BETHANY ALBERTSON: Hi. This is Bethany Albertson in Austin, Texas, where I’m teaching about the media for the elections 2024 class at UT Austin. Hook ’em. This podcast was recorded at…
MILES PARKS, HOST:
1:35 p.m. on Thursday, October 3, 2024.
ALBERTSON: Things may have changed by the time you hear it, and maybe some of my students will be listening. OK, here’s the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
ASHLEY LOPEZ, BYLINE: Hello, neighbor.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Yay, media literacy.
PARKS: Yeah, save the journalism profession, OK?
KURTZLEBEN: Hell, yeah.
PARKS: These are the next generation. Hey, there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Miles Parks. I cover voting.
LOPEZ: I’m Ashley Lopez. I also cover voting.
KURTZLEBEN: I’m Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign. I cover the effects of voting.
PARKS: (Laughter)
KURTZLEBEN: The results…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
KURTZLEBEN: …As it were.
PARKS: Today on the show, we’re going to talk about how voters in a number of states this election are going to be weighing whether to change how they vote, how elections actually work in their states, from nonpartisan primaries to ranked-choice voting.
And a reminder before we get rolling – don’t forget to hit the follow button wherever you listen to your podcasts to make sure you are notified every time we drop a new episode.
Ashley, you’ve been covering this all year, that there are all of these states, and I have your story in front of me. I just want to be clear. There’s, like, pages and pages of states that are considering…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
PARKS: …Some way of kind of changing how they elect their leaders. What is driving this need right now, in 2024, for voters in all of these states to be so motivated to kind of rethink how they do things?
LOPEZ: Well, the short answer is that the system we have right now isn’t working for a lot of voters. And the voters that I’m talking about mostly here are unaffiliated and independent voters – voters who don’t affiliate or register with either of the major parties. And that is a rising group of voters in this country. There have been more people not registering with either party every year.
This is especially a big chunk of the electorate when we’re looking at young voters. And so the sort of partisan structures that we have for how primaries are run right now just doesn’t work for them. They either, like, you know, de facto leave them out completely by, you know, requiring that you be registered with their party to vote in their primary, or they require that people, like, kind of choose between the parties even in the end, to, like, figure out what ballot they want to vote on in a primary, if that makes sense.
So this is a system that was set up decades and decades ago, when people were more likely to register with parties or affiliate with a party, and it’s just not working right now for a lot of voters.
KURTZLEBEN: Well, with the understanding that there could be maybe some benefits of the system, what I’m wondering is, generally, when there’s a rash of ballot initiatives like this, there’s a cause, right? You know, there’s a lot of states that have ballot initiatives about reproductive rights as a result of Dobbs. So did something happen, or is there a group pushing this? Why a bunch of states right now?
LOPEZ: Well, I think there are a couple of answers here. One, the reform space in elections I think has gotten more – and Miles definitely could jump in on this – I think they’ve just gotten more organized, and they have just more, like, power than I’ve ever seen them have. Like, I think people are more open-minded now because our politics just don’t seem to be working for a lot of people.
And one of the other reasons and one of the things that’s not working that advocates say is a cause and effect, created by the fact that a lot of independent unaffiliated voters aren’t participating in primaries, is that we’re getting more extreme candidates out of primaries and onto a general election. I mean, I think anyone could think of, like, a couple of examples of, like, well, this is kind of like – you know, I think things would be called, like, the Donald Trump effect. But there’s also just the effect of primaries, seemingly, especially in the Republican Party, has a lot of notable examples from this election cycle, where it’s like, well, this is a pretty, like, extreme candidate. I’m surprised they sort of survived a primary and made it to a general election.
And the reasoning for that is that there are fewer people participating in primaries. Actually, and one of the folks in the reform space that tackles this issue a lot is called Unite America. They’re a philanthropic venture fund that invests in nonpartisan electoral reform. They ran the numbers for just this primary cycle, and they found that just 7% of the country’s voting-age population effectively elected 87% of the entire U.S. House in partisan primaries. So it’s like a very small sliver of the electorate is choosing who wins probably the most important race, which is a primary race, because congressional races are, by and large, not very competitive during a general.
PARKS: That’s what I was thinking. We talked about this yesterday when we were talking about New York House races, that there are just fewer…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
PARKS: …When there are fewer competitive districts and there’s kind of easy wins for parties on both sides, there is this general feeling that a small number of voters – right? – have kind of an outsized impact on the results.
Ashley, there are seven states considering reforms that you focused on in your story – Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, South Dakota, and D.C. also has a measure on the ballot. What exactly are all of these places considering?
LOPEZ: So, the most popular thing I’m seeing is there are states considering a nonpartisan, usually top-four primary system with ranked-choice voting. And how that would work is, basically, for each office, all the candidates of any party – major, minor, even independent candidates – appear on the same ballot, and all voters get to weigh in and choose whatever candidate they want from that list. And then the top four vote-getters in most cases, or it could be top three, some are doing top two, move on to the general election.
And then because a lot of states are choosing the top four vote-getter structure, that means they’re going to have, like, a lot of people moving on to the general. So they’re opting for a ranked-choice voting system, which would allow voters to sort of rank their preference of candidates in that structure.
KURTZLEBEN: When it comes to those nonpartisan blanket primaries, these do exist in some places already.
LOPEZ: That’s right.
KURTZLEBEN: Famously, California.
LOPEZ: Yeah.
KURTZLEBEN: Listeners might have heard it referred to as a jungle primary. You just – everybody, sort a free for all, all on the ballot at once. And there are a lot of, you know, potential effects of that. For example, in a really blue state like California, you end up with two Democrats, one versus the other, running for the same office.
PARKS: I feel like advocates are really looking at these sorts of changes, whether it is changing the primary system or changing the general election system with ranked-choice voting, and basically pointing at the idea of polarization. That’s kind of the biggest one, I feel like…
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.
PARKS: …That changing these systems will change the incentive structure and make it so U.S. politics is just a little bit less polarized, that there will be more compromise, which we know from polling, Americans want more compromise from their elected officials.
LOPEZ: They say they do.
PARKS: They say they do, yeah. I mean, I guess you could…
LOPEZ: I’m cynical.
PARKS: You’re a little cynical on it.
LOPEZ: A little.
PARKS: But they do. They do say they want that, right?
LOPEZ: Yes. Yeah.
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah.
PARKS: Is there any evidence that these changes will actually bring about that kind of outcome?
LOPEZ: We don’t really see that this is leading to, like, less-extreme candidates being moved into a general or winning elections. What we do know, though, is that it does change how candidates run, right? So they are running while trying to appeal to a broader base of voters. Instead of just talking directly to their base, they are having to consider, hey, I have to win over independent voters. I have to win over unaffiliated voters. I have to win over Green Party voters. Like, it is a very different way of thinking about who you have to appeal to during a primary. But in terms of, like, the end game here, I think the results have been pretty mixed.
I will say, though, it’s very few states that we’re looking at, and it’s mostly Democratic states. You know, a lot of the states that are considering this, it’s sort of a mixed bag of the seven states out west that are, you know, considering these ballot measures. If, let’s say, they all approve these measures, we will have blue states, red states, purple states. And I think we’ll have a better picture of how, like, this actually works in different places, because if you’re just looking at California and Washington, I think you’re getting a pretty, like, sort of small slice of the picture of how these really function. So I will say it’s mixed, but, you know, there’s more to be seen.
KURTZLEBEN: Hear me out here. I’m not going on a tangent. When you look at the Oscars, the Oscars switched to ranked-choice voting…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
KURTZLEBEN: …Not terribly long ago, and there was some blaming of ranked-choice voting for wins by movies like “Green Book,” which were not terribly well liked, but apparently a bunch of people were like, sounds good, check. And lo and behold, you end up with a movie that makes everybody scratch their heads. Do you have a “Green Book” issue in American politics, and is that bad? I don’t know.
LOPEZ: Yeah. And I think at this point, it’s like too early to, like, guess what that would look like, right? We just don’t have this in enough states to really say what’s going to come out of this. And what I think reformers would say – what I’ve heard advocates say is, like, yes, there is the – like, you know, we can’t promise what the outcome will be. We have a good sense of, like, what has happened in other states, but the most important problem they see that this would solve immediately is that it would bring some voters back into the fold when it comes to primaries. It would immediately at least solve the issue of not having a bunch of independent and unaffiliated voters completely left out of the process, which I think to some folks, is, like, sort of the bigger initial problem to solve.
PARKS: But as you’ve kind of alluded to, Danielle, there are a lot of people in all of these states coming out against these sorts of reforms, and we’re going to get into kind of their arguments after the break.
And we’re back. Ashley, one thing I remember reporting on when this issue came up in Nevada in 2022 – and Nevada is kind of a weird case ’cause they’ve had to vote on ranked-choice voting twice, right? They passed it in 2022, and they have to – if they want it to actually get instituted, they have to pass it again in 2024. And it became clear that both political parties in Nevada opposed the changes that were being considered. Is that the case everywhere? I mean, are the political parties generally opposed to these changes because it would just lessen their influence in the system when it comes to primaries?
LOPEZ: Yeah. And, I mean, that’s why they’re sort of the key opponents of this, right? They just don’t want to have power stripped away from them. And, like, from what I’ve heard, especially Republicans say, you know – ’cause I did some reporting on why Louisiana was moving away from its, you know, nonpartisan system – is that they don’t like the idea of people who are less invested in the party diluting the voting power of the people who are their base voters.
You know, it’s like a little bit like team politics here. They just don’t want, like, the people who have, like, the most ideological purity about where their party stands having their voices sort of like drowned out by people who have sort of less rah-rah ties and ideological purity to the party. I will also say, I’ve heard people make some, like, interesting arguments that I think are valid about, you know, this is a big change to how we run elections, so it could also confuse voters. Like, if you think of infrequent voters, people who vote maybe once every four years, this could kind of stump them, right? This could be something that confuses them, and when it comes to elections. You know this, Miles, like, even the smallest little changes, like, or anything that could be even a little hurdle for some voters, it’s just like – it’s enough to make them not vote.
So that is, like, a sort of valid concern, is that this could be confusing to some voters and that could cause people to kind of, like, maybe think about whether they want to vote, ’cause it, like, maybe overwhelms them. We also don’t know how this is going to pan out, and so a lot of the parties are like, well, you think this is going to solve a problem, but, like, I think you’re kind of overselling the promise of these reforms.
KURTZLEBEN: You know, you’re talking about how the partisan apparatus is reacting to this. What about the voters? Are there any obvious partisan splits among voters in these states about these potential changes?
LOPEZ: You know, there’s actually not a lot of polling about election structures people like, but, you know, I talked to someone in Louisiana about their nonpartisan structure and just how much voters really liked it. Besides it being sort of a unique thing to Louisiana, which voters liked, voters tend to like the freedom to do what they want, right? Like, vote for whoever you want doesn’t sound like something that voters would have a problem with, especially, I mean – like, I come across a lot of voters who are like, yeah, you know, I mostly vote for this party, but, like, I sometimes lean towards the other party on, like, sort of local issues, right?
Like, voters tend to have, like, some nuanced opinions about, like, how they sort of align themselves in the party, and having a little bit more freedom to sort of vote for whoever they want and not being tied to one ballot is something that appeals to voters. But, you know, in terms of, like, do they prefer, like, a top-four system or a top-two, that sort of thing, we just don’t really have a lot of information about it. Maybe, Miles, you know about how voters like ranked-choice voting.
PARKS: I was just going to say, basically…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
PARKS: …That, like, it seems like Republican officials think their voters are scared or don’t want these things, just based on the fact that all of the states that have made moves to ban ranked-choice voting are Republican states.
LOPEZ: Yeah. I see.
PARKS: And so I think they must be responding to something, and, you know, you can kind of make an argument on whether that’s the chicken or the egg, because over the last few years we’ve seen a number of Republican advocacy groups really focus and try to hammer this as a kind of radical liberal idea, even though there is no research that this advantages one party over the other. It just is a more representative way to vote.
But, yeah, I’m just eager to kind of see, considering the wide swath of states…
LOPEZ: Yeah.
PARKS: …And all of the different political leanings in all these states where these ballot questions are going to come up, how the results actually – how voters actually – because I think that, right, is going to be the best data we have on how voters actually feel about this.
LOPEZ: Yeah. That’s what I’m looking out for, is, like, I’m curious to see -’cause this is like a good test, because it is a big swath of states. Like, seven is not nothing, and it’s, like, red, blue and purple states. Like, you know, there are two battlegrounds in here. Arizona and Nevada are both going to be voting on this, which is interesting implications for, like, down the road as well. So I’m very curious to see, like, how voters respond to these questions.
PARKS: Totally. This has, like, moved from being, like, a wonky voting topic..
LOPEZ: Right.
KURTZLEBEN: Right.
PARKS: …To being something that actually could determine some really huge races over the next couple of years. All right, well, let’s leave it there for now. I’m Miles Parks. I cover voting.
LOPEZ: I’m Ashley Lopez. I also cover voting.
KURTZLEBEN: And I’m Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the presidential campaign.
PARKS: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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