Colin Moore finds Hawaii politics unusual but fascinating

Colin Moore describes local politics as fascinating — the players, the one-party system, the low voter turnout, even the sign-waving.

On the mainland, where political billboards are the norm, people don’t line the highways holding signs emblazoned with candidates’ names and slogans.

“It’s one of my very favorite things about Hawaii politics, that tradition” of sign waving, said Moore, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii who also heads UH’s Public Policy Center.

But even after teaching in Hawaii for about five years, he still hasn’t figured out the proper response to sign wavers when you’re not a fan of their candidate.

“It’s always a bit awkward when people are waving signs for someone you don’t support,” Moore said. “Do I wave? Do I just ignore them?”

Sign waving signals the start of election season here, a time when Moore puts on his analyst cap for local news media, surveying the poltical landscape — both locally and nationally.

This political season, Donald Trump’s strong presidential bid has made fools of political scientists like himself who predicted the billionaire’s campaign would eventually fade into the background.

Moore, 36, said Trump’s support in large part comes from disenchanted Republicans.

“You see this gaping divide between the party establishment and rank-and-file Republicans, and this seems to have caught them completely off guard, but Trump has managed to tap into people’s genuine frustration with the Republican party,” Moore said.

Moore grew up in Redding, Calif., earned his bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in Philadelphia and his doctorate from Harvard University.

He grew to love Hawaii during the month he spent here doing research for his Harvard dissertation, which is also the subject of his book, “American Imperialism and the State, 1893-1921,” which will be published later this year.

“I always said if I ever had a chance to come back, I would in a heartbeat,” said Moore, who lives in Manoa. “I love Hawaii.”

Question: Could you tell me about your work here?

Answer: I just started as the director of the UH Public Policy Center in January.

Prior to that I was a political science professor. I still am. This is just half my job.

Half my job is back in political science. … I teach the American Government class. I teach the class on elections, which is a ton of fun. I teach the Political Science Methods class, where we do public opinion polling and stuff like that. … I also teach an introduction to public policy at the graduate level.

Q: What for you is the most fun to teach?

A: My very favorite class to teach is the elections class, because it’s an elective and the students are excited about it. They end up thinking about politics in slightly different ways.

You can see them become much more sophisticated consumers of news over the course of the class. And it draws them into some other things. People who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in statistics, for example, but who love politics, all of a sudden see the relevance. …

In that class … every student has to work volunteering for a campaign. They can pick anybody, but just to get a sense of what it’s like, what are campaigns like. Most of them are a little reluctant to do it at first, but after they’ve done it they really enjoyed the experience. They get to meet some cool, dedicated people.

I think more than anything, for a variety of reasons, I think millennials can be very, very cynical because they are children of the Great Recession and they see politicians as controlled by a special interest or corrupt. Having some exposure to that, working for them and their campaigns, I think it helps them to see that most of these people are dedicated public servants and really care.

Q: Well, that’s good, right? We need a little less cynicism.

A: Cynicism is good, but if you get to the place where you think it’s just hopeless, especially here where we have such low voter turnout, it’s good to push back on that a little bit.

The other class that surprised me, which has turned out to be a lot of fun to teach, which is a required class, which none of the students ever want to take but they have to, is the Social Science Methods class — helping them figure out how they can do their own research to answer questions they have.

Q: Do you have some examples of some of the research they have done?

A: One of my favorites was students who wondered: Does sign-waving work?

Sign waving is this central thing in Hawaii politics. It really doesn’t exist on the mainland in the same way. But it has this legendary status here where if you’re not sign-waving, there is something wrong with your campaign. …

They started this design for a project where they went to talk to candidates. They tried to see which candidates had more signs at different corners and whether that had any relationship to their final success.

It’s one of these things that you’d need more resources than they had. The fact that they asked that question and tried to figure out a way to study it, I just thought was fantastic.

Q: What was their outcome?

A: Their outcome was that, yes, it matters, but mainly because of the way voters perceive sign-waving.

If no one was sign-waving, it wouldn’t matter. But if your campaign isn’t sign-waving, it means there is something lacking. That was kind of their tentative conclusion. It was a great question, a really fun one.

Q: Let’s go to national politics right now. It’s a crazy election season. How do you explain what is happening?

A: The Trump candidacy has really made a fool of a lot of us political scientists who said there’s no way his campaign would have success, that the party really decides who nominates. That has been shown, at least in this case, not to be true.

I was the one who was saying months ago that Donald Trump is going to fade. Everyone was (saying that). This is what’s so fascinating about it. …

We know why people find him so compelling. But what we’re seeing, I think, is nothing less than a civil war in a major political party, which really hasn’t happened since maybe the early 20th century — probably before that. … I think it’s an illustration of how out of touch and unresponsive American politics has become to the needs of most citizens. …

The success of Trump and to some extent the success of (Bernie) Sanders show people’s deep anger at a political process they see as unresponsive to their concerns.

Q: What about local politics? Do you follow it much?

A: I think local politics in Hawaii is fascinating.

Q: Why?

A: This fact that we have this one-party state makes it really difficult to understand where the cleavages are, where people disagree. That fuels this perception here that everything is decided behind closed doors because the Democratic Party is so dominant.

Unlike in a state with a healthier two-party system, you don’t see a lot of public disagreements or a lot of public fights, at least in the Legislature. That can make it difficult to figure out, as an outsider, really what’s going on, what are the true disagreements.

Q: What do you think of Gov. David Ige?

A: I think that Gov. Ige is a proud technocrat and it’s unique to have a chief executive who clearly delights in the details of policy, who really is genuinely interested, in my opinion, in some of the most boring aspects of state business, like procurement and IT. And so in that respect I think he’s playing a very important role.

In an American political system where the temperature runs so hot right now, to have Gov. Ige, who is such a calm presence, is refreshing.

There are costs to that, too. It’s hard sometimes to figure out what the vision of the state is. There’s a lot of focus on details, but where he’d actually like to move us is sometimes unclear.

I really have tremendous respect for him. … He just believes in making the state more efficient and improving policies at the margins, not trying to do anything grand. You see this in his policy decisions, you see this in his personality.

Q: Could you tell me a little more about your role at the Public Policy Center?

A: The dream for the center is both to make it a clearinghouse for work that people are already doing on Hawaii and making that work more accessible to journalists and to the public.

We’re working on a new website. … There are people who do lots of work on Hawaii, but it tends to be buried in journals and never sees the light of day. So that’s one goal of the policy center, more accessibility to more of the work that is being done.

My dream, if we can get the resources, is to grow it so that we could have perhaps a survey research center here, because we really do need more data about how people think about local politics in Hawaii.

You’ll get polls, like when the paper does them, but there’s not enough of it. This is partly why so much about Hawaii politics is driven by myths and tradition. I think even compared to other states, we have less data. We don’t have the ability to survey people in a regular way, which I think would really be helpful in designing state policy.

As the center grows, I am hoping we can be more of a resource to the state Legislature. … I would like (to) hire more people in the next few years to do that work, to evaluate homeless programs, to evaluate what it would mean to institute a paid family-leave policy here, what would long-term care programs for the elderly look like … to really be a center for studying the policy impact of those proposals.

Q: What do you think of the governments’ response to the homeless problem?

A: I’m glad it’s being taken so seriously now — finally. I don’t understand how it became an emergency because it didn’t appear overnight. It’s not a storm.

It became an emergency because the public became so furious about it and the lack of responsiveness in the years past. …

In some ways I think it’s good (to declare an emergency) because this allows the state to respond to this very important problem, but it’s troubling because what it suggests to me is that our state bureaucracy has become so unresponsive, so unable to confront a major public policy challenge, the only way to do that is declare an emergency, an emergency that frees them from procurement rules and other things that hamper their efforts. We need to fix that problem.

Q: What about transparency in government?

A: We’re probably better than average … I think the thing that is the most surprising, troubling to me about state politics here is the lack of participation.

What I see is dangerously low voter turnout. That’s a symptom. Voter turnout isn’t so much the problem, but a symptom of some general disengagement with the government.

Q: How do you address that?

A: There is no silver bullet.

Allowing people to register online is great. Allowing people to mail in ballots I think it’s fine.

People vote because they see it as a social obligation at the end of the day. … But doing things like ending an emphasis on civics or social studies in schools, all these things contribute to a general disengagement. … It needs to be acknowledged as a crisis, something that could eventually undermine the legitimacy of our democracy.

How low does voter turnout have to get before you begin to question how much democratic legitimacy the state has? We’re certainly not there yet, but you could get to that point. …

If you want the community to participate in a meaningful way, then you need to have community meetings and forums. Not just as places to explain to the public what’s being done or as opportunities for people to complain and then be ignored. … (But) giving people a sense that important decisions are made with their input while they’re there in the room, that they’re part of the process.