How we will know if it worked
Any argument like this one should be falsifiable. If a movement cannot say in advance what success looks like, it will always be able to claim it afterward.
So here are eight numbers, grouped by whether they test the failure itself or one of the two rules that produce it. They are published every year by people with no stake in this document, and they are hard to fake. There is no deadline column, on purpose: a date invites delay. The last column is simply Done? It stays empty until it is not.
One number deserves explaining: the target for competitive House seats is 150, not 435. Americans have sorted themselves geographically, and even a perfectly neutral map leaves Manhattan and rural Wyoming uncompetitive. A third of the House genuinely in play would be a transformation.
Nobody will close a deal that lets the other side win too
| Measure | Now | Target | Done? |
|---|---|---|---|
Long-term residents without legal status | About 11M | Under 1M | |
Cents of each federal tax dollar eaten by interest | 19¢ | Under 10¢ | |
Americans over 50 with no retirement savings at all | 20% | Under 5% | |
Americans on track to keep their standard of living in retirement | 61% | 90% |
Most of us never vote in the election that decides who represents us
| Measure | Now | Target | Done? |
|---|---|---|---|
States with both an open primary and formula-drawn maps | 0 | 50 | |
House seats where November is genuinely in doubt, of 435 | 18 | 150 |
Self-dealing is legal, and failure has no consequence
| Measure | Now | Target | Done? |
|---|---|---|---|
Members of Congress and covered family trading individual stocks | Legal | Banned | |
Budgets passed on time, of the last 20 years | 0 | 20 |
Each baseline’s source and as-of date lives on the Scorecard, so the numbers can be checked without reading the section around them.
The immigration measure is met by legalizing the people already here and controlling entry going forward. If it is ever met by removing eleven million people instead, the reform failed and something worse replaced it. The two retirement measures are deliberately a pair: the first asks whether we lifted the floor, the second whether we lifted anyone above it, because a person with a hundred dollars saved is off the first list and still facing an old age they cannot afford. Definitions, baselines, and source vintages for all eight are fixed in the implementation volume.29
SOURCES AND NOTES FOR THIS SECTION
- 29.Scorecard definitions, sources, and as-of dates are fixed in the implementation volume: state election offices and Ballotpedia; Cook Political Report; congressional ethics law and filings; Congressional Research Service; DHS and Pew; CBO and Treasury; AARP; and the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. The retirement-readiness measure is the Center for Retirement Research’s National Retirement Risk Index (2022 SCF vintage: 39 percent at risk, 61 percent on track); the 90 percent target is the author’s goal.