- 3 months ago
Today on The Cameron Journal Podcast we are joined by Lura Forcum from the Independent Center. They describe themselves as, "The Independent Center is the go-to organization for information, research, and engagement with independent voters, who now make up the majority of the electorate. We represent those who are fed up with partisan politics and feel politically homeless. We believe the future is not red or blue; it's fiscally responsible, socially inclusive, and free to choose the best options for ourselves, our families, and our communities.
We are talking about how the current 2-party duopoly is not serving the American people and why it's time to leave the two major parties behind!
We are talking about how the current 2-party duopoly is not serving the American people and why it's time to leave the two major parties behind!
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you very much.
00:30Today on the Cameron Journal Podcast, I am joined by Laura Forkham.
00:34She is, and I've got the email here, but I've just, ah, here it is.
00:39Had it and lost it, but here it is.
00:41So, she's with the Independent Center, and we're going to be talking about independent voters today.
00:45She has expertise in consumer psychology, which is always very interesting.
00:49And we're going to understand the behavior of independent voters and explain why it's so important
00:53and why people are fed up with the two-party system,
00:56which is not anything new to anyone who listens to this show.
01:00Especially my Monday night news hour.
01:01Long-time listeners will know I left the Republican Party in 2012.
01:07I am begrudgingly a Democrat, and it is no secret to me why independent voters are the largest voting bloc in the country.
01:13Because we are stuck in a terrible two-party system that serves the interests of people,
01:18and if your net worth is below $100 million, those interests are not you.
01:23So, we're going to find more about the consumer psychology behind this and how it might change elections moving forward,
01:29especially as we lose the boomers and millennials that get more into their middle age and take on more political power.
01:36So, welcome, Laura, to the Cameron Journal Podcast.
01:39Thank you, Cameron.
01:40That was a fantastic introduction.
01:42We look at things very similarly.
01:45Yes.
01:46Well, let's dive right into this.
01:50To anyone who says politics knows, there are two kind of great groups politically in this country.
01:55There's those who don't vote, which is most everyone.
01:58And then of those who do vote, it's really independent swing voters that are the most important group.
02:07And the mainstream media loves, loves, loves to obsess over them and think pieces every election cycle of kind of which way they're going to go,
02:15because how they go is going to decide the election.
02:19No one party really has enough registered voters on its own to do things without them.
02:24And so, in your view, let's just get right into it.
02:30What caused this?
02:32What do we do about it?
02:34And how is it going to change this country politically?
02:37Yeah, so what caused this, I would say, is the two parties realized it was much easier to manage a smaller group of voters that is their base
02:52if they drove out the people who have questions, which tend to be independents.
02:57And so, they have just sort of made politics less and less appealing to anybody who likes to think deeply about issues,
03:08to people who have questions about what the party line is, what the received wisdom is, right?
03:15And so, it's like reasonable people don't want to participate from either party anymore because the two parties have just started to make politics dehumanizing and really absurd.
03:29If you want to have a really absurd conversation about public policy, like go look at the Republican versus Democratic framing of the issue because it's going to be detached from reality.
03:42And I think any reasonable person in the middle is like, wait, why are we talking about these two ways of addressing the issue when there's all this space in the middle, all this agreement, right?
03:53And so, it actually is really effective to consolidate power and fundraise if you are talking about how the other side is the worst thing in the world, the end of democracy as we know it, the end of the world as we know it.
04:07And so, like, I can see why it's effective for them.
04:12The problem is…
04:13The destroying of America, the undermining of American values would be the GOP version of that message.
04:17Yeah, exactly.
04:18Let's be clear, this is something both sides, about the same set of them.
04:22Oh, yeah, 100%.
04:22In my mind, those were equal opportunity.
04:27You're not wrong.
04:28I was just throwing in a couple other Republican taglines in there for spice.
04:32But, yes, both sides participate in this, let them win and the country is over sort of thing.
04:39Yeah.
04:39And I think what's interesting, though, is, I don't know if you share this, that message resonates, as you said, very well with the base.
04:46It doesn't resonate with most of the country.
04:48Yes.
04:49It's where most of the country are at.
04:52And so, they've dropped out, right?
04:53And the reason that the Independence Center was formed is because we see this huge opportunity for enfranchising independent voters and that those voters themselves are the way that we combat polarization and we make government be more accountable.
05:11Because, as you mentioned in your introduction, you know, increasingly in districts across the country and for the presidency, you can't win unless you win over independence.
05:22And that's actually great for democracy and for making government be more responsive, right?
05:28Because, like, your base is not going to cross the aisle pretty much no matter what you do, right?
05:34So, you tell them you're going to do stuff, you don't deliver, and they're just like, fine, anything's better than the other guy, right?
05:40And that just relieves all of the accountability pressures from politics.
05:45But we need that, right?
05:46Otherwise, there's very little incentive to do the things you promised you'd do and also to understand what voters need and deliver on it.
05:55So, if you want politics to be and politicians to be more accountable, it's actually really ideal that you have to win over these independents because the independents are the ones saying, I don't care what the party line is.
06:08I'm telling you what my concerns are, and I want to know what you're going to do about it.
06:12And I think last election cycle, you know, they swung to Trump because Trump had a more compelling message on economic issues.
06:20Prior to that, they swung to Biden because I think they believed that Biden was the better prepared person to address the COVID issue, right?
06:30And so, that swinging back and forth is what creates the accountability expectations.
06:38And that's what we think is really important.
06:41And that's why we're trying to enfranchise these voters because, as you might imagine, the parties don't particularly want them to engage politically because they're a wild card.
06:54And so, there's tons of regulations that make it just very hard for independents to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
07:03No, and that, I mean, one of the things that I've always enjoyed about state-level politics and local politics is because they actually have to do stuff, the polarization is a lot less.
07:16Mm-hmm.
07:16Exactly.
07:17And I worked in state government very briefly a long time ago.
07:21But the reality is, you know, you actually have to do – because that's where most governing happens in this country.
07:27Yes.
07:28You actually have to do things.
07:30And so, you end up with, you know, a lot more, you know, oh my goodness, how do they get Republicans over that in Kansas?
07:37Because they actually have to do stuff.
07:39Like, they actually have to – if they do not do stuff, it causes actual problems that immediately impact people's lives and their lives right away sort of thing.
07:47Unfortunately, the minute you make the jump to national, you then end up with deeply entrenched polarization that just goes nowhere.
07:56And it's kind of funny because one of the reasons why things have been so stagnant is we've had almost 15, 18 years of extreme polarization where the answer to everything is we're going to do things for the person in power and the party out of power saying no, no, no, not under any circumstances.
08:17And then the whole thing goes down in flames.
08:21And so, we really haven't gotten very much done.
08:25And so, it also then becomes a race to not only do you just have to win the White House, you have to get unified government, you know, to get anything sort of done.
08:33And Biden proved even that's not so great if you have people that are not necessarily on board with the agenda sort of thing.
08:40And so, yes, so you end up with this, you know – and I think this is why people feel like the system doesn't work.
08:47Because the system doesn't know – there's no constitutional mechanism to get rid of polarization.
08:53Yeah.
08:53But it sounds like that's what you guys are working on.
08:55So, say more about that.
08:56Yeah, absolutely.
08:57You know, people ask me a lot, like, well, what do you think we can do about the media incentives that are leading to polarization?
09:07And what can we do about, you know, the issues, the incentives in Congress that are leading to polarization?
09:15And my answer is I don't know.
09:18Because there are some extremely smart and talented people with very large budgets working on solving those problems.
09:25And I don't know how they're going to be effective.
09:28But what I can tell you is that if you bring competition into political representation by allowing independents to vote and offering an alternative that's not either party, then you are going to force the two parties to start being more responsive, right?
09:48Because they're going to have to get closer to what independents want in order to win elections.
09:54And right now, there's no competitive pressure on them at all, right?
09:58They just point at the other side and say, like, oh, my God, well, you don't want that, right?
10:02And it's like, well, wait, no, where are your ideas?
10:05So, I think competition is one of the only tools available to us to combat polarization.
10:13And it's a thing that's available right now.
10:14Because what we're saying at the Independence Center is we want you to vote and participate in politics in a nonpartisan manner,
10:25which doesn't have to mean that you vote for an independent candidate or a third party candidate.
10:29It just means when you go to the polls, you're picking what you think is best and what you think is correct for ballot initiatives and for elected office.
10:40And it might be straight ticket Democrat.
10:42It might be straight ticket Republican.
10:44It might be a mix, right?
10:46You might swing vote.
10:47You might split ticket vote.
10:48The important thing is that we're getting these nuanced nonpartisan thinkers back engaged in politics because that's what's going to make it so that you can't count on the base.
11:01If you're a party, you have to actually go and deliver.
11:05And I think it will bring them closer to the middle, right?
11:08Because you're going to have to speak to a swath of voters that right now you're just saying, like, well, who cares, right?
11:14Like, they don't vote anyway.
11:16No, and I love that you mentioned split ticket voting because one of the big stories of the 2024 election, and poor Steve Kornacki over at MSNBC almost had a little meltdown about this, was the prevalence of split ticket voting.
11:30And what was very interesting is, one, Trump didn't win by that tremendous of a margin.
11:36And in some states, the vote count was less than 10,000 votes looking at U.S.
11:39Gonson.
11:40That's the first story.
11:41They didn't get a mandate from heaven.
11:42They squeaked by.
11:45In fact, Biden's margin was larger.
11:47Two, you also had a high – the wipeout for Democrats, they were going to lose everything in the House.
11:54It was not that bad.
11:56The Republican majority is two seats, you know, sort of thing.
11:59The Senate map was bad because the Senate map was favoring Republicans anyway.
12:03And there were a couple easy seats for them to pick up, like John Tester in Montana, which is really sad because he was really great.
12:08And he was a very nice, moderate, normal Democrat who, like, still ranches and things.
12:15And it was good to pull the party a little bit out of the crazy zone.
12:19But it was not as bad down ballot, even at the state level, where Democrats actually did very well, than they anticipated.
12:26And one of the things was the high prevalence of split-ticket voting.
12:29It was quite obvious that when it came for president, they were not on board the Harris-Waltz train by any stretch of the imagination, or vice versa.
12:42But at the state level, there were much – people who – Trump voters were much more comfortable voting for Democrats at a state and local level than they were voting for Harris-Waltz, specifically, sort of thing.
12:56And I think – I think you're going to get your wish, is my point of saying this, is that I think we're going to start – I think that's going to become the norm moving forward.
13:06And it'll be interesting to see what the data is in 26, because there won't be any big top-of-the-ticket polarization draw.
13:15It'll be very interesting to see, because if Democrats end up doing very well, or Republicans don't do as bad as we think they will, and you start to see the data of how the vote went down,
13:27I think that's going to start to become the norm, where people are just picking the best person from both sides, whatever that may be for them.
13:40And I do agree with you. I think that will be good for – that will be good for democracy.
13:45However, I do wonder how that is going to affect a presidential election in 2028,
13:50in terms of – one of the great things about Make America Great Again, as a slogan –
13:59sorry, there's a hair right there and I can see it – it has an annoying name –
14:03about that, is that you can make that whatever you want it to be.
14:08As a political slogan, you honestly can't do much better, I don't think.
14:12And I wonder how this idea of being able to kind of pick the best of both parties is going to work when you're really stuck with a binary choice,
14:25because our political system – that's a whole other – we can talk about ranked choice voting in a minute, you know, sort of thing.
14:31I wonder how that, you know, how that's going to affect it in 2028, in terms of, what is your guys' hope?
14:40That both parties will come more to the middle, or that it'll just change the rhetoric around the race entirely?
14:49So, I would say our goal is to enfranchise independence, because there are too many barriers to their political participation,
14:58and they have a constitutional right to vote.
15:01And in some states, depending on how the state's laws are for voter registration and how primaries are run, all this stuff, right,
15:11like it can make it very hard for independence to exercise that right.
15:17And so, you know, we don't have sort of like a vision for how this will play out in a presidential election.
15:25I would tell you that, you know, I know there are parties like Forward Party and No Labels,
15:31and, you know, when they're talking about trying to get a president elected, I think it's a really laudable goal.
15:40But I also think it is incredibly unlikely to succeed, just because of like how deeply entrenched partisan politics is in the United States.
15:50I think trying to start with a presidency is just like a high-risk endeavor, right?
15:57It really depends on looking at this third-party candidate and Americans saying like, yeah, I'm crazy about that person,
16:06like so much so that I don't want either of these two known quantities in the parties.
16:10So that's where I think targeting House districts is actually a lot better way to go, because it's, you know, this is much smaller stakes.
16:19And the thing about House districts that's really valuable, again, for decreasing polarization,
16:27for making it so that people want to work across the aisles in Washington,
16:30is that if you elected just a handful of independents, like you said, the margin in the House is very slim in favor of Republicans.
16:38Even a handful of Republicans, or sorry, a handful of independents would make it so that you have to, nobody has a majority, right?
16:48Like you have to govern with independents.
16:52It would make those individuals very powerful in Congress, and it would just take away the majority.
16:59You would have to consult with them and come up with policy that is more broadly appealing,
17:04rather than just doing what they're doing now, which is saying, ha-ha, we have the majority.
17:08And like that winner-takes-all approach is terrible for democracy.
17:14It's very unstable, right?
17:16It's just like this ping-pong ball where it's like, oh, now we have the majority.
17:20We're going to do all this stuff that we want.
17:22Now we have it, and we're putting everything back.
17:24That type of political uncertainty causes a lot of economic instability, and it's not good for solving the bigger issues that plague our country that are going to take multiple years and multiple election cycles to address.
17:42So that's where I think not only would having some independence in the House create these larger pressures around depolarization, it would make the House a more effective governing body.
17:56No, yes.
17:59I mean, I've always, of any third-party situation, you always want to start at a lower, more achievable level sort of thing.
18:10And that, because it is cheaper, it's more effective.
18:12And I agree with you, I hadn't considered how it would change the governing dynamics of the House.
18:17That's a very interesting idea.
18:20Yeah, I do think there is a certain hunger for something else.
18:25One of the big stories of the last, kind of the other story in the Trump era that we never talk about is the popularity of third parties.
18:34It is well known that in a lot of the swing states in 2016, massive third-party voting definitely drew away Clinton voters.
18:45In 2020, the effect was more muted possibly due to the pandemic.
18:49But in 2024, they were roaring back.
18:53And obviously, the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, being kind of the two only really nationally known third parties, have capitalized on this.
19:01And they're starting to get a not insignificant amount of the vote share.
19:04I mean, they're really starting to rank up the numbers.
19:06You're starting to get, you know, Green Party did $1.2 million last cycle.
19:10And for a winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system, which we're stuck with, thank you, Great Britain, for that little gift, you know, for that, it is, I think it is a clear signal people are looking for something different.
19:27Yeah.
19:27Yeah.
19:28So, I mean, if you guys can start galvanizing, you know, if you can get some combination of independent voters voting for great third parties at the state and House district level sort of thing, that can become a quite potent political force.
19:43Because as we've seen, it won't take much to get people off the R&D plantation into a new sort of thing.
19:53That could become quite politically potent.
19:55And you're absolutely right.
19:56If we had two independents in the House, well, that's Mike Johnson's whole legislative program under the, you know, underwater, you know.
20:02Yeah, exactly.
20:03And he would have to get some bipartisan support for these initiatives rather than taking the current point of view, which just seems to be, you know, it's like that game of the kids play of like, why are you punching yourself?
20:20I feel like that's what politics, especially in the House, looks like these days.
20:26And it's just, you know, like you were alluding to earlier, it's not like that in state legislatures.
20:32It's not like that in your city council because people want their schools to open, right?
20:38They need the roads paved.
20:40They need water.
20:41They need sewage treatment to work, right?
20:45They need the water to come in and the sewage to go out?
20:47Exactly.
20:48When these things don't happen, life as we know it starts to fall down or fall apart.
20:54And D.C. is not dealing, they're not working within those constraints.
20:59So they can keep having this very absurd approach to political life.
21:06And that's one of the things that we say at the Independence Center a lot is, and I think this is something a lot of our audience agrees with, it's like, you know, if you're talking about your personal relationships,
21:17if you're talking about your neighbors and your community, if you're talking about your faith community or your workplace, right?
21:24Like those are all places where you are connected with people who don't share identical views with you.
21:30And yet you manage to get along, you manage to work together, and you manage to find consensus, right?
21:36It's only D.C. where apparently they can't figure out how to do that.
21:41And I think that's one of the things that makes it so frustrating to voters and makes them drop out of civic participation, because they're looking at what should be leaders of our country and just saying,
21:51this is absurd that you would behave in this manner that, like, none of the rest of us engage in in our daily lives, right?
21:58It's just this political class.
22:00And so I understand why independents look at that and are frustrated and are just like, you know what, I don't need that.
22:07But what we're really hopeful that people will do is say, okay, you're right.
22:11Like we, just by participating, we can decrease some of the incentives in the current political left-right divide.
22:20No, I mean, it's one of the overarching narratives of this show is I grew up very Republican, worked in Republican politics, was in Young Republicans, state treasurer, chapter president, national delegate 2009.
22:35I got involved in, I ran a Tea Party magazine shortly after that, and was very involved, was there on day one.
22:42And then at the end of that, I started covering Occupy's journalists, eventually got involved, and that was when I decided to leave, because I kind of saw where some of this was coming from.
22:54I didn't necessarily predict Trump early on, but I saw where things were going, and I was ready to get off.
22:59And I also saw how the economy that I thought worked for everyone was not working for a lot of people.
23:07And kind of most importantly, it wasn't working for me post the financial crisis.
23:12And that led to a whole bunch of other journeys and inspirations, and that's how you and I are sitting here talking today.
23:20And one of the hallmarks of this show is its tremendous moderation on a lot of topics.
23:31And I have long joked this show would be ten times as popular if I were a hundred times more partisan.
23:37And it's kind of like, people are always very impressed by that, because it doesn't really exist anymore.
23:45But I can tell you, social media does not really raise up the moderate, nuanced sort of voice.
23:55Social media is optimized for the most extreme view.
23:58So what part does the modern information environment, which one argues that's where the battle is taking place now,
24:08how does the modern information environment affect this polarization?
24:13And how does that more moderate, nuanced, independent voice sort of break through the algorithms that are optimized for polarization?
24:22Yeah, that's such a great question.
24:26And, you know, there's a lot of ink has been spilled on this topic.
24:30But I'll tell you, so two things that come from my background in consumer psychology.
24:37One of the things is that we know that what predicts people sharing information online is what's called the emotional arousal,
24:47which is just like how much energy is behind that emotion.
24:51It's not the valence.
24:53So you might think that it's like happy things that people want to share, but that's not actually true.
24:59It's not whether it's happy or sad.
25:01It's whether there's energy behind it.
25:03And energy comes from people being outraged, right?
25:07Like, so you can imagine immediately the implications that has for social media,
25:12because people share stuff and they view it and they click on it and they comment on it based on their emotional response to it.
25:20So if it makes you outraged, you are far more likely to share it than if you're like, oh, what a nice story, right?
25:27And so if you think about, like, what are the emotions that are evoked from being a moderate, right?
25:32It's like, well, let me let me refrain from responding emotionally and think about this rationally.
25:37Let me let me understand, right?
25:40Like, let me suppress my negative feelings and understand what this person who disagrees with me,
25:45what they're really saying and what this means to them.
25:48And let's see where we can go from there, right?
25:49Like that's way lower arousal.
25:52So you can see right there why we're not going to get virality from the type of perspective that you're having, right?
25:59And like, that's exactly your point.
26:01If you would spew outrage, yes, I'm sure that you could quadruple your audience.
26:08However, I'm very thankful that you're not doing that.
26:10I'm sure your audience is also very thankful that you are refraining.
26:15Yeah.
26:16And the other thing that I think is really important, and I don't hear people sharing or talking about this enough.
26:22Um, so the problem with the media bubble that we know exists from, you know, from all of these algorithms and from different ways of approaching content moderation is that we have two separate shared realities.
26:40Um, and so shared reality is this idea from psychology that, and, you know, it's, it's kind of shocking how much our perception of the world around us is actually really easily shaped by our social connections, right?
26:57So like there's all these experiments in psychology showing people looking at bars of different length on a paper and the group will agree about something about the length of these bars, right?
27:09And be like, oh, you know, they'll agree with something that's totally divorced from reality.
27:13And you can see this effect in experiments again and again and again.
27:16It's the group's thinking that determines what reality means.
27:22Um, and so the problem is that with the bubbles that we have of, of, you know, polarized media content, we're ending up with two separate realities.
27:33And you can kind of see that in the fact that, like, for example, you know, Republicans looked at Joe Biden's mental capacity and said, hey, there's a problem here.
27:43And all Democrats looked at it and said, nope, it's absolutely not a problem, right?
27:48Like that type of breakdown of shared reality is super concerning because...
27:54January 6th.
27:55It was just some tourists having fun.
27:56It was exactly the same thing.
27:58Democrats, it's an insurrection.
28:00Yes, totally.
28:01But, but that breakdown of shared reality makes it nearly impossible to govern together.
28:07Um, and that is a tremendous problem because the more, it's like the more extreme those two shared realities get, the harder it is to reach across and say like, no, no, we have, we actually have a ton of things in common.
28:20And that's not just, um, you know, there's empirical support for that.
28:24That's not just me being Pollyanna and saying, hey guys, we can get along.
28:29No, there's, there's tons of evidence of just how close together most Americans are on policy issues.
28:35So the fact that we have all this vitriol is insane because we're actually like very closely aligned on a wide range of policy issues.
28:45Well, and I think one of the sad things is we also, a lot of the most vitriolic stuff is, to be very honest, a lot of low-hanging fruit on social issues.
28:54Um, and, and that, you know, it's, and I always kind of just like, it's like, notice we never have, um, multiple days of dialogue on Twitter on anything that actually matters.
29:06And I'm chronically online, this never happens.
29:10And there's a reason for that because to your point, um, you know, the, a nice, kindly considered, you know, policy on education is not going to get anybody's heartbeat raised or thumping.
29:26Absolutely.
29:27You know, absolutely not.
29:28Um, that's just not going to be a, not, not going to be a thing.
29:32And so, but, you know, if we can have, you know, they're eating the dogs, they're eating the cats in Ohio, that will be everywhere because it has, it, it triggers the right thing psychologically.
29:45Absolutely.
29:45Right.
29:46Because the people who are right, like if you're a Republican and you look at that, you go like, ha ha, that's funny.
29:53I know it's a joke.
29:54Right.
29:54And if you're a Democrat, you say, oh my God, look at, you know, look at how insane this is.
29:59Right.
29:59So you actually are getting juice from both sides.
30:02Yes.
30:03Right.
30:04Um, and, and I feel like people have really, people who are successful online, I understand how to use that specific tool of getting, it's like you get the hate reads and you get the love reads.
30:17Right.
30:18And, um, it's, it's incredibly divisive.
30:21Um, it's not good for us.
30:23You know, I, I mean, I can like wag my finger all day long and say, Hey guys, go outside, um, like the nation's mother.
30:31Um, but I won't because, uh, I don't think that that's actually effective.
30:34Like we all know we need to, that, that some of these things are really destructive.
30:39Um, I think really the only tool available to us is to say your political participation matters.
30:48And like, you know, if you don't feel like you're a Democrat or Republican, like, cool, you can be one of us.
30:53We don't have a litmus test, right?
30:55Like you can sit at our table.
30:57Um, you know, we're people who want to see good people elected to office, decent people elected to office.
31:04Um, we want to see public policy that treats other people with dignity.
31:09Um, and, you know, maybe, maybe if we can get the country back on track to a little bit more political health, we won't need independence in the long run.
31:20Right.
31:21Like maybe we'll get back to a place where people say like, no, you know what?
31:24This party actually fits me really well.
31:26A third party is not, as it turns out, what we needed.
31:29Um, I, you know, that's not up to me that that's a question for voters.
31:34I think the, the thing in the medium term here that we think is hugely important is to make it so that independents want to participate.
31:43And so that people who don't feel like they're part of either party, those are actually the people we need the most to engage.
31:50Yes.
31:51Yes.
31:52Um, I, I quite, I quite agree.
31:54Um, how do you guys feel about ranked choice voting?
31:58So we think ranked choice has a lot of really important benefits.
32:05Um, we partner with a couple of different organizations that are much better, uh, equipped to speak about how this works and why it's important.
32:15Um, and I, I assume your listeners are pretty familiar.
32:19Do you talk about it on the show or?
32:20I, I, I, I, I, I, I do.
32:22I, I, I've, the reason I ask is because Australia has had ranked choice voting for a long time.
32:27We've also seen it work for a presidential race in Alaska in 24 because they have just implemented ranked choice voting for all races and everything.
32:36There's also several large cities that do it.
32:38New York has it.
32:39Seattle has it.
32:40I think Chicago also has it.
32:41Um, it, it's starting to percolate a little bit sort of thing.
32:47Um, and so I was, I was kind of wondering what your guys' thought on that, on that was.
32:51Um, and I was hoping you would be in favor of it because yes, I mean, being able to, and I'm going to ask you this question and also explain what it is in the state.
33:00Watch me do this.
33:00Um, so the, the nice thing about ranked choice voting is that you get to, you know, list a bunch of people get to run.
33:06You get to list them in the order that you like them from however many there are.
33:10That's how many spots they are.
33:11You get to rank them one through whatever.
33:14And then if your first choice wins, great.
33:16Your ballot's done being counted.
33:17If you're, if, if not, then they keep going until they find a person that has a majority that you have voted for sort of thing.
33:24Um, and then that, that ends up who ends up being who, who, who wins.
33:27And in, in my mind, the only way we're ever going to break the two-party political duopoly in this country,
33:35which is really a unit party owned by the wealthy, but that's another show.
33:38Um, is by having ranked choice voting in all states nationwide, because that actually gives third parties a chance to really be viable.
33:50I mean, it's hard even at the local level to win a winner take all city council.
33:54Maybe not so bad, but once you get the state level, it's hard to get a winner take all situation.
33:58I mean, in my mind, having ranked choice voting would be tremendous.
34:04Yeah, I think it could shift really significantly shift some voting dynamics, um, especially where you, you could stop people from thinking about what is the least bad option.
34:19Right.
34:19Right.
34:20To, to thinking like, okay, if that doesn't work, what's the next choice.
34:24And one of the things that I also think is really important and doesn't get said enough about ranked choice voting is if you only want to pick your top choice, you can, you can continue to vote the way you always have voted.
34:34But for people who want to go beyond that and rank further down the list, additional candidates, that's also something that you can do.
34:43Um, because I, I worry my, one of my worries about ranked choice is that it sounds to people who are already on the fence about political participation, like making it so much harder.
34:54And I worry, like, as a psychologist, I worry about giving people the impression that voting is complicated, or that it takes a whole lot of preparation in order to be able to vote, right, to be, to be prepared to vote.
35:10Um, because I worry about who's going to decide in those circumstances to stay home, right?
35:15It's going to be the people who are most economically pressed, the people with less education, the people who are not as sure about their opinions, um, and we need their votes, right?
35:27Like, we need to know what they think, like, right?
35:30Like, I, I think it's, it's gotten so tribal talking about political participation, but like, at the end of the day, your voting is like how we know what's important to you and how we know what you need and how we know how you prioritize things.
35:44And, and, and so if we are systematically keeping people out of political participation, we don't know what they need.
35:53We don't know what their values are.
35:55And that's the real issue here.
35:57No, I mean, I, I will agree.
35:59I think, um, yeah, I, I think the, uh, the voter overwhelm is very, very real.
36:07And I, I've already seen this when you have a, a, a cycle where you have a lot of ballot measures in your state and people get overwhelmed.
36:15Or they're trying to vote for judges and you have no clue who any of these people are.
36:18You haven't even seen a yard sign because no one cares sort of thing.
36:22Um, and, uh, it would, and I, I've seen, you know, especially younger people are first time voters.
36:30Cause I had a lot of buddies.
36:32I got into voting regularly to vote for legalization of weed in their state.
36:36And that actually got them in the habit of voting.
36:38Um, and I've sat with people, all this sort of thing.
36:42And, and I agree.
36:43You get into some of the ballot initiatives and all this type of thing.
36:45And I, I've had, you know, especially in 24, I mean, a couple of friends, it was a lot of Gen Zers first time voting.
36:52And Colorado happened to have a lot of, um, of ballot initiatives that year.
36:57And I'm sitting on them, you know, on FaceTime and I'm kind of like, you can read them.
37:01You can make snap decisions.
37:03You can look in the blue book and read about them a little bit more, or you can skip them.
37:06And hope for what's important and go from there sort of thing.
37:09Um, and some went through and did it all.
37:11And some just said, ask for it.
37:13And so I, I, I do, I do agree.
37:16Um, I think there's definitely a huge voter education piece in there that would have to happen to make that work and, and be viable.
37:25But the thing that I love the most about it is that both major parties are mad about Alaska doing it.
37:30And that fills my little heart with, with joy.
37:33If it's, if it's annoying the two major parties, I'm instantly more in favor of it than I was five minutes ago.
37:40Absolutely.
37:41Um, I, I think anywhere the parties are in strong agreement, we should all take a closer look.
37:47Right.
37:47Because that there's a good reason that they are fighting tooth and nail on things like rank choice, things like open primary.
37:55Right.
37:56Like these concern them because they would love to protect themselves from competition.
38:01And, and I, you know, I, I don't fault that, fault them for that.
38:05Uh, everybody would love to do business in, uh, an environment where there's no competition.
38:11The problem is that it's making voters worse off.
38:14And, you know, I think you and I are in total agreement here of like, this is, this is harming voters and it's, it's just not fair.
38:21It's not democratic.
38:22No, I, I was, so every once in a while, a video of it resurfaces.
38:26I'm not to presume a lady's age, but I'm assuming we're both old enough to remember Ross Perot.
38:32Barely.
38:32No, I'm kidding.
38:33I totally remember.
38:34No, no.
38:35I was born in 88.
38:36I was four years old.
38:37So I don't really consciously remember of it, but I remember my parents talking about it.
38:41And I've seen videos since then about it.
38:44And one of the big things they did after that is they changed the rules of presidential debates to prevent that from ever happening again.
38:55And if you want a really surreal experience, go watch Ross Perot in the 92 election and watch him basically look at the president, Bush senior, and Bill Clinton, the nice governor from Arkansas, and basically tell the country, these two are doing nothing for you.
39:12If you'd like to not have either of these two, find my name.
39:17So, I mean, and the major parties got so scared about that because he had a groundswell of support.
39:22They literally had to change the system to keep him out of it, that that really was the last time we had a viable third-party candidate for president.
39:36And people kind of, you know, wonder how we used to do it.
39:38And I said, this whole two-party duopoly is a very modern phenomena.
39:42It's a post-World War II phenomena.
39:44This was not the case before 1940.
39:48Third, fourth, fifth party, we're all the time.
39:51We ended Reconstruction because no one had a majority in Electoral College in 1876.
39:58And Rutherford B. Hayes got a majority by saying he would end Reconstruction because it was a three-way split.
40:04You know, I mean, that's how politics was in the 19th century.
40:08It was a mix.
40:10There was none of this two-party control everything.
40:12No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
40:14Oh, and you had third parties, third-party candidates winning states in presidential elections as late as 1948.
40:24The last one was Strom Thurmond, who was running as a segregationist party and won three states in the south of 1948.
40:29Yeah, but then, by the time you get into Eisenhower in 1952, you start to have that two-party duopoly sort of the end by 60, it's done.
40:43I was like, so really, in the history of the Republic, this is an anomaly.
40:46Really, people in the 19th century would find it very odd that we're stuck in between two parties that neither of them liked at the time and would be like, vote for anybody else.
40:58Like, come on, everyone, just start voting for other people.
41:00They would find it very odd that this has happened.
41:04So I say all that to say with a little bit of history lesson in eschatology, the study of elections, to say, I love what you're doing, I love what you're advocating for, and I vote you immediately.
41:14Because what you're talking, that's how our country's supposed to work.
41:20That's how the Constitution, we're not, people think we're destroying American democracy.
41:25No, we're just going back to how the system used to work before 1948.
41:30It's really that simple.
41:33Yeah, before they figured out how to shut out other voices, right?
41:40Yes, yes, yes.
41:41And you can only, you know, I think the thing about representative democracy is that when you shut off these feedback mechanisms, you create real problems for yourself.
41:54That's, you know, countless monarchs in Europe who no longer have their heads.
41:59If they could talk, they would tell you feedback from the masses is maybe something that you should listen to.
42:05And the problem with what we've done through the two-party system is that we have made it impossible for people to voice their feedback because we've cut off real competition and politics.
42:20And yeah, I totally agree with you.
42:21I think this is a really unhealthy dynamic.
42:23I also think that there's something about pairs of two in psychology that actually can be really, really unhelpful to our thinking.
42:35So it's called like a dyad or like dualism, where what we see is what our brains construct is if one side is being hurt, it means the other side is the herder.
42:48And it means if one side is good, the other side is bad, right?
42:52Like that type of, it's called completion.
42:55That type of completion, I think, is really easy for our brains to do.
43:00And it's really unhelpful.
43:01Because just because you don't like the Republican Party doesn't mean that the Democratic Party is doing things for you in your favor, right?
43:08And the reverse is also true, but it's just so easy, right?
43:12Like we're so, our brains are just inclined to that type of completionist thinking, and it's really unhelpful.
43:20No, I talk a lot about foreign policy, and I tell people, I said, you've got to leave that thinking behind.
43:24It will not do you any good.
43:25Because once you get into international relations, that type of thing, you can go to a conflict where there are two participants and both are bad.
43:34Yeah, exactly.
43:35And our brains don't register that, right?
43:38We're like, no, no, no, I'm still trying to figure out which one is good and which one is bad.
43:42And the answer is neither.
43:44Yes.
43:45We need to have that conversation more.
43:47Absolutely.
43:48Yeah, both can be bad for different reasons.
43:52There can be good parts to both for different reasons.
43:57And yes, and that's a very important dynamic to understand.
44:01And that's especially true in politics.
44:03And some of us don't remember when that's how most people thought about the parties.
44:10And most people thought about it.
44:11It was very, it used to be very, very rare anybody was a diehard anything.
44:17Mm-hmm.
44:18That was not, when I was growing up in the 90s, that was not a thing.
44:21At all.
44:22No one really thought like, I mean, sort of thing.
44:24I mean, you had a handful of people, you know, obviously if you were, you know, a big union person back then, you probably always would have a Democrat no matter what.
44:33And when I worked for Republican politics, we joked about the Republican Party was really just the Chamber of Commerce.
44:40You know, the Chamber of Commerce vote.
44:42Always votes Republican sort of thing.
44:43But that was not John Q public.
44:47You know, that wasn't most people in the street.
44:49And you had, you know, shades of that kind of moderate towards the center, more extreme towards the very edges.
44:57And I think, unfortunately, both the far right and the far left have pulled the parties away from the center, leading to the conversation we're having today.
45:09Yeah, absolutely.
45:10I mean, if you look at what it's like to engage around political conversation right now, you've basically caused everybody to drop out except the people who are fine with name calling, right?
45:24The people who are fine with dehumanizing people who don't agree with them, right?
45:29Like the stakes of, right, the stakes of political participation have just gotten really high.
45:34And they've made it so, like, of course, you know, you're making this, like, gesture where they're opposed to each other and really far apart.
45:41Like, of course, everybody in the middle is dropped out and you're left with extremes.
45:46And your candidate quality goes down.
45:48Yes.
45:48Between Occupy and the progressive movement on the left and the Tea Party, a lot of more moderate, agreeable Republicans and Democrats both either got voted out or ran for the exits because they saw what was happening.
46:00Yes.
46:01And people, there was a lot of candidates, especially in, like, 10, because you had a lot of Republicans getting to vote Democrat or something.
46:07In 10 and 12, you had a lot of candidate churn.
46:11Mm-hmm.
46:11And even in 12 into 16, tons of candidates turned to where now the people that are attracted to politics and are attracted to run and all this type of thing are much more extreme voices.
46:25And that goes for the Pramila Jayapals, Ilhan Omars, Rashida Tlaibs, as well as the giant Crenshaws, Marjorie Taylor Greene's, and Lauren Boebert's.
46:32Yes, I'm going after everybody.
46:34I totally agree.
46:34We're shooting both ways today.
46:37Kabay!
46:38So, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's, whereas in an earlier political time, all six of those people probably would not have been politically viable.
46:47Mm-hmm.
46:48Yeah.
46:48And some of them, like AOC and Pramila Jayapal, are only viable, and I used to live in Pramila Jayapal's district.
46:55They're only viable because they come from very, very deeply one-sided districts.
47:00Pramila Jayapal represents Seattle, which is very, very deep blue.
47:03AOC represents an extremely safe, like, D-plus-15 district in New York.
47:10Rashida Tlaib, same situation.
47:13Ilhan Omar will always get the Somalian vote in Minnesota just because she's Somali, sort of thing.
47:18But also, MTG, she comes from Georgia, a rural part of Georgia.
47:23She's a Republican.
47:24You could put a Republican next to a ham sandwich, they'd send it to the house.
47:27But the unfortunate part is, when those are your loudest voices, and this goes back into your thing about psychology, perception is reality.
47:37Mm-hmm.
47:38And I have leftist friends who will believe that they are all about the Republican Party, and I will have more Republicans who say they are all, that's all Democrat, sort of thing.
47:49Yeah.
47:49And I just kind of stand here doing my little show in the middle to be kind of like, or we could ignore all six of them.
47:57Yes, and talk to reasonable people.
47:59But, you know, the thing that you're talking about, this phenomenon of candidate quality going down, is a real concern because governing is complex, especially if you're talking about how complicated it is to pass a piece of legislation or even hear a piece of legislation in Congress, right?
48:18Like, budget processes are incredibly arcane.
48:22We need high-quality candidates, and I would challenge anybody, go ask the most decent person that you know, if they would consider running for national office, running for Congress.
48:35They're going to say no.
48:37No.
48:37Decent people are dropping out.
48:38Decent people don't want to do this job because we have made it intolerable.
48:44The rewards are for people who like yelling on Twitter and like calling people names.
48:50Yes.
48:50The rewards are not there for people who are disinterested in power and disinterested in money.
48:54So, you know, how are we going to start getting candidates of high quality back into office?
49:02It's incredibly difficult, right?
49:04But like that is the answer.
49:07We're going to have to reduce the rewards to deep polarization.
49:12One of the things that you will get amazing bipartisan support for is getting money out of politics.
49:19I will walk, I could walk in to a Lincoln Day dinner in a Trump plus 10 district, stand on the stage and say, let's get money out of politics to rapturous applause.
49:29I could walk in to the Seattle Tennis Club with the most, in the most blue area, in a room full of dyed in the wool blue, never voted for a Republican in their entire lives room, stand on the stage and say, let's get money out of politics to rapturous applause.
49:43You know, the only two institutions that are invested in that and never happening?
49:47Well, three.
49:48The two major parties who make a lot of money off of it and wealthy donors who love to control American politics.
49:53Yeah.
49:53You know, when those, and so when you talk about that, when you talk about candidates, it's like, yeah, when you, when half of a job of being elected person is to fundraise, sort of thing.
50:06And I, and that's, you know, and my old friend, Ken Buck, who used to be in the fourth in Colorado where Boebert is, because she got thrown out of Western Colorado, had to move to the east side of the state to get a seat, because she almost lost by 400 votes a couple years ago.
50:20And they got rid of her and she had to move over there.
50:22He was retiring.
50:23He talks about that in a documentary about, it's like, yeah, I spent half my time.
50:27And that's one of the reasons he got the hell out is he was tired of that whole, that whole thing.
50:30I mean, you have, even now the DNC is still using Kamala Harris's name to fundraise.
50:37I know, because I get their emails, you know, sort of thing.
50:40I mean, this is, I mean, and every, you know, all these things become fundraising issues.
50:45There's way too much money involved.
50:47The average person can't even get into it unless they can find, they either have deep pockets themselves, a la Trump, or even at the local level, they have deep pockets themselves, or they can align themselves with someone who does.
51:01And that's where you get someone like J.D. Vance, who was financed by Peter Thiel.
51:05You know, and that's where you start getting, you know, some of these, you know, different, you know, groups of people who, you know, pick people out.
51:11But when you're going off someone who's good at what you're talking about and is really good for fundraising, we get what you're just talking about.
51:19Yes, exactly.
51:19Not people who are just, let's make a great country that does things for everybody, great, and then let's hurry the hell out of here.
51:25No.
51:25It then becomes a, who can fundraise the best, who can get the most traction on Twitter, you know, who can cause the most fuss sort of thing, you know.
51:32And then even, you know, popular people will, even out of the House and Senate, will kind of overestimate the political will because of likes on Twitter.
51:42Honestly, Kamala Harris kind of suffered from that.
51:45She became very well known for asking a lot of very poignant questions in the Senate, which did very well on social media, went viral, all this type of thing.
51:54Didn't make it to her own state's primary in 20.
51:57Because the voter enthusiasm was just not there.
52:00Meanwhile, you know, Biden kind of comes out of nowhere, gets Jim Clyburn to endorsement in South Carolina, and Bob's your uncle.
52:08Smooth sailing after that.
52:10It's a very odd, it's a very odd, but what we don't get is the wonderful, decent people you're talking about who would just show up and be like, how do we make America better for everybody?
52:19You know, how do we actually make America great again, even?
52:22And that ends up with, you know, again, low quality people who are really good at raising money and getting invites on Twitter.
52:31But you can't govern a country that way.
52:33No, not, I mean, or you can, but you see what it looks like, right?
52:38We have been, and the result is here.
52:40We're trying it, and I have questions, you know?
52:44Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely.
52:47Well, we're reaching the top of the hour.
52:49I don't mean to keep you all after, because we could go on and on.
52:51We really could.
52:53Why don't you let us know where we can get in touch with you online and keep up with y'all's work at the organization?
53:00So we're at independentcenter.org, and you can find all kinds of resources there.
53:07If you're interested in what it looks like to register as an independent in your state or vote as an independent, or if you're interested on some takes on policy issues that are not just like what the two parties say, we have some more deeply informed ways of looking at public policy.
53:24We have a lot of polling about what independents think about different issues.
53:29And we also have just started a campaign that we're calling Declare Your Independence.
53:34So if you want to reach out and tell us, like, why you're an independent, if you are, that is www.independentcenter.com forward slash Declare.
53:46So you can get on there and tell us.
53:48And we've been getting all kinds of feedback from people that are just saying, you know, just saying stuff that warms my heart, probably would warm your heart as a neither party guy, right?
53:58And they're just saying, like, you know, neither of these parties is doing anything.
54:02And this, I just don't feel like I'm a member of either party.
54:07So if you feel like you're politically homeless, like, come join us.
54:11You're not.
54:12We're trying to build a home for you and for other independent voters.
54:15And I'd love to hear from you.
54:17We have a newsletter we send out every other week so you can kind of stay in touch on stuff.
54:23And we are starting to put together some in-person events.
54:26So we'd like to have some, like, small gatherings around the country for people who likewise feel like what you're talking about, Cameron.
54:33No, no, thank you.
54:35That is absolutely, absolutely tremendous.
54:38Well, thank you for coming on the Cameron Journal podcast.
54:40Thank you so much.
54:41That's all for this episode of the Cameron Journal podcast.
54:55Thank you so much for listening.
54:57Visit us online at CameronJournal.com.
55:00We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
55:03And I love to talk to my followers and listeners.
55:06So please feel free to get us on social media at Cameron Cowan on Twitter.
55:11And we'll see you next time on the Cameron Journal podcast.
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