In 2013, Katherine Gehl was a young CEO when she crossed paths with Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, who revolutionized corporate strategy with his famed “Five Forces” analysis. Through working with Porter on efforts to revive U.S. economic competitiveness, Gehl — who describes herself as “politically homeless” — realized that the same Five Forces analysis could be applied to the business of politics. Looking at politics through this lens helped explain why the current political primary system produces polarization and paralyzed government. In particular, she was struck by how the Republican and Democratic parties, for all their differences, act as a duopoly in preventing new entrants into the field.
The result was Gehl and Porter’s 2020 book The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. Based on her research, Gehl realized that the most powerful and achievable reform to change our broken political paradigm was Final Five Voting. In this system, closed partisan primaries are replaced with nonpartisan open primaries that send the top five finishers to the general election, in which a single candidate is elected through ranked choice voting.
In this podcast discussion, Gehl describes how she went through what she calls “the five stages of political grief” to arrive at her conviction that Final Five Voting was the reform American politics needed most. She describes how such a system was enacted in Alaska, how it works in practice, and how it shifts the selection power in our democracy from primary voters to general-election voters. As a result, this reform made Alaskan politicians more responsive to the electorate as a whole (instead of a small group of highly partisan primary voters) and more willing to strike deals with political opponents to solve public problems. Gehl discusses other states that are considering Final Five Voting, the opposition that reformers face from both parties and how Final Five Voting can lead to better candidates and governing outcomes.
Transcript
Katherine Gehl: Do the people that we elect have the ability to engage in the kind of actions it takes to figure out how to fix something that’s really complex? They have to not be penalized for talking to people who are “on the other side.”
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Katherine Gehl, the founder of the Institute for Political Innovation, which she created in 2020 as a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization to catalyze modern political change in America. She’s also renowned as the originator of the “politics industry theory,” and the fullest exposition of this theory appears in her 2020 book The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy, which she co-wrote with Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter.
Katherine is a veteran of the private and public sectors. She’s the former CEO of Gehl Foods, which was a $250 million high-tech food manufacturing company in Wisconsin, and she is the CEO of Venn Innovations. She also served on the board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which is the U.S. government’s development finance institution. She has served (and still does serve) on numerous nonprofit boards. And I’m sure she’s familiar to many listeners from her appearances across a wide range of media advocating for the electoral reform known as “Final Five Voting.” Welcome, Katherine!
Katherine Gehl: Geoff, thank you so much. I’m really thrilled to be with you today.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m glad to have you here. Katherine, you first crossed my radar screen in the fall of 2017 when you and Professor Porter came out with your Harvard Business Review article on why competition in the politics industry is failing America. And you have been kind enough to take part in various online gatherings I’ve put together over the years. But you are such a familiar and distinctive personality to me that it was kind of a shock to realize that we hadn’t actually met in person until we had dinner here in Washington last week.
Katherine Gehl: Yes, and it was great to meet you. I do find these days I’m not always sure who I’ve met in person and who I only know through Zoom. It’s crazy days.
Geoff Kabaservice: Your book on the politics industry came out right at the start of the pandemic, which was bad in the sense that you couldn’t go out into the physical world and promote it, but good in the sense that we had time on our hands to think about the problems of politics — and here was what seemed to be promising a solution. A lot of us who work in the politics and democracy reform space tend not to be conspicuously optimistic and cheerful because there haven’t been a lot of cheer-inducing developments for us over the past several years. But the successes of the Final Five Voting campaign and the promise of that campaign have really been an exception to that rule. It’s that rare political innovation that is both powerful and achievable.
Now, it’s relatively straightforward to say what Final Five Voting is. It’s an elections reform package that does two things. First, it replaces closed partisan primaries with nonpartisan open primaries that send the top five finishers to the general election. And second, it replaces plurality voting in the subsequent general election with ranked choice voting.
But before we can get into a fuller explanation of what this means and why these two things together can have a transformative impact on elections and also governing, I’d like to get into the journey that took you to this place of advocacy, if I can put it that way. So can you tell me something about where you grew up, where you went to school, how you got launched on your business career, and how you got interested in politics?
Katherine Gehl: Oh, yeah. Unfortunately that goes back a long way now, but thanks for reminding me about that. I grew up in a small town. It really was a farming community, largely, at the time, although now it is definitely a suburb of Milwaukee, just west of Milwaukee in Wisconsin. I went to public schools there. I grew up a young Republican, which was pretty usual, I would say, for where I was from. My parents weren’t enormously engaged in politics, but they took their civic responsibility seriously, especially when it came time to vote in the presidential election. So I grew up watching all those debates and I would take notes on them and go in and recap them for my class. I remember doing that in fifth grade.
Geoff Kabaservice: Wow, terrific!
Katherine Gehl: I don’t know if they thought so, but…
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m sure they did. Where was college and university?
Katherine Gehl: Then I went to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana — go Irish! — and got a master’s degree in education from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and finally got an MBA from Northwestern University here in Chicago.
Geoff Kabaservice: Had you planned at some point to teach?
Katherine Gehl: I did student teaching in a high school in Washington D.C., actually — Banneker High School. Fascinating. And that was all the teaching that I did, because right after that, as things happened, I went into business. I went into my family business, actually, because of the really still sad to me passing of my mother at a young age. So I went home to raise my brother, moved into business, and never looked back.
Geoff Kabaservice: So when did you start to get interested in not just reading the news, hearing about politics — when did you start to get concerned about the problems of politics, if I can put it that way?
Katherine Gehl: I mentioned that I grew up as a young Republican, and then later in my career I had a stint in the public sector. I lived in Chicago and I ended up in an amazing position working for then Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. I was working on technology and economic development, and I met then State Senator Barack Obama and was immediately really captivated by what I thought he brought to our, at that point, state discourse, but really the national discourse. Long story short, fast-forward, I along with the number of Chicagoans were involved early in his run for the U.S. presidency, and so I would say I became a Democrat for that. And after I worked on that, I was paying very, very close attention to what happened in Washington D.C.
I was, I would say, remarkably naive at the time. I was absolutely all in for hope and change. I absolutely believed we were going to get it — my version of what that was. And that’s not what we got. So I looked at the collapse of Simpson-Bowles, I looked at our government shutdown, I looked at passing Obamacare with no Republican votes at all, the downgrade of our nation’s debt, and the machinations that were happening in Congress around all of these big complex problems that for the first time I saw were so partisan/political versus problem-solving. And I was really blown away.
So by 2010, I said, “I’m giving up this party politics, this candidate politics,” and I went into what I call my five stages of political grief. I said first, “Okay, I care about politics and the problems of the country. I’ll work on candidates.” No, that didn’t work. “Okay, now I will, in stage two, work on policy.” So I joined up with the CEO Fiscal Leadership Council of Maya MacGuineas’ DC organization Fix the Debt. And then I realized, “Oh gosh, everybody knows the broad outlines of the solution on the debt — a little more revenue, a little less spending — but nobody will vote for it. Okay, I know, I’ll do culture.” So I got involved early with No Labels, a national organization which was focused at the time on calling for people to put aside their labels and work together for the general good. And then I realized, “Oh yeah, everybody will say they want that and wear the pin” — there was a No Labels pin they were all wearing — “but then they just all vote the same way.” Okay, stage four of political grief: “I’ll do candidates again, but this time I’ll do candidates not beholden to either side of the duopoly. We’ll work on independents and we’ll get a fulcrum of rational independents in the U.S. Senate who can be a problem-solving constituency there. Oh, shoot, we can’t get them elected.”
So, long story short, the final stage of political grief, which I entered into thanks to former Republican congressman Mickey Edwards was: “It’s the system.” Mickey said in his book, The Parties Versus the People, “Politics isn’t broken. It’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do. And it’s the system.” And I’ve never looked back. I remain to this day somewhat ashamed and blown away by how long it took me to come to that obvious conclusion. But I think it’s not unusual that many of us think that politics works according to different rules than we are used to thinking work in our own lives. In our own lives, we get that incentives matter. We get that we do what it takes to earn and keep our jobs. But for some reason, we were thinking politics works differently — and fundamentally it doesn’t. So if we have a problem in politics, we have a problem with incentives.
Geoff Kabaservice: Mickey Edwards is one of those people whom we both know, many of whom are thanked in the acknowledgements section of your book, who I think have been with you on those five stages of political grief — who’ve gone from real idealism about some of the reform possibilities in politics to a very different place. Mickey’s an interesting guy too, because people tend to forget this, but he was a longtime member of Congress in very good standing in both the Republican and the conservative movements. He was one of the three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation. But the subtitle of that book you just mentioned says it all: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans. And there is the problem that we face. Let me ask you a somewhat personal question here… I’ve always thought, since I first saw you, that you would’ve been an ideal political candidate with the business background, with your energy easily available to see for all on your TED talks, this great centered family background. Why did you not think about going into politics directly?
Katherine Gehl: Well, thanks for that compliment. I don’t know that the voters would ever have agreed, but I nonetheless appreciate it. I totally thought about going into politics directly. In fact — and I’m not sure I’ve ever said this publicly, but why keep it a secret? — after I sold my company in 2015, I sold it in part to do this work on politics. And I explored whether I should run in order to be one of the people who could enact these kinds of changes as well as just work on policy as one is supposed to in elected office.
But through the course of our conversation here, you will see that it would be kind of odd. Because basically the sum of my message is: The system is so stacked against problem-solving that it really keeps anybody from making a real difference when they serve in elected office. So fundamentally, if I were to run, I’d be saying something that would have a lot of hubris in it, which is: “Oh, yes, I know I do that whole work about how it’s the system and no individual can make a difference. But no, I can. Oh yeah, I’m different than that.”
So I don’t make that case at all. I’ve realized that the highest and best use for me in politics is to try to work to change the system so that the people who are serving right now, people who do want to run, can do so and have it actually make a difference in the end. Which is to say I’m not interested in who wins elections, but I’m interested in what those winners do. And so it would never have worked for me to just win an election, even if I could have. It is: Could I have done something?
And the last piece I’ll say about that is when I did explore the run, I explored running as an independent — and you can’t win as an independent. The way our elections work now, independents are spoilers. But I could never win a party primary on either side because I truly am politically homeless, and the things that I would want to talk about for policy would not pass muster with the 8% of voters on the right or the 8% of voters on the left. The things I would want to talk about may work for general-election voters. I don’t know, and we will never know. I’m not planning to run. But that’s actually, I think, a symptom of the problem that affected not only my potentially running but so many people, which is that it’s not an attractive system to run in.
Geoff Kabaservice: By “the 8%,” you mean the 8% of voters who vote in primaries?
Katherine Gehl: You’re correct, Geoff. Yes — the ones who really determine who wins 85% of the U.S. House races and about 70% of U.S. Senate races.
Geoff Kabaservice: I have a friend here in D.C. who was from the Midwest, and she was, again, someone who I thought of as an ideal political candidate: very attractive, charismatic, well-spoken, wanting to come to Washington to solve problems and do the people’s work. And she would’ve been running in a Republican primary. And she looked into that, and she’s like, “Even if I somehow bamboozled voters into electing me as a fresh new face, the instant I actually was confronted with a hard vote, I would’ve had to choose: Do I do the right thing for the country or do I do the thing that is going to actually allow me to be reelected and get past another primary election back home?”
Katherine Gehl: And so you’ve just gotten to one of the two root causes of our current dysfunction in politics, which is that what it takes to win primaries is not what it takes to solve problems. In fact, they’re inversely related. Solving problems in a consensus, solving complex problems with trade-offs where you can’t have everything you want, is a really good way to lose a Democratic primary or a Republican primary. So until we make solving problems in this consensus way a rational way to potentially win reelection, we’re just not going to be able to solve very many. And that’s the first root cause that we have to address, and that Final Five Voting does address.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me go back a little bit… In 2013, you crossed paths with Michael Porter. Professor Porter has an interesting part at the start of The Politics Industry book that you wrote together. He said that for most of his life, he paid very little attention to politics. But that began to change in 2010 when he co-chaired the U.S. Competitiveness Project, which was a multi-year effort by the Harvard Business School to try to understand the root causes of U.S. economic underperformance, which began well before the Great Recession. And then in 2013, he co-led the development of what’s called the Social Progress Index, which is a framework and methodology for measuring and comparing social, environmental, and quality-of-life indicators in countries around the world. And through that, he made the unpleasant discovery that the U.S. was falling behind on social performance as well as economic competitiveness.
And then he had the further frustration of coming up with an eight-point plan to revive U.S. economic competitiveness, meeting with members of Congress, finding unanimous agreement from all of those he talked to that these were the eight things to do — and then realizing that despite this consensus, Washington had made zero progress in any of these eight areas for decades and wasn’t going to make any progress absent some major paradigm shift. And it was at that point that he met you and encountered your politics industry theory. Tell me about that meeting.
Katherine Gehl: It wasn’t one particular meeting. We were in contact over the course of these U.S. competitiveness meetings in D.C. And he would talk to me after those meetings and say, “Oh, it went great. This senator, that senator or these representatives, they loved it. It’s going to be moving.” And I would say, “No, it’s not. They’re not going to do those things because they can’t win reelection by doing them.” And he was almost at an earlier stage of political grief where he thought the problem was: Did you have the right policy? And that getting people to agree this was a good policy was a sign that you were going to do it. And it should be a sign that you’re likely to move the policy forward, but as you and I know, it is not a sign. But he hadn’t yet learned that. So I was constantly raining on the parade of the policy prescriptions from Harvard Business School.
And then I was making this case that we could actually use his work — which was the Five Forces — to analyze politics as an industry. And he eventually joined me as co-author, which I really needed to add legitimacy to these ideas. I’ll be forever grateful to him for signing on. But in the beginning, he was hard to convince, actually. And one of the ways I think he was quite helpful was by honing my persuasive arguments about why politics is this uniquely dysfunctional industry, and how using the lens of competition is not the only way to look at politics but gives you a unique perspective on what is going wrong specifically, so that you can think what should you change to the way those incentives work to alter the products that come out of the politics industry, shall we say, which is now speaking all of the business stuff. But it was quite a dialogue with Michael Porter.
Geoff Kabaservice: So your book is written in the way that I can’t tell who wrote what section or if you wrote individual sentences together or what…
Katherine Gehl: Oh, I wrote the book.
Geoff Kabaservice: Okay. You wrote the whole book?
Katherine Gehl: Yeah.
Geoff Kabaservice: But his perspective is in there, and his perspective actually struck me even as I was reading it as more pessimistic, in the sense that he was bringing a framework about why this matters. I talk to a lot of people who are like, “Why do you spend so much time thinking about politics? Nothing is going to get done. It’s pointless.” But in August of this year, Fitch Ratings, which is one of only three private sovereign credit-ratings firms, downgraded the long-term credit rating of the U.S. government. The last time this had happened — the only time that it happened —was 2011, when S&P downgraded the U.S.
Katherine Gehl: Which was one of the reasons why I got disenchanted with politics at the time.
Geoff Kabaservice: So there we go. And their basic reason in both cases is that the United States is becoming politically dysfunctional, which in turn is eroding international confidence in its fiscal management. There’s a chart in your book which has U.S. strengths and weaknesses, as well as their trajectories. Some of the U.S.’s strengths are strong and improving. They include our innovation and entrepreneurship, our capital markets, our universities. But in the weak and deteriorating quadrant, you find K-12 education, healthcare, and at the very bottom, our political system.
This matters because, as you say in the book, “America’s political system has become the primary cause of our decline and the preeminent barrier to addressing the very problems it exists to solve.” And yet, because what I also get coming through your book is that you do love the country, you don’t want to give up on it. And therefore you actually were willing to engage in this kind of analysis to find out where the possible chances to solve the problem might lie.
Katherine Gehl: You’re right. I could use the “we,” but I’ll use the “I” for the moment. Yes, I love this country so much. And when I sold my business, as I noted, it was in part so I could do this work on the political system, because I was just blown away by this trajectory and the weakness of our system. And it felt a little bit like we were being anesthetized to it; that we were thinking that this is normal, this kind of dysfunction, and this is the best that we can get — which I would say is not true at all. Our bar, our expectations can be so much higher for what we expect the system to deliver. And it’s really been a privilege to figure out what to do about that.
And this thing, Final Five Voting, that we propose and that you’ve already mentioned, turns out to be the intervention that is at the sweet spot of what I call “powerful and achievable,” meaning when I looked at the system and then all of the interventions that we could make… I’m essentially graphing it in a four-quadrant chart, which is to say: What are the things that are powerful enough to change the results that the system delivers? And then what are the things that are achievable? — as in, Can we get those powerful results in a matter of years not decades? And shockingly, the reform that would most change the likelihood we would get results is Final Five Voting. And the reform that is more achievable, as in we can get it done in years not decades, is Final Five Voting.
So let me give you an example… Other reforms that people propose: non-partisan redistricting, or things in campaign finance, or changing the Electoral College… I’m not opining whether I agree to any of these. But they might take an act of Congress (which you can’t get), or they take a constitutional amendment (which you can’t get). So I was beyond thrilled to discover that the thing we should do is the thing we most can do. That’s unbelievable, and that’s why I actually am incredibly optimistic. Because the reasons for our decline, when we understand it, are not a mystery. And the voters actually can make it happen without the say-so of current electeds, even though there are many electeds who do fully support this.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me go back to the analysis that led you to Final Five Voting. It seems that you and Professor Porter apply his famous Five Forces framework to the business of politics. And the Five Forces that he enumerates when looking at business are: rivals, buyers, suppliers, threat of new entrants, and threat of substitutes. How did that map onto politics and the business of politics as you looked at it?
Katherine Gehl: The story behind that is that Michael Porter is the father of modern corporate strategy, and he was my consultant on a strategy project for the food manufacturing company I was running at the time. And I was essentially in the room trying to figure out how to sell more cheese sauce and using the Five Forces analysis to do that, which as much as I loved my company was not necessarily scintillating at every moment. So on the other half of my brain, I was suddenly doing this analysis of politics as an industry at the same time. It was like parallel processing.
And I looked at it and said, “Wow.” Politics is an industry and there are only two competitors — let’s say Democrats and Republicans and their allies on both sides — and 90% of customers are dissatisfied with these rivals. But you never see any new entrants. You never see any new competition — even though in any other industry, like my industry, where I was selling these dairy-based products, if 90% of my customers were dissatisfied and I only had one competitor, and we were doing enormously well and making tons of money, you can bet that another new competitor would come into our industry to say, “Hey, we want to take a part of that market.”
Well, that never happens in politics. Why is that? And that was one of the big insights from looking at these Five Forces and also saying, “Look at the customers.” Most customers of the politics industry have no power, which is to say that those in the industry don’t actually really care about most of the customers. They care about party primary voters, because that’s how most people get and keep their jobs. And they care about special interests and they care about donors. But they in general don’t care about general-election voters, because general-election votes are pretty much meaningless in this industry, which is something we have to note.
What I talk about — and I realized also way back then in 2014, with the Five Forces — is that in politics, one thing that is different from other industries is that we have two currencies. Some customers, people that are looking for results from the rivals, the Democrats and the Republicans, pay with votes and some pay with money. Money, there’s no upper limit to its benefit to you. Whereas votes, once you get 50% plus one, you don’t necessarily need any more. And that, plus the fact that party primaries are the only place that decisions are made, has led to this massive devaluation of November votes. I talk about it as we have an exchange-rate problem between the value of a November general-election vote and the value of a dollar or the value of a party primary vote. These things are not the same. And one of the keys to changing our system is to revalue — to have an inflation to its appropriate level of the value — of a general-election vote.
These were all the things that became clear when you use this Five Forces analysis to look at the system. And it told me where to go for the solution: to change those incentives so that general-election voters would have power and so that there would be new competition. Because it’s only with new competition that you have any accountability in an industry, or any innovation, or any results.
I’m almost done, Geoff, but I’ll say this: I don’t think the problem is the Democrats, or the Republicans, or parties, or that we have only two parties. The problem is that the current two are guaranteed to be the only two ongoingly, regardless of what they do or don’t get done on behalf of these general-election voters. And what we want is the threat of new competition to force them to adjust, to solve problems, or their hegemony could be threatened. We don’t actually need a certain number of new parties, we just need the accountability and the innovation that competition brings.
Geoff Kabaservice: When I tell people about your frame of analysis, I get two immediate pushbacks. One is that you are analyzing politics and trying to say that politics should be run as if it were a business, and you are not saying that at all.
Katherine Gehl: Not at all. First of all, there’s a difference between politics and government. Government is absolutely not a business, cannot be run in that way, and I’m never saying that. And I’m saying in politics two things. One, there is a business of politics, and there is a ton of money in that business. I’m not saying it should or shouldn’t be. I’m actually just stating what is a fact, that there is a business of politics and lots of people make millions of dollars in that business. And that includes both our electeds but also all the allies: the pollsters, the campaign managers, the media, the lobbyists, anyone in this associated industry of politics. They are all absolutely thriving, and Americans know that. That industry keeps growing even as their customers are more and more dissatisfied, which is a massive disconnect. So again, it’s just a fact that it’s a business.
But then the second thing I’m saying, when I use these tools to analyze it, is we want to be aware of the competition that’s happening here. There are two competitions in politics. One is there’s a competition to win seats. And then, after you’ve won, there’s a competition to enact legislation. There’s actually a competition doing the work in the legislatures of which policy you’re going to vote for. And these two competitions determine the results that we get out of the political arm of government — again, not the agencies. So people can not want to use these tools to look at this, but they’re just denying themselves a very helpful tool to analyze what is really a competition: a competition to win, a competition to enact legislation.
Geoff Kabaservice: The other term that you use to describe the system is “the duopoly.” And that raises hackles because people think that you are drawing some kind of moral equivalence between the parties or saying that they stand for the same things. And that also is not what you’re saying. But you are saying that they are both invested in the current system.
Katherine Gehl: Yes, and I do think it is important to draw a very key similarity in two ways here. First is that over time — so let’s not look at any recent situation, but let’s look back over time — these two parties (and by parties I mean really writ large these two halves of the political industrial complex) have worked unbelievably well together in one particular way. And that is behind the scenes to rig the rules of the game to protect themselves jointly from new competition.
They do set the fundraising rules together to fully advantage themselves over an independent candidate. It’s over $900K that any individual could donate to the Republican cause or the Democratic cause in an election cycle. And then — is it $6,400 now? It’s twice the max if you want to support an independent candidate for Senate. So $6,400 or over $900,000.
And they make those rules together. They make the sore-loser rules together, which make sure that nobody can run on the general election ballot if they’ve already lost their party primary — which is a way that the parties use to control access to the ballot. So they know exactly what they’re doing behind the scenes. And the gerrymandering, for example: they’ve optimized that together over time. You can’t look at just one cycle and say, “Who did it worse this time?”
The other way that both sides are the same is that both sides have this fact that political scientists have shown: that the voters who participate in party primaries on both sides are characterized by negative partisanship. Think of it as out-party hatred. What it means is that they are more motivated by how much they hate the other side than they are by a particular allegiance to their party’s policies and platforms.
And by the way, I’m a primary voter. I’m sure you’re a primary voter. Lots of wonderful people are primary voters, and I’m pro-primary voters. But what I’m saying is when they’re the only people hiring those who end up winning, and they are characterized by how much they hate the other side, the instructions that they effectively give to the people that they hire (instead of general election voters doing the hiring) is: “Don’t compromise. Don’t work together. Because that other side is really not worthy of working with.”
And those have profound implications and cannot exist unless we think of the two as being two sides of a duopolistic coin. It isn’t that one can do this on its own. It has to happen in the construct of a duopoly that we have this dysfunction, which is why what we want to do is lower the barrier to entry — which is to say make it easier for new competition to get in. Because then that holds them accountable and brings innovation into the system.
And the biggest barrier to entry is how we vote, which is plurality voting, which makes everybody new a spoiler. And that’s what we’re seeing in the presidential race. Even though 70% of the country may not want the rematch between Biden and Trump, it’s very hard to conceive of a third coming into the race that would not spoil the race for the Democrat or the Republican.
And what I say to us as Americans is yeah, that’s crazy, and we better fix that as soon as possible. Because the moment that we allow ourselves to say, “We’re going to content ourselves with lesser-of-two-evils elections in our House races, in our Senate races, in our gubernatorial races, in our presidency, we’re going to be okay with that” — as if we don’t have control over that — that is the moment from which we will not recover. And Final Five Voting is a way forward to eliminate that from our elections. No more lesser-of-two-evils elections.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just one note on the primary elections… Some of my best friends are primary voters. Nonetheless, you are right that they tend to be the most extreme, the most motivated, but also the most dominated by that kind of negative partisanship, where they hate the other side more than they like anyone really on their side.
Katherine Gehl: Of course, we’re not going to take anything away from primary voters. Their votes will be worth what everybody else’s votes are worth. Right now, they’re just the only votes that are worth anything.
Geoff Kabaservice: True. We both were drawn to this example of Mike Castle running in Delaware for the Senate seat there in 2010. This, I think, is a story worth telling. When Joe Biden left the Senate in 2009 to become Barack Obama’s vice president, his replacement in the Senate was his former chief of staff, Ted Kaufman. I talked about that last week with Franklin Foer, as a matter of fact. But in 2010, there would be an election in Delaware for Biden’s open seat, and the expectation of just about everyone was that the winner of that election would be Republican Mike Castle.
Mike had served two terms as an enormously popular governor. He’d won reelection with over 70% of the vote. He’d then gone on to serve as the state’s at-large representative in the U.S. House for nine terms. I used to work for the Republican Main Street Partnership, which he had founded along with my friend Amo Houghton as kind of a haven for moderate Republicans. So I knew from personal experience that he was sort of the Platonic ideal of the problem-solving moderate who used to represent American politics at its best. And he was seen as such a shoe-in that no well-known Democratic politician in Delaware even wanted to run against him in the general election, even though Delaware was even then a very blue state. So the Democrats put up this obscure county executive named Chris Coons.
But Mike Castle was slightly ahead of his time, for a Republican, in supporting same-sex marriage, and he’d taken some heterodox positions on gun safety and stem cell research that angered the Tea Party that was then coming together. So they put up Christine O’Donnell in the primary. She was an obscure anti-masturbation crusader who believed, among other things, that genetic engineering companies had created mice with fully functioning human brains.
Delaware’s a state with almost a million people. It had 180,000 registered Republicans in 2010, but only 55,000 of them bothered to show up in the primary. And O’Donnell won the vote by 3,000 votes — so 1,500 people one way or another, in a state of a million people, would’ve made the difference in that election. And because Delaware is one of the 44 states with sore-loser laws, Mike Castle couldn’t run as an independent, even though he was 20 points up in the polls heading into that primary. So hey presto, Chris Coons has a job for life. No slur against him, but this is exactly the kind of problem that we’re facing on so many levels with our primary election system. So tell us how the Final Five Voting system would work, starting at the level of the primaries.
Katherine Gehl: We will eliminate Republican primaries and Democrat primaries. You will just have a primary, which is the first round of the election. And in this single open primary, everybody runs regardless of party, and everybody can vote regardless of party — all on the same ballot. You go to the primary election, pick your favorite just like always. And then when the polls close, we count up those votes. And in Final Five, the top five finishers will advance to the general election — not just one Democrat, one Republican. So let’s say it’s a deep-red district: you could easily have three Republicans advancing. Same in a blue district. You can have Greens advancing, independents, libertarians, et cetera.
Then between the primary and the general, we’re going to benefit from the dynamic, diverse competition of these five candidates. There will be intraparty competition if there should be a competition between a Trump Republican and, let’s say, a Romney Republican, a competition between a Clinton Democrat and a Sanders Democrat. All legitimate sort of disagreements even within parties, which competition should play out between the primary and the general. And then you’ll have new entrants, perhaps having new ideas, maybe even not on this single binary or this single vector of left-right competition. You’ll have another dimension of competition.
But then when we get to the general election, now that we’ve had these benefits of competition, we need to figure out who should win. And you certainly don’t want to accidentally elect one of the five with 21%, which could happen if the votes split relatively equally five ways. So what we do is implement instant runoffs in the general election. And that’s exactly like physical runoffs, like people now have in places like Georgia or Louisiana when someone doesn’t get over 50%. But instead of having physical runoffs, where you have to keep coming back for another election, voters simply cast all their votes at once using a ranked ballot. And other people talk about this as being ranked choice voting.
Here’s the key about Final Five Voting… Please know that these instant runoffs are simply the tool that allows us to find the majority winner of the five candidates. The purpose of Final Five Voting is to make sure no one wins an election until November, that no one wins in a primary, and that there’s real competition to serve voters intra- and extra-party in November (because of what competition brings to human endeavor), and that you elect the majority winner without burdening voters to keep coming back. So the “RCV” is just a tiny detail of it in many ways, and Final Five Voting is very different from when RCV is used on its own. And in fact, using RCV on its own is no longer something that I recommend.
What we need is competition in the general election and that all general-election votes matter. And when people win in the general election, the idea is that they will be able to do different things when they’re legislating, that they’ll have a lot more agency to think outside the box and to negotiate and make deals even when they bring their same ideology to the party — which they should bring. But their actions aren’t limited to the small number of policies that party primary voters would accept. They instead have a lot more leverage to craft an innovative solution with people across the spectrum if they so choose.
Geoff Kabaservice: Just to be clear, the state of Maine and New York City both have ranked choice voting, but this is not the same thing as Final Five Voting.
Katherine Gehl: Yes. Thank you for making it so clear, and I’ll make it a bit more clear with the example of New York City. So New York City has ranked choice voting, and their first election held under this was in 2021. And in July, all New Yorkers and the rest of the country knew who to call “Mr. Mayor,” and that was Eric Adams. Because in July, he won a closed, low-turnout Democratic Party primary with ranked choice voting. And he won and we knew he was the mayor, and that was months before the general election in November — months before most voters turn out, months before most people were even allowed to have a say — because the Democratic Party primaries are closed. So unless you’re registered, you can’t even have a say in who your mayor is going to be.
So we have a Final Five Voting campaign now in New York to get a mayor for all New Yorkers — the idea being that the mayor would be chosen in November instead of in July. And the only way you get that is with Final Five Voting. And the reason you need your mayor to be chosen in November is not because it would change who wins; let’s just say that it’s still Eric Adams and he would have a very good chance to win in November. But an Eric Adams elected in November has a lot more agency and latitude with what solutions he might propose for a New York City than a mayor elected by and accountable to, for his or her reelection, a small number of one party’s voters. They just don’t have the same options to propose because they’re not politically feasible.
We talk about “political will” all the time: “Oh, is there any political will for that?” What we mean is: “Can they win again?” And there are a lot of things you could do that you might still be able to win in November, but you for sure couldn’t win in a party primary.
I long ago left my own policy desires on the side of the road. I still talk a lot about fiscal responsibility and not wanting to send this massive debt to our children and grandchildren. But other than that, I don’t talk about policies anymore, even in terms of cities. What I think about is: Do the people that we elect have the ability to engage in the kind of actions it takes to figure out how to fix something that’s really complex? If our issues at a national level like immigration, debt, deficit, healthcare, education — if these things were easy, with no trade-offs, no pros and cons, then even a crummy system would solve them. But they’re not easy. They’re hard, and they involve difficult choices.
So we have to have people in a position to actually do the kind of work that would take, which means they have to not be penalized for talking to people who are “on the other side.” They have to not automatically lose by entertaining a solution where they don’t get everything they want. They also should still not have to all be squishy middle. Believe me, I’m not proposing that. I want people to go there with strong ideologies and argue strongly for their points of view, and then figure out a way to fit that together, craft a solution.
And that’s what Final Five Voting allows. Those are the actions that you can take that are currently prohibited in the existing election system. And then of course, the second piece is, finally, if you don’t take those kinds of actions and you don’t get stuff done, you’ll actually have a real competitor — even one from your own party — in your next election. So you just can’t get away with being slightly less hated than the other side. Now you have to actually accomplish things that those general-election voters approve of.
Geoff Kabaservice: So if we’d had this discussion about two years ago, this would’ve been a largely theoretical discussion. But the fact is that the Final Five Voting movement has had victories — many of them at the locality level, but also at the state level in Alaska. And we now have a real-world example to point to of how this works out both at the level of elections and then what happens after the elections. So can you tell us something about this process?
Katherine Gehl: Absolutely. Final Five Voting in Alaska shows really, in real life, that the theory does come true. Not in a statistically significant way — we have one state — but in a way where the anecdotes and what we see validate the theory that healthy competition to serve general-election voters can change things. So, first, let’s look at what choices the voters have. Did they have real competition?
Geoff Kabaservice: Just to be clear, this was passed by a ballot initiative?
Katherine Gehl: Thank you, Geoff. So in 2020, Alaska voters were able to vote “yes” on Question 2. It was on a ballot initiative for Final Four Voting — by the way, that’s just like Final Five voting, except the top four finishers advance from the primary to the general election. So they voted yes. They passed it and it was implemented, used in elections for the first time, in 2022. And it’s used in all their state elections for their Assembly and Senate, and their statewide governor; and also their delegations, their two senators and their single congressperson.
So in ’22, we had the first elections under this system. An interesting thing is that we see that Final Five Voting gives the voters who they want — which may be very different than who they would have gotten under the previous system. Because choices have always been narrowed in the previous system by the party primaries, whose names were allowed to be on the ballot. Like you were saying, in Delaware, Mike Castle’s name was not allowed to be on the ballot by the previous system, and maybe that’s who they wanted. Well, we saw that in Alaska. Alaska voters elected a Trump-supported governor. Their incumbent, they returned him to office…
Geoff Kabaservice: That was Mike Dunleavy.
Katherine Gehl: Yeah, Mike Dunleavy, thank you. And he was running against a Democrat and an independent. They elected Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who had voted to impeach Trump. They elected her over the Trump-supported challenger Kelly Tshibaka as well as over a Democrat and another candidate. And the same electorate also elected a Democrat to the U.S. House, the first Alaska native, indigenous Alaskan to represent them in Congress.
So the same electorate wanted these individuals, and they got to choose them. Whereas under the old system, Mary Peltola, the Democrat who won, would tell you she would’ve never even run. But she says, “I never could have won a Democratic primary, so I never would’ve been on the general election ballot because I’m not the kind of Democrat that primary voters would’ve elected.” So they wouldn’t have had the choice of Mary Peltola.
And in the Republican case, it is widely believed that Senator Murkowski would have lost her Republican primary to the Trump-supported challenger because of her impeachment vote and perhaps other things. And so the general electorate wouldn’t have had the chance to choose her. And let’s make one thing really clear: If Alaska voters had wanted Kelly Tshibaka, whom Trump endorsed, they 100% for sure could have had Kelly Tshibaka. And if that’s who they wanted, that’s who they should get. And that’s the message of this: It’s letting the voters choose. So it became clear: They wanted Senator Murkowski, and so they got Senator Murkowski.
And you’ll see this play out around the country. One of the things that’s interesting is we know how much intraparty dissension there is, particularly on the Republican side now, but you could easily see it happening on the Democratic side as well. And I think what you’ll find is that different general electorates elect different sorts of Republicans, different sorts of Democrats. Final Five Voting doesn’t prioritize any one over the other. It prioritizes what general election voters want.
Now, we do believe that moderates have been uniquely disadvantaged in our existing system — or at the very least moderate action, or let’s say consensus-building action, has been disadvantaged in the current system. So Final Five Voting does provide an opportunity for that kind of candidate to win if that’s what the general-election voters want. But it absolutely isn’t the only kind of candidate who can win depending on what general-election voters want.
And here’s the thing… We don’t want… What I love about Final Five Voting is you’re going to get this majority winner who can take actions to work together and solve problems, but we don’t extinguish a competition of ideas. In fact, you’ll have more competition of more ideas present in the general election dialogue. Innovation pretty much never arises from the squishy middle anywhere, even politically. We wouldn’t have the Civil Rights movement if the only thing politicians did was the squishy middle of what current public opinion was. You also want some room for leadership and innovative ideas to come up — as long as they’re held accountable in the marketplace. So with Final Five Voting, we get potentially more diversity of opinion, a new dimensionality of what the conversation could be about, instead of just this tired left-right. And when you send people there, no matter what ideology they go with, they answer to their entire district. And they can, if they want to, vote yes on a solution that previously would’ve lost them reelection.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think Dunleavy’s election as governor, even being a sort of Trump-supported kind of guy, does show that this doesn’t particularly advantage one party or another. But of course, the Alaska race or the candidate that got all the attention was Sarah Palin, who was attempting a political comeback by running for the House, and she got defeated by Mary Peltola. Mike Begich, I guess it was, was also another candidate…
Katherine Gehl: Nick Begich.
Geoff Kabaservice: Nick Begich, that was it — was another candidate in the election. And that led to Tom Cotton, the Senator, saying afterwards, “Well, 60% of Alaska voters voted for a Republican, and they got a Democrat. Therefore the system is biased against us.”
Katherine Gehl: Yeah. People are going to say what they think it takes to have people not support this change. But it’s like saying that you can play a game with an extra player on your team, and you should be allowed to win that way. When it came down to two candidates — and it came down to Sarah Palin and Mary Peltola — Mary Peltola had a majority of votes and Sarah Palin did not. So you can’t add up Sarah Palin’s votes with another Republican player, Nick Begich, and say that therefore they should overcome one Mary Peltola. It simply doesn’t add up, shall we say, Senator Cotton.
I will note that in any case it’s highly unlikely that in districts that are “red” or districts that are “blue” that Final Five Voting will ever lead to the election of someone who is not a Republican in a red district or a Democrat in a blue district. It might lead to an independent or a different kind of Democrat, a different kind of Republican. But it doesn’t turn red districts blue and blue districts red.
What happened in Alaska is that they’re not nearly as red as everybody thinks — because once you get outside of the duopoly you discover that 23% of Alaskans are Republican, 13% are Democrats, and everybody else is an independent. They’re not necessarily totally red, anyway. But also Sarah Palin just simply wasn’t well liked. And under the old system, someone who had 70% disapproval in Alaska was considered the likely winner — that’s Sarah Palin. I think it’s a pretty good thing for an election system to be able to elect people who are liked by a majority of the public. If the Alaskans had run Republicans that had much higher approval ratings, it’s hard to imagine how they would not have beat a Democrat.
Having said that, Mary Peltola governs totally differently, because she governs as a Democrat elected by more Republican than Democratic votes, which is true in Alaska. She kept her Republican chief of staff. She hired one of her Republican opponents to head the home office in Alaska. She was a senator who said she would be willing to form a bipartisan governing coalition with other Republicans instead of have Kevin McCarthy do what he did to get his majority together. She governs like a representative of Alaskans far more than she governs as a “Democrat,” because her allegiance is to her voters. And that’s what Final Five Voting creates.
Geoff Kabaservice: That to me is a critical point. Because you didn’t come up with Final Five Voting, you wrote, as a way of making the democratic process more fair, or better, or supporting representation as an end in itself. You really wanted government to deliver results in the public interest. And there is some evidence, particularly from Alaska, to suggest that that is happening.
Katherine Gehl: Yes. So let’s look at the legislature, with less high-profile names in it than the names we know from national office. But we changed the incentives for the entire legislature and the statewides all at once. So an example I have from that is Cathy Giessel. She is a state senator. She served for twelve years under the previous system. She was primaried out in 2020. And then under Final Four Voting, she ran again and won back “her” seat — the same seat — in 2022. I interviewed her to understand how things were going in real life, and viscerally it was such a positive response.
A couple of things to note… She’s part of a bipartisan governing coalition in the Alaska Senate, which was formed within two days of the elections, where a group of Republicans and Democrats came together to agree to govern together instead of dividing everything up along party lines. There were three Republicans who didn’t join the bipartisan governing coalition, but as part of their deal, they said, “Look, Alaskans are super-libertarian. Alaskans don’t want to fight these cultural issues.” And instead, they had three governing priorities that they wanted to accomplish together, including a sustainable, rational budget. And they are accomplishing those, and they are working collaboratively with their Republican governor, and also with the Republican House, which also has in Alaska a bipartisan governing coalition.
So you see a real ability to localize what your state legislature does, because you’re so accountable to those voters. You don’t have to take all the partisan national fights if your state doesn’t want them. Now, if you want to have those fights in your state, if that’s what the voters in your state want, you can totally have them. But that’s not what Alaska’s live-and-let-live ethos apparently wanted, I’m told by the Alaskans.
And then the other thing is Cathy Giessel talked about her election and how what she did always under the previous system was she would buy the voter data. And that told her behind which doors were the Republicans who were likely to vote in the primary, and then who was going to vote in the general, and these were the doors she would knock on. And she said, “Well, under this system, I didn’t buy any of that data. I just knocked on every door.” What a concept, right? And she said — so amazing to listen to her — it was faster. It’s crazy… She was able to talk to more people faster than she was able to only talk to Republicans because she didn’t have to match up the address with the door, which took all this time. So she just went door-to-door and talked to everybody, which is great because she is everybody’s representative. And she learned a lot by talking to the Democrats in her district and independents as well.
And she said that it really changes how she looks at her job and how unbelievably much more enjoyable it was. And by the way, she wasn’t initially supportive of Final Four Voting, as many in the existing system in Alaska were not initially supportive. According to Cathy Giessel — and we can’t verify this, but she said that none of the people in the bipartisan coalition, which is seventeen members of their Senate, would go back to the way it was.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s a set of really encouraging developments in a field where there have not been a lot of encouraging developments. So tell me, Katherine, what lies ahead for you and for the Final Five Voting campaign?
Katherine Gehl: We actually have a national campaign for Final Five Voting. Your listeners can take a look at it at finalfivevoting.org, as you might imagine. And we’re privileged to support Nevadans in a Final Five Voting campaign in Nevada, which will be on the ballot in 2024. Notably, Nevadans already said yes to Final Five Voting in 2022 by a six-point margin. But it’s a constitutional amendment there, and they have to pass it twice. So they will get to reaffirm their vote in 2024, and we are happy to provide whatever support we can to Nevadans on that quest.
A couple of interesting things about that… That ballot initiative won with higher margins than any of the marquee candidate races in the state. And also we had donors to that campaign who were investing political money on opposite sides of their Senate race and their gubernatorial race, but were on the same side of “yes” to Final Five Voting for the system. So even though we have donors who, when they only have a duopoly to choose from, choose one side or the other, they are in this case — and I find this increasingly — choosing “It doesn’t have to be like this. It could be so much better. Let’s have Final Five Voting.” That’s pretty cool.
So that’s Nevada. There’s also a campaign in Idaho. I was just on an hour-and-a-half call with someone leading that in Idaho — very, very citizen/grassroots-driven. Really exciting to see their work there. There are other campaign teams talking about this in various states. I’ll name a few: Massachusetts, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona. And we have legislative initiatives in Georgia and in Wisconsin. If you want to look up our New York City initiative, just Google “Final Five Voting New York City.” Point being there’s a lot of activity out there for Final Five Voting. This will be the last year, I think, that people haven’t really heard of it. And the key is then we get to see the results that it delivers.
One of the things I really like about Final Five Voting is for the U.S. Senate… If we think about it, if you only pass this in four states, you’d have eight senators that are not beholden in the same way to what I call the tyranny of the party primary. Although they would still be, let’s say, the Democrats and Republicans, they’d have a unique freedom to form the bench off of which can come the gang of six, the gang of four, the gang of eight. They’re a nucleus of people who have that kind of freedom to negotiate. And so you can start to really improve the problem-solving capability of the U.S. Senate with as few as four states and eight senators, and however many representatives you would have on the other side. Because both these chambers are so evenly matched that if you grab out a portion of them who have a different kind of freedom and a different incentive, and are answering to different electorates knowing that they’ll have real competition, that changes this zero-sum, party-driven binary that we have right now.
Geoff Kabaservice: And that is the realization of what was talked about a few years ago as “the fulcrum strategy,” which I think didn’t come to pass because the system wouldn’t allow it to come to pass.
Katherine Gehl: Indeed. So one of my five stages of political grief that we started with was when I said, “And then we will elect candidates not beholden to the duopoly.” And that was to be independents — let’s say eight to ten independents in the U.S. Senate — that would be this problem-solving fulcrum. But you can’t elect independents because they’re spoilers, or also because you’re going to change control of the Senate party-wise and people couldn’t get past that. But once you have instant runoff voting, no one is a spoiler. So now it is easy to run an independent, or easy to run a different kind of Democrat or Republican, or easy for the existing Republicans and Democrats to be more the kind of Democrat and Republican they are behind closed doors and not the kind they’ve been incented by the current competition and media environment to be. So we’ll either see new people win, or we’ll see the existing people just do different things.
And I’m somewhat agnostic to which that is — although I will note, Geoff, that I do talk about Final Five Voting increasingly in the context of the war for talent. So again, I come from business. I’m sure many of your listeners are there, and we all know that businesses are always talking about the war for talent, right? That’s a source of their competitive advantage: how good are the people at any company? The people from the top all the way to the entry-level associates are what matters at a company.
And yet I think that the existing way that we hire and fire people in our political bodies is really contributing to a self-selection-out of many, many, many talented people who say, “I wouldn’t do that.” And it’s not just that they wouldn’t do it because of the media circus and the scrutiny, which we can’t make that go away. But they don’t want to do it because they don’t believe and therefore can’t say what it takes to win this primary or that primary. Because there’s only one set of things you have to say, including how evil the other side is, et cetera. And then they don’t want to go through all of that in order to get nothing done, okay? Because then they get there, and it’s gridlock and grandstanding — because that’s what’s incented — so it’s not worth it.
Final Five Voting will change the quality of these jobs. And when I talk to existing electeds, I say, “This is actually awesome for you. Because there’s no layoffs — same number of positions, right? No job reductions. So just win under this system, and then you can actually really work actively on behalf of your constituents and your ideas.” And additionally we’ll see a marketplace for additional talent to come in because it will be an attractive hiring process, and an attractive work environment, in a way that it really isn’t right now.
Geoff Kabaservice: As a last observation, Katherine, you cited in at least some of the writings that I’ve read the book The Upswing by sociologists Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett. And it’s about how the United States during the Gilded Age suffered through a kind of political dysfunction much like the kind that we have now. Money was hugely important in politics. People were cynical about the political process. They hated people on the other side. It was a divided, dysfunctional country that looked like it was heading for disaster. But instead what happened was the Progressive movement happened. And largely based on citizen initiatives, people around the country started to get together and try to reform this political process. And this actually led to an upwelling of trust in politics and, by extension, in business and other kinds of political institutions. And I remember being frustrated with this book because yeah, fine, you told us how that dynamic worked a century ago and more. But you didn’t tell us how you think it’s going to happen now.
And yet I actually do see some indication that something like that might be happening, specifically through Final Five Voting. You mentioned that you were just on a call with somebody in Idaho. Well, the Republican-dominated Idaho legislature has banned ranked choice voting. But there are people from both Republican and Democratic parties now who are putting together an initiative to try to get Final Five Voting to be the political system in the state going forward. And I think if you actually see that start to scale up around the country, this might have all kinds of other benefits in terms of the restoration of trust in government, and then in all of the rest of our institutions that we can’t even envision right now at this moment of comparative cynicism and despair. So I really want to thank you for what you’re doing, and I can only hope for your success.
Katherine Gehl: I really want to thank you for today, and for your interest and engagement and excitement about this possibility. Because it definitely, as I’m sure you know, is not what I’m doing but what the whole group of people who are aligned on Final Five Voting and Final Four Voting are doing. And in the end, this is something we’re offering for citizens of these states to take and make their own. And it is… Oh my God, it’s so exciting. I am truly optimistic. And the ripple effects when you change the incentives, and you change who our representatives answer to and you re-enfranchise every November election voter in lesser-of-two-evils elections, and make problem-solving a good way to win — that’s a pretty darn good trifecta. So it will make your listeners optimistic too. I hope they join us.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, thank you so much, Katherine Gehl, and best of luck to you and all of the people who are working along the same lines as you are.
Katherine Gehl: Thank you, Geoff. Pleasure.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform, and if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact at niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.