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Career education is a vital pipeline to high demand jobs in the workforce. Students from all walks of life benefit from the opportunity to pursue their career education goals and find new employment opportunities. Join Dr. Jason Altmire, President and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), as he discusses the issues and innovations affecting postsecondary career education. Twice monthly, he and his guests discuss politics, business, and current events impacting education and public policy.
Jason Altmire [00:00:05]:
Welcome to another edition of Career Education Report. I'm Jason Altmire. And thankfully we are several months now outside of the election season, which I know was a great frustration to many people that the constant negativity that they saw. And one of the things now that we are in the midst of it, new Congress and new administration. And I think what people become equally frustrated is there doesn't seem to be a change in the tone and the polarization that exists in our politics and that affects policy because if Republicans and Democrats, conservatives, progressives are unable to work together, then the nation is unable to pass big legislative priorities. And I think we have a guest today who who can talk about that with more expertise really, than anyone else in the country. What drives polarization? What can we do to move into an environment where our Congress can work together more effectively? And our guest is Nick Troiano. He is the executive director of Unite America.
Jason Altmire [00:01:15]:
Unite America is a political reform group that we will talk about. Nick, thank you for being with us.
Nick Troiano [00:01:21]:
Great to be with you.
Jason Altmire [00:01:22]:
Jason, talk a little bit about, first of all, what is Unite America? What is the organization? You've also written the book called the Primary Solution, which we're going to talk about. But what is the organization, Unite America's mission?
Nick Troiano [00:01:38]:
Our mission is to foster more functional and representative government. Our organization was founded about a decade ago by a Dartmouth professor named Charlie Whelan, who teaches public policy and saw to your point earlier. Every national challenge that we face comes up against an increasingly polarized and dysfunctional political system. And if we want to be able to address any of those challenges, we have to be able to have a government that can truly not only just represent the people, but also narrow our differences to find common ground and solutions. And our organization exists to help make that possible by focusing in on reforming our elections in order to improve the incentive structure that candidates and elected officials operate within. And we are nonpartisan and support a range of reforms, whether that is opening primaries or opposing gerrymandering or ensuring majority outcomes of elections through instant runoffs that are all are intended to ensure that our leaders are responsive to a broad swath of the electorate and not just their base of their own political party.
Jason Altmire [00:02:49]:
A question that I get asked a lot when the subject of polarization comes up and why can't people in Congress get along is why have we gotten to this point? What is it about the institution of Congress that evolves in such a way that we're unable to get things done? And of course, I say, well, it's because of the type of people that we're electing. And I've talked a lot about how the people who are serving in Congress are disproportionately more to the extreme politically than the people that they represent. And that's been shown by the evidence, by academic research as well. But you, you wrote a book about a year ago that was very well received, that walked through some of the reasons why that is the case. Can you talk a little bit about that? And in particular, I know you have focused on the fact that such a small percentage of the voters actually play a role in the people that we elect, even in national office, like the House of Representatives in the Senate.
Nick Troiano [00:03:58]:
Absolutely. Well, I do think when you ask most Americans what they see as wrong with politics today, the most common answer that you may get is an individual politician they don't like or perhaps a party that they think is on the wrong side of the issues. And why I wrote the book, the primary solution is to try and pull back the curtain that the greatest driver of political division and dysfunction today is not necessarily who we're electing, but how we're electing them. And of course, how we elect our leaders also influences the type of people who run and win. And while there are a range of factors that impact that aspect of what's wrong with our politics, in my view, the biggest solvable problem is the way that we construct party primaries. So let's just pull back for a moment and look at the 2024 elections. You have 87% of congressional districts that are so lopsided towards one political party or the that the general election is over before it even begins. Some of that has to do with gerrymandering, but most of it actually is just because of the way that we've sorted ourselves geographically.
Nick Troiano [00:05:09]:
More progressives living in more urban areas, more conservatives living in more rural areas. And so those districts are almost guaranteed to elect either a Democrat or Republican. That's 87% of U.S. house seats. So 87% of the House seats are decided not in November, but in the primary. And in the primary, not only is there lower turnout because fewer people are paying attention and participating at that early stage, but the rules of the primary elections discriminate, quite frankly, against many voters. So the only primary that matters in a very red district is the Republican primary. The only primary that matters in a blue district would be the Democratic primary.
Nick Troiano [00:05:49]:
And in most states, there are rules that restrict who can even vote in those primaries. For one, in 15 states, over 12 million independent voters are not allowed to participate in primaries, including in the state where you and I both hail. In Pennsylvania, over a million voters, for example, are closed out. That has the impact of only 8% of Americans voting in the 87% of districts where the elections were decided in the primaries in 2024. So if you ask me, well, what's wrong with our politics? Why is it that so many Americans can agree on major issues from immigration to education, but our leaders can't? The answer, in my view, is that very few of us actually elect the folks that get to Congress. In fact, only 8% of us do for the vast majority of those districts. And if we want to solve that problem, we've got to change the way that our elections are organized and run.
Jason Altmire [00:06:43]:
And it might be self evident to some, and you touched on it a little bit, but talk in greater detail about the consequences of these closed partisan primaries and what does that mean in effect.
Nick Troiano [00:06:57]:
So imagine you're an incumbent member of Congress. And for you, Jason, you don't have to imagine this. You were. So you can tell us exactly what this is like. The threshold question for many members is if I want to continue to do a good job and have this job, my first and foremost consideration is what do I need to do to get reelected? And that question, the threshold for it is not for most members. It's not what do I need to do to get reelected next November in the general election, it's what do I need to do to win my party primary. And to win a party primary, the thing that you don't want to do is be seen compromising or working with the other party. Because the 8% of voters who do vote in those elections tend to be the most partisan and most ideological voters.
Nick Troiano [00:07:43]:
In my book, I kind of compare it to, you know, a tailgate before the football game. You know, who are the people who show up? It's the fans with the face paint and maybe they're a little drunk. Same thing, you know, in a primary election. And so you wind up creating an incentive structure where the threat of being primaried is an overriding psychological impact on most members of Congress of why they do not want to stray from toeing the party line. And what we've seen over the last 20 years, and this began in the primary of Arlen Specter and Joe Lieberman, respectively in their parties in the early part of the 21st century, is that these single issue groups and activists have found that trying to influence these primary elections is a great bang for the buck on trying to move their parties in a certain ideological direction. And so over the last 20 years, there's been an increase in the number of actual primarying of incumbents and pretty well known examples. You can look to 2014, when the House Majority leader, Republican Eric Cantor, got primaried because in part of his openness to working on immigration reform. And four years later, one of the House Democrats in leadership, Joe Crowley, got primaried by a name that many of your listeners will find familiar.
Nick Troiano [00:09:04]:
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, primaried in part because of that issue of immigration and how that played out. I mean, she campaigned on abolishing ice, for example. And so on both the left and the right. This phenomena of primarying is really what is driving a lot of congressional behavior and what's standing in the way of members working together to find common ground on big issues.
Jason Altmire [00:09:27]:
And you lead a group called Unite America, as we discussed. So what is Unite America doing to solve that problem?
Nick Troiano [00:09:34]:
Well, our North Star is trying to solve this primary problem. And we don't think there's a one size fits all to doing that from a policy perspective. But we believe that two principles ought to be true of all elections. And the first is every voter ought to be able to vote for any candidate in every taxpayer funded election. And the second principle is that whoever wins those elections ought to have majority support. That's pretty common sense. In fact, you can get over three quarters of Democrats, Republicans and Independents agreeing with those principles in the polling that we have done. The unfortunate reality is that those principles are only true right now in five states where for state or federal elections, they have abolished party primaries and instead implemented what we would call an open all candidate primary.
Nick Troiano [00:10:23]:
So let's just use Louisiana, for example. That's a state that actually got rid of their primaries altogether. All the candidates wind up going to the general election. If no candidate gets majority support, there's a runoff and that person gets elected. Another twist on this is what Alaska implemented in 2020 for the first time and it was been used in the last two elections, which is a top four primary. All the candidates are on the same ballot. All the voters can vote for whomever they want. The top four vote getters go to the general election.
Nick Troiano [00:10:54]:
And because you want someone to win with majority support, instead of having a runoff, there's an instant runoff where voters get to rank their candidates. And if no one clears the 50% threshold, the candidates with the least support are eliminated in succession until someone does. Those are examples of two systems where if you're a candidate from day one, you're not beholden to the 8% of primary voters in your party. You can campaign to the full electorate. And if you win office, no one's threatening a primary challenge of you. If they want to defeat you, they're going to have to get a majority of voters in your district to vote against you. That is a game changer. We believe in electing leaders who are more responsive to the voters and who actually have the incentives to do what we hire our leaders to do, which is to go to Washington, learn about the issues, work with each other and solve problems.
Nick Troiano [00:11:48]:
And these election reform issues are all about getting to a politics of problem solving.
Jason Altmire [00:11:54]:
You mentioned the state of Alaska and it's a perfect example of what you're talking about because they had a member of Congress for, because they only have one House seat who had served for more than 40 years, very well known and he died. The seat came open and they have this new system in place where you do need a majority vote to win, which you described. And one of the people who entered the race, it was a crowded field at first was their former governor Sarah Palin, whom everybody remembers as John McCain's running mate. Very polarizing figure. And I'll let you talk a little bit more about how it worked. But they also had a dynamic where in another campaign their incumbent Republican senator lost her primary years before in a different system. She won by a run in a right in and they had to spell her name Murkowski correctly. But they, she pulled it off.
Jason Altmire [00:12:59]:
I think that was 2010 or so. And she was able to kind of make this name for herself because she, she overcame opposition within her own primary because she was viewed as a more centrist Republican, not part of the team. You know, they use that term Rhino Republican in name only. So she was part of this whole thing too when they had the new system. And she would not have been able to pull that off twice, probably. So Alaska is the perfect testing ground because Sarah Palin had a lot of support, but she didn't have a majority of the support. And when you do ranked choice voting, you rank your first choice and then your second choice. The problem that Governor Palin had was she was a lot of people's first choice, 40 something percent first choice.
Jason Altmire [00:13:51]:
She wasn't anybody's second choice. If you didn't like Governor Palin, you were, you were not going to rank her second. So talk a little bit about that dynamic. And then the fact that because of the results of that there was an attempt to actually repeal that new system.
Nick Troiano [00:14:09]:
Yeah, it's a great case study that we now know a lot more about, given the fact that the system has once again been used in 2024 and survived the attempt for repeal and produced another slate of electoral outcomes that give us insight into how this actually works. So to your point, in the US House race at large in 2022, a polarizing Republican lost and a moderate Democrat in Mary Peltola won. And for a state that's been pretty used to being represented in Congress by Republicans, that caused a bit of a backlash of some activists within the party saying, wow, this new system must be rigged to elect Democrats and not Republicans. Despite the fact that not only did Lisa Murkowski get elected as a Republican, but a conservative Republican governor was reelected in 2022. Nonetheless, there was this backlash. Well, fast forward to 2024. Not only did voters vote to uphold the system, Nick Begich, who is the other Republican who ran in 2022, ran again and wound up winning that U.S. house seat in Alaska.
Nick Troiano [00:15:15]:
And he did so under ranked choice voting. He did not get a majority of votes on the first round. And it was the voters who ranked the other candidate. There was another Democrat and a third party candidate. He got greater vote share when their second votes were tallied and he won election. And so I think it goes to show that this system is not tilted towards one side or the other. It's really about giving a majority of voters their voice in elections and furthermore improving the incentives that they have. And we saw this in the Alaska state legislature, where there was a bipartisan governing majority that was organized in both the House and the Senate after this last election.
Nick Troiano [00:15:57]:
So the problem solvers in both parties came together to form the actual governing body of the legislature in Alaska. And what was most instructive was that many of them, before deciding how to caucus, were actually looking and waiting to see the final results would be from whether the reform was repealed or not. Because they know under one outcome where the reform was defended, they'd be rewarded for working across the aisle and solving problems. And if the reform was repealed, they go back to a system in which, you know, barely 10% of Alaska voters would decide their fate in the next election. So real consequences for legislatures and policymaking as it pertains to these reforms.
Jason Altmire [00:16:42]:
It's no coincidence that the most moderate members of Congress, some of the most moderate, hail from states where this type of ballot initiative has passed and been implemented. We talked about Alaska with Senator Murkowski, but also in Maine, people know Senator Collins, but their other senator, who is an Independent was also elected in that state. And one of the more moderate, I would say maybe even the most moderate House member, Jared golden, is from Maine and has had to go through this process several times. So you see it in effect, it works in states like California and Washington. Larger states have also implemented electoral reform. They haven't done ranked choice voting, but they, they do the top two primary. So what, what is next? You know, we, we, you know, are not in an election season now unless you live in Virginia or New Jersey. But Unite America continues the work.
Jason Altmire [00:17:46]:
I know you're doing a lot of things at the state level. What do you see as the future for this initiative?
Nick Troiano [00:17:51]:
Well, our grand aspiration is to see more states abolish party primaries such that every state that implements these reforms, you effectively liberate two US Senators and the House members from that state from the primary problem so they can govern in the public interest. You know, we can make a big difference in improving the functioning of Congress without changing any of the players or these elected officials, just by changing the incentives of how they might get reelected and in the future. And so that's the goal. The good news is that post Alaska passing in 2020, there's been more interest at the state level to embrace these reforms because it doesn't require an act of Congress and it doesn't require a constitutional amendment. Our Constitution gives the states the authority to set the time, place and manner of their elections. So that's how these reforms are possible. They can either happen through legislatures or through ballot initiatives. And in 2024, we saw the most citizen led ballot initiative campaigns and we've seen in over 100 years since the progressive era, advancing these reforms.
Nick Troiano [00:18:57]:
The good news is that where defensive efforts were on the ballot to prevent repeal or attacks on the initiative process itself, the reform movement was successful. The delayed good news, I'll call it not necessarily bad news, is that none of them crossed the offensive initiatives, crossed the finish line. A few came close within a point or two or three in Montana, Nevada and Colorado. Overall, over 7 million voters voted for reform initiatives in 2024. Now that has led us to a process of evaluating what needs to change in our approach and our messaging and our engagement in order to get these initiatives over the finish line in the next states where they might get on the ballot. So we've built a stronger base of support, learned important lessons, and are looking at the 2026 and 2020 election cycles in terms of what might be next for other states to put these reforms on the ballot. And in the interim, importantly, are working in the state legislatures, where we can win even more incremental versions of these reforms, whether that's preventing states from closing their primaries, as many are aiming to do this year, or helping some states with closed primaries allow independents to participate again. Pennsylvania is an example of that.
Nick Troiano [00:20:12]:
New Mexico is as well, and looking to other strategies, including at the federal level, where there's a bipartisan bill called the Let America Vote act introduced, and that would essentially require all states to allow all voters to participate in publicly funded primary elections. So that's the work of this reform movement. We've got some wind in our sails in part because of the growing awareness of the impact of reforms like in Alaska, and in part because, as you said earlier, Jason, the political system isn't getting more functional over time. It's getting less and people's desire for change is growing. And that's the context in which I think we can reimagine a lot of the ways that we do politics in our country. And what I try to emphasize in the book as well is that's not new. That's part of our tradition since the founding. We've radically changed the way that our elections have worked over time to democratize them, to root out corruption, to give voters more power.
Nick Troiano [00:21:14]:
And this is a continuation of that proud history.
Jason Altmire [00:21:17]:
I think the last question is the lens through which many people would view any type of reform initiative. Which party, Republican or Democrat, benefits most from the types of reforms that you're advocating?
Nick Troiano [00:21:31]:
I'll answer that by inverting the question, which is who's opposing these? And the answer to that is both major parties in the states where they are part of the existing political power structure. So over $20 million, for example, is raised and spent against the reforms initiatives I mentioned earlier, that included from Republicans in Montana and from Democrats in Nevada. So these are not incredibly popular ideas with those who are already in power and don't want to think about new ways of doing elections when they benefit from the current system. I happen to think that's pretty short sighted because as the number of independent voters grows, for example, Gallup had that crossing the 50% threshold for the first time last year. They should want to have an election system that welcomes more people in a more inclusive process, especially to nominate candidates that are more competitive in the general elections. Both parties have lost key races by nominating less mainstream candidates. So that's where some of the friction points are among the sort of party insiders and career politicians. But among voters, there's broad and popular support for these reforms, particularly the principles.
Nick Troiano [00:22:42]:
And we have some work to do to continue to educate people about what these mean for them and how these reforms would actually impact the other issues that they care about.
Jason Altmire [00:22:51]:
If somebody wanted to learn more about Unite America or your book the Primary Solution, how would they do so?
Nick Troiano [00:22:58]:
They can head on over to our website, which isjust unite America.org Nick Troiano.
Jason Altmire [00:23:04]:
Executive Director of Unite America, thank you for being with us.
Nick Troiano [00:23:07]:
Thanks so much. Jason.
Jason Altmire [00:23:16]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Career Education Report. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information, visit our website at career.org and follow us on Twitter @CECUED. That's C-E-C-U-E-D. Thank you for listening.