@djc States are the very worst level of government from a democratic perspective. Do you know who your state reps / senators are? The public pays some attention to the national, and some attention to the local, but the state belongs only to funded, motivated interests. 1/

@djc You can argue that time to show up at meetings is a bad way to allocate influence (I actually have mixed feelings about that one, showing up is a relatively egalitarian way to allocate influence), but how influence is allocated at the state level is much worse. 2/

@djc YIMBYs misguide themselves I think by taking a thing great in a specific case (we can circumvent the busybodies at the state level if we are well funded and organized, which we are!) without thinking through how it generalizes (funded and organized interests can run roughshod of individuals by operating at a level and scale inaccessible and foreign to them, less widely understood and democratically accountable even then the Federal government). 3/

@djc If it was up to me, the state level would not exist at all. We would elect national level officials (there's one national center to which we all pay attention), and local officials (we have a place where we are meaningfully enfranchised and can participate in democratic decisionmaking). The state level is a place for mischief. /fin

@djc (i'd also want to reform away elections for dog catchers and school board members and judges and all of that. meaningful democratic attention is a scarce resource. you don't get "more democracy" by creating an unaccountable blizzard of electeds to whom or information about whom most citizens have no access.)