 All right. Well, let's go ahead and get started then. For those of you who have never joined in on a Center for Election Science event, welcome. My name is Caitlin Penya. I'm the director of operations and programs here at the Center for Election Science. If you don't know us, we are a nonpartisan nonprofit, and we are focused on empowering voters with better voting methods to strengthen democracy. And the main voting method that we advocate for is called approval voting. We're not going to be talking about that today, but just to give you just a 30 second rundown approval voting is a voting method that allows you to vote for all the candidates you like. Votes are tallied up and the candidate with the most votes wins. We just helped St. Louis become the second city in the US to use approval voting this past November. So that was a big exciting win for us this year. We host lots of events like this where we talk about election and politics related issues. So we're really excited to have Dr. Christian Gross on with us today and so happy that all of you could be here. So I'm going to introduce you to Dr. Gross. He is an associate professor of political science and public policy at the University of Southern California. He is the academic director of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for state and global policy. He also directs USC spare maps and political reform lab where researchers students and policy practitioners work together to generate new ideas to transform American democracy. Christian is also an expert in political reforms and voting rights, including top two primaries and the independent redistricting commission. Of course, those are two topics that we're going to be talking about today. And we're going to be focusing on his research which often uses field and survey experimental techniques to answer questions about public policy, political institutions and elite behavior. Christian is the author of more than 30 articles and chapters about American politics, public policy, legislative politics, executive politics, race, race and ethnicity and political representation. And his book Congress in black and white won the best book on race and politics award from the American Political Science Association. So we are very happy to have Christian here with us. And we also have, of course, our executive director of the Center for Election Science, Aaron Hamlin. He's also the co founder of our organization. And so I am going to go ahead and hand it off to Aaron, but just as a quick overview, Aaron, and Christian will be talking for probably about 45 minutes or so. And then we'll use the last 15 to 20 minutes for audience Q&A. Of course, if you have any specific questions throughout feel free to stick them in the chat. If it makes sense, we might answer them in the middle of the discussion but otherwise, I will go ahead and moderate the chat at the end of the event and have Christian answer your questions so with all of that I will go ahead and pass it over to Aaron. And I'll go ahead and so we're looking at two pieces of work that Christian worked on one with the gerrymandering and the other looking at partisanship, comparing different types of primaries. And so, maybe Christian if it's okay with you if we start with the gerrymandering paper. Yeah, sure. That sounds great. And thanks for having me. It's absolutely pleasure talking with you. So just put the link in there. And I find that with a lot of these types of projects. Sometimes like there's like a backstory or interesting component of how you met some of the collaborators is anything going on with that here when you're looking at the political makeup of states and how that differs with how people voted. Yeah, that's a that's a great question. Just for a little bit of background which will help answer that question like who are the collaborators on this particular project about gerrymandering. So I mean I'm the academic director of the Schwarzenegger Institute at USC I'm also a professor. One of the things that we did at the Schwarzenegger Institute the governor Schwarzenegger is really interested in that provides some of that backstory about this project is when he was governor of California he was a huge proponent of the independent redistricting commission, and he pushed for it via ballot initiative took a couple times to get it passed, but it was passed and went into implementation for the first time in 2012. So part of this project is in the spirit of the Schwarzenegger Institute where we focus on redistricting. So that's a little bit of the backstory, but the other backstory is that you know I'm in one part of my job is I'm the academic director of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute the other part is I'm a professor who does research and teaches so the other three authors on this project about gerrymandering and minority rule in the United States are to two former graduate students, one of whom is now a professor from a college, and another one who's professor NC State and current graduate students so we got together because they also are part of the political reform lab that we study redistricting gerrymandering primaries and other election reforms. So a little bit more backstory about one of the authors. It's pretty cool. Sarah Sadwani was a graduate student of mine at USC. We wrote about gerrymandering and then in the interim she became a professor, and she applied to be on the California redistricting commission. She made it through the initial process and her number was randomly drawn to be selected and she is now a redistricting commissioner on the California redistricting commission so one of the authors of the study I'm talking about is actually the California redistricting commission. That's, that's awesome. And it sounds like you've really provided some excellent opportunities for your, for your students to so I'm sure they're very thankful for you. Yeah, and we I try to I try to collaborate with students, definitely. So, so here with this article. And I find that this isn't at least quantified as as explicitly as you do here. But before we go further, we're really talking about here are false majorities. So maybe if you if you can maybe just kind of go over that concept for folks. Sure. I mean the idea of false majorities or what we call minority rule in this study is the idea that under redistricting plans and just to make sure everyone's on the same page. Most of you probably know what it is already but redistricting is the process of redrawing lines that happens every 10 years after the census. The House districts in every state will be redrawn if there's more than one House member and state legislative districts will be redrawn in every single state. That process is happening starting now for the 2022 elections. But we looked at the last cycle of redistricting and wanted to see where our states that have state legislatures that are one party, but the voters are nevertheless choosing another party. So for example, one of the best known ones is Wisconsin, Wisconsin for the redistricting 2012 the state legislature drew a map that was extremely gerrymandering. It was a partisan gerrymander. It favored the Republicans. When we did our study, and we were looking at 2018 data. The Democrats got a majority of the vote in Wisconsin but got much larger proportion, got much fewer proportion of the seats. Similarly in North Carolina at the time. Virginia at the time had one party who got a majority of the votes, but nevertheless got less than 50% of the seats in the legislature so we think these are like the extreme examples of partisan gerrymandering. And so we identified the worst partisan gerrymanders in the country at the state legislative level and the idea is that it's a false majority in the sense of there's a majority party in one legislative chamber, but the voters chose a different party. So let's look at the aggregate statewide vote across the entire state, and that seems to be the most egregious problem when it comes to gerrymandering, the idea that you would have a majority of voters who favor one particular thing but a majority of the legislature is actually coming from another party. And here like you, there are a number of states that which fit this threshold of where the party itself gets the majority of seats and yet the majority of voters go the opposite way. Maybe you want to point out some guilty states for us. Yeah, and I will preface this when we wrote this we did this following the 2018 elections right we just had an election in 2020 so it'd be really nice to update this and to add in the new data and there have been some interesting changes in a couple states legally and also valid initiative wise and I'm happy to talk about. But after the after the last election, not the one a month ago but the one two years ago, there were five states that were the real problem states in the in the state houses in those in the states so we looked at states that the legislature drew their map, right so not states like California with an independent commission, but states where the legislators redrew the map, and then how big of a gap was there between the majority vote from voters and the majority of legislators in terms of who controls the chamber. And so the worst the worst states where Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina, just for example, Virginia at the time 44.5% of the states voters chose the Republican Party, but 51% of the seats in the House were controlled by the Republicans that is subsequently changed in the last election in 2019 and also Virginia really interestingly, even because it was one of these minority rule states, the both the legislature and the voters decided to move towards a commission. So they're going to be using a commission in the next in the next cycle, but Wisconsin as I mentioned earlier just to give you the numbers is considered one of the worst. And actually let me just I have these I have these on a slide let me share the slide is that okay Aaron. Go right ahead. Instead of just barreling through a lot of data why don't I show you the actual numbers that I'm talking about. So, here, this is state houses so state legislatures lower houses. I mentioned Virginia. This is circa 2018 right but Wisconsin 44.7% of the states voters voted for the party that got 64.6% of the seats right and so the Republicans control almost two thirds of the seats in the Wisconsin State House, but received a little bit less than 45% vote in 2018. Pennsylvania, we see a similar story. Michigan, a similar story. North Carolina similar story. Michigan as many of you may know, the voters chose to put a redistricting commission on the ballot, and has been implemented and those commissioners have been selected and will be redrawn the lines in that state as well. So some of these worst offenders in our study that we did about a year ago are actually making some significant changes Virginia and in terms of how they're going to be rejoined the lines. Interesting here and this is something that I see is kind of being pointed to a little bit in the chat. I recall there being some research where there is a an innovative mathematician who said, okay, well, when we're when we have these single member districts which in the US with not now that Illinois stopped using cumulative voting everybody uses single member districts for their for their state chambers. And so one interesting component of this is that you can have some of these false majorities where or or some disproportionality where one party and here in the US redistricting two parties with the way that that our system is set up, but we can have one party get a greater percentage of the vote, where it's just because of the way the geography lies and that by, and some of this other research, looking at this and even if we just kind of randomly drew these lines like what proportion of the time we come up with this result so it was like with this kind of false majority it's just something that is a real anomaly or is this something that just by the mere fact of the way that people are situated in terms of where they live that it's just a product of that so so how much do you see this as being something that is a consequence of heavy manipulative draw line drawing versus somewhere else on that continuum where we're just to some extent dealing with chance here. I mean there's a robust debate in the literature among academics over how much of this is intentional partisan gerrymandering and how much of this is what you described certain people living in certain parts of the state who favor Republicans or Democrats. I mean where I come down is that in, especially in these cases of the worst gerrymanders, which I should pronounce gerrymander I'm seeing Joseph in the chat is saying the correct pronunciation is gerrymandering that is right but I don't always call it that out of habit. I call it gerrymandering, but going back to the point. I think that in these really extreme cases, including Wisconsin. It's not about Democrats being in cities and Republicans being in rural areas. This is, this is pretty intentional choices to draw districts in certain ways to protect the incumbent party. The, the there's if you even just look at compactness of the districts, the, the sort of how how much are they similar to a circle or a square. They're, they're not they're the these are extreme pretty extreme cases where the legislature has has chosen to maximize the seats for their for their parties and this is something we've seen for a long time right so this is. We were studying in the last redistricting cycle from the last decade, but if you go back to the 2000s and the 1990s and, and so on. This has happened where partisan gerrymandering has been pretty extreme. But I would say that this isn't just a coincidence due to geography this is this is intentional to the parties trying to maximize their seats. I mentioned independent commissions as well as as well as like that particular reform team, often as a solution to this. What do you think with like for instance, Canada has used independent commissions for its line drawing since 1964. And we've seen in two recent Canadian elections, the same kind of pulse majority occur at the at the national and so do you see that as like, perhaps like, and not asking you to be an expert on on Canadian. As someone who's not an expert on Canadian politics. Before, before the call you established that you were from North Carolina, which is clearly south of the border into into Canada. And I guess like asking how much of a solution do you see these independent commissions being and pushing this proportionality. And so like, like, compared to like other solutions, even perhaps ones that may not be as viable, obviously like the, the pure solution would be like a proportional representation, but require a lot of a lot of work to be able to allow that to happen. Like, how much of a solution do you see independent commissions being in terms of reducing these false majorities when we see in other places when this independent commission solution is used it doesn't always seem to pan out so how much how how useful do you see this being in terms of mitigating those effects. Yeah, I mean I think part of it is so I will pun on the Canadian part of the question it's it's when I have a co author that I write about redistricting with who is Canadian and also studies American redistricting to be perfect for that question but I'm not an ideal person I Canada, but in the United States like what's the difference between independent redistricting commissions and legislative drawn maps versus say something like proportional representation obviously if you want proportionality between parties votes among voters and seats in the legislature proportional representation will be the the one that will give you the closest to proportionality right because that's drawn into the electoral system. That's something that is done in the United States but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be in the future right the, but in terms of independent commissions to draw single member districts, which is what we have in California and several other states versus legislative drawn maps. In our study we, you know we looked at some of that. If you're interested we have an appendix in the study that Aaron linked to, we have every single percent of vote in each state and the percentage of seats in each day. And so back in 2018. And what I found anecdotally and what I'm doing in a separate project that I haven't published yet is that commissions tend to be more responsive to swings in the electorate. So 2018 was a bit of a democratic year across the country. And then in the in a state like California, a few of the seats were quite competitive and move to the Democrats. This year 2020 it was a bit of a split. All the seats went right back to Republicans right and we're quite competitive so when the legislators don't don't draw the lines. It doesn't mean that you won't get shifts and in partisan proportionality across elections but it does mean you're more likely to have a go back and forth right. So if you look at a legislative drawn map in 2012, almost the exact same proportion of seats for each party stick the entire decade, you look at commissions, it kind of bounces around because there's some competition that's naturally, that's naturally drawn in. So I think I think the commission advantage versus a legislative drawn plan is the potential for a bit more sort of electoral volatility right there's a potential for competition. And then that has spilled spillover effects to voters to write if you care about constituency service I've written about this in my book. The district is competitive and a single member district system. You're much more likely to reach out to voters to try to help them with things that are unrelated to public policy so if somebody just needs help with constituency service being in an uncompetitive district is not a good plan for getting help being in a competitive district is a good way to potentially be competitive. One thing I'll mention about independent commissions this this research is not published yet but I'm working with one of my grad students on public attitudes towards redistricting. And I think there's a component about redistricting commissions and legitimacy, right so putting the PR question aside proportion representation, but just thinking about commissions versus legislators drawing the line. In the government where we just asked voters what do you think about how the commission is drawn we gave them facts about how the California Commission is done. And then we gave some other people facts about how legislators draw lines, and then we ask them how fair do you think this process is not about the outcomes of which party gets would see. But what we found is you give them the fact you explain legislators draw lines. If voters rated is less legitimate, they rated is less fair. You tell them a commission draws the lines and they're randomly chosen who gets on the commission which is what's done in Michigan and there's a component of that in California voters actually write that as more legitimate and more fair so even regardless of the outcomes there's a little bit of fairness evaluation from from citizens on the commission side. One of the things in the article focuses a lot on the false majority aspect, but in some cases like there's this concept obviously the concept of filibuster, where a party that even if they have a majority if they don't have ever 60% to roll a filibuster, they can still have a lot of a lot of sway. So, even in cases where it doesn't cause a false majority say a particular party already has more than 50% of the vote. But do you see that also potentially be in the case where they use their power to be able to draw the lines and be able to keep getting even more powers to be able to go past that 60% threshold to be able to keep a filibuster from happening. Yeah, I mean, the there's there are other things besides the redistricting and the gerrymandering process that can make a difference for enhancing the power of a particular party or particular coalition and the legislature be that at the national level or at the state legislative level. I do think that even with, you know, filibusters and states that have filibusters are similar ways for minority parties to try to block minority parties in the legislature to try to block things. That's harder that that's that's something that is something is definitely going to be used by legislators right any rule that exists to help a particular block of legislators in a legislature will be used and will be used to their advantage. In terms of the filibuster when I think about filibuster and and you're asking about that. And I think it makes me think of the US Senate immediately and so this concept of false majorities or minority rule in our paper, we focused on the state legislative lines right, but I think if you think broadly about it the US is governed by a really minority in most a numerical minority of voters across most national institutions and some state institutions so in our paper. When we were writing 59 million people were represented by legislatures where the party that one control did not get the most votes in the state. Right. That's a lot of people. And at the national level, since 2000, for president, there have been two popular vote winners who did not win the electoral college, right. That's, it's another minority rule in the US Senate where there is the filibuster putting aside the filibuster rule for a second, because states vary in population so differently. The majority of voters do not vote for the majority of senators. And even if you only look at the say 60 senators that would be needed to stop a filibuster. Even then, depending on who they are a majority of voters have not chosen the 60, the 60 senators said that the entire US Senate, and sometimes the presidency is selected by people who are not the majority, in terms of the vote in the country. And then at the US House level, because of what we've already talked about with single member districts, there are some states that have really extreme gerrymanders where there's minority rule, and then there's in a lot of other ones there's more of a match between partisan outcomes, in terms of the seats and the votes but if you if we the sort of macro question about the filibuster, it's it's often considered, oh that's a way for minorities to have more rights, but the Senate is already representing minorities by the fact that really small states have more power than big states, and the president is occasionally elected by less people than than the other candidate got votes for. And then also in the US House, some of the legislative legislators are chosen by minorities as well, numerical minorities and so that there's a lot of minority rule and false majority sort of built into the existing US national and state legislative systems. And there you're talking up to the product of a floor effect with the way that US Senate seats are allocated by state being, it's always at least two. So even those states that have a lower population automatically get those two creating a higher disproportionality compared to even say like US House, whereas the floor is one and not two. Yeah, exactly right so like, there's there's a there's some really interesting work on this by Francis Lee who's presser Princeton and Bruce Oppenheimer's presser Vanderbilt. They look at this and you depending on the coalition you can take us senators and get to 60 votes really easily. And if you look at the voters who chose them, it's not nearly 50% part of that's California and New York and Texas and so on. In Florida, have so many people and are represented by just in those four states on the right menu yet put in Wyoming and Idaho and so on and they have equal numbers, but the voters themselves are represented less and so what it means is there's a partisan component right so right now Democrats are getting more votes in the Senate nationally than they are senators in terms of the seats, but it's also more about policy right there's more things that are agricultural or rural that maybe get a focus there's less focus on urban and suburban interest because a lot of in the US Senate, then if there is more population. So yeah that's what I'm talking about. And I saw some other points in the in the chat about. So with an independent commission, you're talking about people being randomly selected to be able to serve on these in these commissions. And we also talked about PR, but in terms of also drawing these lines. And there's also like an algorithmic approach as well. And so like how do you see, and keeping in mind like, perhaps part of the benefits of having an independent commission is these folks can be aware of the communities, being able to try to keep some cohesiveness like even if it doesn't say draw a pretty geometric shape, but still is able to bring this communities together. How do you see like an algorithmic approach both I guess in terms of doing the job well, but also being viable as well as like actually acceptable to people should that be the case, like should it be a permanent. Yeah, I mean that's a good that's a good question this comes up a lot right because when I mean so much of redistricting is mapping and data. And so that immediately leads some people to thinking about algorithms and some of the studies you've already talked about Aaron are about, you know, randomly drawing 10,000 maps and seeing if the the legislative drawn map is extremely different than what would have been done randomly. So that that is a possibility I mean algorithms are you research on redistricting I do think it's a little, I'm a little concerned by it and we prefer I prefer some human component to it because one, somebody wrote the algorithm to begin with right and that person is at least right now as human and give us another decade and then we'll have the AI writing the algorithms but then so there could be you know that there's something there, but also, you know, we need to consider things like voting rights, communities of interest, the voting rights Act, the which shall be be holder got rid of section five of the voting rights act but there is still the rest of the voting rights act and special section to that's important for redistricting. In general, there's a lot of things that is our important, especially the commissions have tended to do, and some legislators do to is to go out to the community and say, you tell us what are the communities that map, where should the lines be drawn to not cut communities and where should they be. And now we can pick all of that up that sort of public interfacing with where communities may or may not be in worse specific communities of interest maybe an algorithm is also given. If we care about, if we care about multiple dimensions, right, the algorithm would have to choose which dimension matters right and so it's I mean similar one of commissions drawing the map to, but, but I think it's important to have to give and take between voters citizens commissioners line drawers to hear what the communities are less than I think that's preferable to an output. I want to make sure we get some time to the partisanship study with the top two as well but before we transition over there are there any other, like, fun points or highlights that you want to bring up about the gerrymandering and redistricting. Yeah, I mean the last thing on redistricting that I think is really important for everybody to look at is the voting rights component of redistricting. This paper is about partisan gerrymandering and the lack of a majority minority rule in the legislature relative to voters. But this will be our first redistricting cycle coming up right now, where states are redrawing the state legislative plans and their congressional plans. That is without section five of the veterans, which I just mentioned section five of the right side, the many of you probably know. Provided protections for minority voting rights in certain parts of the country mostly the south and a few other places like Arizona, Alaska, and a couple other places. That's not there anymore because the string quart got rid of it. And so what does that mean that means when states redraw their lines, who used to be under section five they don't have to send them up to the Justice Department. Right, 10 years ago. The, the, you know, the state of North Carolina would have had to send their plan to the Biden, the incoming Biden destruction. Yeah, that was still in right now. That's on the Obama administration, but the, that's not there. And so I think that's something just to keep your eyes on that the voting rights act still exists for national section to coverage, but the section four section five coverage is gone. And I think it's going to be another sort of Wild West of gerrymandering with not having to meet the very right sex. And in transitioning to the other work that you've done. I'll go ahead and put that in the chat here. So your other work was looking at the looking at ideology and partisanship and the role that primaries play in affecting that in particular open primaries with with top two. So, in a similar kind of flavor with what we did with the introduction to the, to the other article. What was there anything interesting about the way this, this article and this research group started with you. Yeah, I think for I mean for this article so this this is published in the journal political institutions and political economy that came out earlier this year. The backstory is not quite as interesting, but probably because I just read it by myself. This is a this is a topic that I'm interested in. And I've always been interested in political reform and the political reform lab focuses on a lot of these different topics redistricting gerrymandering voting rights primaries, other electoral reforms. And so this is this is one I've just been wanting to do. And I decided to write the paper so a little bit less interesting backstory. Sometimes you just got to you just got to go with it. The advantage of being a tenured professors you can write things that you think are interesting and hopefully other people also find them interesting. So, so I, so here we're talking about the role that the primary plays in affecting partisanship. So, we've got like two variables here we've got in our social science for we've got our independent variable and or in our dependent variable here the dependent variable being partisanship. That's so how when you're measuring partisanship like what does it look like when you measure that and how do you tell so one there's measuring partisanship but like, how do you tell if something is partisan in general or like are you measuring partisanship relative to the general population so like are you centering like partisanship like how does that work when you're measuring that that construct. That's a really good question so I'm going to just share my screen briefly for this article to and to answer that. And so this is the title of the paper but just to how do you measure ideology right the outcome or the dependent variable that I study in this article is how ideological the member of Congress is I look at all members of Congress from 2002 to the present. And I want to see are they really ideologically extreme or they ideologically moderate. And so in this in this paper I use an existing measure that's relatively common in political science called the, the nominate estimate it was developed by Keith pool and Howard Rosenthal it's been extended by James low one of my colleagues at USC and Jeff Lewis at UCLA and several other scholars. And that looks at every single roll call vote in Congress that every member of Congress has taken, and it scales them left to right. It fixes them relative to one another, and it also fixes them relative to time right so you can track is a member of Congress in the New York 22nd district to the left or to the right of member of Congress from the first district in Illinois, right, and so it's basically scaling every roll call vote, and then putting them on a negative one to plus one scale. And then in my paper what I did is I just, I just folded that scale, and made an absolute value. And I have some other ways to measure to but but the easiest way is zero means you're very moderate. You're very extreme, and then everything in the middle so one is extremely liberal or extremely conservative and is zero is very moderate. And then I just looked at primaries and how people elected and open primaries and top two primaries, are they more moderate or extreme than close primary legislators, and I found that close primaries elect more extremists and open primaries elect more elect more moderates. Going into the scale that you're describing so it sounds like your extremism is measured relative to other people who are elected. What do you what do you think about that relative to like so for in like the paper we just discussed like we were talking about how the people who are elected don't necessarily represent the people who elect them. And so, I think that would play out like relative to like the voters themselves so so that is, do you think these people are on that same part of the scale relative to voters as they are to the other people in Congress. And it's hard to answer with this particular data set just because there aren't really there aren't voters as part of it it's all just legislators relative to other legislators so when I say someone is extreme. They're only as extreme as everybody else in Congress right there's there are almost certainly voters in the United States that are to the left and to the right of the most extreme members of Congress. There's a lot of voters in the country that are probably much more moderate than the sort of average Democrat and the average Republican in the house. And so I don't really measure that as much but then that's, that's kind of like the fundamental measurement problem and political science that people like me and people who are probably smarter than me have been trying to figure out a few people made advances. If you could measure voters and elected officials ideologically on the same scale. One of the voters is they're not always that ideological right they they care about a lot of different things. Some issues some not issues it's a little bit hard to put them on the scale, but elected officials it's really easy to do because they take hundreds of votes every year and say we know Maxine waters from Los Angeles is more liberal than Dan Lipinski former former Democratic legislator from Illinois right like that's just because they vote differently, and we can observe that they vote differently. So with voters it's a little bit harder, but I do think that the scale the scale of negative one to one or zero to one it's just an arbitrary number to try to capture congressional extremity, but there certainly could be people in the country that are that are more liberal than Maxine voters and more conservative than Louis Gomer in Texas for example right I mean the or or don't even what I haven't talked about don't even fit on the left right scale right so so worse where where we're measuring the left left right scale and these measures and in my paper I measured the left right scale. It's also possible to have additional scales. The single member district system used in Congress encourages one dimensional voting. Meaning a traditional left right scale right some of the electoral reforms that you've been talking about and that your center is interested in approval voting proportion representation that we discussed earlier. Those would generally encourage multi dimensional issues beyond the left right scale right and so part of it we're measuring I'm measuring left right scale in this paper, but it's also embedded in the in the electoral system of the United States. And when you say another dimension, you're referring to things like seeing like a Nolan chart where you get to see like multiple like looking at like economic liberalism versus conservatism and like social conservatism versus social liberalism. Yeah, exactly. Social issues versus economic issues are thinking about it right now a good example is like AOC Alexandria Ocasio Cortez actually shows up where she votes sometimes against the Democratic Party, and she's voting on some other dimension besides traditional left right, or at least she is compared to anybody else in Congress right when she's when she's one of the only people is ready now. And so there's some other thing that's going on and explain right in the 1950s and 60s. There was a traditional economic dimension or economic issue in Congress and then there was another one that was messing about race and civil rights. So there's some other issue, besides sort of traditional economic left right conservatism. And in this paper I'm measuring the traditional left. So go go back to the variables that we're that we're dealing with we just were speaking about the, how we measure, how you're measuring partisanship among the selected officials. But you're, you're trying to predict what that is, or see if there are any differences between these, the levels of this independent variable which is the types of primaries. So maybe you can go a little bit more into the type of primaries that you were looking at. Yeah, definitely. I mean, this is of interest for those of you who worked on the St. Louis campaign with the there I mean there was a form of open primaries with approval vote. And so some of you may know this very well, but let me define it for everybody. So I really look at three different types of primaries and I define them pretty specifically as closed primaries, open primaries and top two primaries. Those primaries are legislative primaries, where only people who are registered with the party can vote in the primary so if you're a Democrat, you can only vote in the primary if you're a Democrat. Period, not independence you can't cross over if you're a Republican vote in the Democrat. Open primaries I define as any primary where you can crossover and have independence participate. In some states Republicans could vote in a Democrat or Democrats could vote in the Republican primary. I define it pretty broadly. So I include states that, and this here I borrow from Andy Sinclair who's a professor at Claremont McKenna, who's written a lot about this. I use his measure. I define open primaries broadly as states that make it easy to vote in any primary. So you might be registered a Democrat one year, but then you show up on election day and the state has same day registration. You can change your party on the spot while you're voting in the ballot in the voting booth and so that I count as an open primary, in addition to ones where you can just kind of go back and forth, wherever you want. And then the last one I look at is the top two primary which is used in California Washington and then a variant of that is used in Louisiana. And that's where there's no separate primary there's no Republican and Democratic primary or some other party primary. Everybody runs in round one, and then around to two people advanced, and then in round two it's the general election that could be two Democrats against each other could be to Republicans against each other could be a Democrat versus agreeing party Canada, whoever gets the most votes in round one advances to round two. In that case, everybody gets to vote in both rounds. And I think critically. There's a lot of seats where there's no partisan queue on the ball. And that's what that's what I argue in the paper that top two primaries yield real more moderate legislators compared to close primaries. And that's part due to the fact that Democrats can run against Democrats and Republicans can run against Republicans. So if you're, if you're a Republican in California, and you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Most of the time in the general election you're probably choosing between two Democrats, or between a Democrat and a green party. Right, that's the that's what the general elections look like. And so you're probably not that enthusiastic about either one of the candidates to probably way more liberal than you prefer. But you're going to choose the one that's a little bit less extreme. And so the, the, the impact of the same party general election is to basically have the removal of the partisan queue for voters, you don't you don't choose by party. And then you've got to choose on some other criteria that might be ideology that might also be that might also be, you know, competence. Charisma factors that are sort of unrelated to partisan, but that's the argument that when you're when you when everyone has a chance to vote legislators have to be concerned about not getting their votes so they're going to just moderate a little bit. They're not, by the way, open and top two primaries are not electing moderate moderates, and then close primaries are elected extremists where my paper funds is close primaries are elected extremists. And open and top two primaries are elected just a little less people right so party is still really important in Congress, and then how people act, but because people will be like are you telling me that that you know California Democrats are moderate and that's that's the point of the paper. Point is that they're actually more moderate than they would be as a close primary system. Right. And that's the, that's the big type of one. And I guess like within the closed system that perhaps I try to be too surprising within a closed system that the results would be more partisan because at, I mean, after all you're dealing with a subset of the population, which, by the way, identify themselves is partisan so I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that the person that they pick is someone that's more partisan. Yeah, there's I mean there's definitely part of that and I don't look in my paper at how party line the members of Congress are I just look at their sort of overall ideological voting records, and it's in the what's interesting about open and top two primaries is voters themselves can be can be partisan or not when they go cast a ballot they can use all sorts of criteria, a long partisanship, but the big differences is, is especially in the top two system in the general election. There's, there's, there's a, there's a possibility, a frequent possibility actually of same party general elections and so just to just to show you this let me let me give an example how motivate this a little bit. In about. So this is just in California, but under the top two primary system since 2012 about one quarter of the legislative districts in the state, at least once have had a same party general election. So that means that even in a safe year where an elected legislator might be able to kind of vote party line, and then just hope to get the majority of the same parties voters in the district. There's always a threat in the next election or the following election that their general election might be somebody the same party. And so then the voters won't be able to just say I'm going to pick a D or I'm going to pick an R. They'll have to evaluate them on some other criteria on and just an example of what the findings are in the paper. I'm comparing California to New York for people who are familiar with these members of Congress. The effect that I find in terms of ideological reduction of ideological extremity is basically going from somebody like need a loy who just retired from New York she's a she is less than the close primary from a suburban New York City House District. She is pretty liberal. And then the top two primary tends to elect people who are just a little bit less liberal than her. And so an example would be Julia Brownlee who's from suburban Los Angeles venture County. That's the difference about a 10 percentage point difference in moderation. And most people wouldn't call Julie Julie Brownlee a moderate right she's pretty liberal on most issues, but need a loy is more liberal than her. And this is the sort of get a sense of our both do both of them vote party line like you're asking and both of these are pretty partisan Democrats but but Brownlee is less frequently voting as extremely as somebody like loy. And this is the general effect that I'm finding in the paper. So would one way to be to summarize it and correct me where I'm off here that the open and top two systems are significantly different than the closed system, but the open and top two systems between themselves are not significantly different between each other. Generally, so the close system is very different than the open and top two in terms of the outcomes like so they are more extreme among closed. The top two is slightly if you look at the point estimates of what I what I estimated is it leads to a little bit more moderate legislators than open primaries to but the difference is much smaller as you're as you're indicating between the open and the top two systems. So, if, if you have a good picture to summarize the differences. So like if you had, say, like, zero is like, like, I would say is a good way to kind of reference the effect size that we're talking about with so not just like them being significantly different because like obviously when you have like, and statistics we know that when you have a large sample, you can get significant differences but just because you have a bunch of power because of the sample that you have. So as if we're thinking a bit more in terms of functionally, like how big these effect sizes are. The differences in partisanship that we're seeing based on the, on the type of primary. So how, how, is there another way or any other way that you can kind of quantify the differences that this makes based on the primary, in terms of like, and you Yes, I can. So, so one way that the number I mentioned before because I think it's a little it's easier to figure out like the scale goes from zero to one. And so one way you can think of it is if you have a legislator in a close primary, who's at point eight on the scale, on average electing somebody from a topsy system would would be a point seven. Right, that's that's approximately the, the, the distance. And so the, you know, it's not, it's actually pretty big. The difference of when we look at these, when we look at what causes legislator ideology or what's associated with legislator ideology. I saw the fact size that big is not very common right like but on the other hand, the being being a Republican versus being a Democrat is the gap of, you know, point six or point seven on such a scale right that I'm or the negative one one scale could be even bigger. There are certain things that are much bigger than the primary system, but the electoral system is definitely having an impact here the primary system is making a difference. And you know for people at the center for election science who care about approval voting and really pushing the envelope on new systems. You know the takeaway of this is that, you know this is, I would say the open primary versus the close primary systems are relatively small change right this is not a dramatic electoral system change it's about who's allowed to vote in the first round. In the top two case it's a little bit more radical because of the same party in the general election being able to compete, but that moves things from, you know, point eight to point seven, right. So, a more a more a bigger electoral system change that would be something that kind of is sort of out of the box, compared to what we do at the national level like approval voting or something I haven't estimated this I'm just speculating would probably be a potentially larger but I think the primaries it shows that they're they're pretty meaningful. The change is pretty meaningful in terms of electing more, more moderate members or less extreme members. Even under the system in which parties are really important nationally. There's all sorts of reasons that people that extremely or moderately in Congress, but they are moving people just a little bit, just a little bit to the to the middle. I think that's one of the fun things about empirical questions is that you can hypothesize and measure them so I hope we presents some opportunities for you to hypothesize and measure against other other voting methods as well. Are there, are there any other Aaron on that point one thing I'm one thing I love is the idea that so I think it's really cool what happened in St. Louis. Just even for empirical reasons now we're going to be able to go study this in a really large city and see what happened and so like kudos to everyone who was able to make that happen but now we've got a new system that we can go find out exactly how it's going to work in real life that we know about in theory and a lot. I think I think a lot of the academics I think are are swooning a bit. But for this particular article before we move on to questions. Are there any other takeaways or anything else that you'd like to see us get from this article that you did. I think it just shows that changing electoral systems in general, like putting aside the part about the primaries is pretty important and members of Congress know exactly what system they're elected in, and it's less about voters changing their behavior and it's more about the elected officials. Elected officials are concerned that the system is going to change or the system has changed elected officials will update and change their own behavior in office. So, Caitlin, I'll leave it to you if you want to start to point out some of the questions for Christian dancer. Sure. And Christian, I want to be respectful of your time I there was so much good stuff to dig into with those with those papers that it took us a little while to get to the q amp a. How long do you have. Yeah, I have some time so I can stick around as long as people want to. Gotcha. All right, well let me get to some of these questions. And some of these may have been answered in the midst of the conversation I may not have caught it so we can, we can do a quick recap as so. So first we've got a question from David he asks, how can North Carolina and Jerry Mandarin when we don't even have valid initiatives, the legislator, the legislative majority isn't going to act because the current situation benefits them. Yeah, that's exactly right I mean North Carolina is my home state is probably why I got interested in redistricting a long time ago. But in a state like North Carolina, or other states, you know, 60% of states don't have valid initiatives as fun doing the math right in my head that's an estimate I'm not 100% sure that. But a lot of states don't have valid initiatives so how do you make changes when legislators have an interest in drawing maps to help them get elected and help their party. So there's really two strategies is one elect new legislators that's that's really difficult because the legislators there's one thing that legislators definitely care about and it's their own seats right so that's a hard strategy. It's not impossible. Right, so if you look at Virginia, Virginia did pass through its legislature, a change to its constitution, it had to be passed by two different legislatures, and also the voters to get changed and Virginia is going to be in a commission. I think where it's most likely to occur are in states that used to be dominant one party and are moving in another direction. Right, so if you look at if you look at a state like Virginia, the Republicans were dominant in the state for a long time, controlled the legislative chambers until 2018. And so the Democrats favored reform, and then enough Republicans potentially were in favor of reform to to get it passed, then the Democrats took over the chambers. And suddenly some Democrats when they were in charge we're like I don't know about this Jeremy reform, and the Republicans are maybe Jeremy informants and so bad as they're seeing themselves go from majority party to minority party. And it was passed then with some Democrats and some, some Republicans right so I think a state that's gone from one party to another, maybe the best shot now North Carolina is not that kind of state right so the redistricting has a history of partisan gerrymandering for most of the time that redistricting has existed in US history. And so I think it's harder right and then of course the other strategy is litigation and using the courts. Right so this and this did happen in North Carolina at the state level right a case was taken to the state. You can sue on a number of grounds but especially depending on state law, you know of course federal law after Russia become a cause last year. This said it's there's no national, there's no national prohibition of partisan Germany but some states, including North Carolina could have some constitutional provisions that are related to that. Yeah, I'll leave it at that I have another idea to but that's, that's, that's the best but I do have one other thought. It is tough for those states that that don't have valid initiatives that it leaves you with less power and less direct ways to make that change but it can be done it's just a lot more difficult. But but your comment about Virginia leads me into another question here. Mary is is from Virginia and she asks, do you think that Virginia is new redistricting Commission, being a hybrid of half legislators and half citizen commissioners will likely do as well as truly independent redistricting commissions that are dominated by citizen members. Some of us in Virginia are concerned that we'll have more of the same rather than true reform. That's a good question and there is a lot we haven't talked about it but there's a ton of variation and how commissions are done right they go from everything from like the California model and the Michigan model, truly independent random draws for who gets on interviews in the office of California from the Bureau of audits where they're interviewed by Republican and Democrat and independent, all the way to there's certain commissions that are called politician commissions that are really basically like the legislators choose, or in some cases appoint themselves to be on the commission. I think we have less, we just have less empirical knowledge about these sort of hybrid commissions that will have some citizens and some legislators is very possible the legislators will kind of have a lot of a lot of influence because they're a little bit more knowledgeable and friendly I do think it depends on who the citizens are that are chosen, I think that matters a lot right so I mean one thing I like about the California independent model is that the commissioners go through. Before there's a random draw for the final choices. There's an extensive process considering, you know, competence qualities ability to work with people of other parties. Diversity voting rights knowledge, a lot of different criteria where you get good people in the final pool, and then there's a random draw, and then after the random draw in California they pick six more people. That's based on like all of those criteria again and so I do think the type of citizens chosen help. And, you know, I think it just remains to be seen what will happen in Virginia. We'll have to have to watch them closely and see how it goes. All right, question from the same who I know how to hop out but he's got an interesting question. How do you measure and compare destructing methods and what would you measure to compare them to a pure multi member proportional district. Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean the other projects several ways right so there's just when you're comparing redistricting methods and then electoral systems in general. There are the criteria that you want. And the one big takeaway is theoretically and empirically you can never have all the things that you would want in good governance and outcomes and and in electoral systems just every electoral system cannot deliver every single dimension of important criteria. So, but having said that, right if you if you value partisan match right so what we've been talking about minority rule or not. Right, it's that's a pretty straightforward measure of the percentage of the seats and the percentage of the votes and then the responsiveness along the line of what percentage of voters choose the Democrats and the Republicans or some other party, and what are the seats that go to that party. There are things like responsiveness. So I didn't talk about this but I've measured this in a lot of my research. How do legislators and other elected officials reach out to voters so putting aside ideology, putting aside party. What do they do in office do they help their, their citizens do they respond to their constituents, or do they ignore them right are they are they so safe that they don't have to bother with serving constituents. Another metric. Other metrics that are really important I think our voting rights and fairness and communities of interest. And I think that's something that we've done a lot of with redistricting that we've done less when looking at multi member district in other or excuse me multi member systems and other electoral systems. I think in political science. There's people like me who studied the United States, and we're really comfortable with single member districts and we love to study alternative electoral systems to but they don't exist as much in the US until recently with the proliferation of a lot of real innovations at the local and to the lesser extent at the state level. And then there's lots of people study other countries where we have extensive diversity and electoral systems. And so I think I think the, to really understand the difference between like a US redistricting single member district system and other systems would be to consult some of that that literature outside of the US, and there you know just to summarize some. It's a it's of a luminous literature and I am an expert on the United States so I am not as I haven't done this work myself so I'm citing some other people's work. But in general the more proportional representation. There's some work by Bing Powell for instance he studies studies a bunch of different countries. The more PR oriented, the national electoral systems are the more likely public policy comes out at about where the typical or median voter is under single member district systems. The district itself might choose somebody who's who's consistent with what the voters want but in the legislature as a whole, the outcomes don't end up being that that consistent with what the that sort of average or median person in the entire system. And I, and you know there's some other literature to but I think that's a really interesting one that the PR system, elects extreme legislators sometimes, but on average like the policy outcome is more in line with what the voters want and then the single member district system can kind of move things all over the place for the reasons we've talked about today. Yeah that's super interesting. Definitely makes sense though. It seems like the people who are elected that more of what we would see as like a normal distribution versus like a bimodal distribution, which we perhaps see more with a single member district system that encourages these more of these two parties. I mean, for certain, you know the single member district system and the effectively the electoral system in the United States and almost every state and locality, where there are partisan elections leads to two member, excuse me leads to two party, two parties because of the electoral system and then under proportional systems, and then other systems and other electoral systems used elsewhere, it encourages multi party, multi party systems and so that's one easy metric that we know. Consistently, the single member district system encourages two parties and other systems encourage more than two parties. Let me see we've got a question from Jay, he asks, is it low barrier to ballot access. I'm sorry, I think I got a little confused by this question. Is it low barrier to ballot access, however, lorded up the ballot with minor party candidates. So, so okay he's asking, does low, low barrier to a ballot access. Put too many minor party candidates and candidates with extreme views on the ballot, and thus affect the incumbents and the majority partner party to an even greater advantage, especially in statewide statewide races such as in California, did you get that. Yeah, I got that. So I haven't studied the, how easy it is to get on the ballot across states that much. But you know when you've got, if you've got, you know thinking about the 2003 recall in California when our source center got elected governor right that recall ballot had 100 some people on it and said, did you know everybody on the ballot when that probably not right. There's that was a different ballot than your usual where there's only two people or maybe a few people from different parties. However, you know, having said that I just don't know enough about the, the, that's something worth studying more I think, and probably someone has and I just don't know about it. I will say there's a lot of research in California, and elsewhere, showing that the first person listed on the ballot gets a little bit more of the vote right so by logic if you've got 20 or 30 people on a ballot for one office. You know the low barriers to access could potentially harm the people who are lower down the ballot. And in California the counties, there's randomization of the order of candidates so you can look at who's first and they're randomly chosen to be first and they differ across different places so everyone's ballot doesn't have the first person, the same first person, and you can look and see this consistent pattern of approximately one percentage point maybe a little bit more based on the literature of being first on the ballot and so I don't know if that research has got the number of people on the ballot, it probably has and it probably makes a difference. Yeah, I'm sure there's some information out there somewhere we could find if we dug it up. All right, we've got a question from Joseph. He, he says some evidence suggests that voter politics work more like rotten tomatoes reviews. The scores in the 50% range aren't usually films that people feel lukewarm on their films where half the viewers love it half hate it. So voters might not be centrist or moderate so much as they have very liberal views on some matters and conservative views on others. If that were true, would that reframe the existing research on democratic reforms. That's a really good point and there's there's there's some research showing that voters are exactly like you described right they're not there's a long literature in public science suggesting they're not that ideological. And some of them can't even figure out sort of what would be a left or a right scale others are definitely more ideological, and that may be increasing some of our time to. In terms of the research on political reform, a lot of it is looks at voters and my takeaway is that with voters. Voters are basically going to make decisions within the system they're given right so voters aren't voters don't have to be sophisticated they don't have to be ideologues for ideological outcomes to occur. The people who are sophisticated the candidates running and the people who went right and so they know the system they're running in, and they know that the system will encourage or discourage extremity, one way or the other. The voters are making choices that may or may not be sophisticated so if you think about the top two primary example. You've got you've got a voter who's who's not particularly ideological, but they're very strong identified with the Democratic Party. There's a Democrat and a Republican on the ballot, they vote for the Democrats are really easy choice they don't have to think about it very hard and they're probably going to be relatively happy with some of the choices that person makes right. But then if you've got a general election where it's a Democrat versus a Democrat or Republican versus a Republican, they can't use that easy decision. They don't have to do something else. They don't have to become an ideologue to figure out that someone's moderate. They then have to just evaluate well here's these two people I can't can't decide on party anymore. This person seem more competent. Does this person seem like they're speaking to me right does this person seem like they're off. Right. So there's sort of cues that are you still use potentially by sophisticated voters that can lead to less extreme candidates and elected officials. I'm a big proponent of, but most electoral system changes will change the elites the candidates and the elected officials, because they're paying attention to every single possibility of what can happen under a different system. The voters don't have to change that much. They just have to choose within the choices and the system that's presented to them and so you can. It is not out of the question to have non ideological voters, even voters that are busy and not particularly sophisticated, but a system change that could act an electoral system change that will lead to different different types of people getting elected. That's a really interesting comment. I wouldn't have thought about that because a lot of times when we are talking about voting methods. We, we talk, we focus on the voter and how it how it will affect them. But it's a good point that even if the, it doesn't change the voters behavior, it still is going to have an effect on the candidates and and the electeds. So it kind of goes into this next question and I think you answered it a little bit earlier, but Susan says Texas has open primaries and we still seem to end up with extremely partisan candidates. Of course, we are also pretty heavily gerrymandered. Have you looked at how ring choice voting and I'm going to insert approval voting impacts ideological extremism. I guess I do think the gerrymandering is a big is a big issue there right and so I think a lot of what's going on with some of the elected officials is due to gerrymandering in the state. There also Texas is the state where it depends on depends on where and what districts right in terms of the level of extremity. I would like to do that. I'm extremely encouraged by the changes across the country in Maine, St. Louis, Alaska, elsewhere, North Dakota, where there's changes that will we will have variation in the way people are elected so we can study it more and so I hope to do some of that in the future. Yeah, I can tell you're getting excited about this. Like so much so much interesting new things to study as an academic that's that's really exciting experimentation there. All right, are you still okay on time we've got maybe about four more questions some are a little bit longer than others most I think would be answered relatively quickly. Yeah, I think I could do five or 10 minutes my son is sitting over here that's that's I think so if you hear. Oh, I heard him just now. Okay. Okay, that that's totally fine. All right, well then we've got another a question from a different Joseph Joseph a he asked how much of the increase in legislative partisanship can be reduced to issues and electoral systems, and how much is relative to increased partisanship and the electorate at Yeah, I mean some of that's that's a really good point. You know if we compare the last several decades partisanship among voters has increased, especially among voters who are attentive and paying attention to media, very, very much. That's definitely been part of the story so the part I'm talking about with redistricting and gerrymandering. You know I do think that institution makes a difference. And so do some of these other electoral institutions as well. But, you know, there are other factors separate from what I'm looking at in this in the citizen during the election general. Generally the electorate has become since the 1980s much more, much more partisan and much more polarized and you can see this even in the presidential level right look in 1984. Reagan wins overwhelmingly across almost every state. You just look a couple years later 1992 Bill Clinton wins in a lot of states right the and now in our presidential elections. The idea of any candidate winning, you know states that another party one by 10 or 20 points in the previous couple of cycles is just not likely so that's a there is increasing polarization. Both at the elite level and among voters that I think is important and worth worth trying to figure out and I mean in terms of the electoral systems. You know trying to figure out what electoral system might encourage voter depolarization could be helpful to right but but even among voters I still think there's there's this sort of a group of like elite voters who really pay attention and are you know, high high consumers of news that are extremely polarized, and then there's some other voters that are a little bit less on those dimensions and they're they're still somewhat different. And I do think that, you know, looking for ways to not just to encourage deeply less polarization at the elite level but thinking about voters is important to. All right, then we've got a couple questions from David I'll I'll space them out so to give everybody else some some a chance. But the first question from David he asked what differences and resulting polarization would you expect in the top two primary using plurality versus approval voting, which is, it's kind of similar to what what you were just talking about. And you mentioned that you haven't looked into approval voting yet but is there any insight you might, you might have into the top two primary using plurality versus approval voting and I guess he would have to mean a, an open primary that goes into the top two right because you couldn't, you couldn't use approval voting for the top two because that would just be voting for both candidates. Right, yeah, I haven't thought about it a ton I have thought about a little bit but on the it just changes the dynamics a lot. And, especially if you think about the candidates themselves right in a top two system it's all about making it into the top two, and then winning right and so the those dynamics are really the candidates are really going to think about the two stages with approval voting the dynamics are a little bit different in terms of what the candidate strategies are. I haven't thought through it enough in that regard, in terms of the open in terms of who's participating is if you had an approval system with like only like say an approval voting and partisan close primary versus an open system. I mean in general if you have an open system, be it top two or approval by the fact and this is what's in my paper, by the fact of having the threat of people who don't share the elected officials party voting for them or against them makes them try to appeal a little bit to those other people right so having a close primary with approval voting or having a close primary with plurality voting. Both of that by just restricting the electorate makes it makes the legislator or the candidate not have to be concerned about losing in that round from voters who can't participate. What I will add is a lot of research on close primaries, you're like well you know what it turns out at open primaries. It's still a lot of partisans anyways that is true but again coming back to this theme of the elected officials. It's the threat of somebody being able to vote for against them that matters and so I do think I do think a closed approval voting system, an open approval voting system a closed. Excuse me an open top two system would all three of those would probably lead to different outcomes but I'd have to think through it a little bit more. We'll have to see what what the research says once we once we have some elections to test. All right just two more questions. This one is pretty quick from Paul he asked could a party do a closed primary before the open primary. I mean, I mean I suppose that'd be like a top three or not top three that would be that you could have a three stage primary but and in some ways that is done in terms of party. There's a top in the top two system you have everybody can vote in the first round and choose the two people who moved to the run off or the second round. The parties themselves do endorse candidates right in California. When dying Feinstein was up for reelection last Kevin De Leon ran against her and that both Democrats, that's who made the second round, there are two Democrats on the ballot, the Democratic Party endorsed De Leon, like the party sort of the party elites in the first De Leon and then Feinstein ended up winning but it was very competitive election and De Leon did a lot better than the people expected against an incumbent really close second round election. And so it was by eight points that Feinstein defeated De Leon. And I so I do think the party like a closed system could exist in the sense of parties endorsing and deciding who to choose both in round one and round two. All right, just one more question for you and then I'll toss it back to Aaron to sign us off so one last question from David yes is there a game theory aspect to this where if the Democrat controlled areas disarm by going to top two primaries and Republican dominated areas keep close primaries with Congress as a whole shift right. Yeah I mean I guess that's possible I think that. So I mean if yeah if all the most Democratic or most liberal constituencies in the country were elected under open top two systems and then the most conservative and Republican areas were elected and close systems. Yeah that would mean like on average that could happen. The difference is I think that the the the move the becoming more moderate is a marginal change right so I mean what I find is that they should it's it's not like California used to elect wide-eyed liberals and now they elect they're like moderates right down the middle it's it's that they let really liberal people in Democratic constituencies and now they're letting pretty liberal people in Democratic constituencies. So I don't know if that is the logic per se, and then also, you know Louisiana uses a similar system that is included in my in my estimates and so. I mean I guess if you like if that were to happen the most liberal Democratic states all had open top two systems. Yes, but I just don't see that happening I guess. Thanks so much for answering all those questions and it was a lot. And I will pass it back to Aaron. Thank you so much for for going through these these questions and for doing all this organization and having this event kick off successfully. Christian, thank you so much for for joining us it is a real pleasure getting to turn it out with you and to share your wisdom with all of our supporters. There's an email there for anyone that has any questions. And I was also just about to plug it there for Twitter as well. So if you are interested more of the work that Christian and the Schwarzenegger Institute are doing, you can find that here. And I'll give you a direct link to Christians Twitter. I know all the other quirk that he's doing. And if you would like to see more events like this, as well as more places like St. Louis. We would encourage you to donate and as a little perk if you happen to not itemize this year under the cares act. You can if you make a cash donation to a nonprofit. It's a $300 above the line deduction which is kind of unusual for tax purposes otherwise. I encourage you to support our work so you can see more events like this and be able to see your approval voting and in the new cities and states that way. Christian has more opportunities to turn it out and do more analysis. So again, thank you all for joining us and thank you especially Christian. Yeah, thank you. Thanks everyone. And I will say just if you're interested, the Schwarzenegger Institute in general is really concerned about these issues. So, you know, do check out our website and follow us on Twitter. I'll also put the Schwarzenegger Institute's Twitter handle on in the chat. So thanks everybody.