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- [00:00]
A
Hey there, listeners. Galen here. Before we get started, I wanted to give you all a heads up that we're planning another live show at the Comedy Cellar with Nate Silver and Claire Malone. It's gonna be on September 29, and as summer comes to an end and we get past Labor Day, politics are gonna get more messy. We have a gerrymandering war. We have the New York City mayoral race. We have another government funding cliff by the end of September. So join Nate, Claire and me at the Comedy Cellar to make sense of it all. To laugh, shoot, share some data, maybe play some games. You can get tickets@gdpolitics.com See you there. Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Droog. Even before the mid decade gerrymandering wars began, the 2026 midterms were on track to feature the fewest competitive House districts in the modern elections. According to Cook political reports ratings, 84% of House districts are solidly in one camp or another. Seven percent are likely Republican or Democrat, meaning that 91% of districts aren't particularly competitive. And 30 states don't have a single competitive election for the House. That's before gerrymandering may take more competitive seats off the table. It's a tricky moment for, well, the country and also for good government groups that have long pursued election reforms like independent redistricting commissions. Common Cause, which is frequently sued over partisan gerrymandering, said it won't fight California over its proposed gerrymandering, according to the nonpartisan group Unite America, which has also pursued independent redistricting reforms. This makes reform to primary elections, where the vast majority of midterm elections will essentially be decided all the more important. Unite America advocates for open primaries in which all voters, Republicans, Democrats, independents, on aligned voters can cast a ballot and candidates from all parties compete together. They also advocate for instant runoffs, also known as ranked choice voting. Here with me in part to make the case today is Richard Barton, a fellow at Unite America and political science professor at Syracuse University. Welcome to the podcast, Richard.
- [02:20]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Galen. Happy to be here.
- [02:22]
A
So, first, before we talk about primaries, I do want to talk about partisan gerrymandering. Do you think in some ways it's time to give up the pursuit of independent redistricting reform at the state level, instead turn to this, I guess, mutually assured destruction of maximal gerrymandering that could eventually result in, I don't know, federal reforms as opposed to the this piecemeal state level reform process.
- [02:49]
B
That's a really good question. I guess I should say so. I'm a research fellow at Unite America, and the organization's position is certainly that we should continue to protect, preserve and expand independent redistricting because it's better for democracy. And in the long term, I, as a, you know, academic and researcher, certainly agree with that. I'll be honest, when I think about this from the perspective of what should the Democratic Party do, how should they be responding right now, and whether or not the efforts in California are the right approach. This is something I have personally really struggled with. I struggle with it because on the one hand, there is not going to be an electoral penalty for pursuing these kinds of reforms. Right. I think one of the reasons why we see the violation, continuous violation of these norms and more and more constitutional hardballs, like doing things to the max, technically within the rules, but violating what used to be seen as acceptable among the general public, we see more and more of this because there is no public backlash from these kinds of actions. And I don't think Democrats are going to receive any sort of electoral boost for taking the higher ground here. So when you couple that with the fact that Republicans are going to pick up some seats in Texas and perhaps other states, I see where the Democrats are getting that sort of calculus.
- [04:13]
A
As somebody who spends time thinking about this, why don't you think there's a voter backlash to playing constitutional hardball, as you called it?
- [04:23]
B
Well, I think most voters are not institutionalists. So in survey responses, we see a lot of voters, like huge numbers of voters, huge share, saying that they think gerrymandering is a huge problem and that they disapprove of it. But historically, we see very few voters who are actually going to change their political behavior in response to these kinds of actions of constitutional hardball. And we've done a recent survey of primary voters of Democratic and Republican primary voters. We oversampled them as well as the general public. This is part of a consortium of scholars were part of the primary election survey. We created survey questions asking about political beliefs that were not simply, you know, left right policy ideology, and about commitment to liberalism, democracy, openness to political violence, populism. And what was, what was really interesting is we found that, I'll be honest, my, my initial hunch was that primary voters in both parties might be less committed to liberal democracy than, than general electorate voters. And what we found instead was that there was real polarization among the primary electorates where Democratic primary voters were more supportive of Democratic liberalism. They were actually less populist than Republican Voters. But what was really interesting is that Republican primary voters were actually closer to the general electorate. General electorate voters are actually seemingly less committed to Democratic liberalism than I would have sort of assumed going into this.
- [06:07]
A
Okay. So that's part of the reason that there isn't a penalty to the constitutional hardball, that the general electorate just isn't voting on this, even if Democratic primary voters may be enraged by it.
- [06:18]
B
Yeah.
- [06:19]
A
Okay, so I think we're going to come back to that survey, but I want to ask a broader question here, which is that I think Unite America essentially sees, you know, House elections in this moment as broken. They're probably not alone in thinking that. But what are sort of the problems as, as you see it, mainly a lack of competition.
- [06:36]
B
Yeah. So there are so few districts in this country and states both at the federal level, but also especially at the state and local level, where there is interparty competition. Right. And so general elections are just overwhelmingly uncompetitive, as you mentioned in your intro. Right. We're expecting 91% of. Of congressional districts to be safe seats on, relatively uncompetitive between the parties. And that means that, like, all the action is happening in the primary. Right. It's. It's the primary essentially where the representative is decided. If you win the primary of the dominant party in that safe district, you are almost certainly guaranteed to enter government. So that changes the strategic calculation for candidates and for legislators in office.
- [07:25]
A
How so?
- [07:26]
B
Well, it gives them a strong incentive to prioritize their primary. Voters, donors, interest groups that are active in their primary, as opposed to the kinds of groups and voters that determine the outcome in competitive general elections.
- [07:43]
A
Okay. So this gets to be something of a controversial area of political science, of, you know, how representative or are the primary electorates of the broader country. And I want to get to that in a second. But first, you know, what do you see as the solution? Can you explain in an ideal world, like, how you fix the problem of uncompetitive elections and elections that are largely decided in primaries?
- [08:08]
B
If I could sort of step back a little bit. So there are several factors that have contributed to the dwindling of competitive congressional districts, state ledge districts, et cetera. Of course, there's. There's partisan sorting, geographic sorting that's happened over time, and gerrymandering is a part of that. Right. And I think if we look at the sort of projected gerrymanders that we anticipate seeing in Texas, California, perhaps Missouri and other states, like, that's just going to make it even worse.
- [08:38]
A
Right.
- [08:38]
B
We're going to have even fewer competitive districts. So there's a number, there's a number of sort of factors that have gone into that. So you might say there is very little that we can do and to try and make general elections more competitive other than trying to support independent redistricting commissions and try to prevent further gerrymandering. I think that that would have some impact. But the US Senate isn't gerrymandered. Right. But we still see a lot of problems in the US Senate, as we do in the House. So this isn't, this isn't simply a matter of gerrymandering that's causing the problem. So I think the solution has to be to create a system where the voters that make the difference in the election that matters in the meaningful are more representative of the general electorate in a given district. So what that can look like is all voters are participating, all candidates are directly competing against each other.
- [09:33]
A
You mentioned the problem in the Senate and sort of that the problem exists in the House as well. Can we define what that problem is as you see it? What's wrong with American governance today in a single sentence, if you will? No, but jokes aside, like what is the problem as you see it?
- [09:48]
B
I mean, I think that there's multiple problems, but if I had to pick one, we have a governing structure where power decision making is intentionally fragmented. Right. That's what separation of powers, bicameral legislature, federalism, like that's what it was intended to do and it does that quite well. So when you have a system like that and you have a two party system where those two parties are highly partisan and ideologically polarized, there tends to be very little that's getting done. And so like, this is a big, this is a big problem that I don't think primary reform alone is going to sort of like fully make our government more functional, but it can go a long way. Because one of the reasons why our legislative bodies are so polarized is because the sort of voters and donors and activist groups that are bringing them into office are not representative of the general electorate, which is less polarized, far less polarized than what you see in Congress.
- [10:48]
A
Yeah. A lot of times you hear folks who advocate for reforms like this talking about moderation. So I guess one is the general electorate relative. Are you saying that the general electorate is more moderate and so more representative government would be more moderate? And then also just to make sure we're covering our bases here, like, what does moderation accomplish? Like, is moderation a goal in and of itself?
- [11:09]
B
Yeah. That's a really good question. I don't think moderation is the goal goal in and of itself. Right. And this, this is, I think a, a kind of a complicated question and one that you've probably unpacked in prior podcasts before. So the electorate is more moderate, right? And moderate can mean a couple of things. It can mean between the left and right, they might be moderate in that they have sort of cross cutting preferences. So they might be like, yes, build the wall on the Mexican border, but also please expand Medicaid and Medicare. If you include all those voters into this sort of moderate camp, yet they make up the majority of the American electorate. And whether they, they are sort of somewhere, you know, stationed somewhere in between the, the two ideological camps in each party, or they just have cross cutting issues, it sort of suggests that most voters want a bit more pragmatism and problem solving within their government because, you know, they're, they're flexible. Their, their views suggest that they are interested in more dynamic coalition building actually than we actually see in government.
- [12:14]
A
In an ideal world, how would US House elections work?
- [12:18]
B
Okay, so I'm working on a book right now and I'm sort of framed it as comparing our current system of partisan primaries to two, like very different alternative models. And the first one is based on what I think a lot of other political scientists sort of generally think we should do. Like from a lot of other political scientists perspective, the problem is that actually we've let the nominations become too democratic. We should go back to smoke filled rooms or maybe vape filled rooms if they were to be like in the present moment. Like we should go back to a time where party bosses were sort of handpicking nominees and that's who was going to represent the party in a general election. You know, there's some logic behind that. I mean, if the political parties are strategic coalitions of political elites who, whose primary pursuit, what, what binds them together is that they want to win and win back or, or maintain control of government, then they're going to select candidates that have broad appeal. And so, and that's how lots of.
- [13:24]
A
Other liberal democracies around the world choose candidates.
- [13:28]
B
Right? This isn't like unprecedented for sure. So I take that model and I, I have different, like empirical methods for trying to infer like what things would look like in that counterfactual. And we have some real world, you know, we have variations in how democratic the nomination systems are. We have some states where conventions are still used or closed primaries. We also have a technique, techniques to try and infer what the preference of the party establishments are, which candidates they prefer. And so we can say like in a world where the party establishments candidates are always winning, how would Congress look different? So that's one option. The other is we actually go further in democratizing the nomination process. And the theory here is, well one, there were perhaps real problems to that sort of party bosses sort of closed system to begin with, but that maybe the, the relationship between a democratized nomination system and a dysfunctional government is not a simple linear system where more democratization is bad. Maybe we are just at this really bad place where we've democratized to the. There are certain voters and donors and groups behind just the party establishment that have influence, but they're still rather narrow and they're not representative of the broader public. So the alternative is like let's, let's more fully democratize the nomination system and that's what open all candidate primaries would represent. And so, and we have, we have models of what this looks like in practice in, you know, the top two system in California, in the top four system in Alaska and a few other states.
- [15:06]
A
You know, one question here is the system that we have today has lasted for over half a century. I mean, it came to be in the late 60s, early 70s, and it seems like that system worked for at least some period of time. But what has changed today is not the system because it's been around for decades, it's the people participating in it. Right. Whether it's the voters or the leaders or the media or whatever. So in focusing on the system, do you have any concerns that you're sort of like missing the forest for the trees, that there's actually like a different problem? I don't, and I don't, I don't know that I could name it myself. But like the system has stayed the same, but the outcome has, as you frame it, gotten worse. So is the system the problem?
- [15:56]
B
That's a really good question. Let me, let me start by stacking the deck further against me. So you're right. I mean, there's the McGovern Frazier reforms in the early 70s, 70s that lead to more, that really focus on the presidential system, but they also further democratize or like instituted congressional primaries. But actually it goes back even further. I mean, starting in the early 1900s, you, you have states that are opening up their primary systems. And so, I mean, you have, for most states, they have used primary elections of some sort to determine nominees for state legislature and congress for basically a century. And to your Point, the problem, as I would describe it, is a more recent phenomenon. So what I would say is if you go back to some of the political science critiques of the nominating process, so there's like some classic works from the mid 20th century, a lot of the concern was that primaries could, could become captured by the most well organized and well resourced groups within the society. And I would argue that that for a number of reasons is something that did not happen immediately, maybe even for the first, you know, half century or 75 years, but has happened over the last few decades is that well resourced and well organized, and they tend to be more ideological than sort of your, your bread and butter kinds of interest groups or the average voter. These kinds of elites, these donors and interest groups have more recently developed the capacity or the sort of interest to capture primary elections. And so, yes, the rules have been relatively stable for a long time, and they were not necessarily part of the problem for a while, but they have become recently because political actors have, you know, there's political learning that has taken place and perhaps, you know, the political environment has changed.
- [18:01]
A
And I think as this has developed and primaries have increasingly attracted the ire of good government groups, academics. There's been research into alternative forms of primaries like open primaries or ranked choice voting, and the research is like, mixed to relatively pessimistic about the outcomes of those reforms. So I want to cite some of the studies and then, of course, I'm sure you have your own thoughts, but, you know, there's a 2014 study in the American Journal of Political Science that found that the openness of a primary election has little if any effect on the extremism of the politicians it produces. The 2016 study in legislative Studies Quarterly that conducted a statewide experiment around California's new top two format, and they concluded, quote, that voters failed to distinguish between moderate and extreme candidates. As a consequence, voters actually chose more ideologically distant candidates on the new ballot, and the reform failed to improve the fortunes of moderate congressional and state Senate candidates. And then, you know, there are other studies, but I'll just close with a study from John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, who longtime podcast listeners have heard from before. But they found, quote, that primary voters have similar demographic attributes and policy attitudes as rank and file voters their party. These similarities do not vary according to the openness of the primary. These results suggest that the composition of primary electorates do not exert a polarizing effect above what might arise from voters in the party as a whole. Okay, so you're doing battle with like a lot of, a lot of academic research out there. But give me your best shot. Like why are all these people wrong?
- [19:42]
B
Yeah, I'm doing battle with a bunch of people who frankly are smarter than I am. But, but I'm still right on this issue and I'll, and I'll explain why.
- [19:50]
A
I love the conference.
- [19:52]
B
So first of all, even some of the authors of those early year studies, so colleague and friend of mine, I don't know if he'd consider me a friend. I'm going to call him a friend. Seth Masket, like some of those earlier authors have acknowledged that things have changed. So that 2014 and 2016 studies were looking at one or two election cycles worth of data in California under top two and they found very little impact. If you want to get really into the weeds, I can talk about some of the difficulties methodologically of why we wouldn't really expect them to see an impact that quickly. Part of it isn't just that it's too small of a sample size. Part of it is the dependent variable of legislator ideology that they were using at the, which they acknowledge at the state level. So these are, these are called Shore McCarty scores that are, that are very commonly used to measure the ideology of state legislators. They are constant throughout the career of a state legislator. So the only way that you get ideological change is through replacement through somebody losing or retiring and being replaced by another official. So because that of that dependent variable, it would take longer to develop. Okay, that was very in the weeds there. So let me, let me pull back for a second and say those earlier studies suffered from limited data. If you do the same exact kinds of analyses, so literally using the same exact data, the same models at the, both the state and the congressional level, you find significant depolarizing effects of open all candidate primaries. And I actually don't think that this is something that's sort of disputed for the researchers that have seen it. If you look at the studies that have been done over the last five years or so, you using a larger data set and with more time to have gone by, you actually see considerable depolarizing effects. There's another sort of, this is an important thing to point out. What I'm talking about are the impacts of open all Canada primaries as we were talking about before. So the kind of system, California, Alaska, but also Washington state and up until recently for the most part Louisiana under the jungle primary, we can consider that as well. In some ways the unicameral state legislature in Nebraska is also fits into that that's where we see the difference. If you look at the difference between open partisan primaries and closed partisan primaries, we don't really see much of an impact. So if you're going to open the primary system, but it's still going to be largely dominated by the partisan base, and Democrats and Republicans are still going to run on in separate elections, on separate ballots, we don't see much of an impact.
- [22:32]
A
Right. So what you're saying is it needs to be open in the sense that all voters who are registered in the state can participate and that also all candidates, regardless of party, run in the same election both for the primary and obviously for the general election.
- [22:45]
B
Yeah. Which if you don't mind, Galen, is a great segue to the second to the other part of your question about the sides and fabric study. So it was true a little over a decade ago that primary voters and the general electorate was not all that skewed. Right. That primary, the primary electorate was not all that unrepresentative of the general electorate. It has become much, much less true over the last decade or even, even a little bit longer. I mean, basically since the Obama administration, particularly on social, social and cultural issues. And so this is something that has really rapidly changed. The other thing I would say is, you know, there's a bit of a debate in this literature and, and a part of it is, is driven by like the baseline. So as you talked about vavrec and sides, they really focus on saying that primary voters are not ideologically distinct from co partisan voters who don't turn up in the primary but turn up in the general. Right. So like a Republican primary voter doesn't look all that different than a Republican voter who just shows up in the general election. And I would say that's, that's not the sort of best baseline of comparison. Right. If we talk about open all Canada primaries and why they have an impact, it's because one major reason is because the primary electorate is very similar to the general electorate because you have Democratic Republican voters, independent voters, third party voters, all functioning as a single electorate. And so what I would argue is really we should be comparing where do the primary electorates, how skewed are they? Like, how skewed is the Democratic primary median voter from the general median voter?
- [24:29]
A
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- [26:14]
B
Those weren't hard questions.
- [26:15]
A
In case these have been easy so.
- [26:16]
B
Far, those were easy questions.
- [26:18]
A
So you did this study that I took a look at where you compared primary voters to the general public. You know, primary Republicans, primary Democrats. Look at the general public and what you found is that primary Democrats care a lot more about liberal democracy institutions and the like than Republican primary voters and also more than the general public. Now, some people who would argue for the status quo would say a party has to mean something, right? And it is its own private institution that should be able to promote its own candidates and put together their own platforms. And so someone might say, liberal democracy is very important to the Democratic Party. And so no matter what, say, like the general public thinks they should stick to their guns as a party and continue to pursue those things. If you open up the primary and say Democratic Party, you have less influence here. Republican Party, you also have less influence here. Wouldn't the logical conclusion be like, Democrats should run candidates who care less about liberal democracy.
- [27:23]
B
That is a hard question, Galen. Now I'm biding. I'm biding time. So you had this really interesting debate recently about the the electoral benefits or lack Thereof of moderation. Right.
- [27:36]
A
We love having a podcast listener on the podcast.
- [27:38]
B
Yeah. So super fascinating. I will tell you. I came down on. I, I am closer to the side of you know, that that sort of. There tends to be a 5 percentage point boost or so if you if to moderate candidates. And so I think what you would see is Democrats should be running more ideologically moderate candidates, but on these non ideological issues they should probably be running candidates that are like, I'm not saying anti liberal, anti Democratic, but maybe are less commit like through rhetoric or like whatever they're, they're sort of symbolizing whatever their vibe is projecting candidates that are less sort of in sync and committed to the status quo to, to our, and to our like current institutions now like I like a lot of our current institutions but I don't think it's, it's a politically a good political sell right now. But that doesn't mean like, that doesn't mean ideologically extreme. Like you can be a bit of an anti institutionalist and sort of sell that without being particularly ideologically extreme. And I think like, you know, I'm not saying he's the ideal candidate by any means, but like you look at like somebody like a Fetterman or something like that that I think embodies that in some ways that makes sense.
- [28:54]
A
I want to give you a little more time to talk about some of the research that you've done because it is really fascinating. And you go state by state, you look specifically at Louisiana, you have looked at the states that have instituted some of these reforms. So we can get into maybe more of the numbers here. You sort of cited that there are actual factual differences to the contrary of some of the earlier research, like what did you find?
- [29:18]
B
So to sort of make it concrete, I would say our findings suggest, and I shouldn't say this with a super high degree of certainty, but if you look at the point estimates that we find in our regression models, if every state were to implement an open all candidate primary based on the findings we have at the state legislative level, it would suggest that it would turn us back, turn the dial back to a level of polarization at around the like early Obama era, maybe late George W. Bush era. And at the congressional level it suggests it would bring us back to like the, the Clinton sort of era. So these reforms are not going to bring us to a level of like Kumbaya between the parties. Like I don't know that this is even going to return us to like you know, Tip o' Neill and Ronald Reagan. You know, arm in arm working out the White House. But I, I would still say that the politics of the mid-1990s to the late 2000 aughts were significantly preferable in my opinion to what we've seen over the last decade. I did a study a few years ago on Louisiana, which has had the jungle primary, which in a lot of ways is, is similar to a top two system. All the candidates are competing directly, all the voters can participate. It's a little bit different in that the, the quote unquote primary is happening in November and if nobody wins an outright majority, there is a, there's a runoff election in, usually in December or January, which I would say is, is not an ideal model, but still it, it sort of has the attributes of an open all Canada primary. So that's how we, that's how we consider it. So we looked at how this has played out in Louisiana since the mid-1970s when it was implemented. And you know, really interestingly, despite all the, all the sort of negative attention that these kinds of systems have received by political scientists and other sort of, you know, wonky elites, using the standard metric of state level polarization, the Shore McCarty scores that I talked about before, Louisiana has consistently throughout this time been one of the very least polarized legislative bodies in, in the country. Again, I am not trying to claim that Louisiana is a, is, should be a governing model for the country or that it's perfect, but the evidence does suggest that the jungle primary made Louisiana significantly less polarized than we would have seen otherwise. And you know, I think there's a compelling case to be made that it led to sort of tangible benefits in the lives of Louisianans. So I think a good sort of case study on this is Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Louisiana was, it still is the only Deep south safe to have expanded. Medicaid probably will remain that way and was the first state in the south to, to do so. And I would argue that the reason why Louisiana was able to, despite being a deep red state, was able to pass Medicaid expansion was because John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who was a, you know, pro second Amendment, pro life Democrat who frankly never would have run in a, never would have won in a Democratic partisan primary even in the state of Louisiana, was, was able to prevail in that open all candidate primary system and was able to work with Republicans to enact and, and ultimately preserve Medicaid expansion in the state for, you know, for, for a decade and a half.
- [32:54]
A
Yeah, I think probably someone Else who listeners minds might go to is somebody that we had on this podcast several months back, Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, who arguably has been able to hold on despite opposition from Republicans perhaps now maybe also opposition from Democrats in the state of Alaska. I mean do you see sort of her as an example of the type of governance that these reforms would result in?
- [33:22]
B
Yeah, I think so. I mean look, any individual, I like to look at the numbers right Like I'm a data nerd and so any individual is going to have their, their idiosyncrasies, right? So I'm not, I'm not saying that we're will or should have a Senate like of a bunch of replicas of Murkowski, but even in the state of Alaska, I mean you can see within the state legislature they now for in the second session that they've had under top four they have another bipartisan governing coalition which to be fair they, they, the state had did have one other time before like a decade before the implementation of this reform. But they're now like 2 for 2 as having a bipartisan coalition governing coalition under TOP and so I don't think like Murkowski is sort of alone here in exemplifying the power of this kind of reform.
- [34:13]
A
There's another hurdle in all of this which is convincing the public. So politicians themselves are perhaps unlikely to pass these reforms. They are likely more likely to be passed by ballot initiatives initiated by the public. In 2024 there were six states that considered nonpartisan primaries or ranked choice voting. Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and South Dakota. The ballot measures failed in all six of those states and a move to repeal nonpartisan primaries and ring choice voting in Alaska barely survived. Why isn't the public convinced by these reforms?
- [34:52]
B
Well, there's a lot of opposition to them. You see opposition often from the establishments of both political parties for some of the reasons that you brought up before. Although we haven't, we haven't had a chance to talk about this but I, I, I would just sort of note and we if we have time, while a lot of reformers I think see them and are sort of anti party and that's part of their motivation, I, I can speak for myself and United America here. Like that is not our perspective. Like we see these as, as potentially pro party reforms that could be coupled with other sorts of measures to help strengthen party organizations, especially at the, the state and local level. But nonetheless, like that is the perception that, that political parties have, that these reforms are attack an attack on them. And of Course, you know, any sort of incumbent is going to be really, you know, risk averse to changing a, an electoral system that elected them. And so there's a lot of elite opposition to these reforms. And you know, there's also, I mean, you see this in research on, on ballot measures. Generally. There's the tendency is if you survey the public, they will often find, they'll often express a high level of support for such a reform. We find that in our surveys. And then as the communication environment picks up during a campaign, a ballot campaign, you see support for that reform depreciate. So, like, when voters hear arguments on both sides on a ballot initiative, they tend to just become less inclined to support it for various reasons.
- [36:25]
A
Yeah. And of course, these kinds of reforms haven't been wholly unsuccessful. They have been successful in different states at different points in time. Obviously, some of the independent redistricting commissions passed on ballot initiatives. And so maybe there was something about the 2024 environment as well. But to your point about folks seeing these as weakening our parties, as we mentioned earlier on, there are a lot of political science theorists, professors, whatever, who would say, well, part of what ails America today is that we have really strong partisanship. People feel like they play for one team or another, but that the parties themselves are actually really weak. And so they kind of get overrun by just like radicalized, you know, Americans in a way, and they have a difficult time continuing to craft their agenda, their party platform, and sort of pursue those policies. But you said that as you see it, these reforms don't necessarily weaken parties. Why not?
- [37:24]
B
Well, let me answer that question and then if I could talk a little bit more generally about the relationship like, like what political scientists are sort of, I think, maybe getting wrong sometimes when they are looking at these reforms. But these reforms are, I would say, not inherently anti party for a few reasons. I mean, one obvious one is there are, there are ways that you can couple open all candidate primaries with other reforms that give parties a bit more power even in the nominating process. So there can still be a candidate designation, for example, I mean, in New York State, before the primary, the, the county party organizations will designate a particular candidate and you can, you can have that on the ballot. I should also say one thing that's important is I'm not arguing for, and in the states that I'm talking about, with the exception of Nebraska and the state legislature, the party is still listed by the candidates on the party. So we're not talking about like there, there are no, you know, there are no party affiliations with these candidates. So you can have a system where the party establishments are still able to designate a particular candidate. There's great research on this by a colleague, Ray Laraja of mine at UMass and, and others who study the ways in which, you know, often well intentioned campaign finance reforms have really limited the ability of parties to raise and spend money compared to super PACs and other kinds of groups. And so there are reforms to campaign finance that don't require constitutional amendments that could actually free parties up to be able to play that game more effectively. But then we've actually done research, so I have a project with Jesse Cross at the University of Purdue where we use this system of identifying individual donors who give to the party establishments. So to the, the Triple C's, you know, the, the Democratic Campaign Committee and et cetera. These are unique people, right? These are like kind of weirdos who are giving straight to the congressional campaign committees and we're calling them party donors. And then we look at who are these same people who are giving to the party campaign committees, who are the candidates that they're giving to in primaries. And we use that to infer who the establishment like treating these donors as a function of the establishment, who the party establishment wants to win in these primaries. And then what we do is we compare open all candidate primary states to partisan primary states, and we find that actually in open all Canada primary states, the party establishment is more likely, their candidates perform better and are more likely to advance to the general election. And so I understand where, you know, some of the critics are coming, theoretically, but empirically we just don't see the evidence that this is really undermining party's ability even in the nomination process.
- [40:16]
A
And what do you think is going on there? That like the preferred candidate by the party is a little more pragmatic, a little more moderate or whatever, and that the other voters that participate in the open all candidate primaries sort of support that as opposed to maybe the like Tea Party or like the DSA candidate or whatever it might be.
- [40:35]
B
Yeah, that's a great question, and I think you're absolutely right. That's what we think is happening there. If I can be perfectly honest. I. The party establishments are having more influence perhaps by coincidence, like I don't know that they're actually exerting more power in these primaries, but that the candidates that they prefer just happen to be performing better in these kinds of primaries and are winning not necessarily because of their influence, but for the very reasons you just said.
- [41:01]
A
All right, we've covered a lot of ground here. Final question. Set aside the political realities of the moment. You know, whatever. This is a podcast after all. We can do whatever we want. If you could wave a magic wand, what structural changes would you make to American democracy?
- [41:17]
B
To go back to the beginning of this show, I would say actually independent redistricting commissions were actually quite effective at drawing fairer maps and reducing the partisan bias in our representative system. So that would be maybe one strike, but the other would be to. And, and if I only had one, it would be this, which is the kinds of all candidate primaries that I've been talking about. And if I get more specific, and this is, this might be the first time I've said this sort of out loud publicly in any way. I've generally been agnostic, agnostic between top two and top four. But I have become increasingly convinced that a top four system with ranked choice voting. And I've entertained the sort of critiques of, of RCV and taken them seriously, but I, I think that they're vastly overstated that a top four system with RCV is like the Alaska model is, is what I would do.
- [42:14]
A
Okay, so in the primary, everyone votes. All the candidates run together. The top four advance to the general in which you participate in ranked choice voting. Your first, second, third, fourth choice, instant runoff, you get your winner who gets 50 plus one the votes once all of the subsequent ballots are counted.
- [42:35]
B
Yeah, and I think that this can like, this is not gonna, this is not gonna bring us to like a level of zero polarization. I don't think that that's what we want. I don't, I don't think we want to completely.
- [42:46]
A
You don't just want everyone to have exactly the same views, just little drones sort of like walking around with no disagreements whatsoever?
- [42:53]
B
No, what I want are, I think that our two party system can function. It has functioned before if the parties are a bit more pragmatic and there's more coalition building across the parties. But those parties can still mean something. Like they still meant something. Even in like, you know, the FDR era, they were more sort of flexible and there was more sort of cross cutting issues in coalition building. And I think that our system can be healthy within the two party model. I would say I would not wave my flag, my wand or cast my wish or whatever, whatever the metaphor was here and institute proportional representation in the U.S. yeah. Which is a lot of what a lot of other reformers advocate for. And not saying I would never be open to that, but I, I think that There is too little evidence about this kind of, that kind of system. In a country that is as large and diverse as the United States. If all of the sort of parties that are emerging are sort of racial, ethnic, or fitting some sort of cultural niche, I think there's a value in a big tent party. Right? Like the Democratic Party in the United States is the most diverse organization perhaps in the world, certainly in the United States. And I think that there is a value to that.
- [44:08]
A
All right, well, some interesting stuff to mull over here. I'm going to spend some time chewing on all of this, but I appreciate you helping me do it here live on the GD Politics podcast. So thank you so much.
- [44:21]
B
It was super fun. Thank you so much for having me, Galen.
- [44:23]
A
My name is Galen Droock.
- [44:26]
B
Galen Droog, what do you think of primary reform? Open all Canada primaries.
- [44:30]
A
Okay, well, context here. We finished the interview, I turned record off, we uploaded, and then you were like, oh, if we had more time, I would have turned the tables on you and asked you some hard questions. Okay, so what's your, this would be.
- [44:43]
B
Good bonus material for paid subscribers.
- [44:45]
A
What's your hard question?
- [44:47]
B
My hard question is what Galen drew. What do you think of openl candidate primaries?
- [44:52]
A
So as the guy who's just trying to like keep everyone talking, like mind conflict, I don't necessarily like always weighed in with my own opinion. However, when I was at fivethirtyeight, we did, I don't know, we spent like six months working on an audio documentary project called the Primaries Project in which we looked at where the process came from and how other countries do it. And I think I came away from that with the idea that when you have a multi party system, like not just a two party system, that these closed primaries can work, you know, where candidates are really just chosen by the parties. Because then if you don't like what's on offer, you, you start a new party and you offer something different. And so there's not like a real cap on what options the public has. In a two party system that's kind of hard. Dissent can easily be squashed. So I don't know, I think like, why not? A bunch of the studies have suggested that there's limited change that happens. But like, I don't think any of the studies have suggested that it's like a disaster. And so if this isn't working or if we feel like this isn't working, wind as well try something where there's at least some evidence that it works. And as an unaligned voter. I would love to vote in a primary.
- [46:10]
B
Yeah, I think that's a good answer. I mean, I think the point of like, if we had a multi party system, then the context would be very different and maybe closed. You know, a closed system where party elites decided what candidate best represents them makes a lot more sense because there's already a diversity of options open to voters in the election that matters. And the reason why I sort of ended our main segment there by talking about proportional representation is that a lot of other reform advocates say, well, that's what we need to get to is a multi party system. And I don't think that that's feasible in the United States politically. But I also, I worry that that's going to have sort of unforeseen negative consequences.
- [46:54]
A
It also absolutely does not solve the problem that people say that they're trying to solve. Right. Like when you look at multi party democracies that see that get these sort of like moderate coalitions or whatever, like that's just the circumstances of their politics at the moment. For every instance of that, you also have an instance of like, well, the conservative party gets the plurality and they rely on the far right in order to like actually get to a majority. And so like for every Germany in the Merkel era, you get a Sweden in the contemporary era. And either. So like you either have like a big ten party in America where like, yes, you have to get the extremists in your party on board in order to pass legislation, or you have like two parties that work together that includes one extremist party. And it's like, I honestly couldn't tell you which one is better, but either way it doesn't solve the extremism problem.
- [47:47]
B
Definitely. So I mean I, I think that that's, I think that's right. And those are examples like that you gave of pretty homogenous societies. I mean if you look at like what's, it's hard to say, like what is the best sort of comparison to the United States that actually has pr, but like, I don't know what the answer is. It's probably.
- [48:04]
A
So you think it'll just be like racial parties, like people would just start like a white people party, a black people party, like a Hispanic people party, and that there would be just like real sort of racial and ethnic discord in American politics.
- [48:17]
B
I don't think it would just be that, but I think that that would be a huge part. I think that would be a huge way in which the parties are fractured. Absolutely. I also think that there's other. So if we get to PR through you know, multi member districts, larger districts, it really undercuts the sort of like everybody likes to crap all over single member districts in the United States. But I think that like, like legislating in the US context is largely like constituent services. Like that's when legislators are actually getting something done and they're doing that to a constituency that they're very, very intimately familiar with. And you lose that if you have like five representatives that are all in this large geographical area, probably from like the cosmopolitan part of that large geographic area. Like you lose that sort of attachment. And I think there's value in it for the relationship between representative representatives and constituents. We've also developed a whole like, you know, all these other sort of institutions, like we have all these federated sort of interest groups and nonprofits that have sort of developed on the expectation that representatives are going to have a lot of interest and influence in a specific locality. And so I just think that there's a lot of potential harm to like revolutionizing the US system. And so my, I start like when going back to your answer there, I start with the place of like, I don't think we, I don't think we're getting out of the two party system anytime soon. And I'm actually, if this, if the way to get out of it is through PR and multi member districts, I'm. I'm not convinced that it's worth the, the potential harm or at least all the uncertainty.
- [49:58]
A
Yeah, all right, cool. We'll leave it there. My name is Galen Druke. Remember to become a subscriber to this podcast@gdpolitics.com and wherever you get your podcasts. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes access to the videos and can also join our paid subscriber chat and pass along questions for us to discuss on the show. Most importantly, you ensure that we can keep making this possible podcast. Also be a friend of the POD and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to podcasts, maybe even tell a friend about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.