As I wrote in Part I, we’ve had forty two City Council races or vacancies in the past twenty years, only seventeen competitive races and only thirty eight (38) candidates that may be called ‘competive’. And since many of them obtained office running unopposed or via appointment, the number of candidates who have been tested is actually less.
But Des Moines is now a City of 33,000 people and our budget is $117M. It’s an uncomfortable question to ask, but the stakes are high enough now that it’s worth considering whether or not our system of vetting candidates is up to the challenge of generating electeds who are able to meet those challenges.
The cure is an election
Democracy depends on quality. Quality candidates and quality voters.
The bedrock assumption of our election system is that voters are rational actors and that voters will select for quality.
Our system assumes that:
- Candidates will step forward to run who have what it takes to govern well.
- Voters can and do choose wisely.
- That things will only rarely go wrong, and that when they do, the voters will fix the mistake in the next election.
The phrase you will hear over and over to describe this approach is:
The cure is an election.
Time and again, courts have been extremely reluctant to intervene in anything having to do with elected offices. They rightly leave it to the voters to test candidates to make sure they are obtaining the best quality electeds. They rightly fear constitutional implications of attempting to monkey with the will of the voters. Democracy depends on you doing something.
Why the cure is hard to swallow…
So, the system leaves it up to voters to select good electeds. A couple of challenges with that.
Turnout
Traditionally, only about one third of registered voters actually vote in Des Moines. Their median age is now over fifty eight (58), they are clustered in the wealthiest precincts (nearest the water), have far fewer children on average, and they are overwhelmingly white. In short, the people who vote are not representative of the population as a whole in almost every way that counts: diversity, age, parenting, location. Darn.
Ethics
On paper, WA has among the best election and government ethics laws in the nation. But every elected so quickly learns how to work them that they often make things worse. Also, there is no HR department for Councilmembers. We police ourselves. Or rather, four votes (the Council majority) is the sole enforcement of ethics for the entire Council.
Quantity
Face it. The fewer choices, the less likely it is to get good candidates. Does Gonzaga field a great team? Sure. But they get to aggressively recruit from all over America. We’re limited to residents of Des Moines. I doubt the Bulldogs would do as well if their talent pool was limited to the good people of Spokane Valley.
Candidate Quality
And this brings up the most uncomfortable question possible: With such a small talent pool, it is simply not possible to consistently obtain high quality candidates under any circumstance. One way employers hope to obtain good employees is by vetting a large number of candidates,. right? If you kiss enough frogs, eventually you find your prince.
Electeds take no skills tests and are subject to almost no training beyond just “don’t violate the Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA)’. The training ground is supposed to be the campaign. But how often have you seen candidates tested? Challenged? How many doors have they (not a surrogate) knocked on? How many places do they hang out besides in the Marina District? How well do they know the City, how much policy have they digested and how well are they prepared to govern? Frankly, voters have never seemed to care.
Eg. During the 2022 Council Vacancy process:
- There was no opportunity for public questioning of applicants by CMs. The majority believed that having applicants respond to questioning would be onerous for applicants.
- Not one letter the Council received from residents mentioned anything to do with any policy position; only identity and general qualifications.
Signals
Our City Council races are non-partisan. It uses a very pleasant anachronism that the public will rationally choose the best seven people, regardless of politics or other factors. It assumes that you get to know all the candidates and have all the information you need to make a rational decision that aligns with both your, and the community’s interest.
Unfortunately, voters don’t tend to do that. Instead, they look for signals, time-saving shortcuts to indicate that candidates are aligned both with their positions and values. And notice that ‘quality’ (ie. issue expertise or job-specific skills are nowhere in there.)
The two biggest signals tend to be Identity/Diversity and Political Endorsements. Neither are reliable indicators either of quality or issue positions:
Diversity
It may be hard to hear, but due to the small talent pool, choosing based on identity tends to work against candidate quality. There is simply no correlation between candidate quality, issue positions or even identities such as ‘Black’, ‘LGBTQ’ or ‘gender’.
The uncomfortable fact is that, given our small talent pool, if you vote based primarily on identity, you are either assuming that those identities provide some benefit which trumps all other qualifications, or you believe that candidate quality does not matter.
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- We’ve had five female CMs over the past 20 years. Only one could remotely be classified as ‘progressive’. But again, only one of those women faced strong opposition, which makes it impossible to know if the voters give automatic deference to women.)
- We’ve had three CMs elected under the age of forty: hard conservatives Jeremy Nutting and Dave Kaplan and the only openly progressive CM in our history: Anthony Martinelli.
- We’ve had at least three gay men as CMs. They have been among the most tenured in our history. But again, some were very conservative and some were among the most liberal.
Party endorsements
Within the Des Moines Talent Pool, there has been absolutely no correlation between candidate quality, issues positions and political endorsement. In fact it’s worse than that. There has been no correlation between party affiliation and issue positions. Party affiliation provides no reliable indicator either of quality or of issue positions.
And remember, the smallest unit of organisation for a political party is the Legislative District; in our case, the 33rd. The majority of the 33rd Leg is actually in Burien and SeaTac. And the interests of those voters are often not the same as those of Des Moines voters.
PAC Endorsements
Within the Des Moines Talent Pool, there is absolutely no correlation between candidate quality and Political Action Committee (PAC) endorsements. However, there has been some correlation between some PAC endorsements and some issue positions. But it may not be what you think.
The following PACs tend to support the incumbent or most conservative candidate, regardless of party or issue positions: Police and Fire, Unions, Developers, and Real Estate.
(In fact, many of these endorsements are made without affording all candidates an opportunity to compete. The bias is towards the Devil You Know, regardless of any results the endorsees provide for their members. And their interests are not always the same as voter interest.
Other advocacy groups which are identified more as ‘liberal’, such as teachers or even groups called ‘Progressive Voters’, are unpredictable. But again, their interests are not always the same as voter interest.
So?
When I did the first version of this article, I just left the data there. I’ve been very reluctant to provide any form of ‘solutions’. I’m the first to admit that I either appear biased or I really am biased towards the approach I suggest. I tried (and try) to be the candidate and elected that my analysis suggests is ‘best’. Regardless, there’s no way to avoid sounding self-serving. I’m working with I’ve got.
But without offering a ‘solution’ this will read like just another ‘all complaints no answers’ rant. So…
Here’s all ya gotta do…
I opened this article as follows:
Democracy depends on quality candidates. The bedrock assumption of our election system is that voters are rational actors and that voters will select for quality.
But given the low number of candidates of any quality and all the challenges you face in choosing, here’s all ya gotta do fellas…
- Be well-informed: make sure you have ways to really get to know each candidate, their background and pay specific attention to their issue positions (their values.)
- Avoid any signals: Don’t vote based on relationships or party or endorsements or identity or nothing other than what the candidates tell you. I know it’s counter-intuitive and it’s awkward but the data is 100% clear on this going back thirty years: The candidates who value an issue will support it far more than the people who vote based on signals:
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- Candidates who have strong policy positions on diversity, will obtain diversity faster than voting for people based on their identity.
- Candidates who have strong policy positions on public safety will hire more cops than people endorsed by the police union.
It really is that simple. But by ‘simple’ I do not mean easy. It’s a lot of work to research each candidate and then refuse all those handy temptations to vote based on habit and signals.
So I can make it even simpler, a one step process:
Just vote for candidates who seems most genuinely interested in expanding public awareness.
Think about it: if you’re selling a quality product, you want as many people as possible to know as much about it as possible. And you definitely want customers to see how your features stack up against the competition. You want to maximise awareness, both of the product and specific features.
The candidates who do not prioritise those things are marketing to a narrow audience. And that’s why Des Moines is the way it is.
Coda: OK, it’s not that simple…
Actually, the current system is missing something: It depends on a functioning and free press. It’s actually in the Constitution, under the very first Amendment. And it’s there because the founders recognised almost immediately that voters need some form of ongoing quality control.
And by that I mean, you can’t just wait four years and hope for good candidates and electeds. The public has a responsibility to improve both candidates and electeds as they go.
We rarely do that in Des Moines. We bitch, we moan, but we provide very few incentives (carrots and sticks) to our politicians to make them better. We expect little and they are only too happy to oblige. They should thank us for making their lives easier. 🙂
So I’ll just close by saying that the public must find ways to continuously improve candidates and electeds. All politicians must feel a constant desire (and pressure) to study, to be flexible, to do more outreach, to cooperate with their colleagues, and basically to be more professional.
I don’t know how to get there, but that is the piece of the puzzle that is almost completely absent in the discussion at the moment. With so few people even bothering to run, the only way to obtain good electeds is if the public insists on some form of continuous improvement.
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