I’ve been running down the six big lessons I learned about American politics by running for office. So far, I’ve covered the political time warp, in which today’s politicians tend to be motived by yesterday’s big issues, the corresponding ideological inertia of political parties, and the special inertia of the most enduring issue of all, NIMBYism.
Now to the fourth lesson, which is that politicians are freaks.
We have an ideal in America of the citizen legislator, the ordinary person who goes into politics, the Mr. Smith who goes to Washington. In practice, though, the requirements and incentives of our politics tend to promote people who are not representative of the average voter and in many cases are deeply weird. Ironically, it is the preferences of the average voter that end up selecting for this.
Dynastic Democracy
The most obvious sense in which politicians tend to be very different from the ordinary person is economic.
When a local news report about my campaign was posted on Facebook, I found it interesting that the first three replies were from people who were confident I only wanted to run to get the congressional salary of about $180,000. These people knew nothing about me, and it was clear this was their default assumption about anyone who runs for office, that they’re just in it for the money. It’s the sort of thing people say when they think they’re being clever and cynical, but it just shows how little they know about how things work.
In reality, most members of Congress end up complaining that when they get into office, they take a significant cut in pay. That’s because most of them are extremely well off. Why? Running for office is an activity that can take a year or more of full-time or nearly full-time work: traveling to events, calling donors, making videos, calling donors, meeting activists at local party conferences, calling donors—you get the idea. The people who have time to do this usually are not also working for living. They have either made or inherited enough money to live comfortably while doing nothing but campaigning.
Some people who run for Congress are self-made, but a disturbingly large number were born with money, and not just with money but with a well-known family name and connections.
Examples are common in both parties. In New Hampshire, there is once again a Sununu running for statewide office. The infamous Matt Gaetz was known as “Baby Gaetz” because he’s the son of former Florida state senate president Don Gaetz. Before that, his grandfather was in the state senate in North Dakota.
This summer, a scandal broke involving Max Miller, a former Trump aide turned Ohio congressman. The details are nasty: Miller is accused of abusing his ex-wife Emily Moreno, the daughter of Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno, and mistreating their child. But how did a guy with a clearly troubled past get into this position of power?
He was born an heir of two of the most important families and arguably the most important company in the modern history of Cleveland, the grandson of business kingpin and political power broker Sam Miller and Ruth Ratner Miller, the oldest of the two sons of Abe and Barb Miller and a namesake of Max and Leonard Ratner—the original president and chair, respectively, of Forest City Enterprises, the colossal real estate firm and a font of the clan’s riches, privilege and prestige.
It’s not just the bad guys. In Michigan, Peter Meijer served a single term in the House and distinguished himself as one of a small number of Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump—which is why he served only one term. But if you’ve driven through the Midwest, you have probably seen the Meijer name emblazoned on signs for gas stations and supermarkets, a chain started by Peter Meijer’s great-grandfather.
A very large number of politicians are not ordinary citizens. They are local gentry. The advantage they have over ordinary citizens like you and me is not just money, but also name recognition—being a Kennedy, or a Gaetz, or a Sununu, or a Meijer, or a Miller—and the whole constellation of family connections that comes with that. In Part 1 of this series, I said that if you want to run for Congress, the best time to start is 15 to 20 years ago. But if you really want to do it right, the best time to start is before you were born.
For a democracy, our politics seems awfully dynastic.
