Greetings from AEI---Cuyahoga Falls Version

Friends and peeps:

Hello from Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, a wonderful town of 49,000+ denizens that is located 35 miles south of Cleveland. I am summering here, and taking in all tht is happening in neighboring areas (Akron, Cleveland, etc.).

It has been very good to get out of the Washington, DC bubble. Here the media focuses?mostly on local issues, like a local council race and the expansion of a major road; and the people are inclined to discuss sports (Browns season is approaching!) and share their experiences of the great restaurants, breweries, and other small businesses that have opened in recent years.

Oh, and they talk about the labor shortage. So many businesses are seeking workers and are escalating wages to try to get them in the door. But the shortage goes on, leading to exasperation and griping about government COVID-19 aid that is paying workers to stay home. The chain stores here can handle the higher wages more easily than small businesses, many of which struggle during normal times to compete with the big corporations. This perception about the labor force is something that President Biden and Ohio’s members of Congress need to engage—sooner rather than later.

Although I am outside of DC, my work on Congress, elections, and other topics continues. Here is some of what I’ve done lately:

“The uncertain future of the Universal Postal Union,” AEI white paper, August 9, 2021.

“Truth and governance: A new book offers an antidote to the misinformation imperiling our politics,” City Journal, August 6, 2021. (w/ Elayne Allen)

“House earmarks requests: Why, what, and who?” AEI Blog, August 5, 2021. (w/ Zachary Courser)

“Why the Electoral Count Act needs reform,” AEI Blog, July 20, 2021,

“Biden’s administrative state erases Trump’s deregulatory initiatives,” American Spectator, July 14, 2021.

“New York’s mayoral race shows that ranked choice voting works—even with snafus,” Time.com, July 10, 2021. (w/ Elayne Allen)

“New York City mayoral race shows ranked-choice voting works,” Washington Examiner, June 30, 2021.

“How Utah balances ballot access and election security,” AEI Blog, June 22, 2021.

“Could Kamala Harris steal the 2024 election for Biden — or herself?” American Spectator, June 14, 2021.

“States election adaptations during the pandemic,” AEI Blog, June 7, 2021.

“Election reform and the political right,” AEI Blog, June 1, 2021.

I continue to love hosting the Understanding Congress podcast. Recent guests have included Mark Strand of the Congressional Institute and Rep. Rodney Davis of the House Committee on Administration. Each monthly episode is a 20 minute, deep dive to ponder one of the gears of the complex contraption that is our national legislature. If you haven’t heard an episode, please give it a listen!

I also had the pleasure of launching the Election Reform Conversations series at the start of summer. The point of these quick Q&A pieces is to help us all think a little better about how America does elections and how we can improve them. To date I’ve interviewed two leading conservative thinkers (Rich Lowry and Ilya Shapiro), a Utah elections administrator (Amelia Powers Gardner), and three academics (Matthew Seligman, Zachary Courser, and Eric Helland). More of these conversations are in the works—please let me know if you know someone who I should interview.

Speaking of elections, one thing I REALLY want Congress to do is to fix the Electoral Count Act, the nebulous provisions of which invited the mischief that culminated in the January 6 mayhem on Capitol Hill. Congress wrote the law, and it can fix it. We hosted a program some weeks back that brought smart folks together to discuss how the law can be changed to ensure we do not repeat history in 2025. (You can see it here.)

And to finish on a local note, one interesting takeaway from a program we did on public trust and elections is this: folks tend to trust elections for local office more than they do elections for national office. Hence, when voting is done for the nearby Silver Lake Council election, methinks it is exceedingly unlikely there will be complaints of votes being stashed on German servers and flipped by Italian satellites. Besides, people around here tend to be pretty level-headed.

Cheers!

Kevin