Katherine Gehl: Think about our democracy and like whether we’re functional as if we’re drowning, okay? And we’re drowning under, I don’t know, two feet of water about our heads, right? The only things I’m interested in doing and the only things I’m interested in recommending to someone else, another citizen, that they put their time and energy into is an innovation that, if we win it, if we change it, we’ll lower the water to at least right below our nose so that we can live.

Alex Lovit: Welcome to The Context, a podcast about the past, present, and future of democracy from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. I’m your host Alex Lovit. My guest today is Katherine Gehl. Gehl is the Founder and Chair of the Institute for Political Innovation, and she’s also one of the leading voices in the campaign for Final Five Voting. We’ll come back to that in a minute. Her book, coauthored with Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter, is entitled, “The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy.”

We start every episode of this show by saying that we focus on the past, present, and future of democracy. Our most recent couple of episodes, with historians Martha Jones and Matthew Delmont, have been about learning from the past. This one is about the future, or at least one perspective future, and perhaps a path forward that would make American elections and American democracy function more effectively.

One of the guiding beliefs of the Kettering Foundation is the value of democratic integrity— free and fair elections, accountable government, and the peaceful transfer of power. These are the basic requirements of democracy. On the surface level, American elections usually meet this standard. But when you start considering these requirements more deeply, you have to wonder, how free and fair are our elections when the two major parties squeeze out every other candidate or idea? How accountable are our politicians if they face little to no competition in general elections, and they’re mostly selected by a handful of committed partisans in primary elections?

America’s founding generation, the guys who wrote our Constitution, claimed that political parties or factions were dangerous. Because political parties weren’t part of the original vision of the American republic, you won’t find them in the Constitution. But the structure of elections in the United States, mostly district based, with whoever gets the most votes winning office, encouraged the development of two major parties very early in the history of the republic.

The names and platforms of those parties have evolved over time, but the two-party system has been a constant throughout American political history. The most significant structural reforms of that two-party system happened a century ago during the progressive era of the early 1900s. Until then, nominees were chosen by party elites in literal smoke-filled rooms. Progressive reformers pushed to democratize these decisions by allowing all party members to have a voice in choosing nominees through primary elections.

Most states adopted primaries for state and local offices in the early 1900s, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that they became the dominant method for selecting Presidential nominees. As you’ll hear in this interview, this system of primary elections creates its own problems. Even though all Americans can theoretically participate in primary elections, the people who actually turn out to vote in republican and democratic primaries tend to be committed partisans with relatively extreme ideological views.

So by the time general elections take place in November, unrepresentative primary voters have already winnowed the choice. For almost every office— local, state, and national, there will be only two viable candidates chosen by a primary electorate that doesn’t look much like the country as a whole. Even worse, for many elected offices, including most seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, the general election isn’t competitive.

We think of the general election in November as the main event for American democracy. But for a huge number of offices, November is just a coronation, and the real election happened months earlier in the primary. Katherine Gehl has a proposal to fix these problems. It’s called Final Five Voting. You’ll hear all about it in this interview. This conversation may or may not convince you that Final Five Voting is the solution to the problems of our current political system, but I hope that it will at least convince you that reforms to our electoral system are necessary.

If we want elected officials to truly represent the public, we need to pay attention to our elections process, and we need to think critically about what incentives politicians have under the current system. Final Five Voting is already being instituted in some states, and there are active campaigns to promote its adoption across the country. Would it improve politics in your state? Well, take a listen to Katherine Gehl and make up your own mind.

Katherine Gehl, welcome to The Context.

Katherine Gehl: Alex, I am thrilled to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Alex Lovit: So you’ve had a pretty interesting career and an interesting career transition. You spent the early part of your career in business. And in the last few years, you’ve really been focused on political reform. How did that trajectory happen for you? Why did you make that shift?

Katherine Gehl: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting because it seems so disconnected, my career running this high-tech food manufacturing company in Wisconsin where we actually in Wisconsin did make cheese products and then now doing politics. But for me, it turns out that they’re completely connected. So there were two threads that came together. Essentially, there I was, a business leader, deeply interested in politics as a citizen, as a parent, as someone who was just concerned about where we’re headed as a country and a great lover of America and our democracy and our leadership in the world.

And I was increasingly concerned that we weren’t able to solve any problems. And I’m asking myself, why are we passing Obamacare with no republican votes? Why are we having a government shutdown? Why can’t we solve our debt deficit problem? And I ended up realizing how massively dysfunctional Congress was. And this was at the same time as I was working on my company strategy. My mind just did this parallel processing on what I came to call the politics industry instead of the cheese industry, and I was saying, oh, wow, look at that.

In the politics industry, there’re only two competitors. And really, 90 percent of customers are dissatisfied, or 80 percent, and that’s about the approval rating of Congress. And if none of the customers are satisfied and there’re only two competitors, and yet the people in the business of politics seem to be doing extraordinarily well, which we can see, right, that industry is actually doing well, why aren’t there any new entrants?

Why don’t new companies come in to give the customers, the voters, what they want because I can tell you for sure that if I were making tons of money in my business, but my customers weren’t satisfied, there’d be an entrepreneur that’d come in and say, oh, this is a great business opportunity. Let me give those customers what they want. And then that would either push me to improve, or they would bypass me and the customers would in the end get the value. But that never happens in politics.

And so right at that moment, I realized that the structure of the industry, the incentives built into the industry where you let all the people in the business do great when the customers have never been more dissatisfied, that’s just totally screwed up. And it became clear that, even though we usually think our problem is who wins elections, our problem is that no matter who wins elections, they’re not actually incented to serve general election voters, to serve most voters.

The only customers, the way the current business of politics works, that people can care about are special interest donors and party primary voters, which are less than 20 percent of the whole voting population. So when I put those things together, I said, ah, now we can see what’s really wrong. It’s kind of like we’ve been looking for the solution in all the wrong places. We’ve been looking at who, and we needed to look at what incentives they’re working under.

And I thought there was nothing more important I could do than try to bring this analysis, but most importantly the solution, forward.

Alex Lovit: So what you’re doing there is applying some insight from your business background to politics. And a lot of this is in your book, “The Politics Industry.” But you also make this distinction between looking at the industry as this competition between the duopoly of the two major parties that kind of have—duopoly’s a monopoly, but there’re two of them—-

Katherine Gehl: Yeah.

Alex Lovit:—a stranglehold on access to political power. But you also say that you don’t think government should be run like a business. So what’s the difference there? Like how is business applied to the politics industry of elections, but what does it mean to not apply that to the government itself?

Katherine Gehl: Oh, Alex, I’m so glad you asked that early on so listeners know the distinction that will make. So there is government, all of the agencies and all of the government services, and those things are not a business, right? Government exists, in my view, to do things that cannot be done well by private enterprise. And so I would never say that we need to run that like a business, in which case you would cut off unprofitable lines of service or something.

That’s not what we do as a government when we owe providing these opportunities to all citizens, whether or not one line of business is profitable or unprofitable, shall we say. I am specifically talking about the industry of politics, which is to say the two competitions that occur in getting our representatives. We have a competition to win elections, and then we have a competition, while people are legislating, to pass policies. People are trying to win this election, and they’re trying to win their policy to get passed and put into law.

And it is those two competitions that are dramatically affected by the business of politics, and it is that business, when it’s a duopoly and nobody else can get in no matter how unhappy the customers are, that is our problem. So government, not a business. The business of politics where lots of people have for-profit businesses and they’re making tons of money running their businesses— the pollsters, the media, the campaign apparatus, the lobbyists, et cetera— that business has all of these disincentives built in with the two parties at the core.

Alex Lovit: I want to ask about Final Five Voting, which is the reform you’re proposing. But before we get there, let’s talk a little bit about what is the problem that Final Five Voting can help to solve. So if I want to run for office, and I’m a pragmatic candidate, I’ve got common sense views, I’m sort of middle of the road, and I think, well, you know, I should be able to have an influence in politics. I’m in the mainstream of what Americans think. Why is it going to be hard for me to get into office?

Katherine Gehl: So in business, we often talk about a barrier to entry into a certain industry. And what that means is how hard is it or not—do you have a high barrier to entry or a low barrier to entry—for a new company to come in and compete? And what we have in politics is a superhigh barrier to entry. So we only have these two sort of companies, the two major parties that can regularly win elections. And I will tell you, people have always thought of this as America is a two-party system. We all learned that when we were growing up.

In fact, one of my friends said to me, oh, aren’t republicans and democrats in the Constitution? So we talk about it as if it’s [attacked] for sure. And actually, it’s an accident, a historical accident. So I learned this from clinical scientist Lee Drutman in his fabulous book, “The Doom Loop.” Back when our founders created the country, they got us the Constitution, right? But obviously, it only has so much detail in there. And yet, we have to have lots of rules of everyday.

So they decide we’re going to have a democracy, and we’re going to elect people to our House and our Senate. And so now we have to set up elections, and you have to vote. Well, at that time, nobody was electing anybody anywhere, but our founders had to make the rules. And so they managed to find one example. In the countryside of Britain, there were some elections for some local representatives, and those English elections used a rule that the person with the most votes would be the winner of the election.

And that sounds super logical, and that is indeed how we do it today. But it turns out it’s a super bad decision, and if you were making your democracy from scratch now, nobody would do it that way because, if you let the person with the most votes win, but you don’t require that person to have a true majority, which is to say you don’t make them have over 50 percent, that means in a race of more than two candidates, someone can win with far less than majority support.

For example, in a three-way race, someone could win with 34 percent if the votes split relatively equally three ways and the other two candidates got 33.x percent each. And that means that more people didn’t want the winner than did want the winner. And not only does that seem not fair or democratic, the real problem is that that is why we have all the lesser of two evils elections. That’s why new people can’t get into politics because anytime you add a third or more, that new candidate is likely going to be a spoiler or you’re going to waste your vote.

So all we have to do to change that is we have to say in order to win an election, you have to have a majority. You have to have over 50 percent, which most people kind of think that’s what our rule is. It just actually isn’t, but we don’t usually notice it because there’re usually only two candidates anyway. But once we say you have to have over 50 percent, then you change the rules of the election to find a way to figure out who among those three or among those four or five candidates has over 50 percent, and you get rid of the spoiler.

And then we can have as much competition as we want, and it will be competition that benefits the customers. And I would argue also benefits the people in the politics industry because now there’s going to be competition to solve problems on behalf of voters, which is ultimately what the whole industry should be focused on.

Alex Lovit: So you’re talking there about the challenge for—you know, if I want to run for office, and I start my own political party, I quickly find that I’m being labeled a spoiler. I’m finding it very difficult to—-

Katherine Gehl: Or you’re an independent. You know, even if you don’t start a political party, you’re a spoiler.

Alex Lovit: Sure. That’s the problem of trying to run outside of the two major political parties, which, as you’re saying, those parties are not in the Constitution, were not envisioned. The founders really were suspicious of the idea of political parties at all, but sort of accidentally created this system that basically limits competition down to two parties. So I think, all right, well, I’ll run for one of the parties instead. I’ll run in the primary election. What kind of obstacles am I going to find there?

Katherine Gehl: So let’s tell a story that will illustrate this. In 2008, Joe Biden, of course, was elected Vice President. So then in 2009, there was an election for his Senate seat that he had left in Delaware. And I understand that at the time, everybody knew who was going to be the next Senator from the state of Delaware. It was Mike Castle. He was a multiple-term governor, multiple-term Congressman, a republican, the most popular politician in the state of Delaware.

But we’ve never heard of a Senator Mike Castle. So what happened there? Well, he’s a republican. He ran in his republican primary. And there was super low turnout, and he lost. He lost to one of the first Tea Party candidates, a woman named Christine O’Donnell. The most popular politician in the state lost in a low-turnout republican primary. So now he wasn’t going to be on the ballot in November.

Now what logically made sense is that Mike Castle could turn around and put himself on that general election ballot as an independent because he would’ve won when all the voters in the state got to choose, which is really who should be choosing who wins. But it turns out that there’s a little bit of a problem. Delaware has a law, rather odd, and it’s called the Sore Loser Law. And what that says is if you run in your party’s primary and you lose, you are not allowed to have your name on the ballot in November, regardless of what the people of your state want.

So even though he would’ve been the choice of the voters in November, the rules that the parties have colluded to create to protect themselves from competition meant that that was simply not permitted. So the question becomes, how many states have a crazy, rather undemocratic law like this? And the answer is 44. And most of us have never even heard of it. But that is the challenge that people create when they want to run within the parties, which is there’s only one that ever gets to the November election ballot, and that is chosen by such a small number of people. And then the rules say you have no other way to compete in this race.

And they’ve done that on purpose. Now those are the structural kinds of things behind the scenes, this plurality voting, most votes wins rule, the Sore Loser Laws, all sorts of other rules. But I also think, Alex, what you may be referring to is the other really clear-cut problem, which is that in order to get to the general election ballot, you have to win this primary. And primary voters on both sides are, as groups, more ideological than general election voters as a whole.

So if you want to win the republican primary, you have to first win over the approximately 10 percent of voters that participate in that republican primary, or the democratic primary, the 10 percent of voters that participate there. So unless you are willing to go into those primaries and appeal to that small segment of voters on either side and demonize the other side, it’s really hard to win those primaries if you are more center, if you are more willing to work with the other side.

I actually say these two parties work very well together in one particular way, and that is behind the scenes where we can’t see, they work very well together to rig the rules of the game to protect themselves jointly from any new competition. Sore Loser Laws are one. They’ve protected themselves from competition in the debates. They protect themselves from competition with fundraising rules that give them 500k per cycle versus 3,000 dollars for the independent candidate.

I mean, they’ve structured it all to make sure that no matter how dissatisfied we are, those are the only two products on the shelf. And we don’t really know that because they don’t tell on each other in that case, right? So it’s been hidden from us, and once we wake up to that, then we suddenly realize, oh, maybe if we change some of the rules of the game, we would change how the game is played, and we would change the outcomes of that game.

Alex Lovit: So a lot of the stuff you’re talking about makes a lot of sense to me, that the system is kind of rigged in favor of this two-party duopoly. And as you’re saying, they don’t have incentives to tell on each other in that particular case. But a lot of this stuff has been around a long time, too. We’ve been a two-party government. You know, it hasn’t been the same two parties the whole time, but it’s basically always been only two parties. And primary elections have been around for a hundred years.

But some of the things you’re talking about are getting worse. Negative polarization, for example, is increasing. Do you think things are getting worse, and do you have an explanation for that?

Katherine Gehl: Yes, things are getting worse. It’s just a natural thing with any industry and kind of any human endeavor, which is as people get used to the rules of the game, they figure out how to optimize around those rules of the game. So when you instituted the three-point line in basketball, it wasn’t that all of the teams immediately knew how players should play and what kind of players they should recruit. It takes decades to optimize under new rules.

And what you see in every industry is people optimize in the regulation of that industry over time, which is why you need regulation to be in line with what you actually want to see out of the players in the industry. And what I’m getting at is it took a long time for people to begin to use the primary as a weapon. So I remember when I first started talking about this, I was speaking on it was early as 2013, but I’ll say really actively beginning in 2017.

And this is people—for example, my main audience—really didn’t know that the primary was a problem. They didn’t know that that was what was dividing people and making sure they couldn’t solve problems when they got to Congress. They didn’t know that primary was a verb. What I mean is, when we started it, when the progressive got these primaries for the House and Senate a hundred years ago, it was the primary. It’s a noun.

But by 2010, you started to see that primary had become a verb, as in to primary. And what that meant is, okay, Alex, if you are our representative from this district in the House, and let’s say you’re a democrat, and you don’t do the things that we, the leaders in this democratic party, want you to do, we’re going to primary you. And what that means is we are going to run someone further to your left, and we’re going to take you out in your primary.

So primary as a verb became sort of the hammer that you held over the heads of people on both sides to get them to do what the party wanted them to do and to adhere to those more extreme, more uncompromising views of both sides.

That was just optimized and optimized and optimized over time. And it’s just a recipe for exactly what we see right now, which is a completely dysfunctional United States Congress and, in many cases, reasonably dysfunctional—or, at least, much more dysfunctional—state governments, as well.

Alex Lovit: Okay. So that’s the problem, and that’s a pretty compelling statement of what the problem is. Let’s talk about your prescription for how to fix it. You’re pushing for this reform of Final-Five Voting, which actually consists of two reforms: one to primary elections and one to general elections.

So for primary elections, you would like to see nonpartisan top-five primaries, where five candidates would advance to the general election. And then for general elections, these would be ranked-choice voting. So can you briefly describe how each of these elections would work? And why do we need to do both of them together?

Katherine Gehl: Yeah. Let’s quickly say for a moment that we’re about to talk about the election system. But I want to preface this by noting that just because we’re talking about the election system doesn’t mean that our main concern is who is going to win. That is absolutely a secondary concern of the design of the election system that I, and now many others, are proposing.

Our goal is to change the election system not to change who wins—although it will, but that’s not the goal; it’s to change what winners do when they’re legislating. So think of the election system as the hiring and firing system for this company that is Congress. You need to hire people, and you need to pay them and incent them and promote them if they do the job well that you need them to do.

In the current election system, the current hiring/firing system, if you negotiate and make a deal on these tough issues and you don’t deliver for your side everything your side wants, you will lose your next party primary on both sides. So the deals that exist behind closed doors on all the big issues are deals that will lose everybody their job—if they are chosen in primaries. If they were chosen in general elections, they may well be able to make those deals.

So we want to change how we hire and fire so that that process gives people a job description that is actually what we need them to do. So Final-Five Voting has, as you noted, the two things. We’ve got a single primary. Everybody runs regardless of party. All voters have the right to participate regardless of party. Everybody picks their favorite. And then out of that, the top five finishers will go to the general election.

So now nobody won in the primary. You don’t know who’s won because we have five people competing. So even if it’s a Republican district . . . And normally you would know who won after the primary because whoever won the Republican primary was automatically going to win in November.

But now you don’t because out of those five, you could easily have, let’s say, three Republicans. You can have a Trump Republican, a Romney Republican, a Libertarian Republican all going to the general election along with a Democrat and a Green or an Independent. Any combination.

Then between the primary and the general, you’re going to benefit from this dynamic competition of ideas and candidacies and visions. And in the general, we need to—now that we have competition, we just need to figure out which of these candidates should win.

What we don’t want to do, back to our earlier conversation, is have one of these candidates win with 21 percent of the vote, which could happen if the votes split relatively equally. Right? That’s the spoiler/wasted-vote problem.

So we need the competition to deliver for voters, and then we need to change our rule that you have to have 50 percent. And the way we do that is we change it. You have to have a majority. And we use instant runoffs whereby those five candidates are winnowed in a series of runoff rounds—from five candidates to four candidates, three, and to the final two—at which point, of course, the majority between the final two wins. You do that by using a ranked ballot.

Instant runoffs are exactly like physical runoffs that are already used in places like Georgia; but instead of the voter having to keep coming back each time a candidate is eliminated to cast another vote, they just cast all their votes at once using a ranked ballot. And then you can get the results of all those runoffs that night that all the votes are in. And that’s why it’s called “instant runoff.”

So when you combine advancing five—or, by the way, four, because I also support final-four voting. And in fact, my early work called for final four, which is, in part, why Alaska has final-four voting. They were the first state to adopt this and not final five.

And so when you advance the four or five, then the runoffs are just the additional tool that makes sure you get the right winner, the majority winner, so that they can have their bosses be a majority of general election voters.

Alex Lovit: Let’s talk a little bit about the number five or the number four. Obviously, there’s no perfect single number. Four or five could perfectly well. But why not three? Why not six? Why are you in that ball park?

Katherine Gehl: Yeah, look. In general, we just know that more competition is better because more competition in any industry gets us more innovation, more new products coming out, more accountability—which is to say companies can’t charge too much money because a new competitor will come in and say, “Oh. You’re making way too much money, and you’re taking advantage of the customer. So I’m going to offer a similar product at less price.”

So you need competition to drive the value in the industry. So more is better. Three would absolutely not be enough competition to address the huge diversity in the country and bring enough new ideas and new candidates into the system.

But at the same time, because this is something that we are engaging with intellectually, you don’t have the ability to evaluate 10 people in a general election. So we’re basically trying to find the sweet spot of having more competition, having low barriers to entry so it’s not a protected duopoly anymore; but then having a reasonable number so that it’s not totally overwhelming.

Five is the optimal number. Basically, neuroscience tells us that the average human can hold five to seven things in their brain at one time. And since we need this system for all of us, average humans, we don’t want to go over five.

Alex Lovit: So let’s talk about the places where this has already been instituted. So you’ve mentioned Alaska a couple times, where, as you said, final four rather than final five, but, more or less, the reform you’re looking for—

Katherine Gehl: Yep.

Alex Lovit:—is already the law. And if I understand correctly, it’s on the ballot in Nevada this November. So do you have a word for the voters of Nevada of why they should support this thing?

Katherine Gehl: So Nevada voters actually passed Final-Five Voting in 2022. It won by seven points, which was more than any of their other big races, like governor or senator. So it was more popular than the winners of both those races.

And it’s on the ballot again, as you said, Alex, because Nevada’s constitution requires initiatives to pass twice. So most states aren’t like that. Most states, you can just win it one year, and then it can go into effect. So it will be on the ballot again.

In Nevada, they have a huge problem, which is that Nevada right now doesn’t allow Independents to participate in party primaries. If you’re not a registered Democrat or a registered Republican, you’re not allowed to vote in the primary. But the primary almost always is the only election that matters.

In fact, a sister organization—a great organization called Unite America—ran the numbers. In 2022, 83 percent of U.S. House seats were chosen in party primaries, and only 8 percent of the country participated in those primaries—which means that when most people go to vote in November, it’s a farce. The decision was made. They’re wasting their time.

And in Nevada, for Independent voters, which are about a third of the electorate, they’re not allowed to participate in the elections that are the only elections that matter. They are effectively, in our democracy, forbidden to have a say in who’s going to represent them.

One of the messages that really resonated with Nevadans, as you might imagine, is a veteran who serves time in Afghanistan and Iraq and returns home to Nevada and is an Independent voter and obviously loves the country—they’ve demonstrated it by risking their lives—and they are not permitted, not allowed to vote in the election that’s going to choose who represents them? They’re only allowed to vote in the general, which doesn’t matter? That’s crazy, undemocratic, totally wrong.

Final-Five Voting will change that in Nevada so that no one will win an election until November; and everyone will get to participate in both the primary and the general; and all votes will matter in all those elections.

Alex Lovit: So that’s a pretty good argument for Nevadans, why they should support this. What about the rest of us? What can we be looking for out of Nevada or out of Alaska that would help indicate that this is an effective reform?

Katherine Gehl: So to me, it’s super-clear: We have to see that government solves problems in a way they currently don’t. Like in Congress. After Final-Five Voting/Final-Four Voting in enough states, we will have to be able to look at Congress and evaluate that they are now not mired in gridlock, not mired in partisan warfare, but that they reach a consensus compromise deal on immigration; that they control the national debt; that they manage to create an infrastructure bill that is supported by bipartisan representatives. And the same for healthcare, for example.

And that way, we won’t just keep careening back and forth—you know, pass something, and then the other side takes over, and then it’s repeal-repeal-repeal, and then we go back and forth.

So in 10 years, that’s what we would be looking at. It’s hard to see that immediately, A, because you don’t have enough changed incentives for enough people, but also because it will take some time, then, to readjust all the behavior to be solving these problems.

But we see the original incentives changing quite clearly already in Alaska. And let’s not take my word for it. There’s a woman named Cathy Giessel. She has served in Alaska in their state Senate actually as Senate majority leader and then as Senate president. She describes herself a very conservative Republican, and she served for 12 years before they passed Final-Four Voting.

Now she’s served for two years under the new rules of the game, Final-Four Voting. And she will say, first, she didn’t support it originally. She thought it was a bad idea, which is kind of a lot of politicians’ initial reaction to this change.

And now she says she’d never go back. And she says that she and her colleagues in the Senate, the great majority of them, would never want to go back to the way it was because it changed the way that they can work together.

And it changed their ability to focus on the issues most important to Alaskans instead of being distracted by the national culture wars, which Alaskans aren’t super-interested in fighting in Alaska because they’re very Libertarian. And they don’t have to be driven by what’s happen[ing] nationally; they can be focused in Alaska because that’s how you can win there.

She’s very interesting because she got primaried in 2020 in her Republican primary. So someone ran “further to her right,” and they were criticizing her for working with Democrats—which, even though she’s a super-conservative Republican, as Senate president she felt that she had a responsibility to actually work with everybody as the president of the chamber. She got criticized for that, so she lost in her primary.

The only reason she ran again, in ‘22, is because they had Final-Four Voting. And in ‘22, now she didn’t just have to win a Republican primary. She made it in the top five, and she was accountable to general election voters. And then she won. And she explains, during the campaign . . . This is just anecdotal, but it helps you see how different things could be.

Normally candidates buy lists of the voters that can be expected to turn out in their primaries. So in all the other years, she would buy a list of all the Republican voters. And she would walk, knock on doors, and look at the list and say, “Oh, I’m supposed to go to this address and talk to this person. Then I skip this person because they’re a Democrat. I skip this person because they’re an Independent. And now I’m going to go talk to this Republican.”

And she said, “I just went to every door.” Every door. And she said it was totally different because now she was going to report to all of these people. All their votes were going to matter, and she had massively varied conversations.

So we just see the incentives are changed. Both the Alaska House and Senate formed bipartisan governing coalitions. Now they just work together in a bipartisan relationship in both chambers. They agreed to focus on three major issues that were most important to Alaskans, and then they left to the side—they agreed to not focus on the ones where they had the most partisan division.

Alex Lovit: So I think one advantage of this reform process is that, as you’re saying, it can have effects even without all 50 states signing on because every state that does sign on, it changes the incentives for politicians in that state and the representatives that they send to Congress. And so it can start to have an impact even without every single state signing on, which is lucky because it’s a political reform movement that you have to push state by state.

Katherine Gehl: Think about this. If we had Final-Five Voting in five states—or Final-Four Voting—we’d have 10 senators who are not beholden to the tyranny of the party primary; 10 senators who answer to general election voters; 10 senators who cannot be threatened with a primary, which means that they are free to be deal makers. And in a closely divided Senate, 10 senators can make a huge difference in what kinds of legislation can make it to the floor and can pass.

You absolutely don’t need to change the entire country, or even half of the country, in order to change the debates and the dialogue in the legislation that’s being considered in Washington, D.C. It’s very exciting.

Alex Lovit: Well, it is exciting. So you’re a political reformer. You’re trying to make reforms happen state by state using the initiative process when that’s available to you. There are other reforms that are similarly trying to make our government work better and are similarly often passed state by state, often using the initiative process.

I see a lot of overlap between the reforms you’re proposing and anti-gerrymandering reform or redistricting reform. So when you talk to people in the redistricting reform movement, they say a lot of the same things you’re saying. They say the problem is that these partisan primary elections limit who gets to win, and the general election isn’t really a real election, and that leads to these extremist candidates.

And you also live in Wisconsin, a state that has had some pretty famous recent debates over gerrymandering. Do you have thoughts about the connection between primary reform and gerrymandering reform? And why are you choosing to focus on this Final-Five Voting system?

Katherine Gehl: Yeah. I totally used to focus on gerrymandering. That was an earlier idea that, I thought, was a big opportunity for us to change. In fact, in Wisconsin, where I’m from, I raised money from Democrats and Republicans jointly—I always do everything bipartisan—to work on a legal case there where we were trying to get rid of gerrymandering.

Both sides do this over time, and it’s wrong when either side does it. But here’s why I’m not focused on it now. Think about our democracy and whether we’re functional as if we’re drowning. We’re drowning under, I don’t know, 2 feet of water above our heads.

The only things I’m interested in doing, and the only things I’m interested in recommending to someone else—another citizen, that they put their time and energy into—is an innovation that, if we win it, if we change it, will lower the water to at least right below our nose so that we can live.

And then, after we get the water to here—great—then we can do some other things, and lower it further, and make our democracy more and more healthy. Every other reform out there is either something that seems like a good idea but that we can’t have because it’s not constitutional and we’re not going to pass constitutional amendments.

So we can talk about term limits. You can like them or hate them. But even if you love them, they’re unconstitutional for Congress, so I wouldn’t recommend people spend any time on that.

Then other reforms, like gerrymandering: If we get a nonpartisan redistricting commission, they change something. They will lower the water above our heads, and we will still be dead because they’re not enough.

They make the system more fair, so they make us feel better about it, but they don’t actually change what the real problem is—which is, for example, that lots of districts, the majority of districts, even if you have somehow perfect, if it were possible, nonpartisan districting, are naturally sorted to be blue or red. And in those cases, the election is still going to happen in the primary.

And you’re still going to have a completely protected duopoly. You’re still going to have spoilers and wasted votes, so you won’t have any new entrants. We’re drowning. The only thing we should invest our time in is things that get the water to at least below our nose. It’s straightforward. You can’t do everything, so you have to choose: Where is your most leverage? Where is the biggest ROI?

And what I say to a lot of reformers sometimes: I totally understand the motivations behind these. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t do them. I’m just saying that if you can only do so many things, you need to make some distinctions between where you get the best return on the ballot initiative you’re going to run.

And ideally we’ll have both. No question. I have thought that if you did Final-Five Voting/Final-Four Voting first, the people elected through that will be more likely to change the rules to nonpartisan redistrict just in a legislative fashion. Then you don’t have to spend all that money on redistricting. So I would tend to go for this first. But I also bow to the knowledge and expertise and leadership of people in that state to determine what’s best for them.

I do, though, ask people to weigh and evaluate what you’re going to get from one versus the other. If you’re going to spend 30 million on a ballot initiative, should you try to spend that 30 million—assuming that you don’t have access to unlimited, should you spend it on Final Four or Final Five, or should you spend it on gerrymandering, where you really will still need to come back to do Final Four or Final Five later, anyway?

Alex Lovit: I want to ask about the mechanics of ranked-choice voting and how you think that this would break the two-party duopoly. So we’ve talked a lot about it being a problem—that these two parties have a stranglehold on the American political system—and Final-Five Voting is, in large part, a solution to that problem.

And it does solve the spoiler problem because if I am—you know, really, I want to support the Constitution Party. Right now if I vote for that, probably that’s just a wasted vote. So I might as well just cast my ballot for the Republican Party. Under ranked-choice voting, I can go ahead and say, “Actually, my first preference is this third party,” or third or fourth, or however many number of parties.

Katherine Gehl: Uh-huh.

Alex Lovit: And I can still, using ranked choice, ensure that my vote will go to, in this case, a conservative candidate—whichever one is the most viable. But under that, at the end of the day, only one candidate is going to win in each district. How isn’t this just going to come down to a Republican or a Democrat at the end of the election? How will third parties be more viable?

Katherine Gehl: So the benefit of competition does not depend on how many players are in the industry. The benefit of Final-Five and Final-Four Voting will not be delivered if X many third parties get going or X many Independent candidates wins. It is the competition itself.

So I am not someone who thinks that we need more than two parties. Our problem is not that we have parties. It’s not that we have only two parties. Our problem is that the current two are guaranteed to be the only two ongoingly, regardless of what they do or don’t get done for customers.

So what we need is competition that threatens the existing players on behalf of customers, in a sense, to do a better job. And then either those two parties will adjust their behavior to not just please their party primary voters, special interests, and donors, but to also please general election voters.

Or they won’t. And if they don’t, then maybe one of the new competitors, an Independent or a new party, will sort of take over for them and push them out of business. Or they will adjust their behavior. And then they’ll still be called Democrats and Republicans, but they’ll just be much more functional, and they’ll be doing totally different things than they do today.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that ongoingly we will regularly have two parties that are the most powerful, but they’re held accountable by the competition, knowing that it’s no longer like it is now, where they get to do whatever they want regardless of whether it’s good for voters, but they actually have to serve voters or someone will take their place.

Competition, again, changes the results that industry delivers even when it doesn’t change which company wins in that industry. Competition will deliver the results we need. The ideas are going to get out there. The accountability is going to be there in the elections. And it is that competitive pressure and competitive dynamism that changes both the debate and the accountability that will change the results. So there’s nothing about a specific number of parties that we need.

Alex Lovit: Well, thank you for challenging us to think big about our democracy, and thank you for joining me on The Context.

Katherine Gehl: Thank you, Alex. I do hope that your listeners will consider taking a look at my book, The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. That would be awesome to continue the conversation. And reach out to us on the Web if you want. Just Google “Final-Five Voting.”

Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. If you listen to podcasts regularly, you’ll have heard, basically, every single host ask you to rate and review their shows or to help promote them through word of mouth. The reason we all ask this of you is because these really are the most important ways that podcasts build their audiences.

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I’m Alex Lovit, a senior program officer and historian with the Foundation. Research assistance by Isabel Pergande. Episode production by George Drake, Jr. Kettering’s Director of Communications is Melinda Gilmore.

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Transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a Kettering Foundation contractor and may contain small errors. The authoritative record is the audio recording.