Democracy and the Media: Make the Vessel Visible
Why has our democracy taken this weird shape? Look at the glass it’s been poured into.
In February 2021, after the shocking Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy was one of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. “Our Constitution and our country [are] more important than any one person,” he said. “I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.”
Four years later, in February 2025, Cassidy’s support was pivotal to confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, despite Kennedy holding the radical views on vaccines that have since upended federal policy on life-saving immunizations.
Cassidy, himself a doctor, clearly knew better. So why did he cast the vote that the president wanted, when previously he defied party lines to vote his convictions? Did Cassidy change? Or did the incentives change around him?
Only Cassidy knows for sure. But to understand why our elected representatives act as they do, it’s critical to consider the electoral systems they operate within. Too often, these systems are treated as boring, or fixed, or invisible — as somehow disconnected from the daily push and pull of events. But these human-crafted structures are the vessels that shape our politics. Whenever you wonder: Why has our democracy taken this weird shape? Look at the glass it’s been poured into.
Why is Maryland’s U.S. House delegation 87 percent Democratic when only 52 percent of the state’s voters are registered Democrats? Why have so many more-moderate Republicans left Congress since Trump’s ascendance? And why has the president’s disfavor — despite Cassidy’s vote for Kennedy, Trump this month endorsed one of his opponents — rolled such a big boulder into Cassidy’s path to re-election?
The answers are structural: (1) Aggressive partisan gerrymandering, which across the country (I don’t mean to pick on my home state) yields congressional delegations out of sync with their electorates. (2) Closed primaries, which advantage ideological rigidity and party loyalty over cross-party consensus-building. And (3) Louisiana’s 2024 decision to back away from all-party general elections — which put all candidates, regardless of party, on one ballot, with a runoff between the top two if no candidate reached 50 percent — in favor of separate party primaries.
This last dramatically altered Cassidy’s political incentives. Under the old system, he might have built a coalition of Republicans, independents and even many Democrats who saw his impeachment vote as welcome independence from an executive taking ever-tighter hold of the legislature. Under the new one, he’ll have to forge a majority among a much-narrower group: Republican and unaligned voters who take part in the primary. That’s a very different-shaped vessel; within it, Trump’s support is much more likely to be decisive.
Here, I should pause to note that this column, which will appear at The Renovator about once a month, is about democracy and the media, not politics. And also to introduce myself.
About me: I have 35 years’ experience in newspapers, small and large. I’ve been the managing editor of a community newspaper in upstate New York, and I’ve worked for more than two decades in editing roles at The Washington Post. I was deputy opinion editor when I left full-time employment there last year to begin working independently. (I continue to edit for Post Opinions in a part-time, non-staff role.)
About this column: There are many tremendous media writers covering the successes, blunders, and challenges of major U.S. media. I can’t compete with them, and I’m not going to try. Instead, I want to use this space to advocate for deeper coverage of our electoral system and the fundamental way it shapes our politics — for coverage, in other words, that makes the vessel visible.
Because to change a system, you first have to see it. As Renovator founder Danielle Allen has written, our constitutional structure no longer operates as designed. The concentration of ever-more power in the hands of the executive branch began in the 20th century and has accumulated presidency by presidency. The legislature is no longer serving its role as the engine of American self-rule. As a result, the will of the American supermajority for constitutional democracy — yes, it still exists — is being thwarted. President Trump did not create this problem, but he has certainly accelerated it, and over the past year we’ve seen it expressed in stunning displays of unchecked power.
I believe — I hope — that the next chapter in the American experiment will be defined by how the people move to check that power again. Part of that will have to involve deep and thoughtful engagement with how the structures of our democratic systems shape the distribution and uses of political power.
And so, in these columns, I want to highlight journalists and outlets making the vessel visible. Whose reporting on the Louisiana Senate race makes clear the decisive role of the new primary system? Where is a referendum on ranked-choice voting treated as seriously as a mayoral election? What’s working, and what isn’t, in the effort to restore balance to our constitutional architecture?
Because Cassidy had it right: Our Constitution and our country are more important than any one person — and much too important not to fix.
