The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials)

by Heather McGhee

The “we” who can’t seem to have nice things is Americans, all Americans. This includes the white Americans who are the largest group of the uninsured and the impoverished as well as the Americans of color who are disproportionately so.

Toward the end of our planning call, I cleared my throat into the speakerphone. “So, when we’re talking about the fiscal picture in 2040 or 2050, we’re also talking about a demographic change tipping point, so where should we make the point that all these programs were created without concern for their cost when the goal was to build a white middle class, and they paid for themselves in economic growth…and now these guys are trying to fundamentally renege on the deal for a future middle class that would be majority people of color?” Nobody spoke. I checked to see if I’d been muted. No—the light on the phone was still green. Finally, one of the economists spoke into the awkward silence. “Well, sure, Heather. We know that, and you know that, but let’s not lead with our chin here. We are trying to be persuasive.” I found the Mute button again, pressed it, and screamed. Then I laughed a little, and sighed. At least that economist had said the quiet part out loud for once. He was just expressing the unspoken conventional wisdom in my field: that we’d be less successful if we explicitly called out the racial unfairness or reminded people that the United States had deliberately created a white middle class through racially restricted government investments in homeownership and infrastructure and retirement security, and that it had only recently decided that keeping up those investments would be unaffordable and unwise. What was worse, I didn’t have the confidence to tell my coll...

Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest. The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds. That story was more powerful than cold economic calculations. And it was exactly what was keeping us from having nice things—to the contrary, it had brought us Donald Trump.

In my gut, I’ve always known that laws are merely expressions of a society’s dominant beliefs. It’s the beliefs that must shift in order for outcomes to change.

There is a psychic and emotional cost to the tightrope white people walk, clutching their identity as good people when all around them is suffering they don’t know how to stop, but that is done, it seems, in their name and for their benefit. The forces of division seek to harden this guilt into racial resentment, but I met people who had been liberated by facing the truth and working toward racial healing in their communities.

This is the Inequality Era. Even in the supposedly good economic times before the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020, 40 percent of adults were not paid enough to reliably meet their needs for housing, food, healthcare, and utilities. Only about two out of three workers had jobs with basic benefits: health insurance, a retirement account (even one they had to fund themselves), or paid time off for illness or caregiving. Upward mobility, the very essence of the American idea, has become stagnant, and many of our global competitors are now performing far better on what we have long considered to be the American Dream. On the other end, money is still being made: the 350 biggest corporations pay their CEOs 278 times what they pay their average workers, up from a 58-to-1 ratio in 1989, and nearly two dozen companies have CEO-to-worker pay gaps of over 1,000 to 1. The richest 1 percent own as much wealth as the entire middle class.

“We were shocked. It’s so contrary to the facts, of course, but here we are, getting calls and emails from white people who saw the headlines and thanked us for revealing the truth about racism in America!” said Norton with a dry laugh. “It turns out that the average white person views racism as a zero-sum game,” added Sommers. “If things are getting better for black people, it must be at the expense of white people.” “But that’s not the way black people see it, right?” I asked. “Exactly. For black respondents, better outcomes for them don’t necessarily mean worse outcomes for white people. It’s not a zero sum,” said Norton. As to why white Americans, who have thirteen times the median household wealth of black Americans, feel threatened by diminished discrimination against black people, neither Sommers nor Norton had an answer that was satisfying to any of us. “There’s not really an explanation,” said Professor Sommers.

The story of this country’s rise from a starving colony to a world superpower is one that can’t be told without the central character of race—specifically, the creation of a “racial” hierarchy to justify the theft of Indigenous land and the enslavement of African and Indigenous people.

The U.S. economy depended on systems of exploitation—on literally taking land and labor from racialized others to enrich white colonizers and slaveholders. This made it easy for the powerful to sell the idea that the inverse was also true: that liberation or justice for people of color would necessarily require taking something away from white people.

In 1860, the four million human beings in the domestic slave trade had a market value of $3 billion. In fact, by the time war loomed, New York merchants had gotten so rich from the slave economy—40 percent of the city’s exporting businesses through warehousing, shipping insurance, and sales were Southern cotton exports—that the mayor of New York advocated that his city secede along with the South.

A look through the colonial laws of the 1680s and early 1700s reveals a deliberate effort to legislate a new hierarchy between poor whites and the “basically uncivil, unchristian, and above all, unwhite Native and African laborers.” Many of the laws oppressing workers of color did so to the direct benefit of poor whites, creating a zero-sum relationship between these two parts of the colonial underclass. In 1705, a new Virginia law granted title and protection to the little property that any white servant may have accumulated—and simultaneously confiscated the personal property of all the enslaved people in the colony. The zero sum was made quite literal when, by the same law, the church in each parish sold the slaves’ confiscated property and gave the “profits to the poor of the parish,” by which they meant, of course, the white poor.

White women in slaveholding communities considered their slaves “their freedom,” liberating them from farming, housework, child rearing, nursing, and even the sexual demands of their husbands. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women Slaveholders in the American South reveals the economic stake that white women had in chattel slavery. In a society where the law traditionally considered married women unable to own property separate from their husbands’, these women were often able to keep financial assets in human beings independent of their husbands’ estates (and debts). In addition to relative financial freedom, slavery gave these women carte blanche to use and abuse other humans. They Were Her Property recounts stories of white women reveling in cruelties of the most intimate and perverse sort, belying the myth of the innocent belle and betraying any assumption that womanhood or motherhood would temper depravity, even toward children. An image that will never leave my mind is Professor Jones-Rogers’s description of a white mother rocking her chair across the head of a little enslaved girl for about an hour, while her daughter whipped the child, until the black girl’s face was so mangled that she would never again in life eat solid food.

The zero sum is a story sold by wealthy interests for their own profit, and its persistence requires people desperate enough to buy it.

Some white people even believe that black people get to go to college for free—when the reality is, black students on average wind up paying more for college through interest-bearing student loans over their lifetimes because they don’t have the passed-down wealth that even poorer white students often have.

And in selective college admissions, any given white person is far more likely to be competing with another white person than with one of the underrepresented people of color in the applicant pool.

When it comes to per capita government spending, the United States is near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries, below Latvia and Estonia. Our roads, bridges, and water systems get a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers. With the exception of about forty years from the New Deal to the 1970s, the United States has had a weaker commitment to public goods, and to the public good, than every country that possesses anywhere near our wealth.

The primary source of plantation wealth was a completely captive and unpaid labor force. Owners didn’t need more than a handful of white workers per plantation. They didn’t need an educated populace, whether black or white; such a thing was in fact counter to their financial interest. And their farms didn’t depend on many local customers, whether individuals or businesses: the market for cotton was a global exchange, and the factories that bought their raw goods were in the North, staffed by wage laborers. Life on a plantation was self-contained; the welfare of the surrounding community mattered little outside the closed system.

A functioning society rests on a web of mutuality, a willingness among all involved to share enough with one another to accomplish what no one person can do alone. In a sense, that’s what government is. I can’t create my own electric grid, school system, internet, or healthcare system—and the most efficient way to ensure that those things are created and available to all on a fair and open basis is to fund and provide them publicly. If you want the quality and availability of those things to vary based on how much money an individual has, you may argue for privatization—but even privatization advocates still want the government, not corporations, to shoulder the investment cost for massive infrastructure needs.

The council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their black neighbors. Of course, the decision meant that white families lost a public resource as well. “It was miserable,” Mrs. Moore told a reporter five decades later. Uncomprehending white children cried as the city contractors poured dirt into the pool, paved it over, and seeded it with grass that was green by the time summer came along again. To defy desegregation, Montgomery would go on to close every single public park and padlock the doors of the community center. It even sold off the animals in the zoo. The entire public park system would stay closed for over a decade. Even after it reopened, they never rebuilt the pool.

As someone who’s spent a career in politics, where the specter of the typical white moderate has perennially trimmed the sails of policy ambition, I was surprised to learn that in the 1950s, the majority of white Americans believed in an activist government role in people’s economic lives—a more activist role, even, than contemplated by today’s average liberal. According to the authoritative American National Elections Studies (ANES) survey, 65 percent of white people in 1956 believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country. White support cratered for these ideas between 1960 and 1964, however—from nearly 70 percent to 35 percent—and has stayed low ever since. (The overwhelming majority of black Americans have remained enthusiastic about this idea over fifty years of survey data.)

My law professor Ian Haney López helped me connect the dots in his 2014 book Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Reagan’s political advisers saw him as the perfect carrier to continue the fifty-state Southern Strategy that could focus on taxes and spending while still hitting the emotional notes of white resentment. “Plutocrats use dog-whistle politics to appeal to whites with a basic formula,” Haney López told me. “First, fear people of color. Then, hate the government (which coddles people of color). Finally, trust the market and the 1 percent.” This type of modern political racism could operate in polite society because of the way that racial resentment had evolved, from biological racism to cultural disapproval: it’s not about who they are; it’s about what some (okay, most) of them do. He went on, “Dog-whistle politics is gaslighting on a massive scale: stoking racism through insidious stereotyping while denying that racism has anything to do with it.”

In the 1980s, Republicans deployed this strategy by harping on the issue of welfare and tying it to the racialized image of “the inner city” and “the undeserving poor.” (An emblematic line from President Reagan, “We’re in danger of creating a permanent culture of poverty as inescapable as any chain or bond,” deftly suggests that black people are no longer enslaved by white action, but by their own culture.) Even though welfare was a sliver of the federal budget and served at least as many white people as black, the rhetorical weight of the welfare stereotype—the idea of a black person getting for free what white people had to work for—helped sink white support for all government.

Public commitment to college for all was a crucial part of the white social contract for much of the twentieth century. In 1976, state governments provided six out of every ten dollars of the cost of students attending public colleges. The remainder translated into modest tuition bills—just $617 at a four-year college in 1976, and a student could receive a federal Pell Grant for as much as $1,400 against that and living expenses. Many of the country’s biggest and most respected public colleges were tuition-free, from the City University of New York to the University of California system. This massive public investment wasn’t considered charity; an individual state saw a return of three to four dollars back for every dollar it invested in public colleges. When the public meant “white,” public colleges thrived.

In fact, white high school dropouts have higher average household wealth than black people who’ve graduated from college.

As part of the antigovernment fervor in the 1980s and ’90s, spending on the welfare of youth fell out of favor, but meanwhile, legislatures were tripling their expenditures on incarceration and policing. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails and prisons than they were on colleges and universities. The path to this system of mass incarceration is another story of racist policy making creating unsustainable costs for everyone.

The option to treat poverty and drug addiction as a public health and economic security issue rather than a criminal one has always been present. Will our nation choose that option now that white people, always the majority of drug users, make up a soaring population of people for whom addiction takes over? The woes that devastated communities of color are now visiting white America, and the costs of incarceration are coming due in suburban and rural areas, squeezing state budgets and competing with education. It’s not a comeuppance but a bitter cost of the white majority’s willingness to accept the suffering of others, a cost of racism itself.

The saddest, most common refrain in dozens of interviews and testimonials from borrowers is “I wish I had never gone to college.” If growing cynicism about higher education is the result of this sudden and total shift from public to private, then our entire society will bear the cost.

We pay more individually and as a nation for healthcare and have worse health outcomes than our industrialized peers, all of whom have some version of publicly financed universal coverage.

Texas leads the country in rural hospital closures, with twenty-six hospitals permanently closing or whittling down services since 2010. The state has half the hospitals it had in the 1960s.

I’d had to double-check the figure because I couldn’t believe it was so low, but in fact, if you make as little as four thousand dollars a year, you’re considered too rich to qualify for Medicaid in Texas, and even that has exclusions, as McBeath explained. “I hear this all the time: even some of my friends will go, ‘Oh, those lazy bums. They need to get off that Medicaid and go to work.’ And I go, ‘Excuse me? Who do you think’s on Medicaid?’ First of all, there’s no men on Medicaid, period, in Texas. No adult men, unless they have a disability and they’re poor. And there’s no non-pregnant women, I don’t care how poor they are.”

As a result of this and some federal policies, including budget cuts in the government sequestration that the Tea Party forced during Obama’s second term, rural healthcare is rapidly disappearing. Texas politicians’ government-bashing is both ideological and strategic; they benefit politically by stopping government from having a beneficial presence in people’s lives—as white constituents’ needs mount, the claim that government is busy serving some racialized other instead of them becomes more convincing.

If you were under sixty-five, this left only Medicaid, whose rules were mostly set by the states in another southern congressional compromise, leading to an average income eligibility cap of just $8,532 for a family of three, well below the minimum wage for one earner. If you lived in a southern state, the likelihood of your being eligible was even lower. Alabama: $3,910; Florida: $6,733; Georgia: $7,602; Mississippi: $5,647; Texas: $3,692—these are the paltry annual amounts that a parent in a southern state must earn less than in order to qualify for Medicaid in 2020; adults without children are usually ineligible.

According to an analysis conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice of 2.5 million mortgage loans made from 2004 to 2008 by Countrywide, black customers were at least twice as likely as similarly qualified whites to be steered into subprime loans; in some markets, they were eight times more likely to get a subprime loan than white borrowers with similar financial histories.

The word union itself seemed to be a dog whistle in the South, code for undeserving people of color who needed a union to compensate for some flaw in their character. As the workers spoke, I realized that it couldn’t be a coincidence that, to this day, the region that is the least unionized, with the lowest state minimum wages and the weakest labor protections overall, was the one that had been built on slave labor—on a system that compensated the labor of black people at exactly zero.

(For the past two decades, the biggest driver of retail markets in the United States has been southern-based Walmart, the country’s largest private employer by far. As Walmart expanded from Arkansas, it brought its fiercely low-wage and antiunion ethos with it—and local wages and benefits tumbled in its wake.)

White people today, particularly outside the South, often distance themselves from slavery and Jim Crow by insisting that their immigrant ancestors had nothing to do with these atrocities and, in fact, themselves faced discrimination but were able to overcome it. (In fact, this popular belief is one of the core ideas contributing to white racial resentment against black people and newer immigrants of color.) But the Irish, Germans, Poles, Slavs, Russians, Italians, and other Europeans who came to the United States underwent a process of attaining whiteness, an identity created in contrast to the blackness of unfree and degraded labor. As immigrants, these groups had an opportunity to ally themselves with abolition and, later, equal rights and to fight for better social and economic conditions for all workers. They chose instead, with few exceptions, the wages of whiteness.

But the zero-sum story proved too powerful. Every day, Irish immigrants heard from employers that they would hire either Irish or black workers for the most menial and labor-intensive jobs, whichever group they could pay the least. They heard the zero sum from Democratic Party leaders whose strategy was twofold: become the anti-black, pro-slavery foil to the Republicans and recruit Irish men as voters in large cities. Think about it: if you came to a country and saw the class of people in power abusing another group, and your place in relation to both groups was uncertain, wouldn’t you want to align yourself with the powerful group, and wouldn’t you be tempted to abuse the other to show your allegiance? As they fought to be considered more white than black, Irish people gained a reputation in black neighborhoods as brutal enforcers of the racial hierarchy, attacking those beneath them to ensure their place. “Irish attacks on blacks became so common in New York City that bricks were known as Irish confetti,” wrote historian Michael Miller Topp. In the Civil War Draft Riots that took place in New York City over four days in July 1863, more than a thousand Irish immigrants in mobs attacked the black community, including children in an orphanage. They caused so much carnage and terror that the black population of New York decreased by 20 percent afterward. The logic of the massacre, as much as one can find logic in mass atrocity, was the zero sum: the Irish rioters didn’t want...

All this progress was won against the prevailing business and conservative argument that raising the minimum wage would hurt exactly the workers who went on strike across the country—and that raising it to something approaching a living wage would be catastrophic. Instead, the result has been $68 billion more in the pockets of 22 million low-paid workers. It turns out that more money in people’s pockets is not just good for rich people when it comes to tax cuts—and that employers could have afforded it all along. There was no drop in employment in places with wage increases, and in fact, many places have found the opposite.

“I believe if you can’t have your fundamental right of voting, what do you have? You don’t have nothin’.” These words could have been spoken by a black person during the march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights in 1965, but they were spoken in 2017 by Larry Harmon, a middle-aged white Ohioan.

A recent study by political scientist Larry M. Bartels found that Republicans who score high in what he calls “ethnic antagonism”—who are worried about a perceived loss of political and cultural power for white people in the United States—are much more likely to espouse antidemocratic, authoritarian ideas such as “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it,” and “Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules to get things done.” Three out of four Republicans agreed that “it is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout,” a stunning opinion reflecting the way that decades of anti-immigrant, anti-poor, anti-black, and antigovernment political messaging can tip over into an antipathy toward democracy itself at a time of demographic change.

Possibly the most consequential of the founding racist distortions in our democracy was the creation of the Electoral College in lieu of direct election of the president. James Madison believed that direct election would be the most democratic, but to secure slave states’ ratification of the Constitution, he devised the Electoral College as a compromise to give those states an advantage. As a result, the U.S. apportions presidential electoral votes to states based on their number of House and Senate members. With the South’s House delegations stacked by the three-fifths bonus, the region had thirteen extra electors in the country’s first elections and Virginia was able to boost its sons to win eight of the first nine presidential contests. The three-fifths clause became moot after Emancipation and black male suffrage at the end of the Civil War, but the Electoral College’s distortions remain. An Electoral College built to protect slavery has sent two recent candidates to the White House, George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, who both lost the popular vote. The Electoral College still overrepresents white people, but in an interesting parallel to the free/slave tilt from the original Constitution, not all white people benefit. The advantage accrues to white people who live in whiter, less-populated states; white people who live in larger states that look more like America are the ones underrepresented today.

In the years that followed, federal troops traveled across the South registering seven hundred thousand recently freed black men. The white backlash to black suffrage was immediate, and not just by elites who saw their political privilege threatened. In Colfax, Louisiana, for example, when a pro-Reconstruction candidate supported by black voters won a fiercely contested gubernatorial race in 1872, the following spring, a mob of armed white men attacked the courthouse where the certification of the election had been held, killing about one hundred black people who were trying to defend the building, and setting the courthouse on fire. The white citizens murdered their neighbors and burned the edifice of their own government rather than submit to a multiracial democracy.

Some of the voter manipulation tactics of the post–Civil War era remain in full force today. The requirement that we register to vote at all before Election Day did not become common until after the Civil War, when black people had their first chance at the franchise.

To see what U.S. democracy would be like without the distorting factor of racism, we can look to the states that make it easiest to vote, which are some of the whitest. Oregon, for example, was judged the easiest state in which to vote by a comprehensive study. In Oregon, everyone votes by mailing in a ballot, and Oregon was the first state in the nation to adopt automatic voter registration (AVR), which means rather than making voters figure out how, when, and where to register, Oregon uses information the state already has, for instance from the DMV, to add eligible voters to the rolls. North Dakota, another largely white state, boasts of being the only state without any requirement of voter registration. Until a 2018 voter ID law aimed at Indigenous North Dakotans, you could simply have a poll worker vouch for you at the polling place. Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of black citizens, is dead last of the fifty states in terms of ease of voting.

These same billionaires funded a lawsuit, Shelby County v. Holder, to bring a challenge to the Voting Rights Act’s most powerful provision. Decided by a 5–4 majority at the beginning of President Obama’s second term, Shelby County v. Holder lifted the federal government’s protection from citizens in states and counties with long records of discriminatory voting procedures. Immediately across the country, Republican legislatures felt free to restrict voting rights. North Carolina legislators imposed a photo ID law that “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision,” because it was based on research that pinpointed the kinds of identification to which white people had greater access and then allowed only those forms of ID. Texas introduced a voter ID law that essentially let the state design its own electorate, requiring photo IDs that over half a million eligible voters lacked and specifying what kinds of IDs would be permitted (gun permits, 80 percent of which are owned by white Texans) and denied (college IDs, in a state where more than 50 percent of students are people of color). Alabama demanded photo IDs from voters, such as a driver’s license, and within a year, it closed thirty-one driver’s license offices, including in eight out of ten of the most populous black counties. Between the 2013 Shelby decision and the 2018 election, twenty-three states raised new barriers to voting. Although about 11 percent of the U.S. population (disproportionately low-in...

This is where racism becomes strategically useful. Whatever the Koch movement operatives (which now include many Republican politicians) believe in their hearts about race, they are comfortable with deploying strategic racism because popular stereotypes can help move unpopular ideas, including limiting democracy. Take for example the widespread unconscious association between people of color and criminals; anti-voting advocates and politicians exploited this connection to win white support for voter suppression measures. They used images of brown and black people voting in ads decrying “voter fraud,” which has been proven repeatedly to be virtually nonexistent and nonsensical: it’s hard enough to get a majority of people to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles to vote in every election; do we really think that people are risking jail time to cast an extra ballot? Nonetheless, the combination of the first black president and inculcation through repetition led to a new common sense, particularly among white Republicans, that brown and black people could be committing a crime by voting. With this idea firmly implanted, the less popular idea—that politicians should change the rules to make it harder for eligible citizens to vote—becomes more tolerable.

One pair of political scientists stated, “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” They conclude that “in the United States…the majority does not rule—at least in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.” Another political scientist found that “senators’ [policy] preferences diverge dramatically from the preference of the average voter in their state…unless these constituents are those who write checks and attend fundraisers.” Still another wrote that the preferences of people “in the bottom one-third of the income distribution have no discernable impact on the behavior of their elected representatives.”

This tiny coterie of elite donors who hold such sway over our political process do not look or live like most Americans. Obviously, they are wealthier than the rest of us; of donors who gave more than five thousand dollars to congressional candidates in 2012–2016, 45 percent are millionaires, while millionaires comprise only 3 percent of the U.S. population. As a team of New York Times reporters described in an exposé of the 158 families who dominated funding for the 2016 presidential election, “They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters.” The big-money campaign finance system is like so much of modern-day structural racism: it harms people of color disproportionately but doesn’t spare non-wealthy white people; it may be hard to assign racist intent, but it’s easy to find the racist impacts.

Two-thirds of Americans consider it a major problem that “wealthy individuals and corporations” have “disproportionate influence” in our elections. Though the impact is most acutely felt among people of color whose voices are the least represented, the reach is widespread enough that there’s a powerful Solidarity Dividend waiting to be unlocked for all of us. After a history of high-profile corruption cases earned the state the nickname “Corrupticut” and led to the imprisonment of a sitting governor in 2004, Connecticut passed a sweeping campaign finance reform measure. The Connecticut Citizens’ Election Program offered candidates the chance to qualify for public grants to fund their campaigns if they could collect enough grassroots donations from people in their district, in increments of five to one hundred dollars. In the first years after the reform, the change was dramatic. Candidates spent most of their campaigning time hearing the concerns of their constituents instead of those of wealthy people and check-writing lobbyists. James Albis, representative of East Haven, recalled, “I announced my reelection bid in February, and by April, I was done fundraising. So, from April to November, I could focus only on talking to constituents. Without public financing, I would have been fundraising through that entire period.” Corporate lobbyists had less sway over legislators’ agendas. Reform lifted the wealth requirement from running for office, too. “Public financing definitel...

Connecticut’s Solidarity Dividend was almost immediate. In the first legislative cycles after public financing, the more diverse (by measures of race, gender, and class) legislature passed a raft of popular public-interest bills, including a guarantee of paid sick days for workers, a minimum wage increase, a state Earned Income Tax Credit, in-state tuition for undocumented students, and a change to an obscure law championed by beverage distributor lobbyists that resulted in $24 million returning to the state—money that could contribute to funding the public financing law. Despite regular efforts to curtail it, Connecticut’s Citizens’ Election Program has endured for over a decade, highly popular with both Connecticut residents and candidates, 73 percent of whom opted into the system in 2014. This kind of reform has national popular support as well; among the most potent opposition messages is that it’s taxpayer money for politicians. Senator Winfield has a response to that: “Yeah, we are using the public’s money, but it’s the public’s government, and if you want it to remain the public’s government, you might have to use the public’s money. Otherwise, you’re going to have government by the few who have been paying for government.”