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The Caddo Parish sheriff's contest looms as the highest-profile this election cycle among the chief law enforcement officers and tax collectors of Louisiana, while also serving as a barometer of political change.
All but Orleans Parish will vote on these offices this fall, although the new terms won't begin until the middle of 2024. The most populous, East Baton Rouge, finds Democrat long-tine Sheriff Sid Gautreaux at this point without competition, as occurred last time. But the next highest-populated, Caddo will welcome a newcomer with the deferral of Republican even longer-time Sheriff Steve Prator to attempt a seventh term.
At the beginning of June, Prator was all ready to go for that, but by the end of the month opted out after he evaluated his health as more tenuous than he had realized and decided to retire. Not long after he had announced he would run for reelection, Democrat Henry Whitehorn said he would entering the race, although claiming it wasn't as a mission to oppose Prator. Republican Eric Hatfield, a perennial candidate with an extremely checkered past of legal problems and controversy over a stint as a constable that led to his defeat also has said he will run.
Who will not be the guy area Republicans want to try to retain the office. Prator has said he will return all donations to his campaign but also said he would steer donors towards candidates he finds acceptable. He has named none as yet.
Gautreaux and Prator remain anachronisms in that both are white yet serve majority-minority populations (Caddo barely, East Baton Rouge a little more so). In terms of the Caddo electorate, whites actually have a bare plurality although census data suggest there may be more registrants with some black ancestry than white. But, given their lengthy times in office, both first elected when their electorates had white majorities, good reviews by constituents have led to their continued reelections against no or token opposition.
Without a candidate of Prator's record of incumbency around, this suggests that Whitehorn, who not only would benefit from a Democrat label as most blacks vote for Democrats but also is black, may have an edge over any white Republican. Buttressing this view is that the same electorate in 2015, then with a white majority, elected black Democrat James Stewart as First District Attorney with a comfortable 55 percent of the vote.
Then again, even as Whitehorn has a lengthy career in law enforcement capped with a couple of years as Shreveport's chief administrative officer under Democrat former Mayor Adrian Perkins, it hasn't been all skittles and beer. Long ago head of the Louisiana State Police, that agency continues to take a public relations beating, then and now, for questionable trooper actions. His term as Shreveport police chief was unremarkable, but weighing most heavily on his candidacy is that most recent stint as CAO, where he took arrows for a number of controversial, if not unpopular or even smacking of insider politics, decisions made by Perkins (for example, a change in health plans for city employees and retirees attenuating choices if not increasing costs) that ultimately led to his defeat months ago that sent Whitehorn into retirement.
Still, given the electoral environment Republicans would have to come up with a pretty good candidate whose chances would be maximized by having some law enforcement background to offset Whitehorn's. Time is running out to find such a competitor with qualifying just about a month away for a contest soliciting from over 150,000 voters that just can't be thrown together overnight to be effective.
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In my last post, I said that Donald Trump's strong position in the race for the Republican nomination is not the result of his personal hold on Republican voters, but of support (or at least lack of opposition) from Republican elites. A Republican who doesn't pay much attention to politics is likely to recall that things went pretty well while Trump was in office (up until Covid, which wasn't his fault), and therefore will be inclined to give Trump another chance unless he's given a reason not to. The obvious reasons are Trump's weak performance in general elections and his campaign to overthrow the 2020 results, but leading Republicans haven't emphasized either one. On the first point, here's a comparison of the 2012-2020 results: Rep Dem Other2012 47.2% 51% 1.8%2016 45.9% 48% 6.1%2020 46.8% 51.3% 1.9%In 2012, Mitt Romney was running against an incumbent president who was a skilled politician. In 2016, Trump was running against an opponent who was neither an incumbent nor a skilled politician. In 2020, Trump was an incumbent himself, and in addition to the normal advantage of incumbency, there's a tendency to rally round the leader in times of national emergency. Yet both times he fell short of Mitt Romney's share of the vote in 2012. Usually after a candidate loses an election, people in his party start talking about why he lost, what the party needs to do differently, what kind of leaders it needs moving forward, etc. That's never really happened with Trump. On his campaign to overturn the election, for a few weeks after January 6, it seemed like many Republican leaders were ready to turn against him. But since then, the dominant tendency has been to downplay it by saying that even if the 2020 election wasn't "stolen," there was something wrong with it, or that the Democrats are engaged in "election interference" themselves. For example, when Maine's Secretary of State ruled that Trump shouldn't appear on the primary ballot, Susan Collins denounced the decision on Twitter. She didn't have to say anything--she could have waited until a reporter asked and then just said it was up to the courts. Or she could have said while Trump's conduct might not qualify as insurrection, it was a serious matter, and that was why she had voted to impeach Trump and would not be voting for him in the primary. Other Republicans went farther, saying that there is or will be a Democratic push to get Trump taken off the ballot. So why haven't Republican elites made the case against Trump? I think that some of it is that they thought his support would fade away after he left office and didn't command as much media attention. A second is that the appearance of disunity usually hurts a party with voters. Right-wing Republicans have been willing to engage in intra-party fights in order to get what they want. Rather than fighting back, moderate and mainstream Republicans have tried to placate them in order to maintain as much party unity as they can. This is partly because of electoral considerations--moderate and mainstream Republicans are more likely to be from swing states or districts where they have to get some support from Democrats and independents. I think it may also because their long period of being in the minority in Congress gave Republicans a tradition of being concerned with sticking together. So someone like Collins, who is clearly not a fan of Trump, gives a generic Republican response rather than taking the opportunity to try to weaken him.
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While much of the obvious has been covered in how the ascension of Republican Speaker Mike Johnson to that post will affect Louisiana politics, one under-the-radar aspect is how it can strengthen the state's hand in the current legal tussle over congressional reapportionment.
Last year, Louisiana, which has a black voting age population of just under a third, enacted a plan that created one majority-minority district out of six. Special interests sued, claiming that the Voting Rights Act, despite its explicit statement that population proportions didn't have to be translated into proportions of districts, required the state to have two M/M districts.
In a related Alabama case, the U.S. Supreme Court elevated racial proportion to a preferred status among reapportionment criteria, which include such things incumbent protection, continuity of representation, and keeping communities of interest together. Using that as a precedent, an Eastern District of Louisiana judge firstly threw out the enacted maps and secondly ordered new ones be drawn.
The decisions were appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which hasn't ruled on the former but placed a stay on the latter, saying the former needed resolution first. The Supreme Court this month backed the stay, using the Louisiana case as a potential vehicle that gives the Court a chance to set parameters to its Alabama ruling. Practically speaking, if the former ruling stands, then the Legislature could deal with the latter next year during the regular session or in a special session preceding it without judicial involvement.
Assuming the legal wrangling ends in time for the change to occur next year, whatever the state's majoritarian branches do can set an important precedent. The Alabama ruling instructed that preference should be given to proportional use of race to ensure that roughly as many districts proportional to a discrete minority group's proportion in the population should exist to give that group a opportunity to elect a chosen candidate, but didn't mandate that the proportional output should be constructed utilizing only M/M districts.
Thus, it left the door open for "opportunity districts," or those where the minority population is sufficiently proportionally large enough to elect a chosen candidate without being a majority, to be utilized in this kind of mapping, subject to other reapportionment criteria. A subsequent Alabama attempt that created one M/M and one district with about 40 percent black population was found inadequate to meet the new criterion.
Louisiana might have the chance to define this further, if it must come to that. In contrast to the Alabama case, creating two rather than one M/M district does much greater violence to other reapportionment criteria, so there would be more leeway to creating an opportunity district instead. In fact, one bill offered during the 2022 First Extraordinary Session of the Legislature, called for reapportionment purposes, SB 22 by Democrat state Sen. Greg Tarver, did precisely this in making the Fifth District – which in two M/M plans was made narrowly the second M/M district – a bare majority white district with 43 percent black population.
The case for accepting this arrangement became stronger with Johnson's ascending to the speakership, referring particularly to incumbency protection. With Johnson now the most powerful and important official in the House, it becomes more imperative to maintain a district in which he can get elected.
Almost every of over a dozen bills filed in sessions in 2022 to create two M/M districts made for convoluted plans with these districts at 53 and 52 or 52 and 51 percent black population and, as compared to the enacted plan which largely mirrored existing boundaries, considerably altered Johnson's District 4 by chopping off its four southern-most parishes and instead pushing it to gobble up six parishes to the east and part of Ouachita now in District 5. Tarver's plan did worse, removing more southern parishes and spreading further east, circling around Ouachita. Even so, Johnson's district is nearly a third populated with blacks.
If the GOP legislative majority could swap some things around with CD 5 – for example, some of St. Landry parish for all of Grant – and work on CD 5's borders with other districts, this could push CD 5 above 40 percent black while adhering more closely to CD 4's pre-2022 boundaries and better protect Johnson. This would give the judiciary an interesting test case as to just how much preference to give race when other traditional factors loom large.
It may not come to this, but if it does, Johnson's unexpected promotion may cause equally unanticipated permutations to Louisiana's congressional maps.
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My former colleague Howard Wall asked me to join Lawrence White yesterday evening to discuss the role and future of cryptocurrencies at an event hosted by the Hammond Institute for Free Enterprise. It was a great honor to share the stage with Larry. I've been thinking about cryptocurrencies for a long time; many of my writings and talks on the subject can be found here. My thoughts on the subject are evolving as I learn more about the phenomenon. For what it's worth, I thought I'd share my opening remarks with interested readers below. As usual, any feedback is welcome. The Role and Future of CryptocurrenciesA money and payments system is about managing databases containing the money accounts of individuals and organizations. Any database management system must necessarily define read and write protocols. Read privileges specify who can view what on the database. Write privileges specify who gets to write what to the database.
So, for example, we can read what's in our bank account. So can the bank and its regulators. But other people cannot see how much money is held in any account apart from their own. While we cannot write directly to our account, we can send our bank instructions to so on our behalf. The bank can also write directly to our account. It may, for example, credit our account with interest, or debit it for service fees.
Note that bank accounts are digital. Moreover, the messages we send to our bank over the Internet are secured with the aid of cryptography. In this sense, one could say that bank deposits are a form of cryptocurrency.
Bank deposits, however, are not typically viewed as cryptocurrencies. Well then, what are the distinguishing characteristics of a cryptocurrency? It's not so clear-cut, but two things come to my mind. First, the database for a cryptocurrency is typically associated with an open-read privilege. This implies that the database can, in principle, at least, be subject to audits from any person, or any agency, at any time, all the time. This property offers a degree of financial transparency that is unheard of in conventional money services businesses. Second, the task of managing the database is typically decentralized in some manner to "validator nodes;" or, what one might label more mundanely as "accountants" in the non-crypto world. What is interesting here is how these validators are potentially recruited and compensated. For Bitcoin, anyone can potentially become a validator and compensation arrives in the form of a stochastic reward.
When it comes to keeping track of money balances, an open-write privilege is problematic. This is known as the double-spend problem. In conventional payment systems, the double-spend problem is solved by delegating database management to a trusted third party. A cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum must instead rely on a consensus mechanism that somehow ensures that a dispersed write-privilege does not result in garbage being written to the database. To date, the most popular mechanisms are based on PoW (Proof of Work) and PoS (Proof of Stake). But there are others as well, and one should expect innovation along this dimension since, as far as I know, no existing consensus mechanism has yet proven to be entirely satisfactory.
Of course, the same can be said of conventional database management systems. To young eyes, the current system seems a hopelessly tangled mess of databases that have trouble communicating with each other. Moreover, they appear not to be very secure at times. But despite the problems we all encounter with the modern banking system, one should, in fairness, acknowledge the tremendous achievements that have taken place over the last fifty years. For example, we are now able to travel to foreign countries with just a credit card. This is not the way things worked until relatively recently. Anyone who has had the experience of needing traveler's checks can fill you in on what it was like to travel in the old days.
Well, if there's been so much progress in money and payments, what accounts for the emergence and proliferation of cryptocurrencies?
As is so often the case, I think the fundamental cause of this development is rapid technological change moving against a relatively slow-moving incumbency that includes banks, money services businesses, and especially their regulators. In saying this, I do not mean to assign blame; the inertial properties of existing institutional arrangements likely has some merit. Institutional inertia can stabilizing, for example. But to benefit the communities they serve, institutions also have to evolve to meet the challenges of new technologies. And I think this is happening today in the sphere of money and payments.
What new technologies are we talking about? Innovations in communications, like the Internet, have been transformational. As well, there have been advances in data storage and cryptography that have played a critical role. All these innovations are, however, within the grasp of incumbent banks and money service businesses. And indeed, incumbents have made use of these technologies. Internet banking and PayPal are real things, after all. I think the important innovation as far as cryptocurrencies are concerned isthe development of database management protocols that permits a degree of decentralization for managing large databases. I say "large" databases because we already have decentralized database management systems for small communities, like gift exchange or the exchange of favors among friends (see: Why the Blockchain Should be Familiar to You). Advances in data storage and communications have, in effect, permitted this ancient form of communal record-keeping to scale.
The decentralized or communal aspect of managing a database is, of course, very much at odds with the notion of delegating the responsibility to a privileged set of institutions. Some people believe that these developments will lead to a revolution—an overthrow of existing institutions—a triumph in democracy over a privileged class. What is much more likely is an evolution of existing institutions to accommodate the threat posed by the potential usurpers in a manner that serves the broader community. In short, what we are likely to witness is the usual pattern of economic development in relatively well-functioning societies.
What do cryptocurrencies offer individuals and society? What are the concerns of regulators and policymakers?
To answer these questions, we need to recognize that there are different classes of cryptocurrencies, each of which cater to a specific constituency. Broadly, they can be categorized as belonging to one of two groups distinguished by their respective exchange rate regimes and governance structures.
In one group, we have the decentralized autonomous organizations, like Bitcoin. From the perspective of domestic policymakers, Bitcoin can be viewed as foreign currency operating under a floating exchange rate regime. Except that there's no negotiating with Bitcoin (there's no negotiating with some countries either). The intermediaries that deal or broker BTC transactions can, however, be regulated.
In the other group, we have the so-called stablecoins, like USD Coin (sponsored by Circle and Coinbase) and Diem (sponsored by Facebook). To domestic policymakers, stablecoins can be viewed as checkable mutual funds operating under a unilateral fixed exchange rate regime utilizing various forms of collateral. The major innovation here has less to do with technological innovation and more to do with the willingness and ability to process USD payments outside the commercial banking sector.
Viewed in this light, cryptocurrencies do not look so unfamiliar. As a foreign currency operating under a floating exchange rate, they'll likely never displace the domestic unit of account. They may, however, serve as store-of-value or portfolio hedge. And they may facilitate certain kinds of payments, typically on-chain and large-value. As a stablecoin offering a par exchange rate, they suffer from all the usual problems of uninsured fractional reserve banking—unless they promise to back their currencies fully with USD cash.
The question here is whether these products are offering something fundamentally more cost-effective when it comes to making payments, or whether they owe their existence primarily to regulatory arbitrage. I do not know the answer to this question, but I suspect that much of what they have to offer comes from the latter. Diem, for example, can bypass banking regulations by not becoming a bank. It can leverage Facebook's huge social network as a payment system connecting 2B+ users around the world. It can potentially offer money-transmitting services for "free" or, rather, in exchange for personal data. My guess is that banks (or even PayPal) are not permitted operate in this manner. Regulatory advantage: Diem.
Regulators need to keep a close eye on these structures since it is politically impossible to commit to the doctrine of caveat emptor when it comes to money and banking. The temptation, as always, will be to replace "cash" for higher-yielding "cash equivalents" on the balance sheet. The structure slowly evolves into an uninsured fractional reserve bank, but in the shadow bank sector. If something goes wrong, depositors will seek compensation, first from the firm and then from the government. After all, how could a government knowingly permit such an unstable structure to exist in the first place?
To sum up, I think the future of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is to serve as an alternative asset class for investors. I doubt that it will ever become a dominant medium of exchange in any large economy. Fractional reserve banks using BTC as reserves are not likely to be tolerated.
The future of stablecoins seems more interesting to me. In the first instance, they seem capable of filling the gaps that remain apparent in modern day payment systems (think correspondent banking here). But the main effect here is likely to spur conventional banks and their regulators to fill these gaps at a faster pace. There is a possibility that a project like Diem might one day abandon its peg to the USD and offer itself as a stand-alone currency. Policymakers would in that case be concerned about a country maintaining monetary policy sovereignty. One manifestation of this concern could be a pre-emptive action on the part of the government, for example, by offering its own universally-accessible CBDC.
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Members of Congress go to Washington and establish reputational styles which help explain to constituents the work that they do while on Capitol Hill. There is no one way to "correctly" represent a place, but a representational style chosen by a member reflects in part the priorities of the geographic constituency the member represents and their own personal inclinations born from their pre-congressional careers. Richard Fenno (1978), in his book Home Style, documented the various representational styles developed by members of Congress and used by them when explaining their "Washington Work" back home. Fenno documents three rough representational types: the constituent servant, the policy expert, and the member of Congress as "one of us."
I discuss these in detail elsewhere (Parker 2015, Parker and Goodman 2009, Parker and Goodman 2013), so I'll be brief.. A constituent servant helps constituents with casework, policy experts work on legislation and develop proficiency in a particular issue area, while "one of us" representatives "work to display their connectivity to a place and a group—and through that connection, demonstrate trustworthiness" (Parker 2015: 15).
It is clear that Congressman Zinke is comfortably slipping into a policy expert representational style—emphasizing his defense and foreign relations credentials (which are bolstered by his membership on the House Armed Services Committee). This makes sense for two reasons. First, it allows him to draw upon a pre-political career, which is a considerable electoral and governing asset. Second, it allows him to establish a representational relationship without competing directly with Senator Jon Tester or Senator Steve Daines. I wrote a blog some time ago noting how House members representing a state share a representational space with two U.S. Senators (see also Wendy Schiller's Partners and Rivals). Just as U.S. Senators need to figure out how to craft their own distinctive reputations, so, too, must House members representing a state. This is especially important because media coverage and space are at a particular premium in these smaller states; to get attention, you must be doing something different from the rest of the delegation.
Members of the House face an additional complication when they are the lone representative. Many House members develop constituent service reputations in the House. But, as the work of Lee and Oppenheimer (1999) demonstrate, constituents in small states are more likely to contact their senators to solve problems and address casework concerns because senators are just as accessible, if not more so, than the House members in small states. In fact, the Montana's senators have nearly twice the personal staff as the House member and have more offices back home. One of Congressman Denny Rehberg's biggest challenges in his 2012 campaign was overcoming this official resource disparity to compete successfully with Senator Tester—and it is this disparity as much as other issues that was responsible for his loss.
Congressman Zinke, in choosing to develop a policy expert representational style, is consciously avoiding the problem faced by Congressman Rehberg and other House members representing entire states. He is striking out in a policy area not clearly owned by either Tester or Daines, and he can establish a favorable reputation among constituents without necessarily being in the position to be unfavorably compared to the Senate delegation from the get go. Congressmen simply cannot effectively compete as constituent servants against their Senate delegation in big states. It is a losing proposition.
But, Congressman Zinke is doing far more with his policy expert representational style than becoming a statewide voice on national security matters and simply settling into his House seat for the long haul. Indeed, Congressman Zinke is consciously building a media presence well-beyond the statewide Montana media.
Congressman Zinke, unlike his fellow House freshman, is getting noticed by national news outlets. He has appeared on CNN's State of the Union, on the O'Reilly Factor, and on Fox News with Sean Hannity. He was mentioned in a New York Times piece on veterans in Congress, and had an op-ed published in the Washington Times. This is very unusual indeed for a freshman House member.
How unusual? Let's go to the data!
I searched Lexis-Nexis Academic between January 5 and February 19, 2015 for each instance a freshman member of Congress' name appeared in print, in the transcripts of national news broadcasts, or on blogs. I then produced two quick scatterplots. Both scatterplots have each freshmen house member, alphabetically listed by state, on the X Axis.
The first scatterplot here has the number of mentions in national broadcast news broadcasts on the Y axis. The black line is the mean number of mentions, which is a bit more than one mention. The modal category is zero—meaning most House freshman in the 114th Congress are simply not mentioned by national news broadcasts. Congressman Zinke had five mentions—well above the average. I also indicate the other House freshman who had more mentions that Congressman Zinke. (Click on the plot for a larger version)
This actually underestimates, however, the attention Zinke has received. Congressman Zinke was not just mentioned—he was an invited guest on these programs on five occasions he shows up in the database. In each instance, Congressman Zinke focused his remarks on national security and foreign policy.
Only Congresswoman Mia Love, a freshman Republican from Utah, who is both Mormon and a Haitian-American, has received anywhere close to the attention from the national networks. And while she has been mentioned more than Zinke on national television, she has only been a guest on a national news program twice. In fact, what seems to explain the attention given to the other freshman are special descriptive qualities about them. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik is the youngest woman ever to serve in Congress. Congressman Curbelo is a Latino Republican who is becoming the party's face on immigration. And Congressman Lee Zeldin is the only Jewish Republican in the chamber and is a vocal critic of the administration from his perch on the foreign relations committee.
In the second scatterplot, the Y-axis represents the total number of mentions of each freshman House member of the 114th Congress on national news and in non-home state newspapers and blogs. The mean mention was seven (indicated by the bold black line). Again, Congressman Zinke outperforms this by far, with a total of 16 mentions—more than twice the average mentions across all three media platforms. (Click on the plot for a larger version)
(Quick side note: As other scholarship has shown, members of the majority party seem to get a media attention bonus and that's the case here—Republican freshman in the House have slightly higher mentions on the web, in newspapers, and especially on television than Democratic freshmen).
Developing strong national defense credentials from which to build a constituency beyond Montana helps Zinke both in terms of reelection to the House and burnishes his credentials in a possible challenge to Jon Tester in 2018. How?
First, national media attention is often seen as desirable by constituents. In one study of national media exposure of U.S. Senators, Barbara Sinclair (1990) found that the number of mentions in The New York Times is associated with higher job approval ratings and feeling thermometer scores from individual constituents. Second, national media attention can also lead to additional power within the hall of Congress itself. Sinclair also writes that "within the Washington political community, national media exposure serves as an indicators that the senator is a player of consequence and, by showing she or he can command an audience, it increases the senator's clout" (489). Zinke benefits by seeking out and successfully obtaining national media coverage on the campaign trail and in Washington.
But, thinking long term, developing a national media attention brings an added bonus beyond the obvious exposure to a network of national Republicans critical to raising the substantial sums necessary to fund a competitive Senate bid against an incumbent. It helps craft the perception of an activist representational style that constituents tend to expect from U.S. Senators more so than from individual members of Congress.
I present two pieces of evidence in support. The first is from Fenno's book on North Dakota Senator Mark Andrews, When Incumbency Fails (1992). In that book, Senator Andrews—elected to his first term in 1980—is concerned about the prospect of facing a strong challenge from the state's Democratic Congressman, Byron Dorgan. Dorgan, unlike Andrews, received considerable positive publicity around the North Dakota and was constantly holding forums with constituents. Andrews, on the hand, came home less often and spent much of his time mired in policy detail behind the scenes—while garnishing negative media attention due to a malpractice lawsuit he and his wife had launched against the state's medical establishment in Fargo. Fenno argues that Andrews was trapped by the constituent service, small ball legislative politics style he developed as a member of the House Appropriations Committee—a style which seemed too little for the expectations North Dakotans had of their U.S. Senator.
The second is my own book, Battle for the Big Sky. In that book, I did three focus groups with voters in Gallatin County. One of the questions I asked was whether they saw senators and members of Congress playing different roles. On the whole, they agreed that the two positions were qualitatively different. Here's what Nicholas, a 60 year old retired policeman said on the subject:
"I tend," said Nicholas, to "see a senator as having the potential to be in the role as a statesperson much more than a representative."62 Senators could "get something done" because the House members are "one person in a sea." Not only would the Senate get more done but it would be more careful, "more considerate. [They] will more thoroughly look at something, be more educated on the topic" (153-154).
In this vein, Zinke looks—in cultivating his representational style and national media attention—like he's positioning himself for a run at the U.S. Senate. Add to this the fact that he has been openly critical of Senator Tester on more than one occasion (here and here) since taking office, and I very much suspect that he will try to do what Denny Rehberg could not: Unseat Senator Tester.
I asked Zinke about this on KBZK this morning. Watch the interview here.
He pooh-poohed the idea, saying that as a member of the "loyal opposition" it was his job to occasionally criticize the other side and that there's nothing amiss in his relationship with Montana's senior senator.
Will he run and, if he runs, will he succeed? I don't know. I do know, however, that I will be paying careful attention in the months and years ahead for hints and clues as to the Congressman's true intentions.
