Mommy, where do candidates come from?
Big cities, it turns out, and for both parties. That's not so great for representation.
Dear readers: a couple weeks ago, I sent along to you the trailer for my new podcast — co-hosted with my amazing colleague, Jaci Kettler — called “Scandalized.” Last Monday, our first episode officially premiered to (I assume?) worldwide acclaim. We traced the tragic tale of Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois who tried and failed to sell Barack Obama’s seat in the U.S. Senate to the highest bidder, and ended up on the wrong side of the law.
Yesterday, we shared our second episode, which follows the travels and travails of another former governor: Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who found himself fending off the press after getting caught in an international affair. This is an episode hosted mainly by Jaci, who — as you’re about to find — is much smarter than I am about state politics. I know you’ll love it.
If you want to help us become completely dominant in the world of podcasts, there are a few ways you can do that. I promise these will take just a couple of minutes, and would be a massive help to us:
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With that logrolling out of the way, let’s get to today’s post, which asks the eternal question: where on earth to political candidates come from?
You might live in a big city. You might love it for many reasons: the cultural variety, the museums, the restaurants, the hustle and bustle (what’s the difference between these two, by the way?). But you might be under-appreciating another advantage you have as a city-dweller: you are much more likely than your rural counterparts to run for political office!
Okay, that might not sound like much of an advantage. Polls show that the vast majority of Americans throws up in their mouths a little bit at the mere suggestion that they run for office, and it’s not hard to understand why. But the (perhaps) sad truth is that geography plays a huge biasing role in who does, doesn’t, or quite simply can’t realistically run for office. It plays, arguably, an even bigger role in who influences political campaigns with their hard-earned (or not-so-hard-earned) cash.
Yes, there’s an urban bias in our politics
My readers in urban areas (and my Substack analytics tells me there are many of you) might balk at the suggestion that our politics have an urban bias. I hear you. The U.S. Senate, for one thing, is the ultimate form of affirmative action for rural states, and the Electoral College is not far behind. Many of these kinds of institutions that overcount rural America have more-than-coincidental roots in the enslavement of African Americans.
But that doesn’t mean rural America — and Republicans writ large — have no beef with our political system when it comes to the overrepresentation of densely-populated areas. And efforts to get rid of rural-leaning institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College (the latter of which I have supported in this space) have an obligation to take these biases into account.
Maybe the clearest way this shows up in our politics is in the types of folks who run for office — or, put more accurately, the types of folks with the resources and connections to run for office. Research from two of my former University of Maryland mentors, Jim Gimpel and Frances Lee, takes a closer look at candidates for statewide office in the U.S. — specifically, those running for U.S. Senate and Governor. They find that these candidates “originate from populous counties in numbers significantly out of proportion to these counties’ share of their state’s population.” Meanwhile, they add, “aspirants virtually never emerge out of rural areas or small towns. The pattern holds for all candidates and nominees for both Senate and governor and for both major political parties.”
To see this visually, let’s take a closer look at a chart from their paper. Below, Gimpel and co-authors split American counties into deciles (ten evenly-distributed groups) based on the percentage of the state’s population those counties contain. Los Angeles County, California is in the tenth decile; King County, Texas (population: 272) is in the first decile. The chart compares the percentage of the American national population that resides in rural (or dense, urban) counties with the percentage of major-party nominees for Senate and Governor in their respective states who reside in those counties.
The takeaway from the chart above? Nominees for Senate and Governor are far, far more likely to hail from super-densely-populated counties than the average regular resident of their state. In other words, urbanites are way overrepresented in terms of who has a fighting chance of holding political office in this country.
Why does this happen? There are a few reasons, and they aren’t necessarily nefarious. But for sure they aren’t always fair.
Think for a minute about what major metropolitan areas like New York, Chicago, and LA have that other parts of the country don’t. More people means more rich people; more businesses who have a vested interest in who gets elected; more concentrated wealth that we already know influences political campaigns, not to mention who wins those campaigns. Big cities have big law firms, big business headquarters, and venues that attract people from out-of-city — or even out-of-state — to hold rallies or fundraisers that are most likely to benefit candidates who already hail from that city.
Social and political connections are formed in person, within physical distance; and if that distance is short, as it is in densely-populated cities, then that’s where the folks who can afford to run will come from. The wealthiest people in the country who either can run for office, or who are most likely to identify and highlight these candidates, are not coming from remote rural areas, but from major metropolitan areas where they can do business. Urban areas have plenty of poverty, obviously. But they are also far more likely to house the wealthiest among us, and these are the folks who tend to run.
Contributors and influencers skew urban, too
If you aren’t convinced by those arguments, look no further than the evidence from the non-candidate side of things. Money makes the world go ‘round in American politics, and candidates aren’t the only population that skews urban.
Several of the same co-authors I mentioned before, including Gimpel and Lee, found similar geographic patterns with regard to the small subset of Americans who contribute to political campaigns. “There is a geographic pattern to giving independent of wealth, age, occupation, and other individual characteristics that predict donations,” their paper on the subject finds. “Campaign contributors are not only people with resources and incentives to participate, but also part of networks in which social influence can be brought to bear in the solicitation of contributions.” These contributors — especially big contributors — come disproportionately from urban areas.
And believe it or not, both parties have their culprits here. You might think that most Democratic contributors come from cities, while most Republican contributors come from rural or suburban areas. Not the case — the biggest contributors to Republicans also come from urban areas. “Republican and Democratic donor bases,” Gimpel et al find, “are much more similar geographically than their bases of electoral support.”
A lot of this does depend on the type of candidate we’re talking about. In my own research, I look at the places that members of Congress call home, as well as where they were born and grew up, and the many impacts those places can have on their politics and elections. The chart below demonstrates one recent pattern that I found really interesting: as the member’s city of residence, high school location, and birthplace each get more dense (that is, less rural), lower proportions of their campaign contributions come from within their district. This means that legislators with more rural backgrounds have more homegrown donor bases, even when the amount of total wealth of that donor base is likely much lower than among many members’ urban counterparts.
Put differently, the most rural members of the House do not seem to need to rely donors from outside the district as heavily as those with urban and suburban backgrounds.
Why does any of this matter?
It may be that not a lot of this is surprising to some of you. It may also be that this is just trivia. Why does it matter? Cities are where the money and power are, and that’s the way it goes. Why is this a big deal for democracy and representation?
In an article from a couple of years ago in the Washington Post Magazine, my friend and co-author, Prof. David Fontana of George Washington University Law School, makes the case as only a quality legal mind can. “Our political elite in both parties,” Fontana argues, “are disproportionately connected to a few neighborhoods in a few metropolitan areas that are distant and different from the places they are supposed to understand and govern.”
Fontana cites my and others’ research to identify what he calls the “hidden crisis of power and place.” Members of Congress — especially new members of Congress — have fewer local roots in the places they represent than they have in modern history. In my book on the subject, Home Field Advantage, I create a “Local Roots Index”, combining indicators of whether a member of Congress was born in their district, went to high school or college in their district, and others to capture the full extent of how locally-tied they are. Local ties in members of Congress have plummeted in recent decades, particularly since the 1960s.
Why isn’t this ideal? Because members of Congress are supposed to understand the places they represent so that they can relay their interests faithfully when they go to Washington to make laws. Deep local ties can help them do this; if, instead, representatives are coming increasingly from urban centers, they’re going to lack the necessary background to truly understand their constituents and homeplaces.
Local ties are also electorally valuable: voters appreciate them and reward candidates who possess them. It’s a huge reason why, for example, Senators like Jon Tester of Montana — a Democrat in quite a red state — have been able to hang onto their seats. Tester is a born-and-bred Montanan, a family farmer, and oozes local authenticity with his very nontraditional campaigns and style of representation. Unfortunately, Senator Tester is increasingly the exception rather than the rule.
This recent trend in candidate bios is also translating into less localized campaigns for office. The next chart below (also from my book) demonstrates that candidates are raising less and less of their campaign funds within their districts; and that they are spending less and less of these funds on goods and services within their districts. In other words, their campaigns can’t even be bothered to stimulate their local economies.
These trends add up to a massive disconnection of representatives from the places they’re supposed to be representing. The whole idea of the House of Representatives is that everyone would represent their localized interests with fidelity, compromise and fight it out, and no one place, or type of place, would get supremacy over the others. Instead, candidates and their donors are emerging disproportionately from a few major metro areas.
These areas are lovely places. Chicago, LA, New York, San Francisco; I’ve been to many of them and enjoyed them immensely. Their cultures, economies, and political identities are genuine gifts to our country. But the truth is that most of the country actually doesn’t live in these massive cities, and to me, it’s a problem that such a huge proportion of the influence on our campaigns and elections comes from a relatively small group of people who, try though they might, probably do not understand rural America all that well.
Partisan politics aside, it’s important to have genuinely local voices from across the political and geographic spectrum so that no group of Americans gets left behind. The modern economic and political inequality wrought by geography make that pretty damn difficult.
Stray Links and Recs
I’ve had a very busy few weeks in the not-strictly-academic media, and so I should be a good self-promoter and share them. First up is an appearance my Scandalized co-host Jaci Kettler and I made on Idaho Matters, the lovely deep-dive show from our local NPR affiliate (who also distributes Scandalized), to promote our podcast and talk more in-depth about the creative process behind it. Despite my tiny long-haired dachshund, Pennie, wreaking havoc throughout the live interview, I managed to string together a couple of coherent thoughts, and Jaci made some much more intelligent ones.
The second one also features Jaci, who co-wrote with me an article on campaign finance scandals in The Conversation. The article may look like it was written in direct response to the indictment of NYC mayor Eric Adams; but no! We had written most of the article when, unexpectedly (or maybe all-too-expectedly), the FBI indicted the mayor of the biggest city in America for the most blatant possible violations of campaign finance law. It was convenient for us as authors, but inconvenient probably for the people of New York City. Sorry to that place.
Finally, I’ll shout out an article in the New Yorker from my aforementioned co-author and friend, Prof. David of George Washington University Law School. I mention it not just because it’s an awesome summary of the complicated local politics of both VP candidates in the 2024 election, but because he was kind enough to feature research we published together recently.
Music: “Never Better” by Wild Rivers (Apple Music/Spotify).
Does this song have any possible connection to place or politics, besides the vague idea that a “wild river” is an ambiguous place? Nope. I just like it a lot right now, and it’s giving significant Fall vibes for some reason. Wild Rivers is a great group whose whole catalog you should check out: “What Kind of Song”, “Bedrock”, and “Heart Attack” are other highlights. For now, though, “Never Better” is the one I’m majorly into for no particular reason other than grooves and sensational harmonies.
Interesting read as always. What I really liked was “Never better.” Only one episode into “Scandalized,” and it’s fascinating (and a little funny at times!)