Tenth in a series
Having outlined the theory of our case—politicians should make specific pledges on policy issues, and like-minded voters should reward them for it, making the whole transaction as tight as possible—let’s apply it to a specific policy issue: water desalination. And let’s go to a specific state where abundant water is desperately needed: Arizona.
The Grand Canyon state, having seen its population grow ten-fold in the last 70 years, should have more fresh water. Given the generally arid nature of the Southwest, that almost certainly requires mass desalination—perhaps desalinated seawater being piped in from Mexico, as has been suggested (the assumption being that California, which has been reluctant to desalinate water from the Pacific, would for sure never permit a trans-state pipeline). Arizona is hot and dry and growing--so of course it should have more fresh water. And lots of it.
One company that agrees is the Howard Hughes Corporation (HHC), which is now mostly in the real estate development biz. In 2021, HHC announced that it had spent $600 million to purchased 37,000 acres of land west of Phoenix to build a “city of the future.” However, in November 2022, something at least somewhat unexpected happened: the Democrat won the gubernatorial election, and, in addition, a Democrat won the attorney general post. So a long spell, more than a decade, of Republican control of both offices was broken. This partisan switch changed the dynamic of policymaking in the state. Suddenly, the Arizona’s Groundwater Management Act of 1980 came back into prominence.
As a result, real estate developers, including HHC, were suddenly on the backfoot. As The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2022, “The Arizona Department of Water Resources is currently conducting a study of an underground basin to determine whether the groundwater supply is adequate to support the planned population for 100 years.” Yes, that’s how the law reads, but we can immediately see the problem: What’s foreseeable in a hundred years? Answer: maybe death and taxes. But virtually everything changes, especially if technology is involved.
Arizona state senate president Warren Peterson was both arch and incisive in his commentary on the groundwater bill: “Why is it 100 years? Why isn’t it 105 years — why isn’t it 95 years? California’s (rule) is 25 years … You don’t go to the gas station and buy 100 years of gas.” And in the future, will cars run on gasoline? Or perhaps hydrogen? Or perhaps batteries? Or something different altogether? It’s hard to answer such questions looking 10 years ahead, let alone 100.
Yet here we are: a law written decades ago by trendy limits-to-growth-types—the governor back in 1980, was the late Bruce Babbitt, a Jimmy Carter-ish green—is now being invoked for the same purpose: to limit growth. Many things have changed, technologically, and yet attitudinally, the Malthusian dead hand still has its grip on Arizona's throat.
We should all be assured HHC is not without political resources, and so, in fact, at least some of the project is going forward. But what’s needed for the sake of HHC and all the people of Arizona, including future residents—is a clear-cut vision of more water. The abundance that comes from the ocean as well as, of course, the fertile human mind.
So how to secure such abundance? For starters, Arizona needs a better political framework for growth. And that means a rethinking of repressive, growth-inhibiting laws. Notably, the pro-abundance forces need a mandate. A mandate, of course, from the voters. And if the voters grant it, then they, in turn, have a right to insist that the mandate—which could be rendered as a pledge—be fulfilled. That’s the essence of the idea advanced in the previous nine installments: politicians should take pledges on specific policies, and if the voters agree to support the policies, then a contract, of a moral kind, is established. The contract might not be binding in a legal sense, but it can be binding in a political sense. So woe to him who breaks it, as was the case with George H.W. Bush, who famously broke his “read my lips” contract in 1990, and was defeated, badly, in 1992.
Beyond the bad faith of political promisers, there’s the further complexity of the parties as they are constituted. That is, they are so large, and so old that they have become “barnacled” with myriad interests and positions. There are historical and perhaps legitimate reasons for every position, and yet the cumulative effect is that the parties are hardly “pure plays.” That is, if one votes for the Democrat, or the Republican, chances are that the party will be so “bundled” on so many issues that it will be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to suss out a clear position on a single issue. Once again, this is the nature of pluralism—people have different positions and priorities. Yet our purpose in this series, Securing Elections and Good Governance, is to seek to “hack,” in a good way, the parties so that they can get better at identifying, making, and keeping promises. That's the way to improve politics: Tighten the connection between a politician's pledge and the actual follow-through: Make one follow the other, automatically. So the parties will be less messy bundles and more clean pledge machines, for the sake of making a best offer to the voters. If the voters accept the offer, then the party follows through.
In our time, Arizona’s new Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, has sought to avoid the water issue: on the one hand, she doesn’t want to get in a fight with the greens who are so powerful in the Democratic Party, on the other hand, she doesn’t want to get in the way of growth. So she says that the state “plenty of water,” and leaves it at that. Plainly, Arizona does not.
So now, looking ahead, what are the chances that such a contract on water desalination can be executed in Arizona? We can start with a look at the recent context. Where was the desalination issue in the past? Answer: It simply wasn’t prominent. In Arizona, Republicans were somewhat in favor of desal, and yet it was hardly a top issue for them in 2022. And in any case, as we have seen, the Democrat, Hobbs, won won the governorship that year.
To actually get the Arizona desal project built will enormous amounts of what physicists call activation energy. And energy comes from elections.
Most likely, we need another election--and probably more than one--to break the legal logjam on desalination, as with so many other growth issues. But let’s start with the election in front of us: the Arizona senatorial election, to be held this November. The incumbent senator, Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat-turned-independent, has supported desalination as an option, but it seems fair to say that she hasn’t made a big deal of it; one scans the news in vain for signs of recent action. In the meantime, the likely Democratic nominee, Rep. Ruben Gallego, is more of a progressive green; he wants to tax water usage, revoke well-drilling permits, and generally figure out ways to ration the scarcity—ideas very much out of the Babbitt-Carter playbook.
To be blunt about it, Democrats just don’t seem to be that in to desalination. Instead, green ideology predominates.
So now what of the likely Republican nominee this year, Kari Lake? Lake, of course, lost to Hobbs in the high-profile 2022 gubernatorial election. In that election, she supported desalination, but it was hardly front-and-center for her campaign. However, this time around, she is emphasizing the issue:
Kari Lake will make the development and construction of a system to deliver a new source of fresh water to Arizona and the West one of her major priorities. Kari knows there are multiple options that need to be explored, and the time to do so is now.
Lake continues, diving into specifics:
First, we need to form an engineering working group in partnership with the states, U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Land Management, and other appropriate agencies to examine engineering possibilities and challenges for each of the various options, to include desalination, river pipelining, and any other viable options to increase fresh water supply and availability throughout the Mountain West and Southwest.
This is good clear thinking, offering real hope that Lake will make a difference on the desalination issue if she wins. And that's good news for Arizonans who worry about jobs and incomes and well-being. To be sure, even if she is elected, Lake will be one of just two senators from Arizona, and one of 100 in the Senate, and yet if she seeks a strong mandate on desal and wins, that will send a message: the voters care about this issue. And that could echo far beyond Arizona. Which, in turn, would make it likely that Arizona could achieve the larger consensus for action that any single state needs.
We could help this process along. How so? For starters, by offering Lake opportunities, including venues, to amplify her desalination message. Any blue-collar worker, for example, should support desal for the jobs it will create. And homeowners should support it because it would allow for the amenities--including lawn sprinklers and swimming pools--that make life better. And HHC should love it.
But the larger argument of this series is this: This process should be formalized. And further boosted by technology. That's where real strength comes from: Building a structure.
It's great that Kari Lake has taken a strong pro-desal position in Arizona. But history tells us that we need more than one individual, however victorious and sincere. You need a movement. That's why political parties, and political machines, were created in the first place, and it should come as no surprise that every so often they need to be reinvented. That's what this whole series is about: reinventing electoral politics, mindful of the granular potential of CRM, AI, and all the rest.
So in Arizona and in other states, there could be a clear Desalination Faction that is so committed to desal that it becomes a force on its own to be dealt with: issuing reports and report cards, interviewing candidates, making endorsements. And then, crucially, delivering its votes to the chosen candidates and parties. That's the secret sauce of this whole idea: Our group can deliver votes. You can see them, meet them, and count them, in advance of the balloting, during the balloting, and after the balloting. This is how power is wielded and measured, and this is also how vote fraud is defeated.
It's possible to see this Desalination Faction as a constituent within the Republican Party, as is mostly the case with Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. But it's also possible to see it as an element within both parties, as was the case with pro-Israel voters, at least until very recently. Or it could be some sort of free-floating entity. The main point, again, is that it's entirely devoted to desal as an issue: doing it, protecting it, expanding it, and so on.
So this could be the template for new issues-based constituencies on a wide spectrum of issues. The parties could thus be composed of single-issue activists, always fighting (peacefully, legally) to make sure they get what they want, while forming coalitions to make sure they get a majority. That's how you not only win an election for your candidate, but win elections, plural, for your cause.
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