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Can't they just.... not do those things? Not to derail the discussion too far, but I've had similar thoughts about people who are suicidal due to optional aspects of their life such as their specific job. If you're willing to walk away from it all, why not first break all of the conventions and norms in the hope that it makes it better? What's the worst that can happen, you fail to get re-elected?
Advertise less. If you're a popular and well-established candidate who is likely to win, then you can probably win with a lot less time spend collecting donations and spending them advertising yourself. This reduces your chances of re-election in exchange for more time to either spend on yourself or on your real policy work.
Don't travel on the weekends. I assume this is based on wanting to meet and talk to people in your home district to either gather funds or votes and support. Again, this trades re-electibility for freedom.
Don't do that. In this case, you might lose support from your greater political party (and the endorsements), but if you make good policy that aligns with their goals they'll still likely vote for it.
Not really sure how to solve that, other than if you solve 1-3 then this is less of a big deal.
If you're willing to lose the job anyway, then you might as well do it ethically with lower chance of re-election since, worst case scenario, you don't get re-elected. I suppose if you're taking a more partisan perspective maybe running and losing to a candidate in the opposing party is worse than stepping down and being replaced by a newcomer from your own party. But I would think this would be made up for by actually being a better individual within your party while you have the opportunity.
I think the essence of this is a collective action problem, as hinted about in reason 3 and as pointed out by @MaiqTheTrue and @hydroacetylene, and in my view also a feedback loop problem based on how elections work. Let's assume a person as you said who is a member of congress who don't want to do too much traveling, who doesn't want to spend money on advertising, and want to focus their time and resources on lawmaking. Well, they are surrounded by people who are focused on getting re-elected (the stage), not on good lawmaking (the workplace). Their primary opponents are going to hammer them. The party won't put as much resources into them or just kinda ignore them (how many Rand Paul or Bernie Sanders can a political party really accommodate?). The opposing party can attack them on "being out of touch with the people in the district", "a dinosaur who dines on the public dime".
As @Shakes point out though, the incentives are still there for people to run for Congress. But my question after watching Fong's video would be: Are the crop of people currently running for Congress the kind we want to attract and retain in Congress?
My thesis, for what it’s worth is that this is a function of democracy and especially democratic systems with short terms of office. The way to get and keep office in any democratic system is to become really good at winning elections and doing the work is at best a sideline and at worst a problem. Having short election cycles makes this worse, as the time between elections isn’t long enough that a person can “get away” with doing the work. If you had elections once a generation, you’d have very little of this problem, because you get 20 years between campaigns and this is plenty of time to do a lot of good deep work for the people of your district or state or country without having to worry about whether or not the people are happy about it. If you were appointed, as we used to have governors appoint the senate, you’d never have to court public opinion, and therefore your ability to keep office relies on whether or not you impress the guy who appointed you or maybe those who can fire you. You can thus ignore public opinions and do what you believe is best for the country.
sounds to me like we need different states to experiment with different term durations. Federal politics would change significantly if house terms are 3 years, senate 9 years, and president 6 years.
I’m not convinced anything less than 5 years is long enough. It’s extremely short when the buildup to the election takes about a year and then you need at least half as long again to raise the funds to run. That makes, at current, the term of the house members of 24 months with 18 months of “reelection related activities” and 6 months of everything else. 6/24 is 1/4 of the term with 3/4 for running for the next election. Make it 36 months, and you’ll only have half of the term for actually doing things. Make it 5 years and it’s 60 months, and thus 7/10 of the term is for doing things and 3/10 is devoted to winning office. At this point it’s long enough that you can’t simply be good at running, you have to get things done. And at 5 years, you have long enough lead times that the results of the changes you make are going to be known and thus affect your ability to win (imagine having the effects of taxes or tax cuts coming known before we voted on whether or not to re-elect the guy who voted for it). It’s also long enough that longer term projects with upfront costs (especially infrastructure projects) become plausible.
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I mean I think especially for #3 a lot of this is baked in. Partly because of the short terms as compared to the time needed to gear up for the next election. The term is 2 years, the campaign season is about 6 months, leaving about one and a half years to actually do things. But that neglects two important aspects of the campaign: funding and name recognition. If nobody knows who you are, it’s hard to convince them to vote for you, obviously. And without a horde of gold to spend on campaigning, you lose. But both of those things take a lot of time. You have to make appearances, you have to get interviewed by the media, you have to have a social media presence, all of that stuff, and you have to get big donors to believe in you enough to fork over the cash. So this probably takes about half of the remaining time, leaving about 9 months to do anything actually productive.
My immediate suggestion is that really, if you want to get congress back to doing legislative work, you need much longer terms. A minimum of 6 years in office would allow the official the ability to stop campaigning and do the work.
I think you completely and utterly missed my main point. As an individual, you can funge re-electibility with productivity by campaigning less. Therefore, if the situation is so bad that you're considering quitting, which gives you an automatic 0% re-election chance, any amount of this tradeoff is superior to resigning.
You can in the sense that a country can simply decide not to have an army. You will end up losing to those who refuse to abide by the restrictions. You won’t campaign for 6 months, okay cool. The guy running against you is, and so he gets his name and message out there, he gets the eyes of the public, and probably wins. It’s an arms race that’s really hard to stop and it’s getting worse because of the media landscape that leads to very short attention spans and memories of what you actually did.
Most congressmen will seek reelection. It’s also part of the system that no, or very few congressmen actually serve only one term.
Okay but this conversation started specifically about people who are retiring because conditions are bad. If things are so bad that it's enough to make you quit, do this first and then you don't have to quit.
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Most Americans Do Not Know who their rep is, so it seems like they could get away with it… except for the primary voters, and in safe seats these are a very small percentage of the population which tends to have extreme views.
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