Wednesday morning I posted “You Can Get There From Here, Or: The Theorem in the Tagline,” a piece I had been meaning to write for fourteen years. It is a short essay about why McKelvey-Schofield — the result that majority preference cycles can wander anywhere in the policy space once procedural constraints fall away — is the theorem the blog’s tagline has always been pointing at. I finished it Tuesday night, posted it Wednesday, and felt the kind of small satisfaction one feels after finally writing down a thing that has been sitting in the back of one’s head for over a decade.
Wednesday afternoon, the Supreme Court handed down Louisiana v. Callais.
Reading about the decision, I did not expect to read Justice Alito describing the legislature’s districting task in the language of an algorithm — “all the parameters in the algorithm that the mapmaker uses,” the criteria the legislature might assign priorities to, the resulting structure-induced equilibrium of voter opportunity. He uses the word “algorithm” without scare quotes. He works through the parameter space. He arrives, in legal register, at the McKelvey-Schofield observation: when procedural constraints are relaxed, the set of reachable outcomes expands, and what voters are constitutionally entitled to is whatever falls out of the relaxed constraint set.
I had just spent the morning publishing this argument as a foundational starting point of Math of Politics.
I will not pretend this was uncanny in any genuinely spooky way. Formal theorists have been pointing at McKelvey-Schofield since 1976. The Roberts Court has been working through the Voting Rights Act since at least 2013. Sooner or later, a constitutional opinion was going to recapitulate the structure. What I will admit is that the timing was a strange piece of editorial luck. The morning post became, retroactively, the formal preface to the constitutional opinion that landed hours later.
Then, sitting at a hotel desk in the city I went to high school in, at a conference on Behavioral Models of Politics (here’s a recent iteration of this), I wrote the follow-up. It went up Friday, under the title “You Can Still Get There From Here (Just Not This Way).” The diptych was not planned as a diptych. It became one because a constitutional case slid into the slot between the morning post and what would have been an unrelated Friday post. I am told by people who study creative work that this kind of thing — the outside event arriving in time to make a planned thing into part of a larger thing — is what makes the work feel coherent in retrospect, even when the maker had no idea it was coming. I will take it.
One last note, since this is a Dispatch and Dispatches are where the seams show. I had thought, before reading the opinion, that I would be writing about how the Court “weakened” Section 2. After reading it, I realized that frame would have understated the operation by a full order of magnitude. The Court did not weaken a statute. It broke a structural link in a body of argument, and the cascade was automatic. The frame I went with on Friday came directly from a paper I wrote in 2008 that I had not thought about in years. Sometimes the most useful thing in your filing cabinet is the thing you put there before you knew you would need it.
The dispatch is late because I was traveling. The traveling, in the end, gave me the time to write it.