S5E07: Overturned Tables: Primaries: Nick Troiano

This is Larry Lessig. If there's one issue that we all see as fundamental within American politics today, it is the polarization that has overwhelmed the political system. And not just polarization. The problem with American politics is not just that there are Republicans and Democrats and that they believe different things or bring different values into the political process. The problem with American politics is the hate that comes with these differences. We don't just disagree with the other side, we hate the other side. Negative partisanship, as political scientists put it, has risen dramatically in the course of the 21st century, which means that party identity is central to most of us and identity is the hardest thing for anyone to work against. Now, this view is not universal among political scientists. There are those that argue that there's not been a rise in negative partisanship across all demographics at least. But the dominant view, not just among academics, but among concerned sorts generally, is that negative partisanship is exploding as support for interracial marriage has risen to almost universal in America, 94% in one recent poll. An increasing number of parents are extremely reluctant that their children should marry somebody from a different political party. For old people like me, it's impossible to imagine that the kind of hate that used to attach to race now attaches to partisanship. So we're going to talk a lot about this issue in this season, finding causes for this pathology in many different corners of our culture. But the source we're going to focus on in this episode is the party primary. Does the way in which we select candidates to run in a general election increase polarization in both America and in Congress specifically? Or put differently, are party primaries a primary cause of the division we see across America? My guest, if a zoom room can be described as a location for a guest, is Nick Choriano. Nick is the executive director of Unite America, one of the nation's most important cross partisan reform organizations. Unite America believes in two fundamental principles. Number one, all eligible voters should have the freedom to vote for any candidate, regardless of party, in every taxpayer funded election. And number two, a candidate should be required to earn a majority of the vote in order to win an election. And these two principles have led the organization Unite America to push for three key reforms. Number one, nonpartisan primaries. Number two, instant runoff or RCV elections, ranked choice voting elections. And number three, independent redicting. Nick's book, which will be the focus of our conversation today, doesn't come out until February 2024. It is titled the Prim Solution. Obviously primary in both the sense of the first reform that we need as well as a reform of primaries. We'll talk about what needs to be first, but more importantly, we'll talk about the gains we could get if we could make this one change happen. This too is an overturned table which we could constitutionally write. Nick is a native of central Pennsylvania, as am I. He ran for Congress in the district that I grew up in long after I had in 2014. He was both the youngest candidate in that cycle to run for Congress and the most competitive independent congressional candidate anywhere in the nation in over two decades. After that raise, that loss, that bullet dodged, he helped launch Run for America, a movement to recruit young people to run for office in America. And then he joined unite America in 2016, where he has caused plenty of good trouble since. Nick earned his BA and MA in American Government from Georgetown University. He is one of the most important innovators in political reform right now in America, and I'm so grateful for the chance to talk to him.

Enjoy the conversation. So, Nick, thanks so much for talking to me. You tried to become a Congressman in my former hometown as the youngest candidate running in the nation, running as an independent in a solidly Republican district, as I remember it. And you were successful in the sense that you got more votes as an independent than anyone else, but not successful in the sense of becoming a member of of Congress, assuming becoming a member of Congress would be success. But I want to start by you telling us a little bit about that experience and what it taught you about where we are in American politics right now.

Well, thanks for having me, Larry. And I look back at that nearly 10 years ago and I feel like I may have dodged a bullet on that one. Nonetheless, it was such a formative experience for me that has informed me all of my work in election reform since. The catalyst for my running as an independent was having spent the prior few years studying and working in Washington, D.C. and particularly being active on federal budget issues and concerns about the long term fiscal trajectory of the country. And when I saw that sensible bipartisan proposals like with the Simpson Bowles Commission put forward were failing and instead we were left with government shutdowns and debt ceiling debacles, much like we are today, I decided to hang up my issue advocacy hat and enter the sort of political arena as a candidate. Because my Congressman I viewed as sort of emblematic of the problem at the time. And long story short, I emerged from that campaign with a clear sense that while we might not have the best people in office, it's certainly the case that it's not just the People that are the problem, but really the incentives that they're responding to. And I say that because the district I ran in was a solidly Republican district. It was gerrymandered to be that way. And we had closed party primaries. Only Republicans could participate, not Independents or Democrats. And so I was Republican at the time, but it was clear I had no path in that primary and I wasn't a Democrat. And so I decided that I'd try a new way. And the realization was the congressman's behavior reflected on his pathway to office, which was just having to win out less than 10% of voters in the district, and that there really wasn't a threat of any competition coming from the middle or coming from the Democratic side. And so all he had to do was protect his right flank. And then, so when I didn't win that race, I left with conviction that solving this electoral and systemic problem was the new mission I'd commit myself to.

Okay, so, but there are two parts to that story. One part is that it was a gerrymandered district to be a safe seat district, as you say in the book, 83% of seats in the House of Representatives are safe seats, which means that the only race that matters is the primary, because whoever the party puts up, the other side is going to lose. And so one part of the story is gerrymandered districts, and the other part of the story is once the districts are gerrymandered and you have a closed primary, the only way you're going to win is by appealing to the most engaged of that district, Most engaged in that district. But explain why it is that in a gerrymander district, it's only the extremists that benefit. I mean, the extremists are not the most populace among the people in the party. So why are they the ones on both the left and the right, who are going to benefit when there's gerrymander district like that?

Well, as you point out, when the district is gerrymandered, the November election is essentially over before it even begins. And so the only election of consequence in my home district, like 83% of districts nationally, happens in the party primary. Now, primaries are traditionally lower turnout. Fewer people are paying attention. Earlier in the year, lower information voters often sort of defer the decision of who should be the party nominees to others. And so the folks that tend to dominate these elections and do turn out are those that are most engaged in politics and tend to be more partisan and ideological. And so if you're a candidate running in a Primary, you know, that's your base. You know, those are the voters that you're trying to persuade, the ones that might be nightly turning into Fox News on the Republican side or turning into MSNBC on the Democratic side. And moreover, of those who vote in primaries, it's really only the voters that participate in the dominant party primary that matter. And so it's just in my district, for example, again, it's just those Republican voters whose voices matter. And so all the incentives as a candidate and then as elected official is to pander to that base. And moreover, you know that the only threat that you have is someone else running further to the extreme as you. That's the only vulnerability that you have in a primary is if someone's outflanking you to the ideological extreme. And the only groups that are likely to participate in the primary in terms of outside organizations that might spend money or might organize people in your district are likely to be single issue groups that are more ideological and partisan in nature. And so this is the force in our politics that are essentially pulling both parties to their respective extremes.

But the part of the story which is important that people have in their heads that makes the story you've just said true is that it just turns out that the most politically engaged are also the most extreme in the partisan sense. It's both true on the left and on the right. So one without knowing that might say, well, I don't know, appeal to the people in the middle and then they'll show up and then you'll win because you're appealing to the people in the middle. The reality is those people don't show up in the same proportion as the people at the extreme. So this is why this game is so important.

It's true. And many of them can't. You know, one of the more depressing experience I've had in American politics is getting a phone call from my parents who are registered independents, saying I showed up to the polls today like you told me, but I couldn't vote because I'm not registered with a party and it wasn't evident to them. And I said, this is our democracy. This is the leading democracy in the world where you literally show up to your polling place on election day and can't cast a ballot. Something is dramatically wrong with that picture.

Okay, so this is related to the second part, which is the closed primary part. But I want to make sure that we complete the thoughts about the relevance of the 83%. One way of understanding the 83% of the districts that are gerrymandered to be safe seats. And some of them aren't really properly gerrymandered in the sense of the pejorative sense of that term. I mean, here in Massachusetts, if you talk to people who draw districts, there's just literally no way to draw districts in Massachusetts to make it so Republicans have a fair shot. I mean, if you had something like multi member districts with ranked choice voting, then Republicans could have a shot in Massachusetts. But just the population and the way it's sorted in Massachusetts, any set of districts you draw consistent with the one person, one vote requirement are going to produce Democratic districts. So these are not gerrymandered in the pejorative sense. They're just districts that turn out to be Democratic. But if we imagine moving from 83% that are not competitive to a lower number that were not competitive and, and we instead thought about the competitive districts, even in the competitive districts, is it the case that people are being won over by persuasion or is partisan extremism operating there too to make sure that those people turn out and vote?

Well, first I would say to your point that redistricting plays a role in how many seats are safe, but the larger role is our own geographic self sorting. And what I mean by that is over the last 25 years, we've lost about 77 what used to be competitive districts in our country. And the Cook Political Report found that about 60% of those vanishing districts was due to the way that the population itself has sorted between more progressive voters living in urban areas, more conservative voters living in rural areas. And so even if you were to wipe partisan gerrymandering off the face of the map, we would still face this challenge that most of our districts, the vast majority of them would be, would be safe. And even in the remaining competitive ones. To your question, this problem of partisan primaries and extremism still plays a big role because those members can still be primary and out of office and that first round of voting before they even get back to the general election. They have probably one of the toughest jobs in politics because they both have to appease their base and worry about appealing to crossover voters in that general election. And I think that dynamic is oftentimes why you would expect in our Congress even today to see cross partisan coalitions, maybe not even on issues on electing a speaker for, for example. And the reason why you don't is because even those members that are having to cross the aisle to win votes are still worried about being primaried out of office if they were to really Collaborate across the aisle.

Right. So one concern is the primary. But even more depressing is even if the primary is not an issue in the general election, the most important issue is whether you turn out your voters, and you turn out your voters by motivating them. And here again, extremism might be the most effective motivation so that you still have an incentive, even in a competitive district, to appeal to the extremes, because it both protects you in the primary and it motivates your base to turn up and vote. And that might be enough to overwhelm the base on the other side.

I think that's right. And that reflects sort of where we are today in this sort of, to borrow a Lee Dropman phrase, a doom loop of our politics. Because as things grow more divisive and polarized, the people who may hold sort of nuanced views on issues or not be all that motivated by partisanship, tune out and don't participate. Right. And so what are you left with as the sort of partisan tribes and warriors on both sides, very most reliable votes. And so really, since the early 2000s, we've seen parties and candidates adopt strategies more towards turning out their base than trying to win over the sort of marginal voter that is closer to the ideological center.

Okay, so what's great about this book, the primary solution, is that we're thinking about feasible, and you want to think of the most feasible reforms that could begin to address this pathology. The pathology, of course, is bigger than just the voting system. What I love about the book is you also talk about media, and we're going to talk about that as well. But the question is what levers could we move to address the problem we agree is the problem, which is the polarization. Before we get to the primary solution, which is a lever that you want to move, I want to ask you about one that I don't think is feasible in the United States, but if it in fact did happen in the United States, whether you think that would also address the problem that you're thinking about. That is the Australian solution of making it that everybody must vote. If everybody must vote, then your incentives as a candidate change, because you're not going to win just by appealing to that 10% at the extreme, you've got to appeal to a much wider range of people. Do you think that would be, you know, if I could, we could flip a switch and we had mandatory voting or universal participation in the way the Australians do, that part of the problem you're talking about would be. Would be removed, I think, to the

extent that we have higher voter turnout. You would hope that it's also more representative of the entire electorate. And in that case, I think more people voting obviously shifts an incentive to candidates to want to court more voters across the spectrum and would improve their incentive to represent the whole electorate. The challenge is that even if more people vote and simply turn out, not every election matters. Or is that consequential in our current system because of the underlying pathologies that you described? So I think higher turnout would mitigate the problem but not solve it by itself.

Okay, then let's shift to the parts of the reforms that would begin to address the problem. This is primaries. There are a couple dimensions to the system of primaries that you're talking about, but it's first important for people to recognize. And if you're not an election law geek, it might not be obvious to you, but the first thing you talk about, and I think it's very powerful, is this is a new part of the system of democracy that we have. We haven't always had primaries. And they were created by progressives who were looking for a good way to solve what they then saw the problem of democracy to be. Tell us how they came about. What was the origin story of partisan primaries?

Well, it's true that when our founders crafted our constitution, they did not contemplate partisan primaries at the time because they didn't even contemplate having political parties. They feared them. And so primaries came about as a method of party candidate nomination in the early 20th century when the old system that was used began to come under some strain. And so throughout the 1800s, for example, parties used caucuses and conventions to select their standard bearers who would go on to the general election. And oftentimes those caucus and convention system got corrupted by the party machine. These were the proverbial smoke filled rooms that party bosses would use to hand select candidates, and oftentimes use that to prop up this patronage system and the corruption that it entailed. And so there was outside agitation from progressive reform reformers to reform the party machines. And one way they thought of doing that was to get rid of caucuses and conventions and to empower all voters to directly participate in direct primaries. What was also interesting, I learned in researching the book, was that it wasn't only this outside agitation that catalyzed the direct primary system. It was also from within the parties themselves, as they realized that the growing population of the country caused it to be harder to hold these caucuses and conventions, and that they were beginning to be sort of fractured among the different factions within the parties. So the parties themselves saw an incentive of moving towards a direct primary to address those problems. So 1846 was the first time back to our home state of Pennsylvania, where Crawford county used a direct primary at the local level. It began to bubble up at the local level to the state level. And governor Bob La Follette championed the direct primary in Wisconsin in 1904. And what gives me a lot of inspiration about the kind of innovation we can have today is that within a decade of Wisconsin becoming the first state to adopt primaries, a majority of states followed suit and did so. So there was this sort of contagion effect across the country, and there was big hope for what these primaries would do. Right. The progressive reformers thought it would democratize our elections and cause our elected officials to be much more representative. And the parties thought we'd get much better candidates this way because we'd avoid these factions. And all sides thought, well, we can also root out corruption by doing this because no longer would those party bosses have all the control. And here we are about 120 years later, and unfortunately, all three of those premises have now demonstrated to be false.

Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about the Crawford county example you describe, I believe this is in your book, right? They tried it and then they went back on it because it turned out not to be as great as they thought it would be. But it's certainly true. The rest of the country marched forward and primaries became a default. Almost kind of an entitlement conception of an entitlement for a party. Now, when it starts in the party primary, closed party primary world, and you imagine a large percentage of people identifying with the party, it might not seem terribly troubling that they get a primary, we get a primary, and the vast majority are represented in that. But the real issue today is that so many people don't think of themselves as a member of either party. In a state like Massachusetts, the vast majority are unaligned and they don't consider themselves a member of a party, Even though we vote Democratic, primarily in a context of a world where you've got people who are not actually members of a party, yet the party, state run, state funded primary, is choosing who the candidates are. This begins to create this question about whether the state ought to be supporting a system which is having the effect that you're describing, which is. Which is that it's leading to polarization. There's another dynamic, though, that I want to make sure we flag. You talk about it, but I think we Ought to think about it more generally. You described the white primary in the south. Texas in particular was the location of the most litigation around that. The way the white primary worked is that in a world where the Democratic party was the only relevant party, the Democratic party declared that only white people could vote in the Democratic party. Then they selected candidates. And even though it was hard for black people to register and to vote, in theory they were still allowed to vote in the general election. You could imagine a defender of the white primary saying, there's no problem here. You get to choose who the elected official is because come the general election you get to vote. We all have an intuition that there's something deeply wrong with that. Even if in the general election I have a chance to vote, it doesn't mean I actually participate in a democracy because the candidate was selected with this obviously flawed filter up front. That's the general problem that you're seeing with this primary system that we, yes, we have a chance to choose between two candidates who have been selected by this very exclusionary system that doesn't actually represent the public. And for the same reason why the white primary was deeply troubling, we should think of the partisan primary as deeply troubling. Is that a fair characterization?

I do. I think the primaries have been used in awfully discriminatory ways in the past and we're seeing a different version of that play out today. And when the Supreme Court ultimately struck down the white primary, they basically found that it was tantamount to the election. It's an integral part of the taxpayer funded election process. And so it was no longer tenable for the parties to discriminate based on race. However, fast forward to today, it still has that effect in some places. You can imagine if 90 plus percent of black voters today are supporting a Democratic candidate if they live in a district in which the Republican primary is the only primary that matters. We're talking about, you know, differences of maybe words rather than in meaning of what the system, how the system impacts voters today. And you have about 15 states right now that do not guarantee a right for unaffiliated voters to participate, and that disenfranchises more than 13 million Americans. So we often focus on issues of voter suppression. When states are removing drop boxes or eliminating a day or two of early voting, that's bad. What's also bad is when states actually prohibit people from casting ballots. And that doesn't, in my view, get enough attention as it should today.

So among the party primaries across the country, how many are open and how many are closed?

So there are. Of all 50 states. You have five states, which I'm sure we'll get to, that no longer have party primaries. You have about 15 states each that fall into one of three categories. Fifteen states that are completely open, meaning it doesn't matter how you're registered to vote. You can pick either the Democratic or Republican ballot. And those are mostly states where people don't even register by party affiliation. Then you have a second category of 15 states where Ds can only vote in the D primary, Rs can only vote in the Rs, but independents can choose either one. We call that a semi open primary. And then you have 15 states that are closed primaries in which Ds vote in the Democratic primary. Rs do the same in theirs, but independents cannot participate by right. And in about four of those states, the Democratic parties have said, okay, independents, you can vote in ours, but those happen to be red states where those are not the primaries that are actually mattering. So 15 states are the worst offenders, and about five states are where we see the most hope.

Now, what's striking is, I mean, from a political science standpoint, you would think that that was a great experiment, that we had very different systems across the country, four different systems. I mean, the sample and the one you're aiming for is small but very big differences among the other three, three categories. Is there? I mean, I imagine there is, but it's not clear in the book. So I'm asking you to talk more about it. Like, is there a lot of empirical support for the hopeful conclusion that you have here, or is it too early to say what exactly the consequence of moving the direction you want it to be would be?

I would say it depends what our goal is and what metric we're using. On one hand, the most basic goal is that every voter should be treated fairly and have a voice in who they can support and get elected. So on its face, the open primary and the nonpartisan primary which exists in those five states have higher voter turnout because they enfranchise all voters to participate. That's a win, the higher bar. And the reason why I think primary reform has gotten such traction and support is because it also offers hope to depolarize our politics, to actually sort of defang the political extremes. And we see the biggest difference between the five states that have abolished party primaries and have a single nonpartisan primary and the 45 that don't. Not as much of a difference between the states that simply allow independents to vote and Those that don't. And in the first category, the difference is significant. There was a political scientist at usc, Christian Gross, who looked at this and found that among new members of Congress being elected from states without party primaries based on roll call voting, they're about 18 percentage points less extreme than from states that have party primaries. My colleague Richard Barton, who's a political scientist as well, found that if all states voted the same way as those five did, we would be able to roll back polarization to about the turn of the 21st century, which isn't a panacea. We were still divided around the late 90s and early 2000s, but not compared to where we are today. We weren't talking about democracy's death spiral or election denialism or et cetera. To me, again, that would be a win

that's really powerful. It's also important, though you've referenced Lee Dropman. I think it's valuable to think about the overlay of the issue that Drupman is concerned about in the context of parties, which is the number of parties. And the point that Lee makes and others have made this point too is the history of America is actually mainly the history of four parties, not two parties. And the four parties were the liberal Republicans and the conservative Republicans Republicans and the liberal Democrats and the conservative Democrats. And that the reality of having four effective parties is that the strategy of doing anything in Washington had to be a strategy of cross partisan plays. I mean, Lyndon Johnson, when he was majority leader of the Senate, never brought a bill to the floor that wasn't a cross partisan bill because it just didn't make sense. If you didn't have cross partisan support, you wouldn't get enough of the factions together to get over a majority. But when we move to this ideologically pure political system where there's a Democratic Party and a Republican Party and never the twain shall meet, the strategy of politics in Washington becomes completely different. So that you see games like we've seen, I mean, you know, fights like we've seen around the speakership where you can't even contemplate the idea of cross partisan doing anything except blowing it up, which is what happened when Kevin McCarthy was kicked out. So one question is, do you expect that opening primaries in this way might multiply the valence around a particular party or encourage other parties to be added to the mix? I mean, would Lee like this because it's more likely to get us to four parties parties than we have right now?

Well, I think at the very least, what opening our primaries will do is allow the flourishing of the kind of intra party factions that used to exist. You had New England moderate Republicans, right? Those have been hunted to extinction. You had more conservative Southern Democrats, et cetera. That doesn't exist when politics is as nationalized as it is today. And when the party primaries put a filter of ideological purity on both sides. So you get more one flavor of D's and R's in Washington than you used to. Now, imagine an election system where the primary advance more than just 1D and 1R to the general election, but a primary system in which there are four or five candidates. Well, now this allows a lane for, for a conservative and more pragmatic Republican or a progressive and more pragmatic Democrat. It also allows a lane for those who might not identify with either political party. And then it's up to the general election voters to determine which of those candidates most mirror their own views and values. And I think that is how we'll get a Congress where very progressive districts may elect a very progressive candidate, but ones that aren't so progressive won't. And you'll begin a gradient of red, blue and purple in the Congress like it once was. Now, whether that manifests into multiple actual political parties or not, I think is sort of beside the question, because that kind of cross ideological coalition building will nonetheless, you know, be more available than

it is today if they're allowed to work together. And this is where there's a. There's a part to the story you're telling in the book, which is surprisingly rare in political accounts, which is the interaction between the structure of the media and the potential for healthy government. So you describe the stage of the media that old people like I grew up with, where we imagined an overarching moderating force of three television networks that would, that would basically shoot right down the middle. And everybody's getting their news from these three television networks. And the business model of media was not to turn us into ignorant people who hated each other. It was to basically inform us enough to satisfy the FCC's demands that they serve some public interest. But obviously we don't live in that world anymore. And it's kind of hard to imagine any government intervention that could get us back to that world, even if you thought it was a nice world to get back to. So we've got to kind of accept the reality that we have media whose business model is to turn us into these extremely polarized sorts that we have right now. So that came up again in the Speaker McCarthy fight. The rallying question for why you should support her oppose is whether McCarthy was working with Democrats. You know, he worked with Democrats. That is the greatest sin. And that echo comes from the media who frame it as if that's a sin. And it's not because the other side's position isn't out there. It's not because there aren't people saying, oh, actually, you know, we need a government that can work with each other. It's because it makes it harder to play the polarizing politics of hate that media needs to play in order to maximize the their exposure. And so I wonder when you think about these very, we're going to describe them right now, very clever, innovative ways to break down the electoral incentives to polarization that still the media incentives to polarization could overwhelm. And still we're left with basically the pathology we have now.

What you're describing is why the challenge we face in our democracy today is so large and hard to think about how to unwind because there are so many overlapping dynamics, right, that are causing these forces pulling us apart. Media is one, our geographical self sorting is another. Our economic inequality is piling on top of that. And so the lens through which I look at this is does our electoral system, which is seemingly the thing most at our disposable to tweak and change, exacerbate the other problems or do they mitigate them? And right now the primary system is exacerbating them. It gives the media more influence among a smaller set of voters to produce these extreme outcomes. And so while we might not be able to wave a magic wand around some of these social and problems or information ecosystem problems, we can do something about our electoral system. And that's why it's such a focus of mine and in the book, okay,

so give us the best case reform like the one if you could wave a wand, you would implement tomorrow in as many districts as you could do it.

Well, the way I come at this is less about what's the one size fits all policy and more of what's the single principle or two, that should be true of all elections, no matter how you arrive there. And so the two principles I lay out in the book is first, every voter should be able to vote for any candidate in every election. Second is whoever wins an election should have a majority of the vote. If we do those two things, we will solve what I have been calling the primary problem in our politics. By the way, over 70% of Americans agree with both principles. They're so common sense that over 70% of Americans assume both are true about our current election system, and they're not. They're only true in the states that have eliminated party primaries. And so as I go into. Yes, and so as I go into detail in the book, the single most important change we can make is to eliminate the bifurcated system of partisan primaries, where there's one Republican and one Democratic primary. And there are various ways to do that. And I'll just give you a couple examples of the few states that have. In Nebraska and in Washington and California, they use effectively. In Nebraska, it's just at the state legislative level, a top two system. So there's one primary. All the candidates run, all the voters can participate. The two finishers who have the highest amount of votes go to the general election. And because there are only two, necessarily whichever candidate gets more votes will have a majority of the vote. That's how those three states do it. Louisiana is interesting because in the 1970s, they actually just got rid of primaries altogether. And so there's a general election that features all of the candidates. If no one gets a majority, however, there's a second round runoff election. And then finally, the model that I have greatest hope in is the Alaska model, which was tried for the first time just last year. And Alaska has a top four nonpartisan primary. So all the candidates with their party labels are in a ballot. The top four finishers go to the general election. Voters are able to support their preferred candidate. And in the general election, to ensure that one of those four emerge with the majority of the vote. Rather than using a runoff like Louisiana, Alaska uses an instant runoff by way of a ranked choice ballot. So voters have the option of ranking their candidates. And if no one gets a majority, there's a series of elimination rounds. And that's how someone emerges eventually with majority support. What these systems all have in common is that as a candidate, from day one one, you're running a campaign trying to appeal to 51% plus of the electorate, not just the 10% of the electorate that will be responsible for your election in a party primary. And I think that's what unlocks the major change that we hope to see, which is a government that represents a majority of us, not just the fringes of both political parties today.

So an important part, part of that story is the role of instant runoff voting or ranked choice voting that you described. And both of us have been watching the push for ranked choice voting rolling out across the country. Maine was the state that fought that most aggressively. I mean, literally, the fight was between the people and the legislature who was resisting, which was resisting it. And finally the people succeeded. And in Alaska, it was less of a fight like that. But Alaska followed for the same reason. One unfortunate reality. There's no principled reason why this would be true, but one unfortunate reality about that has been in both of those cases, it seemed to have tilted the result in a Democratic way. So in Alaska in particular, the fact that Sarah Palin, who I think ran a really stupid campaign, given it was a ranked choice system, a campaign that wasn't at all eager to appeal across the lines, was just eager to be the most maga ish Republican candidate when she lost to a Democrat, people began to wonder, is this a secret sauce to make sure that Republicans can't win? I wonder, as you've observed that debate, whether you see it sticking or you see effectively people beginning to understand that there's nothing in the system that's tilting, it's just in the particular mix of candidates.

Well, first, let me say in Alaska, for example, I think the system demonstrated its party neutral impact because of the three statewide elections that happened in 2022. You wound up with a conservative Republican governor, a moderate Republic Republican senator, and a moderate Democratic representative for the U.S. house. So it showed that anyone can run and win under this system. What's required is that you build support among a majority of the electorate. And the reason why a Sarah Palin figure was not able to do that in the U.S. house race was because she ran a campaign that would have worked under the old system, but not under the new. When you need to reach out to a broader segment of the electorate. In that special election, for example, she was in second place. A third Republican named Nick Begich, or third candidate who was also Republican. Nick Begich was in third place when he was eliminated from the instant runoff. 20% of people who supported him ranked Peltola the Democrat second instead of Palin the Republican. And, and that, I think shows all you need to know about the outcome of that one election. So regardless of what the facts are, the perception, however, was that it must have tilted the election a certain way. And so, yes, in our very polarized time among large segments of the Republican Party, there has been an early perception that this voting system may be a Trojan horse. What that ignores, however, is all the places where, where Republicans would benefit from it as well. In terms of, for example, in Georgia or Montana, where there are regular third party candidates in the general election that wind up with vote margins that exceed the difference between D's and R's, and so Republicans will, I think, oppose these reforms at their own disadvantage. Because in reality, what this does is level the playing field for all candidates. Candidates.

Yeah. And you would think that there are many Republicans in the Republican primary, right. Who are contemplating the Republican primary right now for president, who kind of wish that these local states had adopted ranked choice voting for the primary there. Because in a race like the Republican primary, where there's a clear front runner but a bunch of other candidates, I mean, if the front runner is above 50%, there's nothing you can do. But if that drops below 50%, then having a ranked choice system might actually make it possible for somebody to emerge who couldn't emerge under the system as it is right now. But it's interesting how we did a lot of work in New Hampshire to try to get New Hampshire in the last presidential cycle to adopt ranked choice in the primary. The purpose of we even offered to just set it up as a shadow so that they could have their standard system, but we would produce within 12 hours a ranked choice result that they could also use in the context of at least talking about who the winner of that race was. The Secretary of State, who I think was about 112 years old at the time, said that he was opposed to rank choice because the common the consequence of ranked choice, he said, was to make it so candidates were less willing to criticize other candidates in their primary. And that's a real problem, because if you create an incentive for people not to spread hate, then that dampens down political discourse, which I didn't think it was possible to find somebody who thought we didn't have enough hate in American politics, but terrifying to imagine the Secretary of State of New Hampshire being one of those people. I think what you've described in the book, and I would love every one of your changes to occur, and I support every one of your changes, and I love the subtlety with which you've suggested the range of changes, all consistent with these two core principles. Two core principles that I do think are fundamental to fair democracy. The last question I want to push you on, or the last chunk of questions maybe that I want to push you on, is one I'm sure you thought I might have, which is like, you are a disciplined political activist and scholar in this book now, disciplined in the sense that you are aiming at the change that you think is most possible and would have the most significance, and you're not wasting your cycles on other changes that you don't think are possible but also might have significance and the one Change you don't discuss anywhere in the book is the money change. Or to go back to the point about the white primary, I would say the money primary. So if we have a system like we do right now, I just did the numbers for super PACs, which of course have become the most salient of the money in political and politics. If you take all of the contributions to super PACs from the beginning, the itemized contributions, that's about $11 billion. 70% of that $11 billion comes from people giving a million dollars or more. 90% come from people giving $100,000 or more. We have a system, the money primary, where the money is coming from a tiny, tiny few. And that tiny, tiny few have enormous influence in just the way that white people had enormous influence in the white primary in Texas. I know you don't think this is a pro Democratic reality. I know that you think that this is also a problem. But I wonder when you think about how much success you're going to get, even if you get everything you want, given the overlay of this money primary, whether you don't think that we also need to be just as creative in addressing the money primary problem too.

It's a great question. When I surely anticipated coming on your show, Larry, and I would say that I did take a view of what is the biggest solvable problem in our politics. That's how I arrived at primary reform, because it doesn't require a constitutional amendment or act of Congress. This can be done at the state level through ballot initiatives or through legislatures. And I look at it almost the way that, as we were talking about with media before or some of these other pathologies, does it make those other things worse or does it actually help to mitigate them? And I sort of see it similarly with money. Money in party closed party primaries matters a lot more and is more pernicious than does money in open and nonpartisan primaries, where the group of people that money looks to influence is much larger and much more diverse. And so I think we dilute the impact of money in politics. And this is also one of the reasons why of the various models of primary reform I lay out in the book, my preferred models is actually abolishing primaries altogether, like Louisiana has done. And instead of looking to a primary election to narrow down who gets onto the general election ballot, which is often a function of money, because money buys name identification, can we get creative about ways that candidates can qualify for the ballot, such as through number of small donations or through signature collection, to get on the general election election ballot. And it also eliminates one of the two elections people have to fundraise for to win. And so I do think one approach to primary reform could look at ways to decrease how much money we even need to spend in our elections in the first place.

Okay, but if you don't get these other reforms, for example, you get to be on the ballot if you get a number of signatures or small dollar funding to get a number of signatures. One consequence of eliminating the primary is it makes much more salient the candidates who are going to come in with super PAC spending behind them. Because if you don't have the super PAC spending behind you and you don't have two bites at the apple like the primary byte and then the election bite, then it's going to be very hard, if you're not super famous already, to be able to stand up inside that system. The money, even if you get rid of the primary, could still be a significant problem. But I want to just test how much this is turning on the perception of this as an unsolvable problem or on the perception that this isn't really as much of a problem as Chicken Littles like me make it sound like it is. So, you know, I totally agree with you that if we're talking about a constitutional amendment, then it's not on the horizon. And so if the only way to solve the problem of money in politics is to change the Constitution, we're not going to solve the problem of money in politics. And this isn't the context to go into the assumptions behind this. But if it were possible to imagine, for example, the court affirming what I think this court would affirm, that states and the federal government have the power to limit contributions to independent political action committees. And given there is a federal statute on the books right now that would come back to life, if in fact the court said that just like the Dobbs decision brought back to life all sorts of abortion restrictions, then that legal decision would revive an extraordinarily important range of money regulation that could complement the reforms that you're talking about. Like right now. This is not for good discipline, good political activism discipline reasons, what you're pushing. But it's not something you'd push against, is it? It's not something you'd oppose. I mean, you would like the world where the supreme court declared super PACs are not actually within James Madison's vision of the First Amendment.

Correct. And I think there's a long list of other reforms that we need. This primary reform is not a panacea nor is it a silver bullet. I do think, however, it's worth prioritizing because I think not only is it more viable, it can help make the other reforms more possible in itself. And what I mean by that is if we create pathways, new pathways for people to run for office and be elected to office outside of the current incentive structure, those people in turn and their influence in our legislative bodies in turn, can become champions for some of these other election reforms. And I use Ro Khanna as a good example of this. He is someone who is elected in California under the top two nonpartisan primary system, who otherwise wouldn't have had a shot under the closed primary system, who's become one of the more outspoken champions for other reforms to our political process inherently because he was not a product of the existing political establishment and party machine. And so I don't think election reform is zero sum. I do think election reform can happen sequentially, especially if we approach it pragmatically of what might be most achievable within the current constructs of our political system today.

Well, I certainly think it's generative in the way you've described, and I certainly think that the kind of people who get elected are more like Rokahana under the new system than under the old system. I was actually one of Roe's supporters when he first ran against Tom Lantos, and it was of course impossible to imagine him winning the party primary in that context. But I'm not sure I agree with the sequential claim. I wonder whether we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, especially now. I mean, it's one thing to talk about who gets elected. It's another thing to talk about what they get to do once they're there. And I think one of the scariest stories of money in politics is the story of the Republican Party and climate change. Before 2010, Republicans had a real strategy for climate change. John McCain thought he had a better climate change proposal than Barack Obama. And there was a serious argument about whether his ideas for climate change were, were better than Barack Obama's. And then in 2010, the Koch brothers made it known that any Republican who even acknowledged the truth of climate change would find themselves primaried. Now, that's leveraging the system that you're criticizing or would want to change. I get that. But the fear of Koch brother money or the Koch network money was enough to shake climate change out of the agenda. Talk of Republican Republicans and to catastrophic consequences for the world, for America, for everything, because we can't even have a debate about what the right strategy is because one side doesn't think there's a can't say that there's a problem, and the other side is obsessing about particular solutions to the problem that might or might not be the rational solution, especially as a Republican looking at the particular range of solutions. So I wonder whether if we could get the end of the influence of Koch Brother, like money, meaning super concentrated influence of money as opposed to diffuse influence of money. I'm not against money in politics, I'm just against concentrated money in politics. Then it would make both the possibility of getting the right candidates elected easier because of the reforms you're talking about, but also the capacity of those candidates to do something. Let's they get into Washington because they're not realizing that if they go against a couple really powerful influences like the pharmaceutical industry or the carbon monopoly industries or the defense industries are going to find all the money in the world dumped down on top of them. If I could give you two for one, you would accept it? You wouldn't say we've got to do the one before we get to do the other?

No, I don't think we have that luxury either of time. I think there needs to be many irons in the fire, many people experimenting with different reforms. And that's the beauty of our laboratories, of democracy that we have. And so I think we must fight this war on multiple fronts.

Okay, that's everything I wanted to hear. I'm so grateful for the book, which grateful that you would talk to me about it now, given that we know it's not going to come out until February of next year. But when it comes out, I hope everyone will pick it up. The primary solution. And I certainly hope that it has the influence that it deserves because it would be an enormous contribution if this book and the work of Unite America, which you obviously direct, could have its influence in changing this particular pathology in the context of American politics.

Thank you so much, Larry. Of course, people can pre order it. And I just want to thank you as well. I think you've been someone who's not only been a thought leader on these issues, but also a fellow activist, also a fellow candidate. And so when we think about what it's going to take to win these ideas and policies and you continue to leave it all on the field. So thank you. Thank you for everything that you do.

I appreciate that. This is episode seven of season five of the podcast Another Way podcasts produced by Equal Citizens, but actually physically produced by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. You can find out more about Equal Citizens at equalcitizens us there you can give us your thoughts. Please do not your hate but your thoughts. Thoughts are really valuable ideas especially. And of course you can also find a red donate button there. Everything I do for this organization I do pro bono or I hope it's pro bono but I do it for free. But the organization has real costs. Not a lot of office costs. We don't have a real office. I really try hard to keep the organization lean so I don't have to spend my whole life raising money for it. But we do have costs and if you can help with those that would be enormously helpful. Even a small amount every month. I love the $5 subscriptions almost Patreon like but whatever you can give I'd be grateful for. Thank you. Thanks again for listening. Stay tuned for episode eight which we will talk about the Senate. What fun that will be.

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