 So today we are talking about primaries as Mike said, I have an interesting background in primary so on three occasions, two times and Mike got just a little bit wrong but he got really close which was two times in Virginia and one time in Florida. I have worked on congressional campaigns for the United States House and primary elections, and I have always thought it was interesting kind of that process and how it ended up bringing me to approve a wedding. So, I will ask you guys in the comments, because there may be a lot of people. But I will ask you guys put in the comments and ask you guys this question. What were your friends and family say the process for running for US Congress is like, what would you think it is like. It also might give you if you think you can be cop and let people discuss. What do you guys think what what do you think it's like. What would you describe pressure expensive predetermined. Lots of money. That's very well said. That's anymore. Come on, you guys have to have an idea what it's like. It's intense. It's a lot of work. There's a lot of things you have to consider you have to consider your voter based constituency you have to, you have to figure, well how many votes. Do I need to win this and there's a way to figure that out. You got a fundraise whether it's by mail by the internet by personally out reaching out to people where you go to meetings. There's a lot of different things involved. It's very, very involved. It's very little room for error because there's a lot of eyes on you. Not that I've made a horrible mistake I'm starting up now. And you guys can all see my screen okay right now you see the slides. So predetermined, difficult, right. A lot of barriers, a lot of great. Thank you guys so much. Exactly. When I asked the CS staff, I went through this presentation with them. And these are kind of the words that they came up with. Very similar what you guys said opaque, exclusive right somebody put Byzantine love that right predetermined smoke filled back rooms is there nothing more synonymous with with kind of this process then smoke filled back rooms then and then, you know, deciding who's in charge right all of this has a similar theme which is kind of that someone is overseeing the process someone is somebody put rigged for I assume they mean you know rigged for a candidate to become the nominee or you know there's a lot of money right. And so we assume that there are some there's somebody somewhere out there looking for the best candidates, who is trying to make sure that their party. Usually we think it's party somebody put party procedure I love that answer that we usually we think it's a party and we usually think the party is out there trying to find the best candidates trying to put their finger on the scale. Yeah, they're at least maybe putting their arm around somebody who potentially could hurt the brand hurt the company, hurt the party and say you're not going to run. Definitely, that's how a lot of people think. So, we wanted to test that. And my experience from campaigning. I had my view, but I wanted to see how that turned out in in actuality. So, a lot of us, if we want to know how you become a United States member of Congress or how we have the Congress that we have. We should see where they all come from where do little congressmen and women for lack of a better term where do they come from where does it start, you know, if these are potentially people who are going to be part of our lives as Americans as part of a democracy for for decades. What's their origin story why are they here and not somebody else. That's the first question we hope to answer. The second is what numbers can we put around their experience that origin experience where everyone comes from. And what is that experience like and what is it has it changed is it getting better is it worse, what is better what is worse. And we're going to answer this third question before the question we're going to get way at the end but the third question is, does the data suggest that someone is overseeing this process that it does seem like all the words you guys put out there Byzantine and rigged and, you know, people putting the finger on the scale for their person is that true what about that is true. And at the end we're going to talk about why are there changes and if there are any, and what's the impact. So what do we do, or when do we start, well the beginning, all candidates for the most part have to go through primary we're going to talk about that in a second. The primary is is the moment of maximum danger is the way I like to say it's where in a lot of the country. So 80% of the country recording the cook political report. A seat is safe for one party or another now this is the 2020 house, or sorry the 117th Congress which is the current Congress, obviously the different Congress is coming in with 22 midterms, but it's very unlikely that the being safe for one party or another is going to change that much. So 80% of seats are safe. So the one moment that can basically set somebody up for a lifetime of incumbency, or, or being locked out of that seat for probably decades is that very first primer. And so the other thing about primaries are primaries don't necessarily have to happen they only happen when one or more candidates file to run. I think one of the first things we have to think about is, well, is that a lot of people are not does that happen often other often primaries, because that's the first step in the process that we can actually look at. So what do we do. We looked at the first primary of every single new member elected from 2009 to 2021. So remember 2009 is the beginning of the 2010 cycle. And now 2021, it was the beginning of the 2022 cycle. In that time period, 485 new members joined the house. So these are all people who are not incumbents, either they beaten incumbent which was very rare, or most most most likely they ran in an open seat and one. And another reason why this research is really important is understanding where our members of Congress come from is currently 320 members of Congress are we're elected in the last decade. So understanding where they come from and what their experiences like may help us understand that's about three quarters of the Congress. Finally, we only cared about the primaries of the eventual winner 80% of the nation, 80% of seats are safe. So if it's a safe Republican seat, it doesn't really matter how many people ran for the Democratic seat. What is really important is how many people ran when real power, the real chance of a seat in Congress was on the line. And we're going to talk a lot today about contested primaries. So what it, what is a contested primary. So, in our view a contested primary was just a regular old primary one where you know you have it and Virginia we have it and the first week of June on even years where it's open to the public and it's run by the state kind of your normal primary. If you were nominated in a convention where, you know, it was a party only and you weren't allowed people, not necessarily not a closed primary, but a more of a caucus or a firehouse caucus, or a firehouse primary where basically the party is deciding internally we're going to put in person, and this is who it's going to be. That's a little different than the ones the open primaries run by the state, and by so don't confuse a closed primary that has run through the state with kind of a local party caucus don't confuse that. So that's one thing that keep in mind as we go forward so if, if the party put you up whether you were an appointment, or you won one of these little kind of off elections that weren't really a part of the state election process, we counted you as that was not really contested you didn't really have to face the major electorate of the party of your state. And then again, if you, and also if you ran but you were the only person who filed for your seat, you were also on contested obviously that's the most obvious one so as we look at the numbers ahead just keep in mind. We're going to talk almost exclusively about the contested primaries. We counted the people who were uncontested but there's not a lot, and there's not a lot because of the 485 people who got elected since 2010 427 came from contested primaries. That is 88%. So you another way of putting it in this period if you ran for Congress, you had a very small chance of going on contested I think that's one of the myths that we have in our hearts as Americans that you decide to run a non day one it's me versus other parties that a lot of ideas. No, that's one of the first things that should go by the wayside. The days of just kind of coasting into your party's nomination are over. And on the other side, one of the questions is, is someone running this process well if one of the indications is of someone running the process is keeping the field small for a favorite person to win. It doesn't look like they did a good job about that if they did that at all. We're going to talk about that so only 58 out of 485 when uncontested from now on, we're only going to talk about those contested primaries because that's where everybody comes from basically. So these primaries come and three flavors, nice and easy, the public and primaries. Excuse me that and democratic primaries pick the nominees for their party to go into the general election blanket primaries are the types of primaries you see, often at municipal levels throughout the United States where it kind of doesn't all the parties are together. And sometimes blanket primaries have the party labels on there. And sometimes, you know, and usually if someone doesn't get 50% there's a runoff. That all being said, there were more Republican primaries over this time than, than the others. Why one you had the party wave in 2010. You had big movements for the Republican Party in 2012 with new districts. And of course the 2016 election also saw gains in 2016 and 2014 saw gains for Republicans, and they also had a lot of open seats. So it's one thing to keep in mind that these are the types of primaries we have. And interestingly, that there were more Republican primaries there anything else. And with the way the political environment is going into 2022. That should be about that should continue. So what are the big numbers that we got from this research. So we're thinking okay I'm going to run. I've already accepted. I'm going to be in a primary. How many people are going to be in that primary. It's going to be you and five other people. I was trying to think of analogy. If you ever tried to get a bartender's attention. It's a lot harder when there's more people is very similar. When you're trying to get voters attention, six candidates that's a lot of candidates. I think in our minds we often think, okay maybe if there's primary it's maybe two or three candidates. No, there are 2,570 candidates for 427 races. That, that is pretty, pretty big. And not only is it pretty big, that number has gone up every single cycle since 2010. So in 2010, you had about five candidates you had to deal with in a contested primary. And then in my 2020, we're up to 7.3 candidates and a contested primary. It's gone up every single year, and think about it too again. Obviously, people come in integers, but just having that much more competition is happening. We're going to talk about that more in a little bit. 150. These, this is the number of times there were more than seven candidates in a primary. And one of the questions here is, is someone is it somebody's job to try to keep the process small, try to help favor people. This does not help that argument. And if it happens 150 times over 10 years, if you're trying to keep it small and it blows up that big. You're doing a bad job. But that also has another another dimension. The more people that run the less you need to win the more that the first place goes down. So we roughly looked at all the contested primaries and we roughly chunk them up into thirds. So roughly roughly a third of them had two to three candidates and you can see the winner often had over 60%. Nice and easy. Right. You can see roughly a third had four to six. We're starting to get into that average of about six. You had drops pretty quickly. You can tell more people. First place is going down seven or more another third, right 150 times. You could win a seat for Congress for life, essentially with 34.6% of the vote. So one thing that this process is one. Vote splitting is happening. So what's pulling is not just an idea and maybe happens pretty clearly over this decade. You had a lot of people, which happened a lot. There's going to be a lot of votes pulling. And so talking about not winning by a lot. 52% over half of everyone who won a primary and ended up in Congress received less than 45% of the vote and their election. That is bad on multiple reasons. One, remember, this isn't just a general electorate. This is a primary electorate. So that's 45% of a primary electorate, which is subset of a subset. So the way I like to see it too is if I'm a party person, I may not be even getting the people that are have broad support in a party, because you're getting this really crazy vote splitting that people are going to Congress with this without any mandate, having, you know, looking like you squeeze through Congress, or your primary is a great way to become a back venture for a very long time. So I'll stop there for a second. I'll open this up for the chat or I'll open it up for you guys to talk about these numbers surprise you. But what do you think about when you see these numbers and why? Well, a couple of things. Can you all, first of all, can you hear me? Yep. Okay, yeah. So one thing is I would like to see the pre 2010 numbers also because I think a lot of this has to do with the shift in citizens united and shift the internet fundraising because with that in the past you used to have to have a lot of donors to get like large numbers of donations from several different people. And if you they thought you had a chance of losing they wouldn't donate but, you know, in 2012 for example when Newt Gingrich ran for president Sheldon Adelson gave him 10s of millions of dollars I think somewhere between 50 and 100 million dollars so he just had to make one person happy, and he could last the whole race if you wanted to. So I would really like to see the comparison with numbers before 2010, because then you can show that that's really that's there's been a systematic change in why this is occurring. A second notice is note is that Roger Myerson, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, he's argued that we should use approval voting primary the main reason the main place to use it is actually primary so if you're ever looking for like, you know, talking points on that that's one thing is that Roger Myerson won the Nobel Prize says we should use approval voting for primaries. So yeah. Thanks vendor. Yeah, so, so the process is changing has changed, you know we don't have the numbers before 2010 it was hard enough to get these. But, you know, I'm sure that'll be the next iteration. Norma says, it looks like it's not so hard to win a primary if you already have a solid group of supporters. It's not that hard, which is maybe surprising right one of the things we talked about is, or we assume that it was kind of hard. But other things. Norma also says it gets easier if if there's more than two people trying to win. What else anyone else have any other thoughts to these numbers. Not not not so much why this is happening but what are your thoughts just thinking about these numbers right now. Kaya says maybe these numbers explain why we didn't care so much about what's putting in the past. And why maybe such an issue. Now. Yeah, that's a great point. Right we didn't really think about this before who you know I don't think vote splitting was on the top of people's minds. If we were sent to win, then it can it can appeal with a vocal majority so. So, I'm going to leave it right there and guys feel free to put that in the chat. But yeah, things have changed right where these numbers show that something is changing over time. And we can either do you know, except that and kind of do something about it or we could just say, Oh well that's not you know, we can keep in mind how maybe things used to be. And that but that's just not the case anymore. So we added one other dimension to this. And thank you everyone who in the chat. See stateness. So sorry there's lots of words here but mostly what I want you to understand is for every seat for every 485 of the seats. We added all 427 of the contested elections we added the cook political report rating for each seat at the time. So at the, at the time of the election, if the Louisiana fifth cook political report said it was solid Republican. That's, that's what it was. And we care about that because if the fifth Louisiana district opens up and you live in that district. So the things you're going to do you're going to see. Okay, who's going to, who's likely going to win a Republican Democrat. Sorry, you are Republican or Democrat. And you either. Oh, I'm not going to be a part of that. Or oh, holy crap this may be my one opportunity for life. And we want it we had an idea that, but we wanted to see does a seat safeness. So it is how solid it is for one party another impact the number of candidates. So quickly that the answer was, was very much yes. So, cook political report has eight ratings goes from solid Democrat, likely Democrat all the way to solid Republican. You can see that the toss up seats, which are the seats most likely to flip for either party. There are less candidates than the solid seats, probably because it's very nice to have to win only one seat, basically forever whereas the toss up seat. Not only do you still have a primary, you know the average is still 3.6. Not only do you still have a primary you got to defend that seat for two years for every year of your life. So it's clear that solid seats are attracting more people. And it also means that this is kind of where the action is. Oh, and we know that 80% of seats are safe. And this period, about 50% of all the seats that came up were safe. So, not only is are a lot of people running in these seats. These are maybe the most important seats that we don't pay any attention to right where the ones would pay attention to the toss up ones, all the ones that may flip. But it's in these other primaries, the solid primaries, where there are lots and lots of people running, and that's having the effect. You would assume. So, as the seat gets more solid, the less votes about that you need to win. And look at the pretty stark drop off with the solid Republican primaries. And as we noticed earlier. And as you can see here, there were far more of those than almost any other primary. Lots of people are running. Lots of people are splitting the vote, and lots of people are splitting the vote, especially in solid elections, and that has a big impact down the road. So, is this just an aberration is it's just 10 years of political struggle, maybe, maybe, but in 2022, there were six contested races you can see them here. The candidates ran for six seats in 2021. This is 2021. Barely getting 38% of the vote was first place. These people will probably be in Congress for as long as they want. Another big indication from 2021 is that the average number of votes went up every year, or the average number of candidates went up every year. We saw in the last slide that as candidates go up, and they get more solid votes needed to win goes down. But we also have another place we could look at, which is Texas. Texas has the earliest primary in the country, which is in March. And Texas, many Texans, if they're watching probably know their filing period is over so we know exactly how many people are going to run for Congress and their races in Texas, with their new districts so again a lot of places we don't have the full congressional district yet 62 candidates are running for nine open seats so 6.9 average so right in line with our average, and it's ticking up just a little bit more. So it's very likely that 2022 may have the worst vote splitting of any cycle previously before it, as it is very likely that we will get a host of solid seats with the new districts. So, what have we learned from just start these just these numbers right nearly everybody comes from vote split primaries. This is kind of a fact you get elected and the 2010s and probably going forward, you're going to have a primary election, and then may have some impact on the road. And like how Jeff said, you can win without a lot of people, you can win with 35% of the vote as of a primary electorate. The bigger the primary, the less much need to win the bar gets lowered with every new person. And it also seems with so many people running so often and continuing to do so. It does not seem anyone seems to be able to, or is even trying to dissuade candidates from running. And that's really important. So my question to you all. And now you guys can answer. Why do you think more people are running so Mahindra already mentioned oops. You know changes and kind of the political fundraising environment we're going to talk about that. But what else you guys have any other ideas why you think, why is this happening why are more people running. And I can chime in for a minute. I know that that in many ways this is this seems counterintuitive because you have a lot of organizations that are out there telling people you know if you want to make change in your community run for office run for something get get involved and so there's this big push that that's the best way to get it done but people don't think about the potential negative impact on on the political system with too many candidates running. And I think that it, one factor could be that because of the internet, because of social media, more and more Americans are seeing negative impacts of what individuals in Congress and the Senate, whether it be in US Congress and states they're seeing the negative effects of policy that will impact their lives directly. So it also could be that the process is being more available. What it takes to run what the from learning about. Well, what do I need to do to run. What do I have to do when they're beginning to realize well I can do that. And because of social media it's becoming the issues are being more put out there. And the process is being learned by more and more people, and they feel like they can get involved. Great. Thanks DK anybody else. I'm seeing some other great things in the chair. And there was a case I think it was in Florida where a candidate there are two candidates running. And I think it was the Republican I'm not sure, got a third person to run who had a similar name to Democrat say and so that like, encouraged vote splitting that way because I didn't know who you were voting for. Yeah. And I think that's the least as less. I think I, I can't see but I know the voice. Yeah, Alison Sardinas who also now works with us lives in that district. She saw that happen firsthand they found there was a Rodriguez running so they found another Rodriguez. There's a J Rodriguez running so they found another one. So it was weaponized to write that was something we heard in St. Louis and I had great, you guys have great things in the comments about, you know, people feeling like they can do it. Average people are more involved and they seem like, you know, they, you know, average people are in Congress now you know I have average people in Congress I can make Congress you know we. I mean, Norma had a really great one which some people want to be rich. Right. Some people want to be rich they want to be on TV. So, I put one in the chat as well. I think what an interesting part of this is sort of the decay of the power of the state parties to be able to influence who runs and who doesn't. Additionally, the graph that showed the competitiveness rating connected to the number of candidates was particularly striking because the D triple C and the NRCC really do sort of flex their muscles to make sure that that the most competitive candidates are the ones that that win those primaries but they take a hands off approach entirely with safe district. Yeah, Mike, you are jumping ahead to the next, next section. Someone's like, I promise I didn't tell Mike sale those things. This is my opinion, right, you know, I've been out there. I mean, and Mike also has a really great perspective he's worked on the inside on a lot of DC redistricting and things like that but these are kind of my opinions. They are somewhat are mostly educated from from being there and seeing it. There used to be two groups largely that had tremendous power over your potential run. The state party. We're going to talk about them and the media, both of those groups have seen tremendous amount of their power get diminished the last few years. But first of all, I'm talking about the state parties state parties. They don't have that much power anymore. They used to tell people. To me, this is a traffic cop a little bit. There's a gatekeeper, you know, and political science really call it gatekeeper is to hold the reins of power, you if you wanted to get into Congress. And, you know, 3040 years ago you had to make the party have you to be a great state party member. And I know that I'm sure you heard a lot when, especially when Hillary Clinton was running people said it's her time she's waited in line. Right. There used to be kind of a line, and they used to kind of be in charge of the line. And somebody said that before you were right parties also have wings, you know, we definitely see in the Republicans kind of the country club part of the party and then we see a little bit more, you know, Trump favoritist party than to be a little bit different world populace Democrats have moderates and also their own wing of populace. And it comes really sticky for a prime, you know, for a party to pick one side or another they don't really do that anymore. And like how Mike said, the state parties just like the national parties ignore safe seats, because it's a waste of time it's wasted money, you have campaigns are all about limited time. Limited time, limited money and making everything go as far as possible. If you're trying to change the balance of power balance of power can be determined by a few seats. That's where your money should go. So no one is paying attention to them. If you think the state parties paying attention to them. They're not either. And as Mike said the national arms pay. If they if they are if the seat is even potentially close. That's when you see the DC people come in. So not only has the state power state parties completely kind of said you know we're not going to be into this these primaries are because it causes a lot of problems. The state parties come in, or the national parties come in say we're going to run it. But as you can see, they probably have not done that good a job. Keeping the field clear for their candidates as well so they. There's a huge point here which is, Oh, and Mike said the run for something types of groups after you've all kind of heard of that you know, if you don't like how it is get up and go run for something. You know these are groups. There's groups like vote vets Emily's list Maggie's list the collective groups of people who are in the past burned by the old. Get in line system that started their own groups and screw you we're going to run our own people we're going to find our own people. So they go out and kind of independently third party go and try to find more people. And finally, you know the parties don't give any money to primary candidates, even in even in really even if they really like somebody that this is what I've seen, they will never give you much they will never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever give you money while you're a primary. I was in a primary in Florida where I was going to beat the guy. Three to one two to one. The party was not going to help us they they they charged us for certain services. Often the parties charge you to use things that they would give to people for free. So they have zero leverage they don't have access to the ballot they don't have money to give you. They have nothing to stop you from running. Obviously they try to recruit I'm sure there are elements that try to recruit. They do not have the power to stop anyone from running. So, you know, one thing we don't talk about a lot is, there's not a lot of information on these races to this is also probably why we don't think about it a lot right but because outlets. It's it's 2022 right everyone's every media person I know wants to try to preserve, or at least stay away from anything that can make them look bias right and in a district that's heavily red or heavy blue. The right thing to do is to cover a primary because that's going to be a person maybe forever. But there's a there's a big kind of antipathy towards doing that you don't want to even if it's the right thing to do that. And it becomes really hard when there's like 10 people running for for Congress if you're, you know, if you maybe want to feature somebody, you're going to have nine other people say feature me to you get this guy time I want time to. And then people again they throw their hands up and maybe get involved after the filing period but again at that point, you have the field those are everyone's going to be on the ballot. Again the media to their like everybody else they're, they only care about is the seat going to be red or blue. They don't really care about the person involved unless that person tends to be a crazy person, but then that person is getting attention for for all the wrong reasons as well. They feel like most of us that there are, look at all these competitive seats in the country. That's what we should be focusing on and so you don't, they're even less dissuaded, or they're even more dissuaded to to wait into that again it's sticky for them to. If there is one myth that I hope dies that I hope dies a painful death 1000 times over until it goes into the ground and never comes back again is media outlets do not run polls for anything other than Senator, Governor or President. You know it's never will run a congressional poll for a primary in, especially if we're ways out, you know, especially if it's once away, and especially especially if it's safe seat, they don't care either. They know the readers don't care. I can't tell you how many times I got asked well what are the polls say there are no polls. No one. There is no information. There is no information they can't say well these two folks are the real front writer we're only going to focus on them they can't do that. So there's no information. You have all this, let's say you're in Louisa Louisiana fifth district and it's a big Republican district, which I don't think it is but let's say it is for for argument. If it's a big Republican district, you don't see any news coverage about it can't really find out anything about the candidates there's no polling to kind of dissuade you there's nothing to swage you. It doesn't look like anyone's running away with it. Yeah, you're going to throw your hat in. And there's one other. There's one other piece of this that I think you guys nailed on the hand which is times are different. It's easier. It really seems easier to run for Congress for for normal people for average people doesn't cost a lot of money to start a website. You can collect donations, you can do that in two hours and for not a lot of money. A lot of this has been privatized Mike used to work at one of these places you know, I bought services from these privatized places all these voter databases and mapping software and PR and everything you possibly need. You don't need to parties at all, you can buy yourself and it ends up being cheaper most of the time. They're outsiders of one, these two are probably the biggest in this time frame, but there are multiple other ones, big upsets in this period and they what do they do you see okay well. This person X is my hero this is my, I did it I was inspired I watched the documentary about them, I'm going to run. They have their, you know, it seems to be on the conservative side but also Democrats, they can use your own money. You know it's a lot easier kind of use your own money to kind of track your own money, and maybe on a little bit more of the precedent spectrum, you can use your own community action resources that you have developed over years. And one thing I think that goes really unnoticed is it only requires signatures to get on the ballot. Most people will sign your petition if you say hey I'm running for this inside my petition. A lot of people with enough time and enough friends can get on the ballot, so it's not that hard. Now and finally to you know if, if you live in a big deep blue area, there's going to be a lot of deep. There's going to be a lot of blue mayors and state representatives and city council people a lot of people who can make a viable argument for the seat. You know you have a lot of a deep bench that's usually what people call it. And again these, they kind of feed into each other right so new candidates enter the mix we're going to start on the right side, because there's nobody stop them. So they're excited, both splitting. People can see oh well it's going to become more likely it seems easier, right need less votes to win any less people. It's going to be more vote splitting. The seat looks what more wide open, because, you know, because there's so many people, and there's little information to tell candidates maybe they should think twice. And the cycle continues so it's interesting me watching primaries, especially in places like Pennsylvania especially for that's for Senate, but it just seems like there's this bandwagon. And once you get a few people, you're almost guaranteed to get everyone because everyone says Oh, well why don't I go for it anyway. And finally, last piece. Oh, so I. What are actually there's one last piece after this but I want to ask you guys what are you. Who benefits. What are some of the things we just make you think about. You can put it in the chat too. First off it's take away is it sounds pretty bad. And it seems like nobody's paying attention right nobody's telling these guys are girls or anybody to to run or to not run. It's nobody's mind on the shop that's why the paper was called no one's garden house nobody is there to, to find good people or to or to stop, maybe the most power hungry people or normally that's great. Nice. Nice and succinct. Anybody else. Opportunity. I love that one. Well, that makes it nice and easy. It's a great transition because normally I had on it. Opportunity is kind of kind of extremism, right there there's, there's a few things that are really bad about this. It's not necessarily vote splitting, if you're in vote splitting this happens, but I'm saying, hear me out again this is my opinion, so I can say what I want. Because you have vote splitting vote splitting is not like, you know, the campaigns don't know what happens. I think somebody said before they brought up the Florida example. It's weaponized not only weaponized it is well known among campaigns, and especially with folks with with mainstream, far from mainstream kind of, you know, anti democratic ideas. They know that they can't win. I'm both sides and both sides spectrum. They know they can't win if it's a competitive toss up seat, but they very very very very much know that these safe seats they can win. Partly because one it's the only, but it's also for everyone. This is the only way they can win right with vote splitting and a lot of people being a part of these big solid seat elections. They also don't because of this because all you need to win over forever is a subset of a subset. You know, the primary subset and then the group of that primary. There was a study I think was by Yale that said, most people, most, or sorry, most policies, how popular there are have absolutely no impact and whether they get done in Congress. And that's, that sounds right you don't need to keep everyone happy you don't even need to keep your own party happy. You need to keep the slice of people that got you in. And that's about it. You know, most primaries people agree. That's why they're primary, they're all part of the party, unless you're in a blanket primary, you're in a party because you agree. But it's, and in a situation where almost everyone agrees only people are going to stand out. The only people are going to get an edge are the people with the really toughest positions on things. So candidates are the future, they're not going away. We need the best tool that improves situation now and in the future. So you know what my, my spiel is going to be right we're at the Center for election science one of the reasons we support approval voting and one reason I think this is so important. Because a lot of people think about maybe other methods is a proof of voting works very good in the situation works very well in a situation where there are lots of candidates. And what have we seen not only are there already a lot of candidates, there's probably going to be a boat load more. We need a system that is already ready to handle six, seven, eight, nine, 10 candidates. And that's, and that's why I feel so strong about approval voting. So the elephant in the room to us, you know, bring choice voting, right choice voting does one thing extremely extremely well. It works very well. When there's 1234 candidates, maybe five. That's also one of the reasons they limit it to five. In New York, this last year, you could only vote for up to five even though there's 13 candidates. There's elections with 123 or four, or, you know, up to four candidates pretty well then it starts to have issues with votes putting in a, and it just gets murky, and as well as how people feel about democracy in this country general. I think it's better that if we do have a change that it is also pretty, pretty clear. And then, you know, in St. Louis. This is for mayor, this is for mayor in 2017. As you can see, quite clearly. There was a lot of votes putting mostly between black candidates. 68% of the city in this situation voted for one of the black candidates, but instead, you know, the one white candidate one and a majority minority city and the majority black city. The point here is, this is a perfect example of everything we saw in the congressional primary right you know the folks winning with not a lot of support, and ending up governing to not lose one shred of support. And that's what it kind of seemed like, when, when Mayor Cousin was was in charge in 2020, obviously, St. Louis moved to approve a voting and then 2021. They had their first approval voting election. Now as you can see there were actually two candidates from that exact same race to Sharad Jones and Lewis read. They both did much better. Now in this situation, the top two rent moved on. That's how they decided to do in St. Louis. As you can tell, there were not that many candidates as the last time. There's more of you're in the teeth of the worst part of the pandemic to but and the rest of the country is ready to handle all the candidates that are not going to stop coming. What it's worth, we do not want to stop any of these candidates running. Let that be heard loud and clear we want more people to run. A lot of the people who are running are people who have been told no in the past by the parties by the media, and have had these awful barriers put up. It's good that no one is is gatekeeping them anymore. That is also what also that means is if folks want to, you know, I always tell people, proof of voting is never going to make your particular candidate or cause win, but it's going to be but moving to approve it is going to be one of the reasons. It's going to stop being a reason you lose. And so that's why it's really important to look at these elections look at its data look at this. Not only in Congress we are also seeing this isn't the phenomenon with candidates also applies to the city, the city level at the local level week that's a whole another story we looked at 150 cities. On average in those primaries for mayor it was seven. So right on track with the congressional primaries, people are running. We got to be ready. We got to be ready for lots of people to run in the future. And as we know with the proof of voting not only is it great for all those candidates for the future, but it's also a great way of knowing which candidates have the broadest support. And we can finally close those loopholes that help some of the most, you know, on the on the far ends of the spectrum, how they win is with what's putting in and that can stop. And we can let that go and we can finally get some folks that even in our primaries represent the most of that electorate. I have a question. That is great because we're at the questions part. Oh cool. Thank you Chris. My question is, when you talk about this idea of vote approval voting is that the system where on the ballot you see five candidate, a number of candidates. In other words, it's this phrase of down ticket voting banning, eliminating down ticket. And if you could clear up this, this, the situation that I have in my mind, where I heard this, it would. Now is your, is your idea of vote splitting where you have a ballot where you, you don't choose just the one candidate, but with that candidate you're voting for, like, let's say, a group of five. Okay, give me one second. I'm going to pull up here. So I'm going to be, I'm going to be very one of the reasons we, we support proof of voting is that most of the races in the country. So your primaries, your general elections for mayor for Congress, you end up with one winner, right. Most elections in the country. And so that's why we look at approval voting I think what you're asking about is a little bit different from my pay grade but what I wanted to show with this example is this is, you know, you can see you know, just by the color of people's skin, where the where votes are split and again vote splitting is when similar candidates for any reason. You know, votes steal, you know, votes from each other, right. So if likely if it is very likely that if the race is only down to two or three people, the results will be a lot different, you know, and I don't have a ton of time to go into how a lot of these candidates are different or similar ideology, ideologically and how they're similar different. So ahead, you can see, we don't have a good picture of who won, or we know who won but we don't kind of know why. And that's not great for anybody including the person one and everyone else who lost I tell you I've been, I've lost elections and the number one thing I looked at was who stole votes from me. Yeah, if you had any support if there was any presidential candidate you supported in 2016 or 2020 in the primaries I bet you you look this person saw from this person this person still from this person, Warren and Bernie still from each other and they both did worse, right. So, one of the reasons we move to approve a voting is on this ballot, there were these names. So, there are these five names, but there were more. And that's with plurality voting that's vote splitting these two things, plurality voting, and lots of people, more than two people basically. So what did we do what do we, what do we work with the community to achieve was. We just changed one of the rules, which is to vote for as many names as you prove up since in 2021. And you can see there's four candidates, and I showed you those results. You could vote for as many as you prove up. So it's essentially how much of the city how much of this electorate approves of each person so you basically have. There's four candidates for mayor on the left. There's basically four individual elections where you say yes or no. And then the end result was was this where 57% of the city approved of. And 46 proof of care Spencer if you do the math doesn't add up to 100 because you're not splitting a pie, as much as you are individually gauging whether you have a favorable view of people. I think also, I'll go ahead. And if I just pop in really quickly, I think there's a, there's a pretty good debate going on on the chat. Typically, between those who generally favor rank choice and those who are open to the idea of approval voting and so I did want to just kind of chime in quickly and give an easy answer of why I personally would support approval from overranked choice. And that comes down to the, to the idea of with rank choice voting, you still have just a single vote to give. Right, so let's say that you have, you go into the ballot box with a fairly strong opinion about one of the sort of less known candidates. You place that person in first place and then you put second, third, fourth, what have you. Then during the tabulation, your first choice or maybe even your second choice as well. Those don't meet the competitive competitiveness threshold so in a sense those votes are thrown out at the end of the day. The results from your ballot will say that you voted for that one person who was your third choice. And that's all that will really be recorded for anyone to see. So it's sort of, it's a convoluted way of getting to a majority and presents. It's not really the full picture of where people's support really, really were the full spectrum of where those support that the support was in the electorate. So approval voting is the simplest way to get the actual most accurate view of where an electorate really lies within its within the candidate to a running. So you want to challenge that or, or, or offer a thought on that. I can offer a thought because you know, there's a lot of voters out there who have gotten disengaged because of the way the two party system does not really represent the vast majority of people who live in the US. And so, you know, they think they're doing great because they found the right polling place once every four years. But they don't, you know, they'd have to look at the ballot and think, well, I don't know which one I want the most because I don't know anything about any of them. I don't really pay attention. So it would take a very long waiting lines if they're voting in person, and then a very long time to crunch the numbers to figure out who actually won, so that it's frustrating it takes four or five days to find out who won. I have another question, which is similar to the previous question. So the example that you showed appeared to be a mayoral candidate race. Was that in the entirety of what's did include a city council members. And I want to, I want to ask you a side question that applies with that in our city. What we have is called district voting and this is a prominent thing here in our state now, where a city council will vote for a district voting, whereas before district voting. You have all voters when they get their ballot, they have a choice of voting for anyone who's running for city council, whereas district voting. You have the city divided up into districts and the wherever you live in the district, wherever you live in the city, in your district, you can only vote for those candidates who are running for your district. Is that what is considered a voter approval voting. Can you give me more examples of what how approval voting would appear on a ballot whether it will be congressional senate state senate assembly district city council congressional. Yeah, yeah, you got it and let me guess you live in California. Is that right. Yes, I do. Yeah, okay. I'm very well aware of the districts in California. So, and that's a great question. So, the only thing we are suggesting to change is an approval voting, the ballot looks exactly the same, except we changed the directions. We changed kind of the geographies covered. Right, but that's all redistricting is in Congress to right this, this zip code is now in this, the fourth district versus day district. All, all that city did was move from at large where I'm sure that you elected maybe multiple people at a time, which is called block plurality voting which is structurally very close to approve voting, but not the same thing because you still have a limited amount of votes, we're moving to districts so in any situation so I showed that mayoral, that mayoral ballot the ballot is exactly the same and the rule, every other rule about the election is the same. Right, so if, if it's a closed primary for Republicans only Republicans can vote in that primary, but, and they're going to elect one person there's going to do with the proof of voting. Right, it can also work in general elections where if there's a Republican and Democrat, we have one Republican one Democrat one independent, or if another iteration maybe there's multiple of those. But for sake of argument we're going to say that there's, you know, a Republican Democratic green, you know, libertarian. In that situation to you can also still vote for as many as you like. And again it's just which one has the highest approval which one is liked by the most people so that's a good question, it's easy to. It's tough right now but that's also why we look at this part and why we look at approval voting and we look at plurality voting because we just say, that's the quickest thing we can change right. That's the easiest thing we can change. And then one of the reasons the easiest to change is, you know how I mentioned block plurality voting your machines every machine in America already lets you fill out as many bubbles as you want can read multiple bubbles fill that what it all that is done before an election is the supervisor says okay well we're going to like three sanitation people but one mayor, and they just tell the machines what what is too many votes, improve voting. There's no such thing as, you know you fill that too many bubbles. So hopefully that answers a lot of your question and I'm happy to my email I'll share to DK so you can also, if you have any more to I want to also give a few people some other quick comment I just want to add. One of several places have adopted and rescinded rank choice including Sunnyvale California, Boulder, Colorado I think carry North Carolina and some other place and but the biggest one is brollington Vermont and that's the biggest reason I think we should not do adopt a rank choice for single winner elections because basically what happens is that with rank choice is possible for a candidate that is preferred by. So I'll give you the example would have Vermont so there's a candidate called Montroll that defeated all the other candidates one on one. In terms of preferences more voters preferred Montroll for any other candidate one on one, but that candidate had less first place votes than two other candidates. So we got dropped and people were upset about that and so they rescinded rank choice and brollington Vermont and that's a very costly process and I don't think we'd want that. And so I think that that's one of the reasons where, at least I'm strongly in favor of approval loading. Thanks for Andrea. Yeah, I want to thank you. I want to get some other questions here I think. Yes, please. And Mike is a question for you Chris and or Mike as well. So, I've seen a fair amount of elections and been frustrated by the lack of representation for myself. It represented by the by the candidates and the and the past the post system that we have. So I feel like I would take anything as an improvement. By the way, I live in the state of Maryland so if it was ranked choice voting, I don't think it's the right, the best one, but it'd be better than the what we have. And so approval would be even that better. My question is, there's there's other aspects about the voting system that frankly are very, very frustrating as a computer person, all my all my life. The fact that we have 50 different systems is amazing to me that it even exists because from a security standpoint it is riddled with holes. So, so my question is, should the fight for changing the voting scoring, right, hopefully centering on approval voting be connected at all with the, that we should have all paper ballots for for our elections of a standard format. And they should be, we should have the organ style system of vote by mail for everybody in the United States. And then lastly, this is the one that really makes me crazy is we should have not a third parties that we hire to do the the analysis of the votes after the fact right the polling but we should have a system in where these votes then are counted by machine but then limited by hand audits as well. So it seems like there's like three or four like really key things that if we could do it at the minimum at the end of the day, even if my candidate never won, I at least would know that my vote voice was recorded, because it would be easy to verify that in a system that was a little bit more secure, and most importantly, a uniform across this country. So I'd like your, your thoughts and Mike as well your thoughts on that. Yeah, Jason, great. I love that. I love that. The judge, you know, so there's, there's a few questions in there. So I'm going to go from real fast. One of them is, where does this fit in the pecking order of things I should care about I care about, you know, up to other things. You know, you know, huge, you could see everything I presented today and and see. Wow, a lot of those districts are safe that shouldn't be the way we should fix your memory. Right. You know that those also very logical thing you could land on. I always say a proof of voting like we are and people. You know, we are not or people. Right. That's the number one thing about us is you can care about multiple things. You can like multiple things you can have multiple things that you care about people are deep. They don't always have a first choice. So I get, you know, philosophical, they don't always have a first choice of thing that they care about. Approved voting needs to be in the mix and one of the reasons we did this research is it needs to be in the mix because people don't notice the vote splitting, they don't notice that they're not, you know, the water is rising, and it's getting up to the point of their nose. And one of the reasons that that's causing that is all of these candidates. There's all these candidates and that's not a bad thing right we want more representation. And Norma said something earlier about, you know, the, the not feeling represented by the two parties, even the parties are not getting people who are representative of them if it's a slice of a slice. So, you know, I think we not to bail them out but to also say that piece so we, I will never tell anybody that my thing is more important than any other thing I ever see feel strongly about it. But the other way I want, I guess folks to think about it is look at everything you're mad at that you don't like about the system, right. Everything you don't like about the system. You know whether it's those those machines or those ballots or the safety as as urgent as they are. They cost money, and they take time. Right. They cost money and they take time and if you ever want anything done politically time and money, you know, a lot of pain financially or or making people wait is a great way to not make that happen. I hope that a lot of those things happen personally too. But one thing I really want to point out is, if there's one thing that I see out of this whole landscape, that at least gets us something tomorrow. We've got to do that. And that's proof voting and also, but people aren't going to get out of bed for a good idea just sounds like a good idea right prove voting it's a good idea. Sure, we should do that. I like this the best. There is a problem. The problem is people are winning with 34% of the vote, all the time and they are making those federal choices for you on whether what next reforms get done. And I'm not putting one party on blast or the other. But a lot of people are just, you know, I want something done and right now we're kind of really not incentivizing anyone but the most uncompromising, you know you're either do everything at one time or you do nothing under any circumstances. And I think most people are even in the parties even across parties or do something people. And, and that's how we feel about I think I might maybe feels very similarly that this is what we can get done is what we can get done tomorrow. And at least puts us starts to put us on a path to changing those other things. Yeah, maybe it does maybe it doesn't but at least they'll have some different incentives and they'll feel some different pressure. And I'll just add really quickly. I think one of the things that is best about approval voting and the CS approach is the flexibility to how we're doing this. If you look at proposition D in St. Louis, which brought in the approval voting, the use of approval voting, it was a broader good governance measure. And so one of the things that we do here is not just testing approval voting as the as a singular as a singular reform, we're also doing testing on on how it, how it corresponds with other potential reforms. And so we are, we are very focused on approval voting, but aware that people in communities all over America or America are concerned about so many things about elections so I, I salute you Jason for, for having a lot of a lot of ideas. Thank you. Thank you for a great session. Yeah, thanks Jason and we got time for a few questions but of course we're going to stick around. I have a new question. Yeah, no. Hey, you may have noticed that in Michigan, a citizen's ballot initiative statewide changed the state constitution so we can get rid of all these gerrymandered districts. And so they selected for Democrats for Republicans and for independence to recut up all the congressional districts and the presidential or the congressional. So we're all trying to figure out what district are we in now and who's running in our district and it's pretty confusing, but it means that we have a voice. And it won't be a safe district for anybody because it's all new and it's pretty diverse, because Lansing is in with a bunch of rural areas so guess what the member of Congress in that district is going to have to represent all the citizens. And how to get along together because there's diversity in every party. And instead of saying, I'm going to vote for so and so because I think he leaves in fiscal policy responsibility. But there could be some Democrats who care about that, you know, and there could be some Republicans who care about reproductive health. The thing about approval voting is it lets a candidate run on their issues, and it causes voters to pay attention to the issues. And issues are what's going to bring us together, because there's a lot of reasons for and against all the things that divide us. And the two parties that say, you got to be for corporations or you got to be for unions. Well, what if you don't know about that, you know, if you don't know which candidate isn't a rhino, you know, Republican and name only or Democrat and name only and then vote against their party. Approval voting cuts through all that it gets money out of politics because if you've got a website and some friends to do literature drops and you show up at the debates that the League of Women Voters hold. People will get it which things you stand for. And if you've got nine issues, and this candidate has five of them and the next one only has one or two. Well, you know, I'm not going to vote for somebody like I'm going to choose the one that will really represent me. And that will tell us what the people want. And both parties could bent that benefit from that. Instead of saying we know what's best, even if they never pull the voters, and even if they never even tried to engage the voters, because they're homeless people I serve people have been criminalized. And believe me, those people see no reason what to vote. Right. I think that's very well said, I think you hit the nail on the head on how approval voting changes some of the incentives that are involved in decision making for everyone involved and this is what part of the reason why I'm particularly attracted to approval voting because by this simple reform, you're changing the equation for voters for candidates and for elected officials for voters that more power to make your, your, your voice known with your ballot for the elected officials, they get a clear sense of where public opinion really is when they're electorate. And then with candidates, they're incentivized to have to actually try to appeal to the broad spectrum of voters in their district, giving people more voice. And less mud slinging from dark money. Exactly. I have one more, a few more questions that are rightly fit together. Hold on one second DK I wanted to make sure we got somebody. Mary Beth I think you had a question. Yeah, I just, I was trying to understand how this works and I've learned a little bit about ranked choice, but how that works with parties and them having their primaries. Does, does the success of approval voting mean that you have to get the parties to not have individual primaries how does that work. That's a good question. So, and it's a little confusing because a lot of times when we're in choice voting is presented, right there's, it's kind of like there is no primary everybody in one election and then we're going to run that race that's what kind of people approve voting. So in St. Louis I showed that example. So the in 2017 they had democratic primaries at the city level which is rare. It doesn't really happen. Right. I think it's 80% democratic, a democratic is going to win us useless right. But all you needed to do was win that primary just like all these congressional seats, right you just had to win that primary and you're set for the four years. You got like to buy a small group and now you're good. Well, what St. Louis decided to do is they decided to put everyone, regardless of party and one primary, and they decided to have top two people move on. I think proof voting, I think personally works a little bit better when just one person wins, but you don't have to change the parties don't need to get on board and in fact, a lot of political people hate this. They hate it. They are trying to repeal it right now they try to appeal it every day everyone in Fargo. It's rid of their industry yeah it's it's it takes power away from them because they secret is candidates, the dirtiest secret of all the campaigns is candidates and campaigns want to talk to the least amount of people possible. Save money, it makes your life a lot easier right if you just have this little group and that's all you need you're good. So one thing I like to point out is, you can move to open primaries that's a separate subject but again it gets a little tougher because people primaries are in. Again, in Skonston law differently than voting methods, but we work with open primaries all the time. It's a national group that likes open primary. One thing I like to point out is I hope down the road we have open primaries in the meantime, and this is where Mike was saying about flexibility. If the Democrats in Michigan, so I did tomorrow that they want to pick their nominee using proof of voting. There's nothing is pretty much nothing stop them. They're Republicans of Florida want to do that. And actually I feel whatever party figures it out first that, oh wait, instead of sending someone that only 30% of the party supports and now I have to spend the whole campaign, trying to get, you know, so Biden I got get the Bernie wing on board and all these other things right like keeping the party together. I can send in my party nominee, who is the most approved to maybe a 70% approval in my party so it's my person who's got 70% approval versus somebody's doing it the old way with, with only 20, you know, someone who got through a 25 person primary with with 20% of both so you could do it with the party structure, I think that's going to be the fastest and I think I think you will see some results. I also think you could do it without open with open primaries. And the place like California they basically have open primaries already. But the problem is without approval voting, you have a lot of people running, even in those open primaries, so you're just basically squishing the Republican and Democratic primary together. So I didn't bring it up earlier but on average in a open primary like in California and in Washington, they had about 8.8 candidates run on average so you're still going to bunch of people, and you still have no clue whether the top two people are even people, people, you know, the top candidates people like the most so I love the open primaries guys. I want them to succeed I also like personally open primaries that doesn't fix the problem of a lot of candidates, and I think that's where I think proof voting and open primaries actually work really well together. And I would not honestly suggest doing open primaries without approval. That's my suggestion but I like to open primaries guys I have a 60 personally, but hopefully that answers your question and DK I wanted to make sure you got your question to. Yes. So two questions. Earlier you had mentioned that approval of voting to it would eliminate those candidates who do not meet competitive standards. So two questions on that. Who, what are those competitive standards, and that that that would have to be met. What are they not, and what. How would approval voting be instituted by by who by what governmental agency process. I think when he mentioned competitive standards, basically what he means is to win an approval voting election where vote splitting does not happen because it's because it's it doesn't work the same way. Essentially standards would mean you would need a level of support to to be able to win an election right so instead of the situations where you have seven candidates running for a specific seat and someone wins an election with 23% of the vote in an approval voting election at candidate will have to get near or above 50% approval. Is that right Chris or is there a better way you wanted to say that. Yeah, that I didn't fully get the question so I hope Mike got it. I will at least answer the second part of the question which is, who should do it maybe this is a good place to wrap up and also decay if we don't answer your question please reach out to. Who does it. You do it. We do it. Activists people on the ground to it politicians as Jason was saying with all the issues that that he cared about that we all care about. They're not going to change how they got elected and what world would they really change how they got elected and be very careful of even candidates who say that they want to change the system of what they got elected because when they got elected in an office things ended up being different in Fargo, North Dakota in 2018 and St. Louis, Missouri in 2020 and now Seattle this year, the approval voting work was was implemented by ballot measures by the people coming together and organizing to to collect signatures and get this on about Seattle is in the middle of that right now they're collecting signatures right now. You could lobby the government. I think it's, I don't think it's a good idea I think the best thing and what we do is we organize we, we set up chapter systems in a chapter is just an opportunity to meet other people interested in the approval voting into work towards action. We train our activists we have last year we did a training with 10 activists and resulted in three statewide or three organizations two of them statewide. We are going out there and we're getting people involved to advocate for it by signature gathering. And, you know, the only people are going to be able to change the laws are are us, and because wait for politicians, you're going to be waiting a really long time. So hopefully DK I answer your question but I also want to maybe leave room for one more and if, and if not please email us any other questions. Thank you for this was interesting. Lots of information. Chris before we before we go is there. Do you want to try to sum up with the three big takeaways that you want to get people to remember as they leave. Yeah, yes. The big takeaways are I had them all up before. I think the splitting and primaries with lots of candidates is happening. It's happening a lot. And as we saw it's probably happening more every year. And this year will probably even have more than we've ever had that takeaway number one that is happening and is impacting who exactly makes it to Congress. Number two is, you know, these safe seats are where nobody's paying attention. And what has to change is that's obviously we would like those seats to be more competitive. But until they are, we need a reform that gets even those safe seats, even the electorate and those safe seats to get what most of them want. Right. That's not even what's happening right now is, you know, all the Republicans in the safe seat may not be getting what they want. They may be getting even slices and slices of people. And the last thing is, no one is stopping extreme folks from running. They can't, they can't stop on serious people from running they can't stop people who want to be on TV from running. They can't stop and it's not going to stop and it kind of shouldn't stop we want there to be a lot of people and we want there to be a lot of choices. We see that the main way you can actually achieve that is with the proof of voting where it happens quicker and it happens clearer. And, you know, whether it's an open primary or everything down the road, the candidates are coming. They're going to stop. And if we want to get ahead of it and be ready for a future with lots of candidates. We, we need to start changing the way we do things and we suggest a proof of voting first. Yeah. And so, Mike do you want to lead us out. First, just thank you Chris for doing that that was great and I want to applaud all of the members of the audience members who've stayed and asked some fantastic questions. If you do have follow up questions you can reach out to me at Mike at election science.org or contact us to the website we really really did enjoy getting a chance to chat with y'all. On that note, I'll go ahead and shut it down. Thank you so much everybody.