Joe Stanley

About a week ago, there was a great article on O’Reilly Radar by John Geraci.  Entitled “The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System“, it broke down the transparency movement into four main channels of communication that all need to be maximized in order to produce a civically-engaged society.  In short, these four sections were the following (and I’ll try not to copy too much for the original article):

Government to Citizen (G2C): This is the publication of information that is often viewed as making the government more accountable.  Minutes of meetings, candidate contributions, lobbyist disclosures, etc.  Anything data which the government collects that the citizenry can manipulate falls into this category.

Citizen to Government (C2G): This is the ability for the citizenry to easily send information in to the government, who as John writes is hopefully listening.

Citizen to Citizen (C2C): While sometimes overlooked, the ability for the community to talk and learn from itself may produce more efficient solutions to problems than a top-down government solution ever could.

Government to Government (G2G): A sector that is oftentimes referenced with very broad language by politicians, the various departments of the government need to be able to exchange needed data more easily so that neither party is essentially re-inventing the wheel in terms of data collection, or otherwise so held up in the gears of bureaucracy that the information is no longer timely.

As someone who is more interested in process than necessarily any given policy, I found the previous categorizations quite informative.  While they may seem quite simple or otherwise obvious, let’s think about what technological solutions in Virginia really serve within each category.

Government to Citizen
o    Richmond Sunlight
o    Virginia Public Access Project
o    Lobbyist in a Box
o    Virginia Stimulus Website
Citizen to Government
o    Legislator’s Websites
o    Advocacy CMS Systems
o    Likely Voter Databases
Citizen to Citizen
o   Richmond Sunlight
o    Advocacy Groups
o    Google Maps
Government to Government
o    Fusion Center?

The transparency/good government movement has made impressive strides within the G2C category, and in a way it makes sense, as it is primarily a classical, top-down method of information distribution.  You take a centralized agency such as the Legislative Information Services, and have them provide their data in a way that is easy to manipulate (although Waldo can attest that easy is a relative term).

Regarding G2G systems, as someone who has not worked within the apolitical agencies of government, I can’t say what kind of systems they have in place.  The first that sprung to mind was the fusion center to track terrorist intelligence between the various enforcement agencies that work within the state, and I think that overall there has been a large push for greater integration of this sort in first responders.  Whether this already exists in other departments or will otherwise spread to them is an important question I cannot answer.

Where I currently see a dearth of activity (at least in terms of information synthesis and manipulation) is really in the C2G category.  There is obviously a serious need for the citizenry to be able to effectively get in touch with the government, and I think this need for contact falls into two main fields:  Political and apolitical.  The desire for effective contact in the first category is so great that it is a quite valuable industry.  However, for a number of reasons I don’t want to delve too deeply into that category.  On the other hand, allowing citizens easier and more informative ways to get in touch with state bureaucratic departments is a field (to my knowledge) virtually untouched within the online community.  Just imagine if you could text a number whenever you found yourself waiting in traffic.  This data is then collected statewide, and triangulated based on your position relative to nearby cell towers to produce a realtime map of traffic conditions for VDoT.

However, just because we have these four categories doesn’t mean applications can’t exist in multiple groups.  One example I listed was Richmond Sunlight, but just imagine a cross between the C2G and C2C categories.  Using the city of Richmond as an example, you could log onto a city website to file a problem with the city, such as a pothole or maybe something like a condemned building inhabited by vagrants.  This complaint is then overlaid onto a custom Google Map, which displays the location of the problem, but more importantly also allows other citizens to add comments or otherwise “upvote” the problem.  With enough users, you’ll begin to get a sense of the problems with entire regions of the city, providing data that is useful to the citizenry in the area as well as to the city departments in charge of the area.  At this point you’re no longer engaging in anonymous, one-way conversations with nameless departmental entities.  Instead, city hall and RVA itself are in a collective discussion.

The transparency and good government movement has made impressive strides, but we also must take care never to forget that these are simply means to an end.  A transparent government is a more accountable government, which in turn is more responsive.  If we so truly desire a civically-engaged society, we must use what tools exist (and create those that do not) to provide the processes needed for such engagement.

Joe Engagement, Government, Process

Creigh Deeds with some of the Sorensen CLP Program

So for those unaware (why are you reading if so?), Creigh Deeds just owned the competition in the Virginia primary.  Even a week ago, I think few would have confidently predicted his victory, let alone the margins by which he won.  What happened in the interim was, in a word, interesting. Based on polling, it seems that literally every undecided voter sided with Creigh on Primary Day.  Breaking down the data both by turnout and total vote share on a county level, we can see that Creigh did not rely on any particular region to win, and there weren’t any significant deviations in turnout numbers due to the storms in NoVA and Hampton Roads.

So what does this say about Virginia Democrats, and what does a Deeds/McDonnell matchup mean for the Commonwealth between today and Election Day?  Regarding the former, I think there were a couple of elements playing into the numbers we saw yesterday.  The first is that Moran’s no-holds-barred take on attacking Terry obviously backfired, and drove up his own negatives.  I’m a strong supporter of Brian, and I had many friends that were in the upper echelons of his campaign staff, but I’ve been worried with their strategy starting with the JJ Dinner speech.  Moran gave the electorate plenty of reasons not to vote for McAuliffe, but no strong reasons to vote for him.

Furthermore, his shift to a much more populist message was undercut by Deeds already owning that territory, and Moran never displacing him in public perception.  The only other move he made was to steer sharply to the left in policy, which only would have worked if he had supplemented it with the Deeds “common guy” perception.  Ultimately, he came off in many ways like a party street fighter, which is great for Caucus Chair of the House of Delegates, but not so much for the gubernatorial election.  I have no doubt that Moran will actively work to elect Deeds, and will be a necessary element in overcoming the latter’s underperformance in the general election for AG in Northern Virginia.  Whether Moran is also a sufficient element is an entirely different question that I can’t readily answer.

Now, on to Terry McAuliffe…Where to begin?  I’ll readily admit that when Terry first entered the race, I was still undecided between the candidates, but quickly fell into the McAuliffe camp.  The main reason for this was because I felt none of the candidates had a real strong chance of defeating McDonnell, and at least the ground-game and money

Terry campaigning with Will.I.Am

Terry would bring in would increase the chances of taking the House of Delegates (and with it, a better shot at bipartisan redistricting).  However, as time went on I grew worried that McAuliffe would not live up to his word of funneling large amounts of money into the Delegate races, and I also found Creigh running an amazingly efficient and effective campaign.  Although McAuliffe is on the record on his own site of stating he would fundraise for the House even if he lost the nomination, I’m incredibly skeptical.

Which I think was Terry’s major problem.  Despite the massive amount of money he poured into Richmond and Tidewater, he was unable to really move turnout in those regions by any significant margin.  Now, I’m sure people much smarter than myself will bust out the predictive models and explain why this was the case, but my purely gut feeling is just that this campaign was a lesson that money cannot buy or otherwise replace trust.  Regardless of whether the allegations of impropriety with business and political partners are true, they tied into a larger narrative of Terry’s life, just as the similarly exaggerated statements that he tried to run in Florida and New York before choosing Virginia.  If anything, all the money he spent putting advertisements up (Super Bowl?  Really?)  only hurt him because it also tied into that same narrative of attempting to “buy” the election.

I think Terry’s loss really speaks to recognition by Virginia Democrats that work on the federal level, even if it is in support of the same issues, does not translate to the state level.  With Virginia’s new position as one of the battlefront states between the Republicans and Democrats, I’m very relieved by this pushback, because it should keep out a number of contenders that may otherwise try to get involved with state politics in order to use it as a stepping stone.
One final note about Terry’s loss, which I think speaks more to the voters than necessarily his campaign.  While anecdotal, a great number of primary voters I have spoken with said they would have liked to vote for Terry, but they were aware that our recent string of electoral victories has been far outside the expected bounds given the commonwealth’s actual ideological makeup.  Thus, a vote for Terry also carried the connotation that you were an arrogant Democrat, and would also scare away permanently some of that surge of undecided voters from the Obama race that had voted Democrat.  That there seems to have been a party-wide recognition of this danger is extremely curious to me, and I wonder if that sort of foresight will fade the further we move from 2008.

Does this mean Creigh was simply the last man standing?  No.  If he had not run his campaign perfectly, allocating his resources almost exactly like it needed to be, he wouldn’t have won.  However, the fact that both of his opponents seemed to have been paper tigers played into his victory.  Moving forward, we as a party will need to realize that McDonnell is no paper tiger, and that the general election will be far more difficult for Deeds than even this past primary.

Joe Deeds, Gubernatorial, Politics, State

This is the second half of a larger article.  For the first part of this topic, click here.

We ended up meeting in person with McDonnell about two months ago, along with a number of his campaign staff.  Here is a point at which I want to segue for a moment, and speak about Bob McDonnell the person.  I walked into that meeting with a set of pre-conceived notions of who he was, based off of his policy stances.  I was pleasantly surprised to meet a leader who saw some long-term branding problems with his own party, and wanted to solve those issues without compromising the integrity of their political philosophy.  While I may disagree on nearly every social issue and many fiscal ones, having met him I can say confidently that he understands many of the nuances of each issue, and has simply interpreted the facts in a manner I disagree with.  This is infinitely better than many legislators who have no knowledge of an issue, and simply adopt it as it is the expected party stance.

With this in mind, two things became apparent during our initial meeting:  The first was that Bob McDonnell did not believe bipartisan redistricting would solve the problem it set out to rectify:  Namely, the level of passive “partisan bias” in a chamber that was purely the result of the district lines, and not the overall attitude of Virginia’s citizenry.  The second was that McDonnell recognized his party needed to start fighting with the Democrats more as to which party were the champions of good government.  From a political perspective, he knew he needed to include something along the lines of redistricting reform, whether he supported it personally or not.

If I recall correctly, at one point in time, McDonnell asked our group whether we had any way to show whether or not bipartisan redistricting produced the results we said it would.  Luckily, building off of a body of research from a number of political scientists in the commonwealth, I had compiled a series of research articles published across the nation that showed that (1) No redistricting is the worst for producing slanted bias, (2) the median effects of partisan redistricting across the nation are better, and (3) the median effects of bipartisan redistricting across the nation were better still.  Some of the datasets had found that even the bipartisan commission with the smallest reduction in bias still had a greater reduction than the most effective partisan form of redistricting.  As I discussed the data with McDonnell, Wyatt Durrette also wisely pointed out the effect of arbitration, which in many ways is what a bipartisan commission would be; Even when both sides appoint members that are on opposite ends of any given issue, most arbitration results are typically unanimous, once the biased members are brought together and handed the task of settling the dispute.

McDonnell asked a number of specific questions regarding the methodology and data samples used in the studies, as well as whether or not they could be applied to Virginia’s political climate.  All in all, I appreciated the depth of some of his lines of questioning, and apparently between the ethical and political arguments (supported by some hard data for him to fall back on), Bob McDonnell was noticeably warmed to the issue.

A few weeks later, I received an email from one of McDonnell’s advisors, asking for a series of components representing what the coalition’s ideal redistricting bill would be.  I pulled together the document, got it verified by the requisite leadership within the group, and sent it off.  Surprisingly, many of those components made it into the final good government package that was released.  Those that did not make the cut were some of the strongest policy components, that would also be the most difficult to pass politically, such as altering redistricting votes to be an up/down vote.  Of course I pretty much knew that they were not going anywhere, especially when the most pro-reform candidate, Creigh Deeds, wouldn’t even touch those anymore.

So what does McDonnell’s change of heart mean for the success of redistricting reform?  Well, as I wrote in the previous entry, we now have every single candidate for both tickets on board with redistricting reform.  The key now will be to leverage that over the coming electoral months.
However, here is my honest assessment (and I would love to be wrong).  McDonnell now gets to avoid the attacks that he is against good government by supporting this package.  When we go into the General Assembly session, he can say he is applying “closed door” pressure on the Speaker and the Majority Leader to allow the bill through.  The bill will fail, he will get the benefit of having remained true to his word, and then a partisan redistricting process will happen.  Assuming the Democrats do not get a lead in the House, Saslaw and Griffith will strike a deal to produce maps that protect incumbents in the House and Senate, respectively.  Thus, both chambers will end up with greater majorities for the current parties in charge.  After the next redistricting process, assuming the Redistricting Coalition keeps pressing McDonnell, we might then see a bill come through and get passed by a group of legislators that are confident with the fact that the results of their bill would not take effect for another decade.

Joe Gubernatorial, McDonnell, Politics, State

Republican nominee for governor 2009

Bob McDonnell, the Republican’s brand-new nominee for governor in Virginia this year, has also recently released his good government package. Of particular note is his recent change of heart on the issue of redistricting; while he once favored partisan redistricting, he has now called for a bipartisan commission process to draw the lines. I wanted to write about part of the process for how this change came to be, because as a policy fellow with the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy, a large part of my time was allocated to working on redistricting reform through the Virginia Redistricting Coalition. Getting McDonnell on board was one key element in a strategy that will leave us as best positioned as we can be walking into a General Assembly session where all the pieces will have been settled before the 2010 Census. First, however, let me lay the groundwork leading up to that moment.

Working on the various redistricting bills this pas session, I think at this point in time I can safely say that the eventual results of that legislation were determined pretty early on in the process. One of Majority Leader Griffith’s aides (and someone I learned much from in my first few years working at the General Assembly) made it clear to me early on that there would be orders from on high to kill any redistricting bills. In addition, the elections sub-committee of House Privileges and Elections was reshuffled this year, swapping out those delegates that we had pressured the past few years and were in danger of flipping. They were replaced with people such as Jeff Frederick, legislators who had no hesitation to kill the various bills. Due to the amount of power the Speaker (and majority party) has, we knew that the only real way to get these bills out of the House would be to convince both Howell as well as Griffith to someone let it get to the floor. For a lot of reasons I won’t go into here, that effort obviously did not work. With the House bills killed, and the only other bills coming from the Senate would have Creigh Deeds’ name on the patron line, we knew there was no chance. Even if the House Republicans agreed to allow a bill make it to the floor, they would never allow one from a Democrat gunning to be governor that election year.

Even if there was still a chance at that moment, the redistricting effort took yet another partisan turn as Tim Kaine held a press conference calling for the Republicans to pass the bill, surrounded by what we had initially expected to be a bipartisan showing of legislators and business leaders. Instead, it ended up being (if I recall correctly) one Republican Senator, Jill Holtzman Vogel. In addition to actual Democratic patrons of bills, Minority Leader Ward was there, as well as a number of the Black Caucus which did not actually support the redistricting bill. Even if it was not intended as such, it came across as an exploitation of one friendly Republican, and an attempt to leverage redistricting into an electoral issue in the coming fall.

This left us without a major success in the one session that everyone thought would be our best chance. However, as we had seen the writing on the wall early on, we had also been working through our conservative members of the Redistricting Alliance (even if the issue seems partisan, the group isn’t) to court the McDonnell campaign. Meanwhile, I quickly got the only new contender for the Democrats, Terry McAuliffe, on the record in support of bipartisan redistricting (originally through a Q&A at NotLarrySabato).

A number of months ago, we had a breakthrough with the McDonnell campaign. While our coalition partners were working from the outside, a group of key campaign advisors (Wyatt Durrette among them) were working on Bob from within his operation. These combined efforts had gotten us a sit-down with McDonnell himself, without a limit on time, to discuss the issue of redistricting reform.

Tomorrow I’ll explain what happened in that meeting, and how it took both groups down a path towards an environment where I expect that every candidate on both party’s tickets will be in support of redistricting reform. Perhaps more importantly, I’ll also discuss what that means walking into the 2010 session.

Update: The second portion of this article can be found here.

Joe Gubernatorial, Politics, Redistricting, State

Anyone that has been interested in Virginia politics for any amount of time has an opinion about the entire NoVA/RoVA debate.  For those somehow still unaware, the issue boils down to the following:  Arlington, Fairfax, Alexandria, and some surrounding regions are an outgrowth of Washington, D.C.  Accordingly, they have a massive amount of people in a comparatively tiny space.  In fact, they have so many people that they can command an amazing amount of political power over the rest of the commonwealth.  Naturally, Republicans are angry because while they may represent more land, they lost a chamber of the legislature primarily due to the fact that NoVA comprises so many people who happened to have voted Democratically.  Even rural Democrats are angry, as they feel their voice is nonexistent compared to the “Fairfax Bloc” in the party.

The key thing to realize, however, is that I emphasized that rural Democrats feel out.  In reality, this NoVA/RoVA debate is only true on a few key issues.  The real debate is over a urban/rural split in the Commonwealth, and particularly in the Democratic party.  I remember many people complaining when Governor Kaine was running back in 2005 that he wasn’t focusing enough on western Virginia (unlike Warner), instead putting his resources into the three areas of NoVA, Greater Richmond, and Hampton Roads.  You can debate whether or not he actually did this, but there is no question that a majority of his votes came from those three areas.  It has since become a electoral tradition to watch Democrats be down 10+ points statewide, until areas like Fairfax and Richmond start to submit their precinct votes, at which point it becomes a neck and neck race.

I bring all of this up not to discuss the past, but rather to focus on the future.  Specifically, the upcoming Gubernatorial primary for the Democrats.  We’ve got three candidates, Creigh Deeds, Brian Moran, and Terry McAuliffe.  When viewed through this NoVA/RoVA lens, we’ve got Senator Deeds representing RoVA, and Delegate Moran and Mr. McAuliffe representing NoVA.  It has even been suggested that Creigh can capture the RoVA vote and let Moran and McAuliffe battle it out over NoVA.  In the process, Creigh ends up with a plurality, and the nomination of the party.

I’ve heard this strategy from a number of people now, and it has never really made sense with me.  If you assume that Moran and McAuliffe’s strongholds are only in NoVA, it works.  Also, you have to assume that the vote will be split very closely to a true three-way race.  Unfortunately, I think neither is really the case.  Moran and McAuliffe appeal to urban votes, not simply NoVA voters.  And I suspect (the explanation of which is far too long to elaborate on here) that by the primary, the urban vote will have coalesced strongly around one of the two candidates.

So, in this situation, what are we looking at?

This is a quick coloring of how I see rural and urban interests breaking at the primary level, based partly on my gut and partly on what kind of candidates these areas have supported.  I should also note that it has been tweaked to be representative of what I expect this upcoming primary to be like.  Green represents rural areas, Orange is urban, and yellow is split enough at the county/city level for me to be unsure how to code it.

I have also pulled the statewide Democratic primary data for 2006 (Senate) and 2005 (Lt. Governor’s race) from the SBE website.

In 2005, rural interests represented around 36.4% of the total, my split areas were 10.91%, and the urban areas represented 54.63%.  Turnout was low in NoVA because this was not a federal election, but it was also lower overall compared to a primary to determine the governor.  In this example, assuming Deeds received 100% of the rural vote, none of the urban, and the undecided area was a wash, one of the urban candidates would have to get a little less than 67% of the vote from the orange regions to still win.  Perhaps a little bit more realistically, let’s assume that Deeds wins 80% of the rural vote, and 15% of the urban vote.  In this situation, the urban candidate would still only need to win about 60% of the urban vote and 15% of the rural vote to win.

It bears repeating that the yellow areas represent a significant 10.91% in these examples, and if they were to go solidly either way, it would make a major difference.  Furthermore, this is from 2005, which is now four years old, and also before a massive voter registration effort by President Obama’s campaign (which focused mainly in the urban areas though still statewide).  I believe that the odds are even more favored towards the urban candidate now.

If you think of the 2005 results as favoring the rural vote share, then the 2006 results would favor the urban vote.  At the time, urban vote share was roughly 59.56%, neutral was 8.17%, and rural was 32.38%.  In this environment, the numbers a bit different.  Assuming Deeds won 100% of the rural vote and only 10% of the urban vote, the urban candidate could still win with 65% of the urban vote.  More realistically, if Deeds won 80% of the rural vote and 15% of the urban, the urban candidate could still win with 55% of the urban vote and 10% of the rural.

Obviously, my definitions of what are rural and urban are subjective, and the neutral localities hold a significant share of the vote.  If you have any suggestions of how they should be coded, I would love to hear them.  In the meantime, here is my data in an excel sheet (if you need a non-proprietary format, contact me).  This way, you can make the judgment calls yourself, and then just simply add up the numbers to see what a candidate needs to win statewide.  The main take-away point here is that as time goes on, rural interests in the state, particularly when examined from within the Democratic Party, will hold much less sway.

Specifically for this summer, Creigh is going to have to hope that the urban vote ends up being split competitively, because these numbers were still very favorable to him in terms of total share of the rural vote.  However, he’s still in a better boat than Moran, who needs to discredit McAuliffe and then battle Creigh back to his own rural regions.  Perhaps surprisingly, McAuliffe looks the best from this vantage point, provided he continues to generate money at the rate he has so far.  If so, he’ll be able to battle Creigh on his own territory while simply outspending Moran in his own home.  In another bonus against his urban competitor, he seems to be quite easily passing the “knowledgeable about Virginia” bar.  If he comes out of JJ looking good, I’d be willing to label him the frontrunner.

Joe Gubernatorial, Politics, Regional Issues, State