#everyvoice

Apparently (CTMirror, Washington Times, Hartford Courant) the Democratic leadership in the Connecticut Senate is about to kill the public funding of elections in Connecticut for the 2016 cycle. 

Connecticut is one of three states with serious public funding for state officials (CT, AZ, and ME). In the first year after its enactment, 78% of elected representatives opted into the system. But now, the Dems are talking about killing the program — which of course would be wonderful for the lobbyists in Connecticut, and further strengthen the power of SuperPACs in that state.

This is officially #REALLYbadNEWS. A week after Maine voted to strengthened its own public funding system, and Seattle voted to establish an innovative voucher program to fund city elections (here’s Paul Blumenthal’s piece about both), Connecticut should be talking about how to make their program better, not dead. 

If you’ve got friends in the state, please ask them to ask the Democratic leadership what’s going on? You can reach the President of the Senate, Martin Looney (D-New Haven), here.

We Democrats tell ourselves that we’re leaders on this issue — everywhere, including Connecticut. Let’s make that true. 

This is a must read analysis from TalkingPointsMemo because it illustrates the foolhardiness (stupidity) of pursuing an electoral strategy to change  federal campaign finance laws. (The major assumption in this plan is that you have to elect more Democrats, along with a few Republicans.)

The nut graphs:

A closer look at the numbers shows why the GOP House majority is basically impenetrable until the next redistricting, and maybe beyond. It was never more stark than in 2012, when Democrats received about 500k more votes nationwide than Republicans but still ended up with substantially fewer seats. Some of this is due to an extremely effective gerrymandering effort by Republicans after the 2010 election. But it's not only that. Democrats are also increasingly concentrated in small geographical areas, which greatly amplifies the effect of gerrymandering and is also a significant and growing issue in itself....

Here, TPM has taken a look at three states that are among the most populous in the country and that figure prominently in presidential elections. Democratic House candidates in Pennsylvania and Michigan won more votes overall in 2012 but in each state the party ended up with fewer seats than the GOP. In Ohio, Republicans garnered more votes overall in 2012 and 2014; in each year, their percentage of seats won was vastly higher than their share of the vote.

Republicans did better in all three states in 2014, but the distribution of House seats remained the same. And this pattern, if not always to the same degree, shows itself in numerous states.

It's a good illustration on how virtually unwinnable the current House is for Democrats. As currently constituted, the chamber is relatively immune to big swings in popular opinion and voting support.

Now, of course, all this wouldn't really be a problem if you could really convince sufficient numbers of Republican candidates to endorse campaign finance reform.  But the likelihood of that is somewhere between slim and nil.  Republican's positions on that have hardened over the years.  They are less likely to support systemic reform (indeed, any reform) today than they were in the past.

This morning, my husband RIchard says to me, "After last night's election results, we should be thrilled that DC approved the legalization of marijuana."

Yup. That sounds about right. It's got to make the next few years a little easier to take.