 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is John Samples, vice president and publisher at the Cato Institute. In early November, the Republicans saw massive victories in the election, the midterm election. I guess the first question is, is this the beginning of a new age of freedom? Is this a massive repudiation of Obama's policies? Is this a libertarian moment or is this just standard midterm election discouragement with the president? I'd say all of the above. I mean, I don't know that it's except maybe beginning of freedom. A lot will depend on just what happens as you go through the legislative process. And I don't know that the election will have a lot to do with that. I do think it was a combination of factors, but sort of being tired and or rejecting the Obama administration. And the Obama administration had been having a lot of problems for a while, was a big part of it. You know, I mean, political scientists at any kind of election usually, usually, most of them go at it and look at fundamentals like the economy or war, the two big ones. And this one, you had one where the economy hadn't been good for a long time. It got a little better recently, but definitely in the exit polls, people were not happy with the economy. And the thing about Obama is, you know, you never really got a big economic upturn to replace what happened during the recession of 2008. And so you're really off track in the sense of you haven't returned a trend. And it's a hundred year trend. There's really a lot in terms of lost productivity, lost wealth in that period. And so in a sense, I think that's in the background too. That, and he promised a great deal in 2008, 2009, which is probably always a mistake. So are we seeing a situation where Republicans who are possibly, quote, unquote, more right-wing and what we would say maybe more libertarian have better electoral prospects than they did six years ago, we would say, or 10 years ago? Yes, in the sense that it did seem to me in the midterms that the social conservatism or some of the winning Senate candidates were indeed socially conservative. And the emphasis on those kinds of issues above all gay marriage had really, that's been in a long-term decline. Even a decade ago, it was an issue, but not front and center. And now I think it's really not an issue for candidates. So I think that's, in that sense, without putting emphasis on that, you could say a candidate looks more libertarian than in the past. The exit polls don't show a great deal, though, on the foreign policy front. It seems to me that the exit polls still show a Republican electorate in 2014 that was pretty hawkish. And on the other side, this I think one of the interesting trends of this election, although maybe some, quote, unquote, more extreme, I put that in quotes because that way they would describe us, but more extreme Republicans can get elected or hold their seat. But on the other side, are we seeing more extreme liberals, more extreme leftists, being able to win or are they losing by bigger margins? People like Wendy Davis in Texas, for example. Right. And also I think you've even sort of moderate Democrats who are losing in places like Arkansas with David Pryor. You know, thinking about that, this was an election that really those kind of candidates didn't do very well, actually. Now, in the past six to eight years they have, but I don't see that on the other side at this point. Does this election tell us anything about 2016? Is there a sense that these Republicans swept in and so now they have a better chance to take the White House? Well, they have a better, they also did well in the state level. They picked up three governor's seats, which they weren't expected to. And the sort of folk wisdom was that you're in better shape with having a governor of your party in a state, you're in better shape to win the state. So that'll be of some help and also if you have the legislature, that can be helpful. But I think the real issue here is you would expect the Democrats not to win the presidency in 2016. Because it's been eight years now, they haven't been particularly great eight years. Obama has struggled often to get above 50% approval ratings. He did win twice, but still it hasn't been robust in that sense. So I would think you would think this is the Republicans' election to lose. However, we've seen some, again, in terms of fundamentals. You're starting to get job production. You're starting to, the economy is looking better in that sense. So if you have a couple of back-to-back years of 3.5% growth perhaps, which I don't think anybody necessarily expects, but if it happens, really, again, this is the way political scientists look at these things. They're referendums on the status quo. And so the question in 2016 is the same question of 2008. In 2008, do you want more Bush administration, even though the guy's name is John McCain and he's opposed the Bush administration most of the time? That's the question. And the same was with the elder Bush in 1988. So Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are not on great terms, I guess, but still she'll be running, presumably, as his successor. So the question of the Obama administration will be on the ballot in 2016, and right now you would expect that it hasn't gone very well. As is the case after every election, everyone's talking about it. Everyone's got an opinion about it. I mean, we're inside the ballot way. Of course, everyone has an opinion and there have been lots of think pieces and whatnot. But also, I mean, just people I see on Twitter and Facebook in the day after the election, we're expressing all sorts of strong opinions one way or the other. And I guess what I'm wondering is what are people getting wrong in the way that they talk about this? Are there things like where people think that this means X or that this influenced the election that, say, political scientists think there aren't significant or point in different directions than the conventional wisdom, just kind of myths of the way that people think about this election or other elections? Or what do political scientists know about this that the electorate doesn't seem to know about this? Or what, in another way of putting it, what about that goes on in D.C. about this among the media saturated environment that drives political scientist nuts? And I would say there's a couple things. One is the lack of attention to fundamentals, the look at the economy and so on. That was also true of Obama's reelection. I don't think I ever heard anyone mention that the economy had grown enough from the end of 2011-2012 that was entirely consistent with his reelection numbers. What other fundamentals besides the economy? The only one that I put big confidence in would be war. I think war really kicks in and causes trouble. It's so bad, in fact, once you start getting casualties that you really don't understand why people do it, presidents do it, because it has a significant political cost. So I would say that's a big issue here is you're looking at the economy. And a lot of the people who did, we do have on the Internet, a lot of good modeling and so on. And some of those people pointed out that we looked at fundamentals in February and predicted this and the fundamentals being primarily expected growth of the economy and so on. The other thing I would say is you've got to be careful with how midterms are different from presidential election years, and they are because there's a difference in turnout who turns out to vote. So you can't really, you can talk about the American people as being the electorate at any one time, but the American people in 2012 and 2014 are a different group of people. So making broad generalizations about what the people are trying to do or trying to communicate is, I think, is somewhat complicated. I mean, one of the things that did happen in 2014 compared to 2012 was the number of people who make under 50,000 a year went down. Their share of the total electorate went down by about six points. And those people vote very strongly Democratic. So the result is that I think there was a five or six point drop in the Democratic vote share there. Is this just because people who aren't as politically engaged and so maybe don't hold as extreme views one way or another don't turn out as much for midterm elections because they're not as exciting as a presidential election? Yeah, in a sense, but the political science point of view I think would say is you have to always remember that voting or any kind of political participation is not something you can take for granted, it's something hard. And so actually the normal case might be 2014 whereas 2012 or 2008 where Obama's on the ticket, he's an exciting candidate, tends to drive people to the polls. So by having it be hard, you mean that voting takes some effort. So because of that, you can't just assume that the kind of person who goes out and does this is a specific type of person that's on a representative sample of the population. Well, this is another part of these discussions which is that there's sort of an idea that people will come out and vote at that sort of the norm and there's citizenship norms and all that kind of thing. But really it just takes a lot to get people to vote in, particularly in these midterms, you're talking the range is 38 to 42% of eligible voters, something like that. And so in a sense I think that's part of the story too. The other thing, I mean there's a lot that's wrong. One thing is if you read particularly very influential people, they make a big emphasis on how much campaigning matters. That's the other side of the fundamentals, that is, and you'll hear them, this is particularly true in presidential years, but in general, you'll hear them say if he had said this or something about the situation with ISIS or things that people don't even know about that are really obscure and don't have any effect on the race, that's very common in Washington. And campaigning, one way I can give you a point where I think campaigning did matter, but it was in Georgia. Purdue, the candidate, Republican candidate was behind and looked like he might really be in a runoff, but he just focused really like a laser on the economy, on the Obama administration, on happiness with the Obama administration. So his choices in campaigning to focus on fundamentals actually pulled him through. I mean he finished very strongly, but that was not campaigning in itself, not some esoteric judgment about campaigning or being nice and having a friendly smile. It was to drive home the fundamentals point. Is this then this notion that if only politicians talked about these sorts of things, it would have gotten them more votes, a variant of what we sometimes call say the pundits fallacy, which is this notion that like the way the Democrats need, what they need to do in order to pick up seats or what the Republicans need to do in order to pick up seats is to adopt the policies that I, the pundit, prefer. That's one. I mean, yeah, that's a version of it. And there's, you know, the one I always like is that there's something you could have done that didn't have anything to do with the larger world. The one I loved after 2008 was you'd hear these Republican operatives talking about messaging. We've got to have better messaging. If we'd had better messaging, we would have won. Well, you know, you had a war and an economic meltdown. You weren't going to mess it your way out of that. And in fact, these kinds of things really, it has to be very close to begin with. And so the parameters are usually set by fundamentals. And then, you know, there's other stuff that can happen in a kind of episodic way. Do we think that certain things that are aside a fair amount of causal force such as, let's say, Obama's, if you like your health care plan, you can keep it, that kind of thing, which I think was big enough that a lot of people who weren't even that engaged politically had heard about this and maybe actually affected them because that's the thing about the health care. Even a war doesn't affect many people the way America fights them now, but health care might. Do we think that those things and the messaging about those things and their response, are those the kind of things that have more influence on elections or still just the small amount of undecided voters in the middle there are going to be influenced by this, but most people who vote are pretty decided? Well, that's the other thing too. You make a good point, which is partisanship. We live in a highly partisan age. So a lot of these, if you look at those numbers about how partisans vote in the exit polls, they get, if you're an identified Democrat or Republican, not more than 90% vote with their party or for the party candidate. It's possible. I mean, I think to some degree, for me, as an election issue, the health care plan remains, Obamacare remains kind of an odd thing. In the past, the Obama people bet that this would become popular after it was implemented. And in the past, that has happened. That happened with S-Chip recently, with S-Chip. Medicare Party. Party. Although it was unpopular for a while there. But this one does seem, as a general rule, to have not, it's underwater. It's 50% at the exit polls in 2014. 51, 52% said they did not approve of it. So it's possible that things like that, it's created a great deal of uncertainty. It's been a lot of focus that the administration itself put on it. So it's possible that it made some difference, but mostly in probably loosely affiliated people. In part because, you know, I mean, you look at the emphasis of the two of the partisans, Democrats put their likelihood of saying health care was a major issue in the country now is much higher. So they were very supportive. That is the other thing, you know. Don't independent voters voting for the man, not the party, you know. You look in the exit poll data and man, what you see is partisanship everywhere. What about money? I mean, there's, whenever one side loses, they tend to blame it on money. So it's, you know, George Soros is spending this money and that's what causes to lose. The Koch brothers are spending a lot of money and that's what caused Democrats to lose. And that this money not only is, you know, causing our guys to lose but is somehow corrupting. I mean, there's this kind of underlying assumption that if things weren't being corrupted, then our guys would win because our guys are obviously right. But so what we need to do, so Larry Lessig has his plan to have public financing of campaigns that would get private money out of politics. What we need to do is get the money out of politics and then our elections will be better and again better means they'll, the American people will vote for the policies I happen to prefer. Does, is there a truth to that narrative? Does this overwhelming campaign spending by these groups impact results? Well, in the past we've, as Trevor knows a lot about this issue too. I mean, in the past we were in a new era after Citizens United. So you're going to end up with, you know, some of these super PACs that are spending and have large contributors to them are going to be spending more money. So we're going to need to take some, someone's going to have to figure out how to look at those and figure out what their effects are in terms of, but again this is, you know, reminds me of 2010 in a lot of ways 2014 does in the sense that when you've got problems, there are, you know, money can't solve them, right? And the Democrats may or may not have, it's hard to say, may or may not have been outspent, but it's not, if they were outspent it was by a small percentage of the whole. They spent significant sums. So it clearly, they, you know, they lost 60 seats in 2010 and many of those seats, I think two thirds of them, they spent more money than the challenge, the Republican challenger. And here, you know, it didn't, in the Senate you had significant spending and it still didn't change it. I mean, what I would say about it is money, the issues really are candidate quality and environment and those are, money has a, can have, you have to have money. You can't go in and win with $50,000 probably. But at the margins, money is not that big a deal. It's just out of curiosity when political scientists study this issue. So they said we'd have to go in and look at these things again now that Citizens United has changed the environment. When they go in and look at this and try to answer the question of how is money influencing politics or influencing elections, how do they do that? How do you, how do you figure out if, if someone spends a huge amount of money in a given election, how do you figure out if that money had an impact? Well, there's two things you're interested in. There's three things they've been, or three things they've been interested in really in the past. Probably the, the three are, does it have an effect on the electoral outcome? The second thing is, does it have an effect on the policymaking? Do people who receive the contributions or donations affect their, their work, their policymaking? And then the third thing is, does the money have an effect on the issues they're interested in? That is where do people go from, do they go from being sort of not interested in an issue, but not against it, to being interested in an issue? In which you don't really change the, the money doesn't really change the person's view, but it gets them interested and gets them going to actually do some, do something. And the way you do that has been less than perfect. I mean, the, the, in terms of policymaking, does it affect policymaking? There's been a lot of efforts to relate contributions, pre-citizens united to roll call voting in Congress. Do they, does it seem to change that? There's been a few studies about committees and over time, things like that. Those studies have found very little effect of contributions. But again, this is, well, there was a period of large contributions up to, to McCain-Fangold. And that, the studies there are somewhat limited, but I would say they didn't find a great deal. In part because the large contributors tend to be highly ideological. They're not trying to change tax breaks and things like that. How do you, how do you figure that out? Like how do you, how do you determine if the money caused the person to become interested in this or cause the person to adopt policy A instead of say the money going to the person because they were going to adopt policy A? That was the, the problem is, does, you know, the question was put this way. Does the money cause the vote or does the vote cause the money, right? So you give, and what was generally accepted probably by 2005 or so was that it seemed pretty likely that people were giving money to people that were inclined to support their position. So that led to the access issue. That is the issue of, did it get them going? And so that led to, it was a much harder study to do because you went around trying to find out, trying to measure what people actually did, what members of Congress. So you'd have to try to find out if the, you know, a fairly large number of congressmen, what they actually did in terms of introducing bills, case work. Picking up the phone, talking to people, meeting with people, how much time they give people. And those studies, there was a famous one that's somewhat old now, but it was famous that said there was an effect that, you know, they did do that. The other thing that is important here is these are usually, particularly the roll call votes are usually put into regression modeling. So they try to take account also of other factors. And so that was... For listeners aren't familiar with that term, what does regression modeling mean? Well, it's a statistical effort to try to mimic what experiment, when you have data that you just come upon that if you were trying to, you had experiments where you could manipulate various factors. So you're trying to take into account all the things that cause an outcome. So if a person votes for or against something, you're trying to see over the whole congress what correlates and what causes. And a lot of that research indicates that once you control for party ideology and partisanship, but also constituency, that is your people, that money itself had very little effect on the outcome. So there's this sort of multiple causal world that campaign financial form has a problem with, I think. The other thing I should say is about the third thing, which was it does look like money determines electoral outcomes. If you just look at, say, the House of Representatives, because if you look in the overwhelming number of cases, the person who wins spends more money and frequently a lot more money than the challenger. The problem with that is a lot of the seats attract very poor challengers, which in turn, for various reasons, because they're a safe seat in the general election because the person who is in it is very popular. So when you have poor challengers, not surprisingly, you get very little money. And if you get very little money, you lose. But that doesn't mean the money is the reason you lost. The real question is if a candidate is weak for other reasons, can the challenger raise money? And studies there have generally shown that, yes, they can. And they don't even need as much money as an incumbent needs to make a good race of it. So the real question is, you want people to be able to challenge and to raise the money if they can do that. But it has to be, usually the rule is if someone's weak, if it's a bad year, if they got 55, an incumbent got 55% or less of the vote in their last election, all of those things are signs that they might be beatable. So you can't really take much into effect from that fact that just looking at data that there's a bunch of people with a million dollars raised and they ran against somebody that had 50,000. Can we talk a little bit about these competitive districts? Because I think this is an important point that a lot of people don't realize and that I think we can bring money back into it too. So in the house at least, how many actual districts, there are 435 districts in the house, how many actual districts are even winnable, changeable in play at all? I saw an estimate going in in 2014 that said the number was 407 were out. So that means you had about 38 that were doable? That seems really upsetting in its own way. These are the only ones where democracy actually occurs anyway, the rest of it being safe seats. Unless they're safe because the representative holds them is so awesome. That's true. I guess that could be a possibility but then that would be kind of strange. But the gerrymandering and things like that, we've seen an increase in safe seats. I mean a safe seat being 15% more usually margin of victory where you won't be able to get any party money or anything if you decide to challenge an incredibly long-serving representative in some district. The primary has become more important in those kinds of districts. Yeah, I think... Is there mentioning primaries? I wonder when we're talking about safe seats, do we mean safe in the sense that the opposite party's candidate stands no chance or safe in the sense that the candidate is not going to lose to a primary challenger? The safe seat is usually a reference to the general election. I mean some of these things have been surprising like Eric Cantor. He would have said that he was safe both ways. He was certainly safe in the general election but not as it turned out. I think some of that, it's easy to overestimate how much of its partisan gerrymandering. The gerrymandering goes on in the general election but a lot of it is where people live. The Democrats have a real problem which is that they're bunched too closely together to put it that way. If you just look at the blue and red map you see it looks like the whole country's red with these little islands in blue but they're about equal really. So you've got 700,000 people in roughly a little more than that in a house district. You really want to use as few seats as possible in that district to get your victory. They do make some districts in racial gerrymandering under the Civil Rights Law. They do do this on purpose and they usually aim for about 57, 60% African-Americans or whatever. So for partisanship they do about the same thing. The problem is the Democrats have a bunch of people winning with 70, 80, 90%. It's just because you can only draw districts. Our colleague Peter Van Doorn was telling me about his, he used to live and was born in upstate New York which basically is depopulated and his parents who live near Syracuse are in a congressional district that's also in Albany. So there's this gigantic territory that has got a lot of people in it. It's very hard, you know, you can't just create a Democratic district that's up in Rochester and takes out part of New York City. I mean you could in theory but it becomes problematic too. And in those safe seats, the ones that they look at the election, they want to go back to money. They look at the election, the party people and also the outside spenders which would need to make that distinction clear. And they say these are the ones that we could possibly win if we spend some money maybe in these districts a turn. And then there may be the money at first initially matters to get their name recognized but does it mean you can buy the election in those districts that are actually in play, do you think? Buying elections, the famous cases that have happened have really indicated no that you can't, the money itself is not enough to... People like Meg Whitman and stuff like that. Yeah, well Tom Starr who was trying to, I don't know if he was trying to buy specific elections, he certainly spent a lot of money. I do think something did, I wonder if referendums are somewhat different. I don't know the literature well enough on that. You had this, I remember reading about this referendum on gambling in Massachusetts and there was predictions that there was popular... The referendum was about rescinding a legalization of gambling in Massachusetts and the prediction was that it would lose because all the money would be on one side and in fact the referendum did lose. But I'm not sure that even there the record is. Money gets people excited and it's a one trick pony, it's one causal thing. So it becomes hard and it's a thing that people don't like, a lot of people that get excited about politics. So there's a tendency to think everything comes back to this one thing and the world's more complicated than that I think. Let me ask about money in a different way then. If the people who want, say, public funding of campaigns got their way and we wrote that into the law and there was no more private money in politics, would that change anything as far as electoral politics? Would that usher in a new era of, in this case, Democrats winning lots of seats because they no longer have to face Republican donors or would it just not have much of an effect? The thing is you don't have full public funding in a lot of places. You had some in two or three states for statewide and the effects were not large, although there seemed to be effects early on. In terms of you had full public funding for a long time with the general election of the president so kind of an odd race, kind of odd election. But it didn't, I would argue, I think it's possible to argue that public financing made a difference in the 76th campaign. So Jimmy Carter may have become president because of it because it kept the candidates equal. At that time the Republicans were gaining a big edge in money before public financing. But on the other hand, Ford and Carter was such a close race that really anything could have changed it. Otherwise, you know, I think, again, you're a model of fundamentals, what's the circumstances, what's the candidate quality, those kinds of things, probably gets you most of the rest of it. The other problem about public financing is it's really, I mean it's a weird thing about campaign reform arguments really, is it's really unpopular. The public financing has generally been quite unpopular, so-called reform itself is quite popular too. So you have this mismatch. I don't, myself I think the problem is, you know, it's a classic public choice problem if someone's going to have to create rules to allocate the money, right, and how are they going to do that and is it going to be fair and so on. I think you would end up probably with increased stability of incumbency with a public financing plan. The outside spending in the election, and that's a point I want to clarify, we had the contributions, but the stuff that people are mostly talking about is this so-called dark money type of stuff in the campaign, right, which includes the people who use this term, which I don't use the term dark money, but the people who use this term includes the co-brothers, includes Tom Steyer, and other people spending outside. So can you actually explain a little bit what this dark money is, as described is, and how it's being used in elections? Well, so the parties and candidates are within the system. That's the non-outside part, and they raise money. Basically, they're covered by federal campaign finance law. That means they're limited in the contributions they can receive. They're limited in a lot of totals, aggregates, and so on, and they also have to pretty much disclose everything. After Citizens United, and even before that, at various times there were groups that were outside the party apparatus that could raise money that weren't really limited by contribution limits or donation limits. And they also may or may not have had to disclose everything who the donor was. This would be like Citizens for a Better America type of thing. Yeah, yeah. Well, Citizens United. Yes, yeah. And then it had relationships also to corporations, which was complication in itself. But none of this could actually be given to candidates, and that's what we're talking about now, in the sense that money cannot be given directly to candidates. But you can argue on behalf of a candidate. You can't argue on behalf of the issues and so on. And so essentially we have a kind of parallel universe of fundraising and campaigning going on. We've really built a second kind of campaign apparatus after Citizens United, and that may or may not have to be disclosed. It depends on the circumstances, but it doesn't have to be for sure. And that's the issue. And now you have to keep in mind that I read something a couple of days ago about – everything's preliminary about 2014, but it does look like in almost all the cases that were competitive races that candidates and parties outraised the outside money. So in most cases, the parties still matter. And I would like to make one point right here, is the reason we have the system we have is because of McCain-Feingold. A choice was made by reformers in 2001 that they wanted to get rid of the money, which at that time was large donations going to the parties, right? If you had just legalized all of that, all of the money that you're talking about, generally speaking, there would be a little bit outside, but generally speaking this would be going inside to the party apparatus, and you would have another line – all these concerns about influence would have the problem that party leaders would stand between donors and individual candidates. Instead, we have a different system, and it's entirely because they wanted to not have a party system. And how do candidates – do you think or know if you have direct knowledge – usually feel about this outside spending? Because they don't have control over it. So theoretically they're not supposed to coordinate and make sure that our message is going to be on the economy this week, so you outside spender make sure you stay on the economy. They might say something totally different and make the message go somewhere else, make the conversation go somewhere else. Well, you know, one of the – there's a big story here, which is that I believe in a lot, which is that the party leaders and people involved at this level in elections really know how to adapt and go through pretty quick learning phases and all that kind of learning cycles. So I think probably early on in this period, post-Citizens United, that there was anger from a lot of the candidates because they wanted – they felt that these outside groups were saying things they didn't want said and so on. They were angry about not being able to control their campaigns. I think that two things are true. They've learned to mitigate that. And also they've learned to stay within the law at the same time. So they are both – and one way to do it is you simply hire people who used to work on your campaign to run these outside groups or these outside groups hire them and then they pretty much know what's going on. Or you can coordinate by just going into the newspaper and say, well, we're going to be concentrating on law or whatever. That's public speech. It's not illegal or anything. So I think that's been learned generally how to. Well, because the First Amendment exists, we've gotten where we are and there was really no choice about it, but there could have been more intelligent decisions made, I think, about system design if we were just designing it. And for the coordination part. That's something you hear people talk about this too. That is when you have the outside spender and the candidate coordinating that in some ways that's illegal. That can run afoul of the FEC. But if they're – what is the concern with coordination? Or better we put it – so why are we doing this at all? What is the wrong that we're trying to stop by making sure that they're not coordinating with outside spenders? What is the evil we're trying to keep from happening? Well, you don't – first of all, consider the normal case, which is I give you a contribution directly and you give me a bridge or a contract for to build a bridge. Okay, that's what we don't want that. If I give – if you coordinate with a third party and I give them money, that's in a sense there's an intermediary, but this relationship remains the same. The other issue, of course, is independence means that that corruption rationale – that's one of the rationales for regulating basically freedom of speech through campaign finance. That corruption rationale doesn't exist. So there's those two things. It's all about the corruption idea and how direct the relationship between the contributor. The assumption is if you're coordinating, then you've really recreated a direct relationship and therefore the potential for corruption and you should be regulated or you could be under the First Amendment. So taking a step back from all of these details, I guess my question is if the political science data says effectively that campaign spending doesn't have a huge effect, certainly doesn't have as big of an effect on outcomes or policies as people tend to think it does and that those studies are out there. I mean, political scientists aren't hiding this stuff. Why do people spend so much money on campaigns? I should say, first of all, in answering this, it's a slight mistake to say that they don't have effects. The evidence is that high-spending campaigns actually improve voter knowledge and make it more likely that people will vote at some margin. In other words, it does look at these positive results, particularly positive results of negative ads and so on. And the way to actually realize that that's true for listeners who are skeptical is imagine an election where the spending limit was $200 and no one would know who was running from office. There would be five signs and unless you happened to drive by one, you wouldn't even know what the issues were. So clearly it can be too low and spending high can increase that engagement. And so that's another reason for competition. Competition is associated with high spending. But to return to your question, how do we explain this? I mean, we've got to have another explanation for it. That is, this is what you've mentioned is the investment theory. That is, people spend on candidates and then candidates give them something, some return on it. But it may well also be that people, they may have that and it may not work out. They may be doing that. But the other thing is they may just do it for consumption reasons. They may get involved in politics. And I believe particularly with high dollar donors that you really do see that in the sense of people like Steyer and Soros and the Koch brothers. These are people that have big picture issues. They're against wars. They're against global warming, climate change and so on or whatever. But there's also the issue too is that you're just, you're giving money to try to, this would be consumption in economic terms I guess. You're trying to get a guy to win because you believe that their ideas or their general outlook is one that you agree with. And that doesn't, that's a small part of the population that does it. But it's still, and yes, that's consistent with getting stuff, right? Unless you believe that people's, their economic outlook or the political views are ones that don't lead to good things coming to them from government. I mean they get things from government that they may want less government or they may want some kind of subsidy or whatever. But that could be something as part of a political outlook. Well then I guess let me ask another way. Why would you, given what political scientists appear to know, why would you give a ton of money to buy campaign ads? It's even these dark money kind. Instead of putting money into say identifying really high quality candidates or grooming people or something of that sort, the kinds of things that seem to actually impact who wins. Well, I think that I'm going to step in a little bit on this. And John of course has ideas too. But I think that first of all, let's just say that people might not be familiar with the literature. Secondly, which just happens all the time, but I think it's a good point. Secondly, there are people who are spending money on finding candidates, grooming candidates. It's becoming more popular to do that. And thirdly, ads do work. I mean, they're not totally useless. So if you don't have any ads whatsoever, it's a problem. So if you were trying to run a campaign in some way and you wanted to try and get someone elected, I would advise to look at trying to find a good candidate, try and groom them, try and make sure that they're a good candidate, but also spend some money on some ads. Because we don't want to say that money is irrelevant. It matters. But it's not the only thing that matters. And it's not determinative of as many things as people seem to think it's determinative of. This John Sidus and Lynn Vaverick's book about the 2012 presidential election is good on this, which they make the point that money didn't have much effect on the outcome, but you had to get to even first. So I think some of the appeal at some level, even regarding these last second ads and all that kind of thing, is it's not so much that you're going to accomplish a lot, but if you don't in a close election, it might make a difference. In other words, you can make it 50-50, and it turns out without you it's 53-47 in terms of the shares of spending. What's more than anything else what these people are doing is they're preventing the other side having an edge that might make a small difference. Let me ask about something that I'm always struck by after these kinds of elections, and that's the distribution of voters to candidates of the different parties. Because we've talked about there are safe seats where the results are extremely lopsided one way or the other. But it appears that at say statewide elections for senators or presidential elections that are nationwide, you often, I mean, you don't tend to get landslides one way or another, and the results are often quite close to 50-50. It's like 51-49, 52-48, somewhere in there. And this has always struck me as kind of bizarre because if you take anything else where people have like two choices, you don't tend to get 50-50 distributions like Coke and Pepsi. You don't get a 50-50 split of the market. Marvel Comics versus DC Comics. You don't get a 50-50 split of the market. And so it seems totally unlikely that in politics where people are, there's a set of ideas that they think are true and these ideas are more appealing to them than these other set of ideas and so they vote for the guy who represents the set of ideas that they are appealing, that the American people would split so close to even on these things. So is there something weird going on there? There's a few time at the underlying preference set and the underlying preference set is almost certainly as you describe it. It's a continuum but it's forced into that kind of binary choice because we have a two-party system. We have single-member districts, first pass the post-elections. So that you don't get from most districts, most states, from any state. You don't get a multitude of, in other words, if Kentucky has six House members, you don't get, they come from six districts, not from Kentucky itself. And you might arguably have, if you had Kentucky represented by six people and the six top vote-getters in Kentucky, you might have greater distinctions that reflect better those divisions within the society. But then you still, to get to some kind of legislating, would have to have some kind of bargaining going on. In other words, what you're talking about basically is that, yes, the preference set prior to politics, as it were, is not going to be binary in this way. I think this is that point. But the political system we have does force it into... But that's what I'm wondering is how do we get to, because if the parties, I mean, most people tend to think about the parties as representing these kind of broad ideologies. So there's a Republican ideology and there's a Democrat ideology and people identify with that ideology. And you may be more extreme, like you're more Republican, I'm less Republican or whatever, but we still identify with this broad set of ideas. But in other fields, there's these polls that are conducted with philosophy professors asking them about their beliefs. And a lot of it is like, which school of different philosophies do you think is correct? And so take moral philosophy, which looks as the closest to political ideologies, right? And so you don't see these even divides. You don't see 33% utilitarians, 33% deontologists, 33% virtue ethicists. You see much more clumping. One kind of dominates and the others are smaller. But why do Americans seem to sort nearly perfectly 50-50 into these two ideologies? Well, I think that you're asking a question we've talked about before on Free Thoughts and I've talked about it, like my Primitivism of Politics episode two, that in terms of deontology, you know, how are we going to be a moral philosophy? There is no victory at hand there. There is no first pass, the post-victory. It's not that either this guy wins or that guy loses. And so if there is going to be a victory, it's going to push people into choosing one over the other because the victory means a loss. So in all these other situations, there isn't a victory or there's a loser. So it makes people think I'm going to choose one over the other. And so they tend to put themselves into very broad groups that end up being if you just take the bell curve of distribution and cut it in half, these people to the left of it call themselves Democrats and these people to the right of it call themselves Republicans. And then don't forget also the behavior of candidates within each little district to run to the middle to try and make sure that they're right there and right about where everyone is having the debate, right? So if we did graph their opinions as a bell curve where they continue them, the debate will be in the middle, whatever it is. And with these artificial teams, which is true, these are artificial, we've invented this game, we've invented the rules of the game. But at the end of the day, I think it sort of describes a kind of moral intuition. I mean, it's not complete that runs in the bell curve. Another way of answering the question is just to point to some interesting new research by two political scientists named William Claggett and Byron Schaefer. And there's this big data set on public opinion called the American National Election Studies data set. It goes back to 1950s and it's the best one, biggest one, longest live. And what they were interested in is could you really talk about voters in terms of issue voters? And do they have kind of an issue outlook? Or just a team. Yeah, apart from these, you could separate it from... So there's a bunch of issues over the time at various times, various kinds of questions have been raised in these national surveys. And what they've gotten out of, it's quite interesting. They claim that there are basically four major kinds of outlooks out there. It's not two, it's four. And I swear I didn't... Kato Institute didn't support this research or anything or didn't even know these guys. You basically have conservative and liberal, but then you also have a libertarian and a populist point of view. But they don't map on to parties real well. Not...they do. I mean, in the sense that conservatives vote very... over time, more and more for the Republican Party and liberals more and more with the Democratic. But the populist and the libertarians have been going back and forth between the parties for some time. But the other interesting point is, I should say a populist is, shorthand would be liberal in economics and conservative in values. And libertarian would be conservative in economics and liberal or tolerant in values. So that's what they're working with here. There's more conventional views. So it may well be that there's these underlying kind of general, roughly general frameworks and then they map on to the parties in different ways. So you're right to say, but then it's not... there's clusters of points of view. Libertarianism being one that would have these free market ideas combined with social liberalism. In exit polls in the last election, 54% of people answered yes to the question, is government doing too much? And presumably people who think that government should do less are moving in a libertarian direction. So I guess the question is, given the setup, we know about elections, about our two-party system, and then given this majority of people seem to think the government ought to do less than it is right now, do libertarians have a chance in, say, national elections? Could a libertarian candidate win the presidency? And would that be different for a third-party candidate? Is there any chance of that happening or a libertarian running from within one of the two major parties? Well, third-party candidates have just deal with that first. It's been a century since there was a serious third-party run. The ones in the post-war era were, you know, it's just very hard to win electoral votes, which is what matters. So I would have to say no there, though, never is a long time. As far as a libertarian candidate winning, I think that's certainly possible. It would have to be, I mean, a libertarian candidate would be at odds with both parties in different ways, right? So I would say that that could happen if the ways in which the candidate were at odds with one of the parties didn't matter much. I think it's going to be hard for a libertarian Democrat to win because the economic issues, free markets, or non-free markets or managed markets are so important to the party. On the other hand, with Republicans, the way it would have to happen is the social conservatism would really have to wane or be off the table, and then you would have to move away from the sort of more activist, so we say, or hawkish foreign policy. It could be that both of those things for just reasons of circumstances would not be... This is not just a question of what views people have, but what's salient or important, and perhaps those two things wouldn't be so salient if you've come out of a war with another one and so on, or if the social conservative issues seem to lead to presidential-presidents' candidates losing. In that sense, the free market thing that libertarians really have seen as important could be front and center. And in that circumstance, I think you could see a Republican getting the nomination and winning. But all this stuff has to fall into place, and it's likely also, I should say, that they're going to be a somewhat modified libertarian, at least the way they talk about things and so on. But that's frankly true of just about any candidate and any pure liberal, pure conservative or whatever. It's hard to get a majority out of one of these more coherent positions. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions or comments about today's episode, you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod. That's Free Thoughts P-O-D. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute, and it's produced by Evan Banks. To learn more, you can find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.