Michael Waldman is the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, and a former head of speech-writing for President Bill Clinton. His new book, The Fight to Vote, traces the contentious history of voting and democracy in America, from property requirements at the founding to today’s battles over voter ID and money in politics.
Waldman sat down with MSNBC to discuss the book—as well as what Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments owed to John Adams, how Donald Trump goes further than George Wallace, and why President Obama hasn’t done enough for democracy.
This interview has been lightly edited and restructured for clarity and length.
You write that as the 2016 election approaches, democracy is under strain. How?
I think that, as we are undergoing this crazy 2016 election, democracy in America is under stresses and strains that is hasn’t seen in years. In 16 states, there are new voting rules designed to make it harder to vote for the first time in a high-turnout election. This is the first presidential election in 50 years without the full strength of the Voting Rights Act. But that’s not the only thing. It’s also an election where the flood of big money from a tiny handful of mega-donors is dominating much of the campaign finance. You have the longstanding problem of gerrymandering. In the last election, voter turnout plunged to the lowest level in 72 years. These are all real threats to our democracy and suggest we could be moving backwards.
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But we are also seeing the possibility of some significant forward progress. People are reacting, the political system is reacting and all across the country we’re now seeing positive developments and breakthroughs for reform, especially in the states. The biggest single change that would make the most difference in voting would be to move to automatic voter registration, which would add tens of millions to the voting rolls, and for those who really worry about it, curb the possibility of fraud. California and Oregon have passed laws moving towards this. The New Jersey legislature passed it, though Gov. Christie vetoed it. It’s starting to move in places from Illinois to Arizona, and it would be a big breakthrough. You’re seeing new models of public financing enacted in cities around the country as the way to stand up against the super PACs. And you’re seeing bipartisan redistricting reform, blessed now by the Supreme Court, pushed in California by Gov. Schwarzenegger, in Ohio recently by Gov. Kasich. This is not a left-right issue, so this could be a spring-time moment for democracy reforms that are taking shape all over the country.
How are these issues connected?
Sometimes these days we tend to think of these issues all as separate and somewhat arcane technical matters, where it’s voting over here that affects some people, and campaign finance over there. It really is the same issue. The issue is democracy and the power of everyone’s vote to matter. And throughout our whole history, going back to the Founders, Americans understood these to all be a part of the same issue: Who would be represented? How would they make their voice heard? What would their vote mean? From the beginning, they understood the formal rules mattered a lot, but also making sure the system wouldn’t be overly dominated by wealth and that there wouldn’t be shenanigans and manipulations that kind of rigged the system, the way James Madison worried about, and the way we see today.
You know, a lot of this bears the mark of a very concerted political strategy. Throughout history, one party or another has either been pushing to expand democracy or restrict voting rights. There is no question that right now and in recent years, it is the conservative movement that has pushed for more restrictive voting laws, that has pushed to weaken campaign finance laws whenever conservatives have gotten so much as a pinky on a lever of power. They’re moved to change the rules of democracy, whether it’s in the state capitals or in the Supreme Court. What’s striking is that, until recently anyway, Democrats and progressives didn’t have their own strategy to expand democracy in this day in age.
You show how these fights over democracy go back to the founding. We like to think of ourselves as the world’s oldest democracy. But why have voting and democracy always in fact been so controversial?
Well, I wanted to understand, has it always been this way? And it turns out we’ve been having this fight, the fight over who can vote and what mattered in our democracy, from the very beginning.
You know, at the beginning of the country’s history, we weren’t a democracy. Only white men who owned property were allowed to vote, and that was a small part of the population. But even at that time, that was controversial. And the momentum of the Revolution and the American ideal began to set things in motion. Benjamin Franklin led a workingman’s revolt in Pennsylvania in 1776 to expand voting rights to all men. John Adams on the other hand was one of those people who were really worried about this. He said if you do that, women will demand the right to vote. And men, he said, who hath not a farthing to their name will think themselves worthy of an equal voice in government. There will be no end of it. And of course that’s exactly what happened, there has been no end of it.
Does the success of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders reflect popular anger about the state of our democracy?
This is an election where people are angry. They are angry at the system, and they think the system is rigged, and you see it in both parties. You see a really wide recognition on the part of the public that it’s not only this policy or that policy but the basic state of our government and our democracy that’s on the ballot. And there are very different solutions that people are talking about, but whether it’s Sanders talking about campaign finance reform as the heart of campaign, Trump bragging that he is the only one in the Republican party who can’t be bought, or Hillary Clinton in a more muted way putting out the most advanced policies on voting rights and campaign finance.
This is an election where for the first time in a long time we’re debating not just what government does but how it does it.
You say we’re having a debate over democracy, but the GOP has worked mostly under the radar. They don’t seem to want to debate these issues openly, because they know restricting democracy is unpopular.
You’re right that before the 2010 elections when they took control of so many state legislatures, it’s not as if they ran on, let’s pass voter ID in the first month. But that’s a lot of what they did as soon as they got in. But you heard a great deal more about voter fraud, ACORN being a threat to America in the 10 years before than you did the opposite on the left. The Democrats were caught flat-footed and didn’t really offer much of an effective response to most of these moves.








