DENVER (AP) — A national campaign is backing ballot measures in six states to eliminate partisan primaries, seeking to lower the temperature in a polarized country by eliminating a process that gives the most lively members of both major parties an outsized role in the election Heads of State.
The $70 million effort to replace conventional primaries with either nonpartisan primaries or ranked-choice voting is being led by Unite America, a Denver organization dedicated to depolarizing the country.
“People are losing faith in democracy itself,” said Kent Thiry, co-chair of the group and former chief executive of kidney dialysis company DaVita Inc., during a debate in Denver about the Colorado ballot initiative.
Nick Troiano, executive director of Unite America, said the goal is to end a system in which 85% of congressional seats are effectively filled in partisan primaries because the districts are so overwhelmingly Democratic or Republican that whoever gets the wins the corresponding primary election, victory in November is practically guaranteed.
Troiano said the Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, almost all represented uncompetitive districts and would only have to answer to their party’s voters.
Supporters are enthusiastic about the breadth of the campaign.
“It will be dwarfed by the presidential election, but this is the most important year for this kind of structural reform that I can remember,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University.
But some skeptics contend that, given that vast swaths of the country live in either heavily Democratic or heavily Republican communities, changing the structure of primaries won’t make much of a difference in polarization — and that they will, of course, elect people who do representing ideological extremes.
“It seems like it’s increasing political complexity, weakening political parties, and it’s not clear what problem they’re solving,” said Lee Drutman of the New America Foundation in Washington, DC
The voting measures include proposals to switch to ranked-choice voting in reliably Democratic Colorado, evenly divided Nevada and two reliably Republican states where a pointed rightward shift among Republican primary voters has left conventional Republicans in distress – Idaho and South Dakota.
Both swing state Arizona and conservative Montana have taken steps to move from partisan to nonpartisan primaries. In deep-blue Oregon, an initiative would allow parties to continue holding their own primaries but require them to employ ranked-choice voting in certain state and federal elections.
The ballot initiatives come at a time when there are an unusually high number of election-influencing measures on state ballots in November.
Eight states will consider conservative-led measures to ban non-citizens from voting, already illegal under federal law. Voters in Connecticut will decide whether to allow everyone in their state to vote by mail, and in Ohio whether to have a bipartisan commission set their state’s legislative guidelines.
The biggest change in US elections could come from the increased adoption of ranked-choice voting. It requires each voter to rank the candidates according to their preference. If one does not achieve a majority, the candidate with the lowest score is eliminated and that politician’s votes are allocated to the person their voters chose second. This continues until a candidate receives more than 50% of the vote.
Ranked-choice voting is a more complicated way of conducting elections that aims to produce winners who better represent the entire electorate. The process is used in two states – Alaska and Maine – as well as in some cities such as New York and San Francisco.
It allowed a Democrat, Rep. Mary Peltola, to win the race for Alaska’s only congressional seat in 2022, even though the state’s Republican governor and senator also won re-election. This result angered many Republican activists, who then pushed through bans on the trial in Republican-controlled states such as Florida and Tennessee. Even as more states now consider adopting ranked-choice voting, voters in Alaska will consider a ballot measure to repeal it.
Critics say the campaign to attack partisan primaries is an attempt to silence the voices of ideologically committed voters.
“This is trying to bring back centrism,” Jason Lupo, a conservative political strategist in Colorado who opposes the measure in that state, said during a recent debate in Denver. “This is a way to eliminate progressives; This is a way to eliminate conservatives.”
Critics also warn that the proposed changes come as conservatives have become more wary of electoral processes after Trump spread lies about fraud that cost him the 2020 race.
“It makes elections more complicated, and that in turn makes elections harder to trust,” Trent England, the founder of the conservative group Save Our States, said during a recent debate on the ballot measure in Idaho. “Do we really think now is the time to do this?”
Still, proponents of ballot measures say something needs to change.
Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Republican strategist in Arizona who formerly worked for Sen. John McCain, wanted to support a Democrat running for Congress in one primary in 2022 and incumbent Republicans running for county executive in the other. But he was only allowed to run in a primary in a state where the Republican Party had swung sharply to the right.
“I think, ‘I can’t do this anymore,'” Coughlin said after 2022, when every candidate he worked for lost the Republican primary and the Republican candidates for governor, attorney general and secretary of state all lost Democrats lost November because they were too extreme for the state’s evenly divided electorate. “I can’t just hold elections on the sidelines.”
Coughlin was thrilled to receive support from Unite America, which donated $5 million to his Arizona initiative earlier this month.
The group was founded in 2013 to promote political independents. Troiano, who unsuccessfully ran for a congressional seat in Pennsylvania as an independent, came to take it three years later. He has contributed to greater investment in structural changes to democracy, such as non-partisan redistribution of electoral districts.
Unite America has several wealthy backers, including board members Kathryn Murdoch, daughter-in-law of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and Kenneth Griffin, founder of hedge fund Citadel. His resources have become a target for opponents of his ballot measures, who argue that ranked-choice voting and other changes to partisan primaries will primarily support well-funded candidates win elections.
Opponents of the measures cite funding as a reason to oppose the change.
“These are not the people I want in my voting law,” said Sean Hinga, a labor leader who is leading the opposition to the ballot measure in Colorado.
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Boone reported from Boise, Idaho. Associated Press writers Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska, and Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this report.
