Who Wants to Be A Prime Minister?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

(colors denote which parties topped the poll)

The elections were finally over, and not a moment too soon. Prime Minister Ted Cruz, the unpopular leader of the Christian Conservative Party, (or Chris-Cons as they were so known among the general public) saw his party lose a bunch of seats to the Heartland Party. Joe Biden, head of the now-resurgant Liberal Party (long seen as the country's natural governing party), once again won a plurality of the seats, making huge gains in states such as California, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. Party colluegues were telling Cruz it was time for him to go.

John Hoeven was a strange man. A major centrist politician and well known for his criticism of the government's allegedly Southern-centric policies, the party slate had taken two of three seats in North Dakota, gaining a near-majority of the vote. He was not alone in having a home state bonus. Bernie Sanders's personal vote helped the United Left Party win two of three seats in Vermont, and in the important state of Pennsylvania, Joe Biden's party won eight of twenty seats, with the party winning a majority of the votes in Lackawanna County, where he spent his childhood. And much like Sanders had done in Vermont, Joe Biden won two of three seats in Delaware for his party.

One thing was clear: the Heartland Party was critical in deciding who formed the government. The three parties of the left won a combined 260 seats, a strong plurality, which was a sign that the public wanted a change in government. Joe Biden however was uneasy with the Green Party. It ran a platform that party polling showed was toxic to the swing voters in key swing states. Biden was winner of the elections, and he was in a strong position to form government. But, like 2017 had shown, things could get complicated even for the side seen as winning the election.

Hoeven was also uneasy with the Greens. The Greens were a fresh party that were popular with some on the left, but it was extremely urban-based and represented a very, very, very different political tendency - drastically different from what he had. Furthermore, Sawant was more inclined to be in opposition.

In 2017, a strong result for the fourth-place Freedom Party had helped Cruz narrowly become Prime Minister at the head of a two-party coalition government. This time, both parties lost a lot of seats, and they'd have to get Heartland Party support for any new government. Hoeven had ran on the slogan "Ted Out! John In!".

Cruz was prepared to resign, but the Heartland Party's attitudes were likely too hardline for them to accept him merely serving as Cabinet Minister in a new government, and they were hostile to the Chris-Con-Freedom government's record. The move to cut ethanol subsidies for budgetary purposes was especially a lightning rod of criticism and led to defections. There was no reason for them to risk their brand by getting together with the party to give it government again.

In the meantime, the chattering class pondered what it meant that the Chris-Cons had (very likely) lost the government...

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Greg Abbott was probably one of a few winners on the conservative side of the political world. And he knew it.

He had made it his mission to downsize government and cut taxes. The Cruz government had done just that.

Taxes fell under the new government, and the agreement between the two parties of the right, the framework that had governed their behavior over the next few years, had carried a mix of things for everyone. Cutting agricultural subsidies that cost tens of billions of dollars a year, religious liberty laws, a moratorium on stem cell research, a downsizing of the Department of Education, and various other goodies designed to keep one or both sides happy. The informateur did a good job listening and working with them, and him and Ted Cruz had a productive time in office.

What a shame things had to go downhill. Cruz and Abbott were both Texans, and both had got their starts in and around Houston. Where did things go wrong? Why was it that, a few months before the end of the coalition, Texas Tribune reporter James Wilson had wrote, "they spend more time fighting each other than they do fighting the Liberals"?

Abbott blamed it on the fact they led different parties. The Freedom Party was fiscally conservative, socially diverse, and supported a sizably smaller federal government and above all, lower taxes. The Christian Conservative Party was in some respects almost fiscally liberal, and was concerned with the Christian Right vote. They were also poorer in their support base.

The two right-leaning parties were opposed in some matters. Cruz did not like cutting subsidies for agriculture, but he accepted it in order to get into government. But Abbott, nicknamed "Mr. Deregulation", didn't regret a thing, despite him knowing it cost the right votes. "Do the right thing. The people will thank you later" he said.

After all, he asked himself, "why impede the free market in agriculture?" Farming was a free market. Anyone could buy a plot of land, plant seeds, and try his luck. Abbott didn't care if it wasn't popular. He cared that it got done. And he was proud of it.

Abbott, in his view, had been vindicated. He held more of his base than Cruz held of his. That was a victory. The Freedom Party was the party of smaller government, and now it was the biggest right-wing party in the country. A shame that had to come with a move to the opposition benches, and the Liberals likely returning to power...

Still, the left had been denied a majority. The Heartland Party held the balance of power. Bad thing about this is that in fact, they were the most hostile. They were likely to reverse many of the steps his government had helped make possible. They were rooted in the rural Midwest, a region where Abbott wasn't very popular. Abbott's party won seats here, but not from rural votes - rather, they were gained from suburbs, especially wealthier-than-average suburbs opposed to Liberal big government. Among these was vote-rich Waukesha County, Wisconsin, where he had held his last campaign stop.

Abbott was very concerned. Heartland Party having balance of power meant that in essence they would be dictating many of the terms to the Liberals in the event the two parties got together. He would likely get his worst nightmare - a Liberal big-government administration combined with a rural pork-barreling coalition partner that would abandon thrift for sake of short-term expediency.

He missed the days of the coalition with Cruz, despite the infighting and annoying behind-the-scenes power struggles. But all good things had to come to an end eventually...

[LAB-LIB]

You know Gordon Brown had announced his resignation as Labour leader in hopes that would make the Lib Dems more likely to enter into coalition with Labour. Maybe Cruz will try that here.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

You know Gordon Brown had announced his resignation as Labour leader in hopes that would make the Lib Dems more likely to enter into coalition with Labour. Maybe Cruz will try that here.

Good point. Of course, his position is a decent bit more hopeless than Brown's was.
Time will tell how government formation will go. It'll be a bumpy ride...

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

John Hoeven, in his Bismarck hotel room, considered his options.

He hadn't expected he'd do this well. His party was small and minor beforehand, with only a dozen seats. Now, it had increased its seat total six-fold. Seventy-four MPs, from thirty-seven states. What an accomplishment.

But this was just the start of a new beginning. Seats in the Parliament were merely just a means for an end. Hoeven was not a man with small dreams. He was a man of moderate convictions, but not a man of moderate ambitions. He wanted to harness the anger in rural Midwestern America to fuel his party to new heights, and then deliver what he had promised. He had done the first. Now he had to accomplish  the second.

The means to accomplish the second was simple: a governing coalition to his liking, fortified by a coalition agreement promising just that. And he would ensure that when changes were wrought to the laws of his country, he would get the credit.

But he knew that saying you'd do one thing, and actually doing it, are two different things.

He had to work with the makeup of the parliament as it was. And it looked good for him. He was kingmaker; unless some bizarro coalition formed uniting disparate elements emerged, his support was needed to form government. And he was willing to work with many, many people to get his aims accomplished. There was only one party he had ruled out working with. A Christian Conservative Party led by Ted Cruz.

It would be toxic, just toxic. There was no way he was going to give Cruz another term in office. He may as well bless his credibility goodbye. And credibility was important currency in politics.

So then, what was there to be done? Well, if pundits were to be believed, Hoeven might form government himself! With the help of the right. At least, that was the take the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan came up with. He genuinely hadn't considered that. If he became Prime Minister, wow. He didn't feel it to be completely fair, though. He'd probably make the left hate him. He was already somewhat implacably opposed to the ChrisCons, and diametrically opposed to the Freedom Party due to their agricultural policies. If he could work neither with the left, nor with the right, he'd be unable to deliver.

Working with Joe Biden was an interesting idea to him. They had both been critical of the government's record and promised change on the campaign trail. But there were things that were probably not so attractive to the voter base he had gained in this election. For example, Biden had promised to try to push for a carbon tax, something that Freedom Party voters hated. The Heartland Party's base probably didn't like a carbon tax. And it probably didn't like a wholesale reversal of the social reforms the previous government had implemented either.

Whatever was the case, Hoeven had to compromise somewhere on something, or prioritize some things over others. He knew what mattered most to him: agricultural subsidies had to return to the levels they were at before the previous government took office. He had to think about where his ideas differed from Biden's, and from that of senior Christian Conservatives.

He decided though that immediately, he would do a power play. He would speak before the media and demand Cruz resign as leader of the Christian Conservatives. If he demanded Cruz resign, and then he left, then this would give him credibility among the public, by arguing he had forced Cruz out of office for good. If he left, he could claim a victory. If he refused, he could claim that the Christian Conservatives had stood by Cruz, who by now was toxic among Heartland Party voters. He ran the idea past a few aides, and they all agreed it was a good move. Machieviallian, but good.

When Cruz learned of what had been said, his heart sank a bit. He then knew that Hoeven was even more ruthless than he realized.

[Boss_Rahm]

What electoral system is being used?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Joe Biden was greatly surprised to hear the news that Hoeven was demanding Cruz resign.

He was equally surprised when he learned Cruz stood up for himself. "My fate is to be decided not by a centrist demagogue but rather by my own party. In the Christian Conservative Party, we don't let other parties meddle in our internal affairs" he told the press. Cruz was fed up with Hoeven, and sought to show some spirit. Despite basically almost everyone telling him it was time to go, Cruz wanted to both vent out his annoyance at Hoeven and show he was a fighter.

More division among the opposition, Biden thought. The worse relations were between the Christian Conservatives and the Heartland Party, the better it was for the Liberals, as this made it completely impossible for the Liberals to not form government.

Biden was glad the Christian Conservatives weren't in great shape. They had essentially sacrificed a large portion of their credibility to helm a coalition that pushed Freedom Party policies, then their party leader got toxic and was rejected in the nation's premier marginal region. And now, after being baited by Hoeven, they were backing their leader up on a matter of party principle.

Biden had heard that President Susan Collins was likely to name as informateur that great luminary of the "Blue Liberal" wing of his party, Tom Petri. Petri had served as Liberal MP representing Wisconsin from 1975 to 2016. It was Petri's job to talk with all the parties and see what common ground existed, to ease the way forward to forming a government, regardless of his personal sympathies. Petri was known to have mavericky stances on some issues and when he was active in politics, he proudly identified himself as a "center-right, reasonable Liberal". In the recent election, he had endorsed Biden in part so that he could bring back stem-cell research, while harshly criticizing some of the social reforms pushed by the Freedom Party.

The Freedom Party was the only one who was critical of the rumored choice (yes, even the Greens approved), and Greg Abbott claimed Petri would be certain to try to screw his party over. In practice, Abbott was merely politicing, trying to use Petri as a scapegoat for the problems the right was undergoing. Curiously and conversely, Cruz saw something of a rapport in the making with Petri, in the sense that he was a man who commanded a lot of respect from many in the Chris-Con benches, and he was very managerial and highly professional. Petri had also served in this position in 2017 and managed to pick up on the right's willingness to form a government by themselves.

Biden laughed at the fact that it was Abbott of all people who was complaining. He had no right to complain. Sure, Petri's friendliness with unions was seen as suspect by many in the Freedom Party, but that hardly mattered. It really was such a silly ploy, he felt. Policy stances didn't matter here. Professionalism did. If anything, it made other parties think less of the Freedom Party, as they were holding up the process.

But Biden was not unhappy with all this. Other parties' loss was his party's gain. It was the job of the Liberals to unify the people, not necessarily to unify the political parties. If the Freedom Party did divisive things, that was a net good, as it forced political parties who cared about a less divisive democracy to work with him.

If the Freedom Party wanted to be divisive and hurt its reputation, that was its choice. Was this not a democracy?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

What electoral system is being used?

No formal threshold whatsoever on constituency level; it varies depending on district magnitude (using a simple calculation of 100%/the # of members elected). On national level, parties need to get at least 3 percent in at least a fifth of all states to win seats anywhere. Everywhere, there is a closed-list proportional representation, which translates into stronger parties in practice. Internal primaries are generally used to determine who fills list positions in each state, but this is far from universal.

More generally, all the vote counting is done on state level, but rules are uniform and decided on national level. The votes of parties that fail to reach either threshold are discounted entirely for purpose of seat allocation, unless party leadership has decided where they will go (the Greens refusing to do this in 2017 has been cited as a major factor in the right's narrow victory). Despite this transfer mechanic, these rules can still result in disproportionate results in states dominated by a particular party.

This status quo favors bigger parties as well as those with broad national appeal and distinctly disfavors small, newer ones, such as the Greens.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Kshama Sawant was a major winner in this election. After becoming Mayor of Seattle in 2014 in an upset win against a Liberal incumbent accused of an extramarital affair (the charges were eventually found to be unfounded), she served one term, ending in 2018. Her eyes no longer were focused on Seattle. She was interested in bigger things.

She took over leadership of the Green Party in 2017, a few months before the elections, and shocked many in the political world by her transformation of the party. With support from socialist factions in the party, she moved it to the left. In a few months, she had taken it from a center-left, pro-environment position, to a "watermelon" party that was to agruably to the left of the United Left Party. She refused to let any Green votes flow to the Liberals either, a move that rankled the party's right factions.

The Green Party's position as a revamped party continued in this election, as it had picked up a bunch of votes from the far-left of American politics. Sawant initally justified the move on grounds that environmental issues were being coopted by the Liberals, but now, many of her critics had left, defecting to a Liberal Party that was seeking their support. Biden's political strategy in this election relied on the middle class vote, attacking the two right-leaning parties using a mix of social and environmental issues to gain moderate suburban swing voters; most of the right flank of the Greens was thus now in the Liberals.

Despite the Greens losing many voters to the Liberals, they proved able to gain new votes from a United Left Party that was riddled with divisions and factional infighting. The leadership of Bernie Sanders was coming under criticism from many; he was regarded as "too establishment" by a chunk of the youth vote, and his old school social democrat views were seen as iconoclastic by some "modernizing" factions. Some of them joined Sawant's Green Party.

This time, Sawant had run a campaign as critical of Sanders as it was of the right-leaning government. She claimed Sanders was a "racist" on immigration, citing his stances on immigration enforcement, and she made an issue of remarks in the deep past of his career. She called him, in a very pejorative sense, "Old Left", and said he was stuck in the past. Sanders shot back that he had got "good things done" in his career and called her "all talk, no action". He called her "enthusiastic, but wrong-minded", and one time called her "Lady Gaslight". The bad blood was mutual between them.

To rub salt in the wound, Sawant decided that this time she would allow her preferences to flow to another party...in this case, it would be the Liberals. Why the Liberals? Well, Sawant wanted to avoid being cast as a spoiler, and she wanted to ensure the government was actually defeated.

Sawant's move was not without reservations, though. There was one longstanding point of dissatisfaction many had with the Liberals - that the electoral system that they had designed unfairly disadvantaged smaller parties. During the Greens' time as a more moderate party, electoral reform was a more important plank than fighting landlords, and it still had some resonance to this day among many. Sawant proposed an expansion of the parliament, creating 200 proportional representation seats based off the nationwide vote, and also pushed for eliminating all formal threshold requirements.

For obvious reasons, Joe Biden was not interested in this, and he knew that the Liberals benefited from the current system. Unsurprisingly, all big parties had no interest in reforming the system to allow smaller fringe parties more of a chance to get seats, and there was history of major parties getting together to form government by themselves, rather than rely on small parties that managed to meet the 3% threshold. Sawant fired up on this issue to keep more right-leaning still-Greens on board, and it was a ploy that succeeded.

Sawant, in any case, had more to offer than just electoral reform. She also supported a raft of proposals to radically reform the housing market. In response to many young voters beginning to question homeownership, she proposed taking the proceed from rents by 10% and banning rent increases of more than 3% in a given year. She proposed making renters unions mandatory, and she went so far as to call landlords "class enemies of the youth" at a campaign rally.

Her rhetoric was making her very unpopular with many voters, but it led to a rise in the Green vote, as many flocked to her banner. The United Left Party trashed her platform, calling it "unconstitutional", but they were merely limiting their losses, not making any gains. Sawant called Bernie an "unimaginative old hat" due to his inability to support her platform and mockingly said that his philosophy was "better things aren't possible"; Bernie called it "unlawful, unconstructive, and divisive". His proposal for more social housing in expensive cities was called "laughably modest" by Sawant associates in the national media.

Sawant knew full well her platform was not going to become law anytime soon. She knew that going into government would be suicidal for her plan to make the Greens into a major national left-wing opposition party, so she let everyone who did so little as to merely ask, know that "the Greens are determined to use their new seats to place whatever government arises to their promises and to put the establishment on notice that they are no longer able to cheat the public of accountability in government".

[Boss_Rahm]

What electoral system is being used?

No formal threshold whatsoever on constituency level; it varies depending on district magnitude (using a simple calculation of 100%/the # of members elected). On national level, parties need to get at least 3 percent in at least a fifth of all states to win seats anywhere. Everywhere, there is a closed-list proportional representation, which translates into stronger parties in practice. Internal primaries are generally used to determine who fills list positions in each state, but this is far from universal.

More generally, all the vote counting is done on state level, but rules are uniform and decided on national level. The votes of parties that fail to reach either threshold are discounted entirely for purpose of seat allocation, unless party leadership has decided where they will go (the Greens refusing to do this in 2017 has been cited as a major factor in the right's narrow victory). Despite this transfer mechanic, these rules can still result in disproportionate results in states dominated by a particular party.

This status quo favors bigger parties as well as those with broad national appeal and distinctly disfavors small, newer ones, such as the Greens.

Thanks! Love your writing!