it actually increased their divergence. That's really due to a Supreme Court case that allowed states to reject Medicaid. But this is now also happening on democratic institutions themselves, like voting rights, legislative districting and sort of the policies are Around counting votes.
Jenna Spinelle
You mentioned a little bit ago that politicians from the left or the right, who were looking to enact these policy changes started increasingly looking to the state tonight. This is framed, at least in the current era as being very much a more right leaning thing, something that Republicans are doing, especially on these issues of democracy. I wonder to what extent this is a left and a right thing, or that, you know, one party may be doing it more than the other?
Jake Grumbach
Absolutely. It's hard to say so because Republican goals are often to block expansions to the social safety net, or the welfare state and things like that. It's hard to know like how much progress one coalition has made, and when the coalition's have different goals around expansion or contracting things. But I will say it's very clear that yeah, there have been major changes from sort of liberal groups and the Democratic Party in blue states. So thinking about during the George W. Bush administration, environmentalists and climate activists really seeing not going to get much done at the national level. With a Republican former oil executive. At the helm, it's probably a good idea to move to setting fuel efficiency standards and cap and trade on the West Coast or in the Northeast states. And that was quite impactful and successful. Without federalism, the US would probably be a bit farther on its climate policy. But even so there were major progressive gains in coastal states on environmental policy in the 2000s, for example, but then it is true that the conservative wave of policymaking once states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, became sort of red states, North Carolina as well, both on in terms of policies like labor policy, passing right to work laws, and limiting the ability of labor unions to organize which has been hugely consequential in many ways, plus abortion restrictions that have been very powerful. The Texas abortion laws, probably the biggest, most groundbreaking one yet, but there's been really since the 1990s, there's been huge restrictions on reproductive rights in red states, especially then the probably the biggest deal, I would say, Now are these democratic institutions where certainly you have seen blue states and divided states expand access to voting and produce fair districting. But that's less of a story, I think, then states engaging in democratic backsliding and making it for the first time since, again, in the post Civil Rights Era, taking major steps to make it more difficult to vote and to make districts unfair in partisan terms at record levels. Those are really new and do suggests that sort of this, the conservative movement has been especially, I guess, forward pushing, when it comes to state level changes.
Jenna Spinelle
I want to talk for a second about criminal justice issues. I was thinking as you've been describing this, it seems like criminal justice is maybe the outlier here, or there's maybe a different set of dynamics at play, for example, in the tough on crime era, we saw the proliferation of three strikes across red states and blue states. I don't know if we thought of them that way back then. And we're seeing in the modern era with actions around policing, it seems like there's something different going on when it comes to issues of criminal justice.
Jake Grumbach
Absolutely. Compared to those other policy areas like health policy, environmental policy, gun control, and gun rights and reproductive rights. All of those areas, labor laws, and taxation of the wealthy. All these things have been really polarizing across states where red states are making their policies more conservative than those areas, and blue states more liberal in those areas. But one unique thing is criminal justice, where you actually saw red and blue states sort of hand in hand. And the federal government, regardless of which party controlled it, really, since the 70s, and especially that tough on crime 90s era, you saw the proliferation of those sorts of laws that contributed to mass incarceration and sort of authoritarian policing that we've heard so much about in recent years, due to activists from Black Lives Matter and other social movements. So that has been unique. But we're in a really uncertain moment. So that post George Floyd murder, Black Lives Matter activism, that protest movement in 2020, was up there with the most widespread social movements in terms of participation in US history. So that was a major change that produced a ton of uncertainty how maybe now blue states would actually diverge from red states and sort of engage in decarceration policies, policing reforms and things like that. I think pun intended, the jury's still out on that. But I would say the general trend is continuity rather than change. In terms of criminal justice policy, where there's actually been some slight decarceration in red states to do to a sort of far right libertarian anti statist movement to is one thing, but we thought blue states like California and Minnesota would pursue pretty serious criminal justice reforms. And I think it's been more limited than some have expected. And we've seen how the mass politics and sort of media coverage around race, criminal justice, crime has really changed since 2020. So that may be a reason why we may not see much divergence between states on criminal justice despite this social movement. But the point there is that there are a number of reasons why we didn't see that divergence, one of which is that political power at the state and local level of police departments and police unions, which is relatively unique, so we've seen many cases of often reformist blue mayors, or blue governors coming in with an agenda to reform criminal justice in their city or state, and then not quite be able to so Bill DeBlasio, in New York City is a clear example of this, who campaigned on these reforms, and then there was not much change. So again, remains to be seen, keep an eye out on, you know, the 2020s, we may see some change.
Jenna Spinelle
The other thing I wonder if it's wrapped up here is the sort of representation of state officials there's a fascinating table or chart, but you show in your book, how candidates or local office holders at the state level are actually wealthier and less diverse than people who hold national office. So can you talk more about those dynamics?
Jake Grumbach
Yeah. So that's a goes back again, to some of those classic sort of mainstream theories of the virtues of federalism. So one of which is that, you know, you often hear politicians say it's like, as opposed to those fat cats in Washington. I'm here like, with this community, in my state here, right. And when you ask ordinary voters, they actually will say that to my state governments great to stupid Congress in DC. It's terrible. That's a classic framework in mass politics and political appeals. But what you actually see is that the local level, and the state level actually has more political inequality, within its participation. And to some extent, it's sort of descriptive representation. But really importantly, ordinary voters know a lot less about the state and local level, it requires much more attention, which means that it tends to be people who are more likely to be older, whiter, own homes and have more income and wealth are the ones who disproportionately participate at these lower levels of politics. In my book, I show that this is true with respect to campaign finance, the people who are donating to politicians at the National versus state level that donors to state level politicians are wider are wealthier than donors who donate in presidential or congressional elections, right. And then again, it's really important to think about where, especially with the decline of state and local journalism, and the rise of sort of national cable news and internet news that's really focused on national conflict. People know the most about presidential elections and these big deal, for example, Senate races, even though Donald Trump presented a lot of challenges to the American political system, but it is clear that people generally through this time period know what these presidential candidates stand for. Whereas in a state level, state legislative primary election, you know, I'm a professor of political science, and it's actually quite hard to know who in a state legislative primary, has my sort of policy agenda in mind compared to I certainly know the difference between all of these I know the difference between Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, you know, like, I know, the difference between Michael Bennett and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and all these people, you know, so that's a crucial thing where all of that sort of information asymmetry further allows people who have resources and organizations like businesses that have resources like money to spend and have the capacity to lobby at lower levels over complicated issues, it gives them an advantage.
Jenna Spinelle
The other thing that is kind of popular to talk about these days is the prospect for the next civil war. And I know that's not the question you're taking up for your area of expertise. But I do wonder if there are things that thinking about these trends in federalism can tell us about whether we are likely to continue to see this further split between red states and blue states red America Blue America, as is so often described in the media and the punditry.
Jake Grumbach
Yeah, that's a really important question. I would say, there's a few things that sort of put wrinkles in that idea. One is that while there are red states and blue states, there are huge numbers of red people in blue states and blue people in red states. So with national political conflict, that really does matter where within North Carolina, you have a state that famously went red, has restricted voting access has produced record, setting gerrymandered maps and things like that, but has these blue cities like around what they call the Research Triangle in North Carolina, that really matters. And because of those dynamics, you're not going to see a civil war between states in the way the US war war was. And I do not think civil war in a real sense is likely, but I do think there's two potential ways this might happen. One is the sort of argument that some make that there's actually a lot of similarities between previous eras, where the US Constitution does allow quite broad leeway for state governments to restrict the right to vote to gerrymander to even potentially subvert presidential elections and the electoral college like that constitution is expensive. The Senate out of the Constitution is now produces huge mal apportionment by population. So really, it's actually these constitutional institutions are producing this crisis in some ways. But then there's this other side of the argument that currently the way politics is so nationalized, where you see, for example, in debates around critical race theory that are happening in local school boards, the this is coming down from national level political conflict not bubbling up from whatever is going on in the particular locality, the places that are passing anti critical race theory bills, for example, in state legislatures, or from school boards and things like that are not places that have experienced some disproportionate rapid rise in critical race theory, right? There's a huge amount of uncertainty with that national level conflict, what it means if, for example, some state legislatures do subvert the 2024 presidential election, there could be a true constitutional crisis that produces all sorts of forms of intermittent partisan violence,
Jenna Spinelle
You argue that some of the way forward here particularly around these issues of democracy is to kind of shift some of that power back up or that has trickled down to the states. Tell us more about that.
Jake Grumbach
Yeah, an implication of the analysis of my book is that when coalition coalition's that are supportive of democratic institutions like the expansive right to vote, fair, districting, things like that, when they do take national power, you should really use it to standardize national standards across states and democratic institutions. That's very crucial and historical, you see this pattern, threats to American democracy have tended to be state legislatures have been the main sort of backsliders or institutions that hold back democracy, whether it's through allowing slavery, Jim Crow, disenfranchisement, even mass incarceration, now current threats to voting rights, and gerrymandering and so forth, and elections version. It's been the Supreme Court that is largely enabled the state legislatures. And then it's been when they step up, Congress has been the one to stop state legislatures from doing that. So Congress has tended to not actively backslide. But they often have this sin of omission, where they don't actually organize to pass national policy to stop state legislative backsliding on democratic institutions. So I think that's an important implication. And then also, just, in a way, broader sense. All of those theories of federalism being great for policy, innovation and so forth, policy learning, bringing people closer to their, you know, elected officials, depolarizing, politics naturally, all of those things don't appear to apply anymore in this era of highly nationalized, polarized parties and national media and all of this, those don't seem to apply anymore.
Jenna Spinelle
And one, maybe concrete way this also plays out as by federalizing elections, what might that look like?
Jake Grumbach
So there's been some cool proposals from people like one of my colleagues, Charlotte Hill and Lee Drutman and among others on how could the US create, for example, a true national elections agency that would help standardize election and election administration across states and counties? I think this is important. So again, coming back to the very beginning, where a lot of people were thankful for federalism under Trump because they said great now Trump can't capture all 50 state election administrations and all these county administrators and things right. It's such great insurance against like a would be autoCrat people argued. But the flip side of that that I think is under emphasized. And all of this is, again quite uncertain we don't have a bunch of experiments on counterfactual us is, but really importantly, it's that this sort of politics I've described at the state level, highly unequal politics, restrictions on democracy, and so forth actually propelled a would be autoCrat to national power, right? So states administer elections from local dog catcher up to president of the US. So when states backslide on democracy, it affects the entire political system. So that's the flip side of having this decentralization is, over the past couple of decades, you've seen the entrenchment of anti democratic coalition's in part of the system in some of these key states that I observe, really backsliding on democratic institutions, and that helped propel national governments to threatening democracy itself. So that's the flip side. So of course, when you have a would be autoCrat and national power. Yes, you absolutely want decentralization, but you have to think about how decentralization helps empower that national autoCrat in the first place. So that's why I think a national election agency as well as all the sort of bills being discussed in the Democratic Senate and Congress are quite important for standardizing and protecting democratic institutions.
Jenna Spinelle
That is a good place to leave things. I think, Jay, thank you so much for your work in this book, I hope folks will check it out. There's a lot to think about, especially for people who care deeply about democracy as I know our listeners do. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Michael Berkman
Well, Jenna, that was a terrific interview really interesting, I want to pick up on something Jake was talking about having to do with states as laboratories of democracy. Because, you know, this is always been something that we've held out as one of the real strengths of federalism, the idea that one state can try something out, and other states can kind of see what's happening and learn from it, and apply it to their own circumstances. So you know, some of the Western States legalized marijuana, right, and other states sat back, they waited to see what happened, they saw that there were lots of revenues coming in, they saw that the social structure of the States didn't fall apart, and then you saw a lot of other states starting to follow them. And in political science is a kind of research tradition, often referred to as diffusion research that picks up on this, and it looks at how policies might start in one state, maybe a state with a lot of resources, or that tends to be highly innovative, or whatever the case may be. And then other states sort of follow. And you can track these patterns of following. And what Jake identifies I think, really, quite importantly, as that pattern is probably breaking down.
Candis Watts Smith
But I think what we're seeing here is that there isn't policy diffusion. It's just not necessarily diffusion of high quality ideas. I think what states are learning from each other, especially red states are, they're learning how much inequality people are willing to put up with. Right. So like, let's test the tolerance of our public's willingness to deal with not excellent policy, like not expanding Medicaid, for example. And I think that they're also learning to see to wanting to see how the Supreme Court will deal with it. So I think that people, for example, are looking really closely at Texas's bounty on abortion law. When we talk about diffusion, we tend to think about it like it has a very positive connotation. And so what we're seeing is that there is confusion, it just doesn't matter if the idea is good. It just matters if someone from your team is doing it, whether it's good or not.
Michael Berkman
Right, exactly. It's not a diffusion. It's not a laboratories of democracy, where states are looking to see what works well. Right. In terms of good policy, it's become much more what will be tolerated politically. How far can we go? And let's recognize as well that on the Republican side, in particular, they've put in, you know, sort of centralized institutions to ensure that this happens, the most important of them is ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a very conservative Koch funded institution that writes model legislation, as you were referring to it to begin again, this but just to just to put a bow on it that this is coming out of institutions designed to do exactly that. But you just can't overstate the extent to which Democrats have neglected the states. And you mentioned North Carolina before and Jake has really nice section in his book on North Carolina, about how North Carolina policy turns distinctly to the right, and distinctly undemocratic in some ways, and that all traces back to the 2010 election, as do so many of the Democrats problems, because in neglecting state politics, they neglected the level of government that makes the rules governing elections and governing so much of our politics.
Candis Watts Smith
But I will say that there's something to be said about standardizing across the states concerning basic Right, right. Yeah. And so I think that focusing on the national government has, I mean, like, there's two kind of eras, right, like reconstruction, and then like civil rights. Oh, yeah. And the New Deal. Were looking to the federal government, all the stars have to align Congress, SCOTUS, White House, they, you know, they all have to align. But in those times, we've seen where federal policies serve to standardize rights and access to, you know, high quality policy. And so I mean, the thing is, is that we do need that, right, that it's, it is, on some level, unfair to walk across state lines, if you want more rights.
Michael Berkman
So I don't think we disagree on this. Yeah. I think that Democrats have recognized that in order to ensure constitutional protections, across the board, they needed to turn to the national level. Yeah. And just the states, especially in the south during civil rights, in particular, we're going to deny them these rights.
Candis Watts Smith
Kind of related, but maybe a little bit of a pivot is that one of the things that Jake shows is that, you know, of all of the ways that there are a lot of polarization, and these nationally coordinated parties, the one area where we see kind of bipartisanship has been and continues to be around issues of crime, which is largely a racialized policy for all of the kind of fights that Democrats and Republicans have. At every level of government. It seems like the one area where everyone can agree is who can be tough on crime, and everyone wants to out tough there competitor, we do see some change, especially in light of the past several years of Black Lives Matter. But it's not like a divergent split in the way that we've seen other significant areas of policy.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, I was such an interesting finding. I thought that he had there that that was the only area. I mean, it is also I think maybe the only area during the Trump administration, where there was any bipartisan cooperation, and that was on the criminal justice bill. Jared was involved in that moves things in a somewhat more progressive direction, actually really loosened things up some way.
Candis Watts Smith
Yeah. One other thing that stood out to me that Jake mentioned was about the fact that state level governments are not necessarily more representative of the constituents, even though they are closer, right. So like the whole, you know, if we're going to sell federalism to somebody, it would be so that representatives are closer to their people, and that they can produce customized policies. But in this moment, we're not seeing that we're seeing that state representatives are richer, wider and more out of touch with their constituents, and that they're not customizing because they just look to ALEC or look to the national parties, instead of focusing on what exactly it is that their constituents need of them.
Michael Berkman
Yes, and he didn't even really go into the extent to which some state legislators are gerrymandered in ways that also undercut representation pretty dramatically.
Candis Watts Smith
Right. So that component is I think, really well highlighted in the conversation around democratic backsliding. And my home state of North Carolina, which I love so much, is a prime suspect of democratic backsliding. And I thought that this conversation around that was so important, because even though we tend to talk about whether the United States of America is a democracy, Jake's work shows that there are variations across the states and across time, concerning the extent to which they could be characterized as democratic. And again, we see that states have learned from North Carolina what could be done, what could be tolerated and what is allowed to be implemented, particularly around voting and gerrymandering.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, I was glad he focused on North Carolina and produced some nice graphics on it too. I have often since 2010, US North Carolina and my teaching as an example to students of how elections matter. The 2010 election in North Carolina, I believe went over to the Republicans by maybe one or two seats at best. And after that election, you saw very dramatic changes in public policy. And one reason that that's I find that such a nice example is And this speaks directly to Jake's work as well. It's not like there was a massive change in public opinion.
Candis Watts Smith
North Carolina brings to light and characterizes and illustrates so much of what Jake helps us to understand about what's going on nationally. Obviously, we can talk ad nauseam about this book. It has a lot of really important contributions to our understanding of state politics of democratic backsliding, a party's federalism, but also, I guess, I have to say that I will update and be more careful about when and how I sling around the old adage that all politics is local. I'll be more circumspect about how I use that phrase, and the extent to which it is describing our political reality. So with that, I'll say thank you, Jenna, for the excellent interview. Thanks to Jake for giving us an early peek of his book, and congratulations on tenure. I'm Candis Watts Smith for democracy works.
Michael Berkman
And I'm Michael Berkman. Thanks for listening.