"It's Your America"
By Jean-Luc Currie
Why political polarization isn't permanent,
and what you and I can do to help fix it.
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We’re at our most polarized since the Gilded Age. Bipartisan support for legislation has decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, and the representatives we send to Congress do an increasingly poor job of representing us. All of this happens despite the electorate remaining moderate, sane, and stable.
The word I heard most growing up in relation to Congress was ‘gridlock’. My civilian professors at the Naval Academy disappeared for two weeks in 2013 because Congress couldn’t fund the government. We haven’t passed any significant legislation on immigration since 1990 because of moves to block reform by fringe elements in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2013. Every major piece of legislation passed in the last two decades has been strictly along party lines. Compare that to Social Security, Highways, Medicare, and Welfare reform, all of which had significant bipartisan support.
The Economist recently ran a story ('Partied Out') about the ongoing political races in the United States and the role of the parties in the primaries. Citing polls from Gallup, it describes an electorate that is increasingly independent while an overwhelming majority of adults across America are dissatisfied with ‘the way democracy is working in this country’. The reality, it concludes, is ‘muddled and dispiriting’.
There have been calls for changes, but many of these have gone nowhere. For some, the culprit is gerrymandering. For others, money in politics and Citizens United. Still others propose “voting dollars” or penalties for failing to vote. The Economist floats a third party as a potential option. But all of these suggestions avoid addressing the underlying problem. “The reformer is always right about what’s wrong,” quipped G.K. Chesterton, “However, he’s often wrong about what’s right.”
The underlying reason for all this dysfunction and polarization is that the incentives of our system are designed to discourage our representatives from representing the majority of their constituents and instead appeal to a minority. But which minority? And which system?
Our direct primary system has become a weapon in the hands of a minority to block or advance legislation which suits their narrow ideology. The primaries themselves are loaded guns to the heads of legislators that negatively influence the proper functioning of Congress.
When a Senator or Congressperson is considering legislation, her first question is not, “Is this good for the country and my constituents?” Her first question is, “How will this look in my upcoming re-election cycle?” And, these days, in most primaries around the country, it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a moderate to win a partisan primary.
February 2024
Issue 18
If you’re a Republican in Massachusetts, your vote hardly matters. In 2022, Democrats won all nine of Massachusetts’ House elections. The smallest margin in the general election was 19 points. The largest was an incredible 69 points. We’re told this is because Massachusetts is a staunchly liberal state, and so these results may even represent the will of the majority. But, if we dig deeper, the reality is more complex, which makes these landslide general elections disturbing.
In August 2022, Massachusetts had 4.8 million registered voters. Of those 4.8 million, 1.4 million were registered as Democrats. 436,000 were registered as Republicans. And a whopping 2.9 million were registered as Independents. The Massachusetts Secretary of State reported a 21.8% voter turnout in the primaries. That’s just over 1 million voters. But what matters is not the low voter turnout in the primary. What’s significant, buried beneath those stats, is that participation in the Democratic primary is the only thing that matters. In several districts the Republicans chose not to even nominate candidates for office.
Similarly, to be a Democrat (or Independent) in a staunchly Republican state strips your voice in any general election because, again, the only race that often matters is the primary. Primary voters, who are often more ideologically extreme, exert a disproportionate amount of influence on our political system, resulting in unrepresentative outcomes for the entire country. Veterans for All Voters, a nonprofit dedicated to political reform, points out that just 8% of voters elected 83% of the current U.S. House of Representatives in 2022.
In other words, our elections have become non-competitive. As Katherin Gehl and Michael Porter point out in their book The Politics Industry, American politics is one of the few sectors of our society that is increasingly anti-competition, leading to negative outcomes for voters, citizens at large, Congress, and the country.
In total, forty-five states have partisan primaries. In ten of those states, independents are barred from voting, representing 13 million Americans. Massachusetts is a rare case where Independent voters are able to vote in a primary of their choosing, a so-called ‘open partisan primary’. Eleven states have similar rules for their Congressional races, including Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Wyoming. While this represents an improvement over closed primaries it still leaves many voters with less competition and less choice. And what about those 13 millions Americans in states with closed primaries? It ultimately means the disenfranchisement of 13 million American citizens.
Americans are disillusioned with our political system. With nearly half of Americans registered as Independents, it's clear that a major swath of the country is desperate to find a sane, moderate middle that avoids the dreaded 'gridlock' and extremism ever-present in Washington D.C.
The Play of States
In order to truly understand what’s really going on, to really understand why those reforms mentioned earlier – like third parties or voting dollars or redistricting laws – are ultimately ineffectual, it’s necessary to understand two things.
The first is the history of our nominating process. We have to understand how our current system evolved into what it is today. A little history lesson goes a long way toward dissipating our despondency and dispelling our doubts. Our modern nomination system – what we think of as primary elections – is actually the result of several hundred years of experimentation. These are rules we have tested and implemented at various points in order to improve outcomes for all voters and make our representative democracy work better for as many citizens as possible. That same spirit of experimentation can carry us forward today.
The second is seeing our congressional election process as a system. Only when we view our current election apparatus as a complex system, comprised of incentives, players, choices, channels, etc. can we begin to understand why piecemeal, kick-around-the-edges-type changes are ultimately doomed to fail and why true systemic change is only possible through resolving the primary problem.
In an extensive study of our current election system, Gehl and Porter point out that when originally conceived party primaries were a political innovation that gave citizens the power to directly nominate candidates for office. It represented an improvement over the selection of candidates by party bosses. In that sense, it was more democratic. But the system’s been corrupted. This is no one’s fault. It’s a fundamental law that systems break down. But the way to keep a system running and healthy is to open it up to innovation and change.
The State of Play
While the Constitution mandates we must elect someone for office, it doesn’t dictate how to do so.
At the country’s founding ‘the united states’ was considered a plural noun, a union of different sovereign states. As Alexander Hamilton discusses in Federalist 59-61, there was real concern that some states would choose not to send elected representatives to federal office in order to hamstring the federal government. In the chaos of the failed Articles of Confederation, many of the thirteen States were narrowly focused on preserving their own authority. So, the Framers’ focused on the preservation of a fragile federal government, mandating that elections must take place but granting states the maximum amount of autonomy in determining the method and the result. The compromise is detailed in Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution, which states:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
The Framers were less concerned with how candidates should be nominated for elections and more concerned with ensuring elections actually happened. As a result, the methods for nominating candidates for office varied drastically over the past 200 years.
For the country’s first 30 years, nominations were made by friends and allies of candidates. Essentially, conversation among closed (upper class, white, male) groups amounted to a nominating process. They would circulate their preferred candidates in the local newspapers, and on Election Day people would vote for the person of their choice. As formalized parties developed – the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists – ballots were then provided by the parties with the “nominated” candidates listed on the paper. All a white, male voter over the age of 21 had to do was drop it in the ballot box.
By 1828, that system was changing. The first big catalyst for change was the collapse of the Federalist Party. Without an opposing party, a nomination by the Democratic-Republican Party was a de facto electoral victory. (A similar frustration to that which Massachusetts Republicans might feel today.) More and more men became frustrated with this informal nominating system that robbed them of a real choice, and as a result, the caucus and convention system developed.
Where It All Began
By 1828, local party leaders began holding caucuses to nominate delegates to the statewide conventions. These delegates were trustees, charged with communicating the will of that group to the state nominating convention, which helped state parties reach consensus on candidates. Given the communication and transportation technology available, this system made sense.
There was no Google Form option or Zoom Caucus that could have brought everyone together cheaply and effectively. At the time, caucuses and conventions were a common sense innovation that gave individual voters more say in who was ultimately nominated for office. But, by the late 1800s these nominating systems were co-opted by parties and party bosses to serve narrower personal and party needs, and our elections once again grew increasingly uncompetitive. By 1890, things looked grim.
At 100 years old, our country had exploded in population. An influx of immigrants provided the workers we needed for our growing industrial complex, but massive amounts of immigrants also proved to be pliable populations for coercion and manipulation through urban patronage. Party machines purchased votes through a bribery system that awarded immigrant populations with the equivalent of social welfare services and others with jobs, money, and positions of power.
On the enfranchisement front, things also looked bad. Reconstruction had been abandoned in the corrupt bargain between the Republicans and Democrats in 1876, leading to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. “Between 1876 and 1898,” write Gehl and Porter, “the number of African Americans registered to vote plummeted by 97 percent in South Carolina and 93 percent in Mississippi.” Louisiana was similar, they point out. In 1896, there were 130,334 blacks registered to vote, but by 1900, the first year after the adoption of a new state constitution there were just over 5,000.
Economically there were also major causes for concern. Consolidation and corruption in business led to the rise of the robber barons who mixed business and politics to their own gain. “These titans of industry,” write Gehl and Porter, “came to dominate not only markets but also politics, using their vast resources to gain undue government influence, distort policy, and extract special favors.” The 4,000 richest families, they write, had as much wealth as the rest of the country combined. Then, in 1893, a depression struck in what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin calls ‘the most serious depression the nation had yet experienced.’ At its height, one in every four workers was unemployed. And then, on September 14, 1901, Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley, a gruesome end to decades of social unrest and economic upheaval. And yet, in the midst of all of this bleak political outlook and civil chaos, a second wave of political reform swept the country.
The Progressive movement was not a nationally coordinated campaign but rather a grassroots movement of political reformers across the nation. Some were in government positions, like Robert La Follette, the governor of Wisconsin, or Teddy Roosevelt, who ascended to the presidency after the assassination of McKinley. Others were journalists, the ‘muckrakers’ like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, who wrote about the corruption rampant across the country. Still others were average American citizens fed up with the way things were going. These groups of reformers ushered in a series of innovations that changed our election machinery for the next century. It was only toward the end of the 20th century that the systems they put in place began to waver, rust, and grind to an inefficient halt. Here are just a few of those reforms.
First, the introduction of the ‘Australian ballot’. Prior to the government-supplied election ballot, parties supplied voters with colored pieces of paper on which to cast their votes. This allowed poll watchers for the party machines to guarantee a party member voted ‘correctly’. After the introduction of the Australian ballot, the government, not the parties, supplied a single ballot that listed all candidates regardless of party. While this may seem obvious to us today, in the 1890s this was revolutionary. Massachusetts adopted the Australian ballot in 1888, and within five years, every state had followed suit.
Second, initiatives and referendums were two innovations in direct democracy introduced during this time. An initiative allows citizens to collect signatures to put a new measure on a ballot. A referendum is a process by which citizens can repeal, or uphold, a law passed by a state legislature. These reforms were another way of the citizenry providing a check on their legislatures. As of this writing, 26 states in the U.S. still have initiative and referendum processes.
Third, and most importantly, direct primaries. In 1904, Wisconsin became the first state to adopt a primary system where party nominations were determined by popular vote instead of by the convention system. Within a decade, most states adopted the direct primary system, a system with which we should all be familiar today.
In February 2024, yet another bill on immigration failed to pass the U.S. House of Representatives. Republicans in both the House and Senate who had been working on the bill for months suddenly abandoned it, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. This latest in a string of failures to make substantial progress on immigration comes in the face of overwhelming American support for reform. In a December 2023 YouGov poll, 71% of Americans ranked immigration as a serious problem. So how did Congress fail to deal seriously with an issue that a majority of Americans feel is critical, and to many cities, like my hometown of Denver, is existential?
The only thing most representatives care about is making it through their next primary. As a result, instead of passing meaningful legislation on the issues that matter most to Americans, like immigration policy, our representatives spend their time focusing on issues that matter only to a small sliver of primary voters. The most recent failed immigration bill is a case in point.
Because it’s an election year, Congressmen and women don’t want to become targets in their primaries, and so they avoid collaborating on bipartisan legislation or supporting measures that might not appeal to their local, primary electorate. They’re incentivized to grandstand and even be obstructionist because it appeals to their narrow voter base. While this immigration bill is desperately needed and immigration reform is broadly supported by most Americans, Congress won’t work on it because they are held hostage by their primaries.
And immigration is just the tip of the iceberg. Artificial intelligence, climate change, and decaying infrastructure all need significant attention. Our national debt is skyrocketing, the U.S. credit rating was downgraded last year, and The Economist recently categorized the U.S. as a ‘flawed democracy’, ranking it 25th on their democracy index. The stakes are too high for the sort of dysfunction we’re seeing in Congress, so what can we do?
The stakes are (way too) high...
Jean-Luc Currie is the co-editor of
The Hart & The Cur
What do you think? Is electoral reform viable? Did this change your mind? Respond to this piece by email to jeanluc@thehartandthecur.com with the subject line "Letter to the Editor". We'll publish the best responses in our monthly Letters to the Editor.
Other options exist, for example, scrapping primary elections entirely, like the state of Louisiana. There’s good data now to show that even this system works just as well as a nonpartisan primary. Louisiana voters have consistently elected a diverse slate of candidates that have resulted in improved outcomes for their state. In two other examples, California and Washington state currently run a Top-Two Nonpartisan primary election system. Even this system has produced better results than the current partisan primary system still seen in most states.
The amount of choice here is a good thing. States should be able to construct the election system that works best for their constituents and particular needs without sacrificing the essential underlying principles necessary for reforming our current practices.
Of course, any changes will always be met with resistance. The types of electoral reforms mentioned above benefit the voters, but they strip power away from key players in our political industry. Parties, particularly in ‘safe’ districts, resent the loss of control they have over the outcome of elections.
For example, in my home state of Colorado we have had a semi-open primary system since 2016, when a voter-led ballot initiative passed Proposition 108. 47% of the Colorado electorate registers Independent, or unaffiliated, allowing these voters to participate in either the Democratic or Republican primaries. In 2023, the chair of the Republican Party in Colorado brought a lawsuit against the state to end this practice, hoping to revert to a closed primary, but recently a U.S. judge ruled that the Republicans’ lawsuit to close its primaries to unaffiliated voters had no standing. Had it passed, it would bar nearly half of the state from participating in choosing their representatives. In addition to Republicans’ challenge in Colorado, groups have mounted efforts in Nevada and in Alaska to repeal their most recent changes as well. But why?
Gehl and Porter write that the politics industry generates over $100 billion each election cycle. This highly lucrative industry benefits the Parties (both Democratic and Republican), lobbyists, media companies, and adjacent industries like voter-data shops, where candidates can purchase data to run targeted campaigns. However, the one group who does not benefit from this cabal are the voters, the “customers” so to speak. To show just how littler power we actually have in our current legislative process the authors reference a 2014 study that found, ‘When the preferences of economic elites and the stances of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appears to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.’ Politics is the only industry where we can dump more and more money into it and yet get an increasingly poor product for the customer, that is, you and me.
I want to be careful not to villainize the people in the politics industry. Many of them are good, well-meaning people, but they are caught up in a system with perverse incentives and have little choice but to go along with it or get out. As a good friend likes to say, ‘a bad system will beat a good person every time.’
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Look at the change that immediately happened in Alaska. This isn’t something that took decades, or even years. Bipartisanship blossomed as soon as partisan primaries were abolished and candidates were forced to appeal to a more broad voter base. The same could be true in your state and in the country at large.
We have a chance to alter our electoral system so that it benefits the sane, moderate middle, so that we can once again pass meaningful legislation, so that we can lean into this still ongoing experiment of democracy in America. The time for meaningful reform was not just in 1790 or 1910. The time is now.
No system is perfect, however, and whatever changes we put in place today will require alterations and reforms in the future. And that’s OK! Our Constitutional system was designed for this type of experimentation.
G.K. Chesteron wisely observed that if there exists a statute or law, like a fence erected across the road, it’s only common sense to ask why it was put there in the first place. The existence of the fence, he writes, ‘rests on the most elementary common sense’:
The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody.
Thoughtless people, he argues, are only too willing to tear things down because they don’t understand their original purpose. But the thoughtful reformer understands why it might have been put there, and because they understand its original intent they’re better suited to call for its destruction, alteration, or transportation. ‘In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle,’ he writes: we must understand its history, then we know how best to make use, or dispose, of it.
As for our direct primaries – it’s time to tear the fence down.
Tear the Fence Down
The incentives, as they’re currently designed, were not set up by federal legislation, the Constitution, or any other overarching mandate. As I noted earlier, the Constitution is veritably silent on how we conduct our Congressional elections. Each state puts in place its own rules for primaries and elections. It doesn’t require a Constitutional amendment. It doesn’t even require all 50 states to get on board.
Everything that gets done in Congress is based on leverage. The most important people in the legislature are the holdouts, the swing votes, the Congresspeople unaligned with their party. They hold a massive amount of sway because each side needs those votes in order to craft, block or pass legislation.
As Gehl and Porter write, “If just ten states sent delegations to Washington who were elected through [alternative means, like Final Five Voting] we would immediately have twenty senators and approximately one hundred representatives who could serve as a new, vital fulcrum.” And this new voting block would be less beholden to party fringes and a narrow subset of constituents because there would be no threat of getting ‘primaried’. Rather, they would be encouraged to align their decisions and actions to appeal to the broadest majority of voters. We alter the incentives by altering the rules of the game.
Up until a few months ago I was unfamiliar with electoral reform, but the thing I found helpful was to focus on the principles around which most reform is structured. So we’ll start there––with principles––and then we’ll look at three variations on reform.
In the book The Primary Solution Nick Troiano suggests ‘two key principles’ that any future changes to the electoral system should rest on:
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All eligible voters should have the freedom to vote for any candidate in every election, regardless of party.
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A candidate must earn a majority of the vote in order to win an election.
The first principle immediately lends itself to nonpartisan primaries while the second necessitates altering how we run elections in the future.
Gehl and Porter advocate for what they call Final Five Voting. Final Five Voting combines a nonpartisan primary with a general election based on ranked choice voting (RCV), sometimes referred to as ‘preferential voting’.
In a nonpartisan primary, every eligible voter would be able to vote for any candidate. All candidates would be listed on the ballot, regardless of party affiliation. In theory then, the primary election might consist of 3 Democrats, 5 Republicans, and 2 unaffiliated candidates. Under Final Five Voting, the five candidates with the most votes advance to a general election, so this might be 2 Democrats, 2 Republicans, and one Independent or third party candidate. In the general election under RCV, voters can rank these final five candidates instead of just voting for one or the other.
Maybe my top candidate is a Democrat, but my second favorite is a Republican. I can rank all five candidates according to my preference. If my top candidate doesn’t receive a majority of votes, then my vote is reallocated to my second choice. This guarantees two outcomes: This system avoids any runoff elections and guarantees the winner will receive a majority of the votes.
Gehl and Porter contend this system forces candidates to appeal to the broadest swathe of voters (the sane, moderate middle) rather than fringe primary voters because candidates will compete to be a voter’s second choice as well as their first choice. Candidates can’t afford to alienate a majority of the voters. ‘Voters become the most important customer . . . The general election replaces the primary as the most important election . . . The winning candidate will have the broadest appeal to the most voters,’ the authors conclude.
Nevada voters approved a Final Five voting measure in 2022 with 52.8% of the electorate. Because it requires a change to the state constitution, the voters will reaffirm this decision this year before it takes effect in 2026.
Alaska adopted a similar type of reform, the Top-Four primary system, in 2020, and the results have been overwhelming. In 2022, Cook Political Report wrote: ‘For years, advocates for ranked-choice voting and top-two (or four) primary systems have argued that these reforms will help to moderate our polarized political system . . . Given the results of this primary season, those advocates have a stronger case than ever.” The Top-Four system incorporates a nonpartisan primary, but the top four candidates proceed to the general election (as opposed to Nevada’s top five), and the general election uses RCV to ensure there is no runoff.
Since instituting their Top-Four system, Alaska has elected a very conservative Governor, an independently minded Republican Senator in Lisa Murkowski, and a moderate Democrat (and the first Alaskan Native) to the House of Representatives. On the state level, they elected a bipartisan slate of state senators, Democrats and Republicans, who were moderate and reform-minded. Without the threat of their primary, this bipartisan group of representatives did something which seems amazing in this day and age: they worked together on a number of major pieces of legislation that spanned public safety, education, and the budget. As Nick Troiano points out, ‘The state budget included the largest increase in public education funding in the state’s history.’
Electoral reform changes incentives –– which changes behavior