The Failed Game Theory Of Democratic Electoralism
If they impose no consequences for cheating, their opponents will cheat their way to victory.
Let me stipulate a few things I think most people, even many Republican voters, would agree with:
Principles are supposed to run deep. Politics allows for all kinds of hypocrisy and maneuvering and compromise, but everyone who serves the public should have lines they’d never cross.
Democracy is a system for assuring that governments advance the will of public majorities; it is not a rulebook to scour for loopholes.
But a democracy is and must be rule-bound. And everyone—wealthy citizens, poor citizens; ruling-party politicians and their opponents—must be held to the same set of rules.
If rule-breaking is not met with consequences adequate to deter further rule-breaking, incentives will encourage more rule-breaking, eroding democracy until the system breaks down altogether.
My argument today: Republican elites walked away from each of those first three points. As they did, Democrats failed to grok the fourth point for far too long; even now they can’t quite accept that they alone have the means and authority to impose consequences.
They have tolerated Republican illiberalism, and, in their infinite patience, lost the respect of every political faction in the country—those on their own side, and those across the ideological divide. Democracy has thus eroded, and the system is breaking down.
To rehabilitate democracy, and restore it to a sustainable place, the Republican Party will have to deradicalize. Either they will have to embrace a patriotic duty to share power and play fair from the top down; or their constituents will have to demand bottom-up change from them; or a combination of the two.
That is unlikely to happen so long as discarding all principle continues to be politically lucrative for Republicans. And part of the reason it’s been politically lucrative for Republicans is the absence of accountability.
Democrats obviously lack law-enforcement powers at the moment, which means they can’t seek justice for literal crimes. But for decades now, Republicans have treated the laws and norms that govern our system as problems to be hacked rather than as rules of a game that can be played vigorously, but must be played with good sportsmanship.
The default response to that kind of seething contempt for the game can’t be: appeal to the refs and hope for the best. In soccer, players angle for advantage by flopping to the ground theatrically, hoping the ref will penalize the opposition. In politics, there are no formal refs. There are voters and journalists, whose judgements matter a great deal. It’s certainly important to appeal to voters and to “work” the media “refs”—a topic I’ll return to in a subsequent newsletter. But news cycles come and go, and voters are (politely speaking) somewhat mercurial.
There has to be an element of direct risk to rule breakers. In hockey, if the ref doesn’t catch you high-sticking, you don’t necessarily get away with it: There’s also a good chance you’ll get punched in the face.
What does it mean for principles to be principles?
It doesn’t mean stubborn, self-destructive inflexibility. It means finding balance when competing principles come into conflict. Democrats are committed to democracy, so much so that in response to partisan GOP gerrymanders, they established non-partisan districting commissions in blue states, leading by example to uphold the one-person, one-vote principle. It was a terrible error that made it much harder for them to respond proportionately these past months as Republicans radicalized further against democracy.
Democrats would’ve been much better served to weigh one democratic principle against the related principle that, in a democracy, one set of rules must bind both parties.
They found a healthier balance starting in 2025. They embraced tit-for-tat redistricting, against the alternative of unilateral disarmament, but remained willing to toss out all partisan gerrymanders and district the whole country fairly. They fought fire with fire not in the hope of burning down the opposition for all time, but to re-establish fair play.
We can see now that the optimal balance is to turn up the heat a bit past tit-for tat: to burn Republicans just badly enough that they re-embrace fair play, out of sheer self-interest.
But the contrast is still revelatory: Republicans herald gerrymanders in red states, and decry them as partisan power grabs in blue one. Rigging elections is for them, not for Democrats. That is consistent with the pursuit of victory for all time, which, of course, is not consistent with democracy. Sweep away the high dudgeon and you’ll find no principle of any kind.
They love to fake it, though!
Before Republican justices nullified the Voting Rights Act, Democrats would have to sue to challenge illegal Republican gerrymanders. But even when Democrats prevailed, Republican judges would typically let Republican politicians keep their ill-gotten gains, at least for a while. There’s a “principle” called “Purcell,” you see, and the principle holds that it’s wrong to change the rules of an election in the midst of voting or just before. Your map might be illegal, but—rats!—it’s just a couple months until people begin casting ballots, so we must let you use it this cycle anyhow.
This week, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court decided the entire South could redraw maps in the middle of ongoing midterm primaries. No more requiring them to leave the current maps in place to honor the Purcell principle.
Apologists for Republican judges and Republican election-rigging will strain for legal distinctions. They’ll note that Purcell is meant to prevent judges from ordering states to change their election rules, not to prevent states from changing those rules as opportunistically as they want. But that’s not how a principle works. The principle is that rewriting the rules in the middle of an election when you don’t like how it’s going is wrong. The court should not create conditions that allow such meddling. Nevertheless the Republican justices went out of their way to facilitate major election disruption, including the nullification of tens of thousands of properly cast ballots, because that is what Sam Alito and his five most partisan colleagues wanted.
They scoured the rulebook for loopholes, found one, and now pretend they’re square with God. They are not.
There is similarly no principle to justify status quo jurisprudence and legislative procedures, which together allow Republicans to govern straightforwardly, while Democrats never can.
There’s no fair rulebook in which tax cuts can become law with simple majorities, and judges confirmed with simple majorities can arbitrarily void laws and regulations Republicans don’t like, but passing new programs requires legislative supermajorities, and comes with a high likelihood that if Republicans hate the new programs enough, their judges will simply nullify them.
Hard as Republicans pretend otherwise, that is not some sacrosanct norm. They just hacked and hacked and hacked the system until it gave them what they want while placing Democratic objectives out of reach. For us, anything goes; but you must clear insurmountable obstacles.
What would consequences look like? What’s the political or procedural counterpart to a hockey brawl?