Freakonomics Radio - 255. Ten Ideas to Make Politics Less Rotten

Episode Date: July 28, 2016

We Americans may love our democracy -- at least in theory -- but at the moment our feelings toward the federal government lie somewhere between disdain and hatred. Which electoral and political ideas should be killed off to make way for a saner system?

You know, I had been fighting to try to bring up issues that I thought were important to address, and basically the Senate had been shut down. That's Olympia Snow from Maine. Yes, I served in the state legislature in both the state house and the state senate prior to my 34 years in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, where I served 16 years in the U.S. House of Representatives and 18 years in the United States Senate. Over that time, the tenor of Congress changed a great deal. In fact, the last Congress I served in, in 2012, it was the least productive Congress in modern history. Snow was a moderate Republican, a coalition builder, happy to work across the aisle. In fact,

her support for some Democratic positions on reproductive rights, on ending Don't Ask, Don't Tell, her votes for Democratic judicial nominees, this all came to anger her Republican colleagues, especially the new breed of hardliners. Over time, Snow saw her brand of centrism essentially disappear. And in fact, three political scientists conducted a study and said that we are experiencing the worst polarization since the end of Reconstruction in 1879. If you think about it, that is, you know, pretty serious. An analysis up through 2013 that showed in 1982, there were 58 senators that came between the most conservative Democrats and the most liberal Republicans. Today, at least up until 2013, and I doubt that that has changed, for the fourth time in a row, fifth time ever,

zero senators come into that category. And the House of Representatives in 1982, there were 344 members of the House of Representatives that came between the most conservative Democrats and the most liberal Republicans. Today, there are only four in that category. So it tells you, you know, there is no Democrat who is more conservative than a Republican. There's no Republicans more liberal than a Democrat. This polarization became spectacularly manifest during the debt crises of 2011 and 2013 when Congress threatened to shut down the federal government and actually did so in 2013.

I mean, I was stunned that we would be at a point in the United States Congress that we were prepared to take the country to the financial and political brink to make a political point. Snow had been planning to run for reelection to the Senate. Everything was in place. She was just 65 years old. She had the money and the organization. In her previous election, she'd won nearly 75 percent of the vote. But she decided that she didn't fit in this Congress anymore. So they abandoned legislating and policymaking and just devolved into a series of, you know, gutcha votes, my way or the highway, and the all oror-nothing proposition that was really the road to nowhere.

Certainly been a monumental day in Maine politics. One of the most prominent women in the United States Senate is leaving, Olympia Snow of Maine. The principled voice of reason in some of the most contentious debates in Washington. What does it say about the state of our government and politics when serious people conclude that serving in the United States Senate is no longer worth their time and effort? And I decided that I would take my fight on the outside

because I realized that the change was not going to occur from within. Snow joined the Bipartisan Policy Center, which addresses, as she calls it, congressional dysfunction and political paralysis. She wrote a book called Fighting for Common Ground, How We Can Fix the Stalemate in Congress. Many of her solutions have to do with recreating a bipartisan Congress, less filibustering and grandstanding,

more regular meetings between majority and minority leadership, more regular meetings between Congress and the president. Because that's how it was in Snow's early years in Washington. But over time, moderates were purged from both parties and partisan battles became more intense, more destructive. So what's to be done about that? And since it's election season, we might as well ask a bigger question. What's to be done about all the other rotten things in American politics? Today on Freakonomics Radio, we ask politicians and scholars, donkeys and elephants, and everyone in between,

what's the one political or electoral practice that deserves to die? The idea that I would like to die unmourned, buried as quickly as possible, no funeral. The idea that we ought to abolish. If I could do a single thing in American politics, it would be to get rid of. Doing away with. The idea I want to kill whose time is coming simply around the idea of blowing up the existing system. From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. We Americans may love our democracy, at least in theory,

but at the moment, our feelings toward the federal government lie somewhere between disdain and hatred. Consider these numbers. In 1958, the American National Election Study found that 73% of Americans said they trusted the government either most of the time or just about always. So, 73% in 1958. As of last year, that number was 19%.

Congressional approval ratings have plummeted. They now range from roughly 10 to 20%. So it's probably no coincidence that the U.S. has one of the very lowest voter turnout rates in national elections among OECD countries, at just over 50 percent. The conventional wisdom is to wonder why so few Americans vote. But given the way we feel about government, a better question might be, why so many bother? That said, we keep having elections, relatively orderly ones at that. This year's presidential election has already proven somewhat less orderly than usual and may well get even weirder.

So we thought we might do our civic duty here at Freakonomics Radio by taking a level-headed look at the American electoral system. Some time back, we put out an episode called This Idea Must Die, where we asked scientists to nominate a scientific idea that had outlived its usefulness. Today, with apologies and thanks to Edge.org, from whom we stole that idea, we present This Idea Must Die, Election Edition. You will recall that Olympia Snow, the former Republican senator from Maine, was so appalled by the partisanship in Congress that she quit to try to reform the system from the outside. Among her proposed solutions, getting rid of gerrymandering through independent nonpartisan districting, limiting the power of political action committees, and requiring a five-day workweek in Congress, which would, as she writes, provide additional time to address the critical issues while also fostering more opportunities for senators and representatives to interact socially with each other in Washington.

But if there's one idea that Snow would personally like to kill off, it would be... A closed primary. Meaning a nominating contest that is closed to voters who aren't registered with a particular party. Today, there are very few what you would call centrist, moderate candidates on either side of the political aisle. And that's the problem. You no longer have the middle in politics. There is the middle in America, but they're not producing the candidates because the primaries are so closed that it gets locked down. And so it's only those who are the hardline activists that are ultimately voting in the primaries and therefore voting those who are

more aligned to their views that are not predisposed to building compromise or consensus that are nominated. And therefore, that is the choice for many in the general election. And the bigger fear today among elected officials is facing a primary, because that's where you get the more hardline ideologues who are going to participate, as well as the outside groups that weigh in with millions of dollars and that will work to defeat these candidates. So that is the problem. Open primaries already exist in 11 states, while a few more, including California, have what's called a top two primary. That lets voters choose any candidate they want in a single open primary. And then the two top vote getters advance to the general election, even if they're both from the same party.

So far, political scientists are split on whether open primaries really help. Some research shows that moderate candidates don't do any better in an open primary. Others argue the change in California has already led to more competitive elections and a more functional state legislature. We need to change the way we currently vote. That's Howard Dean.

My title is former, former governor, former chairman of the DNC, former presidential candidate. The DNC, for those who don't know, is the Democratic National Committee. If I could do a single thing in American politics, it would be to get rid of the single vote for your favorite candidate. Right now, we vote for one person, and that person either wins or doesn't win. That is, if there's 10 candidates in a race, you get one vote. There's a system called ranked choice voting where you don't get just your vote for the top choice that you have.

You also get to vote on all the other choices, and you get to rank them. So that if your candidate doesn't win, your second choice vote counts. What that does is create as the winner, the person who is best respected and best liked overall in the electorate. It's just a good system. The other thing about it is that it makes people behave themselves better. San Francisco put in ranked choice voting a few years ago, and they had the most polite mayor's campaign that you ever saw. Because if you're hoping to get somebody's second or third choice vote, if you know they're not going to get their first, you're not going to say anything bad about them in the campaign because you drive those voters away. And those are the voters that eventually get you elected. So ranked choice

voting simply means that you get multiple choices. You can weight your choices and the candidate that the most people like, and usually the one that's the most reasonable becomes the next mayor, the next president, the next senator. And I think that makes voters happy. It makes politicians behave better. And it's something that's coming slowly to the United States and where we have it, it works well. A lot of the people we talked to for this episode had similar-ish ideas about modernizing or at least adding some nuance to our current electoral habits. Rob Ritchie, for instance, of the electoral reform group called Fair Vote. I'd like to get rid of winner-take-all elections to elect Congress, state legislatures, and city councils. So whoever gets

51% of the vote represents 100% of people. If you get 60% of the vote, you not only represent 100% of people, but no one even cares about the election because you're going to win easily. And we're left with elections that leave most people stuck in sort of lopsided, one-party districts. The proposal that we put out there, there's something called the Fair Representation Act as a draft, and we have some members of Congress who do want to put it in. What it does is a statutory change that within states, they would take congressional elections, go from having only one person per area to bigger areas with more than one person. So a state like Massachusetts might go from nine one-winner

districts to three three-member districts, and then in each district, it would take about a third of the vote to win a seat. That degree of opening up the system does some really interesting things. One, it makes the general election matter, and it very methodically and reliably represents the left, center, and right of every district. If there's one thing that I could do differently in our democracy, it would be doing away with straight ticket voting. And that is Joaquin Castro, a Democratic congressman from Texas. Straight ticket voting means that you can go into a ballot booth and without looking at any of the individual candidates or races on the ballot,

at the top of the ballot, you can simply mark that you want to vote for all the Democrats or all the Republicans. And what it's done is it's allowed a lot of people to go into the ballot booth really on autopilot without considering the specific candidates in a particular race. So if I could retire straight ticket voting, I would. Norman Ornstein is resident scholar at a conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute. He too is troubled by the overt partisanship in politics. So I've become a big proponent of the Australian system of mandatory attendance at the polls.

In Australia, and this is a system that they've used for eight decades or so now, you don't have to vote, but you do have to show up at the polls or write a plausible excuse. If you don't show up and if you don't write the excuse, you're subject to a small fine. In my various trips to Australia and my discussions with politicians of all political stripes there, they will tell you that when you know that your base is going to be turning out to the polls, and when the other side's base you know is going to be turning out to the polls, your focus turns to the persuadable voters in the middle. And it changes the way you talk about politics.

You don't talk in the most strident and extreme terms in ways that are designed to gin up your base or to scare them to death. You don't work on wedge issues, things like abortion or transgender bathroom issues. Instead, you talk about the issues that matter most to the broad range of voters, and especially those persuadable ones, the big ticket items. And you're forced into talking in

ways that look at the issues so that you can persuade people. I think you'd agree we've already heard some pretty interesting ideas, but none of them is particularly radical. Okay, so how about this one? It's an idea called quadratic voting. My name is Eric Posner, and I'm a professor of law at the University of Chicago. And what's the idea Professor Posner would like to kill? And I want to kill the idea of one person, one vote. So in place of our current system, what I'd like to see is a system in which people would have lots of votes. Imagine, for example, that you're given a kind of a currency, let's say 100 credits.

And every time there's an election, you could allocate those credits among different candidates in different races. In other words, you could use credits to buy votes. So, for example, if you really cared about somebody, you could buy lots of votes for that person. And if you cared only a little bit about another person, you could buy just a few votes for that person. And then there's a final element in this scheme, which is a little more complicated but also important, which is that when you use your currency to buy votes, you pay the square of the number of votes that you cast for a particular person. The square of the number, meaning you multiply it by itself, to square, from the Latin

quadrum, which is why this idea is called quadratic voting. So I could, for example, in the presidential election, buy two votes for Hillary Clinton by paying four credits, and then I would have, you know, other credits that I could use for other candidates I care about. So, for example, in the mayoral race, I might care a lot and pay 25 credits to buy five votes or 81 credits to buy nine votes until I have no credits left. So now I have a way of registering how intensely I feel about the candidate. Now here's why this could matter. As people have known for thousands of years, democracy is prone to various problems like tyranny of the majority. In one interpretation known for thousands of years, democracy is prone to various problems

like tyranny of the majority. And one interpretation of tyranny of the majority is that a majority of people who don't really care about a particular outcome or a particular candidate, let's say, but nonetheless favors that candidate, could outvote a large minority of people who passionately care. And most people think that that's not a good outcome, that we of people who passionately care. And most people think that that's not a good outcome, that we want people who passionately care about an outcome to have more influence on it. Of course, they could be outvoted if the majority is huge, but you do want to give them the chance to register the intensity of their preferences. If quadratic voting isn't radical enough for you, consider this idea.

The idea I want to kill is that we're spending too much money in politics. Pardon me? You mean we're not spending too much money in politics? Each year, automobile companies spend roughly $25 billion on advertising. In contrast, four years ago, all candidates for the House, Senate, and the presidency spent $7 billion, roughly 30% of what auto companies spend each year. That's Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor. The problem isn't that candidates are spending too much money letting us know where they stand. It's that the rich are dominating the conversation. During the present election season, big donors who give more than $2,000 have given 30% of all the money. And donors who have given more than $500 have given half of all the money. Even the rest of the money,

small donations, are not being given by ordinary people. To change this picture, the citizens of Seattle have come up with a fundamental reform. At a referendum last year, they endorsed a program that will provide each registered voter with a democracy voucher to spend in support of whoever they favor for candidates for municipal office. One person, one vote, one voucher. This is the formula for reclaiming democracy in the United States. Suppose, for example, that we took the Seattle Idea National. Under my proposal, federal legislation would provide every registered voter a special credit card account containing 50 democracy dollars during presidential years and lesser amounts during off-year elections, funded by tax revenue.

Account holders could send their democracy dollars to a government website that would credit the money to their favored candidates and political organizations. About 130 million Americans went to the polls in 2012. If they all spent their democracy dollars, they would have injected about six and a half billion dollars into the campaign, dramatically changing the balance of economic power in politics. Ackerman has written a book about this idea with his Yale Law colleague Ian Ayers. It's called Voting with Dollars. Only one point needs emphasizing here.

The voucher program is perfectly constitutional under current Supreme Court doctrine. There is no need to wait for a constitutional amendment or a dramatic change from the Roberts Court. All we need is a serious political movement to push the Seattle idea forward. In fact, democracy dollar initiatives are on the ballot this fall in the states of Washington and South Dakota. This is a reform whose time is coming. So the democracy dollar idea wouldn't need constitutional amendment, but what if it did? What happens when a good modern idea is stymied by an antique document? I think that one of the significant weaknesses in American democracy is the difficulty of amending the U.S. Constitution.

Sandy Levinson teaches constitutional law at the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, the United States Constitution is, among world constitutions, probably the single one that's most difficult to amend. Our Constitution is also generally thought of as the longest surviving operational national constitution in the world, which may be something to be proud of. But, as Levinson suggests, it may lead to a lack of flexibility. My proposal is actually to learn from a number of the state constitutions be in New York, where the New York electorate will have the opportunity, required by the New York Constitution, to vote every 20 years on whether or not there should be a new state constitutional convention in order to assess the degree to which the current New York Constitution is working well and the extent to which it needs to be amended. New York, in fact,

has had five constitutions over its history. And of course, there have been a number of amendments, many of them coming through previous conventions. I believe that the United States Constitution would be a far better constitution if, in fact, the national electorate had the same opportunity. And I think it is a serious blemish on our democracy that we venerate the Constitution, we celebrate it, but often very thoughtlessly, and we prefer to attack each other and to attack the deficiencies of certain alleged leaders or political parties rather than to confront the possibility that it's the 1787 Constitution itself in its surprisingly unamended form that is afflicting our politics in the year 2016. What would happen if the U.S. held a national referendum on constitutional reform?

There's only one way to find out, Although we should note that if you actually call a national referendum and the citizenry of your country passes it, well, it's not necessarily all sunshine and rainbows. Brexit means Brexit. The decision taken to leave the EU. I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its the EU. I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country

to its next destination. Very disappointed about the result. Shocked that we actually have voted to leave. I didn't think that was going to happen. Even though I voted to leave, this morning I woke up and the reality did actually hit me.

I thought we were just going to remain. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, how to make presidential debates less dramatic. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience. And Karl Rove looks at today's political landscape through the lens of history. I'm just saying if you think it's bad today, it was worse before. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. Today, we're playing a game we like to call This Idea Must Die.

The topic, American electoral politics. The idea that I would like to die unmourned, buried as quickly as possible, no funeral, is the notion that we have to have a live, cheering, jeering audience at presidential debates. Kathleen Hall Jamison directs the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The reason I want to get rid of that idea and I want to get rid of that concept as quickly as possible is that we know that the audience response in the auditorium to the debate content affects the audience at home, and as a result can bias not only what people learn, but their evaluation of the candidates. For instance, one of the Ronald Reagan-Walter Mondale debates in 1984. When the audience applauded and laughed at the Reagan

exchange between Reagan and Mondale on Reagan's age. You already are the oldest president in history. I recall yet that President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuba Missile Crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances? Not at all, Mr. Truitt, and I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience. We can show experimentally that benefited Reagan substantially. What does that say? The audience in that auditorium shaped perceptions of those viewing the debate at home.

We could show the same thing with the disadvantage to Dan Quayle out of the audience that was disapproving of his answer to Benson. That debate was in 1988 with the Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Benson up against Republican VP candidate Dan Quayle. I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency. Senator Benson. Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine.

Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy. That's highly problematic. That audience can include partisans whose jeering and cheering is choreographed there's no reason to think that audience is representative has a whole lot of donors in it among other things and that's problematic because we shouldn't have donors as the primary in-studio audience for a presidential debate and also it's problematic because when you have a jeering cheering, the candidates have to respond by increasing their volume in response to each other. And when you edit those responses by the candidates into sound bites, they can sound unhinged. That's not fair to the candidates.

So unfair to the audience, unfair to the candidates, unfair to the process. I'm just saying if you think it's bad today, it was worse before. That's Karl Rove. I write a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal. I'm a Fox News contributor and helped found the Super PAC American Crossroads. I was previously senior advisor to President Bush and deputy White House chief of staff. Let's start briefly with your most recent book, The Triumph of William McKinley, why the election of 1896 still matters. So tell us why

the election of 1896 does matter. Well, for two reasons. One is the politics of the era look like today only worse. I didn't set out to write a book drawing parallels. I set out to write a durable history of the 1896 election. The election of 1896, while acknowledged by political scientists to be one of the five great realignment elections in American history, we spend more time talking about the guy who lost the election, William Jennings Bryan. You shall not crucify mankind upon a trough of gold. And the guy who follows McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt. I am not leading this fight as a matter of aesthetic pleasure.

Then we talk about the guy who actually brought about this election victory and whose subsequent administration ushered in a 36-year period of Republican dominance. So the first reason I wrote it was I wanted to have a durable history of a very interesting race. But the more I got into it, the more back then looks like now only worse. Broken political system, political gridlock, the two parties locked in a death struggle with each other, both of them facing serious challenges, a rapidly changing demography of America, economic anxiety brought about by a generation of disruptive innovation and change and globalization, and some really interesting characters. So who could argue with that? So as with many things in life, the good old days, including the political system and the electoral system, were not so good, you're saying. For those who look at our current political and electoral systems and say, you know, get me to Canada, get me to Bhutan, get me anywhere. It's horrible. The American political system is crap. For people who feel that way, and there seem to be quite a few,

talk to me about the ways in which it was different or worse. Well, we had five presidential elections in a row in which no one received 50 percent of the vote. Every one of those elections was settled with the winner taking a plurality, a minority of the vote. Two of those elections involved somebody who won the electoral college and lost the popular vote, came in second. One of those elections involved a five-month-long dispute about the outcome in Florida. A third president won the electoral college and won a plurality of the popular vote nationwide by 7,000 votes. The two parties were at each other's throats. They not only hated each other because they had deeply different ideologies, but they were still fighting the Civil War.

From what you've written, I gather that you are not a big Donald Trump fan, although that may be evolving. You've called him graceless and divisive. You've called him a petty man consumed by resentment and bitterness. You've said that he's denigrating the party he seeks to lead. This was all written, I should say, before he was your party's nominee. But you also wrote this. A longtime Republican who has toiled in the vineyards can expect loyalty for having given it. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, has donated generously to Democrats and backed Senator John Kerry in 2004. He's also savaged past Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. savage the president that you worked for, among others. Why is party loyalty such a good or important thing? Because to me, it represents the kind of tribalism that creates political problems, not solves them. Well, you assume that political tribalism doesn't exist outside of a two-party system. There's even more tribalism outside of a two-party system, and it is of a more destructive nature because it is oftentimes based upon one simple issue or one personality.

And that's one of the great things about our two-party system. Both parties tend to move away from their extremes in order to win elections, and sometimes they tend to share a great commonality when it comes to the public agenda. They differ in big ways, no doubt about it. But imagine a system in which everybody could organize around personalities, single issues, and highly developed and very narrow ideologies. You know, we'd get something like Italy. It's had 41 prime ministers and over 60 governments since World War Two. Now, maybe it's good that Italy topples its governments with great regularity. But I think it fundamentally undermines the confidence of the people in the system of government and in like politics very much, either the governance end or the electoral end when there's an election, especially like this one going on, something it would seem needs to change. So in keeping with the theme of this episode, what in your view is one idea, whether in politics or in governance, that needs to be spiked and why? Well, mine's a preventive measure, not something that will improve the system. It'll keep it from getting worse. And that is the idea that we ought to

abolish the electoral college that needs to die. Just to be clear, Rove thinks the idea that must die is the idea that the electoral college should die. In other words, he thinks the electoral college should live on. The electoral college pushes us towards a two-party system, and that thereby promotes stability by providing a barrier against multi-candidate races and the kind of disasters that we see in democracies in Western Europe and elsewhere, where the electorate is fragmented by a multi-party system with a wide range of parties, some of them based around personalities, some of them based around regional interests, some of them based around ideological constructs, others of them based around a single issue, some of them based simply around the idea of blowing up the existing system. Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, disagrees with Rove. The Electoral College is an anachronism that was created around the founding of the nation because it was very hard to travel from one place to another. There was no telegraph, there was no telegram. And so in order to elect the president, somehow you had to get the

vote totals to a place that could be counted. And the way that founding fathers devised it was each state would have a number of electors that was proportional both to their Senate clout, which was equal by state, and to their population, which was the number of congressmen. You add the number of senators and the number of congressmen together, and that is the number of each state's electors. That, by the way, is still the case, although each state's number of electors rises or falls over time as the state's population rises or falls relative to other states. And so those people would gather several months after the presidential election and they would elect the president. Now, that is not necessary anymore.

Today, we have vote counts that are almost instantaneous within 24 hours. With the exception of Bush versus Gore, we knew who the next president of the United States was. So you don't really need electors to all go and cast their votes. In fact, there's some danger in it. Roy Neal, who was my third campaign manager and very close to Al Gore, just wrote a wonderful book called The Electors. It's a fantasy book about what happens when electors do what they damn well please. And there actually is no law that prevents them from doing that. So you could actually have a group of 535 electors meeting and 15 of them could decide they weren't going to vote the way the state told them to vote. So I just think it's a 235-year institution that needs to be gotten rid of because it's doing more harm than good.

I think the abolition of it would make these problems that we have of confidence and a sense of personal efficacy worse. That's Karl Rove again. The Electoral College prevents, for example, presidents with a deeply minority vote. It keeps us from engaging in runoffs like we've seen recently in Austria and Italy and France that further scramble and weaken the two parties. It provides the winner a sense of a national mandate that helps the new president govern. It forces both parties also to campaign in diverse states, big states like Florida and Ohio, medium states like Colorado and Virginia, and small states like New Hampshire and Iowa, not just sort of big cities, big concentrations. But it's interesting to me in your support for continuing a two-party system and continuing to support the Electoral College, you've elsewhere been advocating for new and nimble businesses

and technologies for decentralization, things that give consumers a larger choice set, things that give people more ability to express heterogeneous preferences, right? So why is that good for consumers or for veterans who need medical care but bad for voters? Well, because there are two different things. In one, we're trying to have something that garners the support of the country. In the other, we're trying to satisfy the individual desires of consumers. You don't need to sell a good phone. You don't need to get a 50% plus one of the market share. If you want to win the presidency, you have to in order to govern effectively.

Parties are intensely different than our individual consumer choices. You may like your double macchiato with Madagascar cinnamon. I like a cup of decaf coffee. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's. How'd you know? How'd you know that's what I like? Well, you know, I've read the file on you, man. I've read the file. The National Security Agency, they can, it's amazing the amount of information they collect on you. It sure is. Now, let me ask you this. How much is your current view of the Electoral College and the value thereof influenced by the fact that you were the architect of President George W. Bush's presidential campaigns of practices that we ought to stop, and that is exit polls in which the data is collected and made available to the media before the polls close across the country. If you take a look, remember 2000, there were erroneous exit polls that

suggested that Al Gore was going to sweep the election and that he was going to carry Florida by a wide margin. And this colored all the coverage. A big call to make. CNN announces that we call Florida in the Al Gore column. This is an important win for Vice President Al Gore. NBC News projects that he wins the 25 electoral votes in the state of Florida. So you'll remember the networks all declared Florida relatively early. In fact, they declared Florida in Gore's column while Florida was still voting because Florida is split between two time zones. And the heavily Republican panhandle, which is in the central time zone, was still voting when they declared that Florida was going to be won by Al Gore.

That Florida call was shortly rescinded. The networks were wrong when they projected that Florida would go to Al Gore. All the networks pulled it back. Now, why did this matter? Draw a line across the country. To the east of that line are the states whose polling had closed when the media announced that the election was now in effect over, that Al Gore had won Florida. And to the

west of it are the states where the election is, where voting is still going on. And you'll notice something. The turnout in the states to the east of that line, whose polling had closed before the networks made their own erroneous call, turnout in those states increases generally compared to 1996. Take a look at the states to the west of that line. Those states turn out generally, almost in every instance, does not increase from 1996, but drops. And why? I remember sitting in the headquarters here in Austin, Texas, and we got a call from our California chairman. And he said, I don't know what to do. He said, I'm getting phone calls. Everybody's watching the television on our phone banks, and they've seen the networks call it for gore,

and they're getting out of the phone banks and going home. People are getting out of the voting lines because they've heard Bush has lost Florida in the elections over what do I do? So my second idea to abolish would be to say, you can do these exit polls, but the exit poll data cannot be collected and aggregated until the country's polls have been closed. Use it to explain what happened in the election. Don't use it to color the coverage. That's our show today. Thanks for listening. Maybe it's given you a few new things to think about during this very long and very trying election season.

For what it's worth, if you feel an urge to quit paying attention already to the presidential election, you are not alone. A recent Pew survey found that with four months still to go until the election, six in 10 Americans were already, quote, worn out by so much coverage. I hope this episode hasn't worn you out even further. Whatever the case, let us know what you think about this or any episode. We're on Twitter and Facebook. You can leave comments at Freakonomics.com. We're on the Freakonomics radio page on iTunes, where you can also subscribe to this podcast. You can write to us at radio at Freakonomics.com. And be sure to listen to Freakonomics Radio on public radio stations across the country. If your station doesn't carry it yet, well, there is a cause worthy of your political activism.

Make it happen. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalski. Our staff also includes Irva Gunja, Jay Cowett, Merit Jacob, Christopher Wirth, Caitlin Pierce, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, and Jolenta Greenberg. Our intern is Harry Huggins. Mic drop.