“You want to know why we’re polarized? You want to know why we have division?” Our featured guest Frank Garner posed this question to voters at the constitutional ballot initiative debate we attended in Helena, Montana and many similar events. “We have a system that allows for it and the pressure that is put on people… to vote a certain way.” A Republican member of the Montana House from 2015 to 2023, Garner spent over a year as the primary spokesperson for Montanans for Election Reform, the gro...
Dec 19, 2024•25 min•Season 4Ep. 23
The 2024 election results are in and clearly underscore a rightward shift in American politics. Most pundits and many pollsters did not foresee such a clear victory for the GOP. But some of our Purple Principle guests from the past four seasons have recognized the important dynamics at play behind these results. Such as Carlos Curbelo on the shift of Hispanic voters and Thomas Edsall on the longstanding drift of the Democratic Party away from economic issues and toward identity politics. In this...
Nov 20, 2024•16 min•Season 4Ep. 22
“You meet them and you're like, ‘oh, wow, you're a good person trying to do the right thing, and there's nothing in it for you,’” says Andrew Yang, Founder and Co-Chair of the Forward Party. He’s referring to largely volunteer teams around the country that have raised the profile for election reform in 2024. “I mean, what could be more worthy of praise than that combination of attributes?” Yang was a relative unknown upon entering the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries. But that did not last...
Oct 31, 2024•19 min•Season 4Ep. 21
“It’s a thrilling year. It’s a tense year. I am a believer that this is a marathon,” says Rob Richie, Co-Founder and longtime Director of FairVote, the nation’s foremost catalyst for ranked choice voting elections. “There's moments of excitement– of cresting hills, of victories and sometimes defeats.” In this Purple Principle episode, Richie recounts the highs and lows throughout the steady progression of ranked choice voting in US elections since co-founding FairVote three decades ago. For exam...
Oct 23, 2024•32 min•Season 4Ep. 20
In 2020, Alaskans passed a first-in-the-nation voting system which helped energize similar reform efforts around the country. In 2024, Alaska voters are now presented with a ballot measure to repeal this same Final or “Top Four” system that includes a unified open primary of all candidates plus a ranked choice general election. Meanwhile, voters in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado and other states consider measures to pass major elements of the “Alaska model.” This Purple Principle episode features discu...
Oct 09, 2024•37 min•Season 4Ep. 19
“The notion of getting rid of a closed primary system in Alaska appealed to me instantly,” says former Alaska House Speaker Bryce Edgmon who has represented Bristol Bay and parts of the Aleutian Islands for nearly two decades. “It overrode right there almost on the spot any trepidation I might have about having to rank candidates or anything else that would eventually become part of the ballot measure that narrowly passed in Alaska.” Rep. Edgmon is referring to Alaska’s first-in-nation passage o...
Sep 25, 2024•46 min•Season 4Ep. 18
Election reform is officially on the ballot for voter approval in Colorado this year. This “Top Four” voting system is similar to the Alaska model of a unified open primary plus ranked choice general election. But there is a catch to this Colorado ballot measure, and it came via the state legislature in the final moments of the 2024 session. “Well, the last couple of days of the legislative session are very hectic,” says Jeni Arndt, a three term Democratic House Member in Colorado before her ele...
Sep 11, 2024•29 min•Season 4Ep. 17
“I've sat in rooms where we as Democrats have high-fived when a Libertarian party candidate gets into a competitive race,” recalls former Oregon House Speaker Dan Rayfield. “That's not democracy.” “And Republicans high five when a Green Party candidate gets into the race,” says Rayfield, currently running for Attorney General in Oregon. “That's not democracy.” Dan Rayfield is describing the spoiler effect of plurality voting, where a third party candidate with minimal support can determine the e...
Aug 28, 2024•36 min•Season 4Ep. 16
In 2024, Nevada voters will see a ballot Question 3 strikingly similar to the question on Final Five voting that passed by 6 points back in 2022. That’s because a constitutional amendment must be passed by voters twice in succession, according to Nevada law. And should voters approve Question 3 again this year, Nevada will become the second state (after Alaska) to implement this ambitious electoral voting reform system including a unified open primary and ranked choice general election. “After w...
Aug 14, 2024•39 min•Season 4Ep. 15
“Everybody likes to think about these reforms as being revolutionary,” says Paul Johnson, former Mayor of Phoenix, now Co-Chair of Make Elections Fair AZ, on the record number of state level election reforms in play this year. “They’re not. City governments have been doing these reforms for about 50 to 60 years.” Johnson, a former Democrat turned Independent, is leading a third attempt at opening primary elections in Arizona to independent and unaffiliated voters through a 2024 citizen ballot in...
Jul 31, 2024•43 min•Season 4Ep. 14
“I like to say the stars are aligned for open primaries right now,” says South Dakota Open Primaries Director Joe Kirby. “I think there’s a realization that closed primaries simply don’t make sense when you’re in a single party state.” “I also think that Open Primaries will foster a more representative and functional government,” adds De Knudson, former Sioux Falls City Councilor and Co-Director of “Amendment H” - an effort to create a single unified primary of all candidates from which the top ...
Jul 17, 2024•29 min•Season 4Ep. 13
In this bonus episode we revisit the vast nation-sized state of Alaska, model for election reform in numerous states around the country even as that voting system of an open, unified primary plus instant runoff general election faces a potential 2024 recall ballot measure back in the frontier state. The Purple Principle has made three previous audio visits to Alaska, arguably our least partisan, most indy-minded state with 60% of voters choosing not to register with either major party. We first ...
Jul 03, 2024•25 min•Season 4Ep. 12
It was nearing summer temperatures on this early June primary voting day outside a polling station in Washington, DC. Lisa Rice, official Proposer of Initiative 83, is wearing a sandwich board with the message, “Ask Me Why I Can’t Vote Today?” “Why can’t you vote today?” asks a woman on her way to vote. “Because I’m an independent,” Lisa replies. “ I'm not affiliated with the Democratic party or the Republican party and we're barred from voting in the primary…” “All day people came up to me and ...
Jun 26, 2024•43 min•Season 4Ep. 11
In April of 2024, Luke Mayville, co-founder of the grassroots organization ReClaim Idaho, addressed volunteers on the final day of signature gathering for this year’s Open Primaries and Final Four Voting ballot initiative. “We are here today because we are tired of playing the same old game under a broken set of rules,” Luke told the 50 or so volunteers gathered in Boise’s IvyWild Park that morning. “The root of the problem,” Mayville stated, “ is the fact that there are 270,000 independent vote...
Jun 12, 2024•41 min•Season 4Ep. 10
Katherine Gehl, co-author of The Politics Industry and Founder of The Institute for Political Innovation, has always asked herself what she needed “to do in order to change the political situation.” “So at first I needed to sell my business,” Katherine tells us. “Then I needed to make the intellectual case.. And then I needed to try to sell this reform to people. It just went like that.” Today, in 2024, after many years of effort and adaptation, Katherine Gehl’s Final Four or Final Five voting i...
May 29, 2024•39 min•Season 4Ep. 9
“The Presidential race might get thrown into the House of Representatives,” says Dr. Sam Wang of the Princeton Gerrymandering Initiative in this episode. “And in the House of Representatives, every state gets one vote.” Both a neuroscientist and recognized authority on gerrymandering, Wang is highlighting the connection between partisan gerrymanders in states throughout the country and following on effects at the national level in the US House but potentially also the White House. “And certainly...
May 15, 2024•36 min•Season 4Ep. 8
The 700-plus attendees at the 2024 Principles First Summit in Washington DC come from various locations and backgrounds yet attended this event for similar political reasons: all are concerned about authoritarian trends within today’s GOP. Blaire Egan, for example, had been questioning her GOP political orientation since interning on Capitol Hill for a Republican legislator. Jeff Mayhew points to congressional gridlock, especially within the US House, as a major obstacle to functional, represent...
May 01, 2024•20 min
“I’m still in it to hold a mirror up to my GOP colleagues,” former RNC Chair Michael Steele tells us in this episode. “To show them how unLincolnlike they have become.” Michael Steele has borne painful witness to that transformation over the past two-plus decades as the first African American Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, then RNC Chair in 2009-2011, as well as US Senate Candidate. Steele may have been one of the first prominent Republicans to push back on the populist redirection of the part...
Apr 17, 2024•31 min•Season 4Ep. 6
“I'm the only candidate that was Head of the DEA, that was in charge of border security in the Bush administration, governor for eight years,” says our featured guest, Asa Hutchinson. Yet despite possessing perhaps the most impressive resume among GOP presidential candidates, Hutchinson failed to receive substantial media attention or garner significant support from Iowa caucus goers. There's just so much happening in his world that you have to say is newsworthy,” says Hutchinson of Trumpian med...
Apr 03, 2024•19 min•Season 4Ep. 5
“I had been a conservative critic of mainstream media bias for many years,” says author and MSNBC columnist, Charlie Sykes, a “contrarian conservative” and our featured guest. “It suddenly occurred to me that we had succeeded in not just critiquing the liberal bias, but in destroying the credibility of fact-based media altogether.” Sykes is the author of the notable 2017 book, How the Right Lost Its Mind. Within our interview, as in the book, he is unsparing of himself and other traditional cons...
Mar 20, 2024•33 min•Season 4Ep. 4
“My goal in this book isn't just to diagnose the problem,” explains Nick Troiano, Executive Director of Unite America. “But to give people a solution that is viable and can happen right there in their own states.” That book is “The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy from the Fringes,” published this week by Simon & Schuster in time for another polarizing primary season. Yet Nick notes in the book, as in our interview, that a record number of 2024 state level efforts to reform primary e...
Feb 27, 2024•25 min•Season 4Ep. 3
“Every time I talk to someone about running for office, the first thing they say is, Eric, you have to pick a team,” confides Navy veteran Eric Bronner, COO of the non-partisan group Veterans for All Voters. “And something didn't sit right with me. So the pump was primed, as my parents would say, for some kind of awakening.” That awakening occurred listening to a Freakonomics podcast episode with former Purple Principle guest Katherine Gehl, co-author of The Politics Industry. In that episode, a...
Feb 14, 2024•27 min•Season 4Ep. 2
“I know that I would not be in this position if we didn't have the Final Four system,” Representative Mary Peltola (D-AK) tells us in this first Purple Principle episode of season four. “Because I would not have made it through a partisan primary.” A native Alaskan, Representative Peltola gained re-election to the US House on the third ballot of the nation’s first Final Four election in 2022. Final Four Voting combines a unified open primary with a ranked choice general election. The intended go...
Jan 17, 2024•25 min•Season 4Ep. 1
“The American people want serious people to solve serious challenges,“ declares former Texas Congressman Will B. Hurd in this season finale on the U.S. House of Representatives. “That’s the lesson we should take away from 2022.” But he’s quick to add, “I don’t think that lesson is going to be implemented in this new congress.” Hurd then dissects the GOP factionalism at work in the contested house speaker’s election and confirms that most House members are more interested in “messaging bills” tha...
Dec 19, 2022•29 min•Season 3Ep. 25
“It appears to me that the fever has broken,” observes Bob Corker, former two-term GOP Senator from Tennessee. ”And there's gonna be a real serious debate on the Republican side of the aisle as to where the party is gonna go in 2024.” Fading GOP loyalty to former President Trump is the elephant in the room as we discuss the 2022 election, successes of the current Congress, and prospects for governance going forward. “Right now you got a lot of folks feeling their oats over in the House” says Dou...
Dec 07, 2022•39 min•Season 3Ep. 24
Happy Thanksgiving from The Purple Principle team! This week we’re revisiting an episode from November 2021. In the aftermath of another fractious election season, and heading into the holiday season, it feels appropriate to bring psychologist Tania Israel back into the feed. She explains the active listening methods we need to have genuine conversations across the political divide and across the dinner table, when opposing viewpoints are in the house. Are we Americans trapped in our end zones o...
Nov 23, 2022•29 min
The 2022 election will consume us over the coming days, weeks, and months. There will likely be recounts, runoffs and court challenges before a new Congress takes shape. This Purple Principle episode highlights concerns surrounding this election, with many GOP candidates questioning election integrity, while providing context and perspective from a variety of guests. For Sarah Longwell of the Republican Accountability Project, the question is whether Democrats nominated “broadly appealing candid...
Nov 10, 2022•19 min•Season 3Ep. 23
Alaska will soon be the first state in the country to hold a ranked choice voting election for all representatives, state and federal. But can RCV moderate our severely polarized politics? If the August special election and current congressional campaign are any guide, the answer is a hearty, “Maybe.” That’s according to Matt Buxton, editor of the Alaskan political blog The Midnight Sun and co-host of the Hello Alaska! podcast. TPP Reporter Dylan Nicholls interviewed Buxton just after the specia...
Oct 27, 2022•28 min•Season 3Ep. 22
TPP wraps up its series on Hispanic American Swing Voters with three very different yet highly insightful guests. Northwestern University historian Geraldo Cadava tells us that both parties have spun overly-simplistic narratives of the Hispanic voter – a mythical concept in his view. Carlos Mencia has always been an iconoclast aiming satire in all directions. He reflects on his immigrant childhood, as one of 18 children, and living with relatives in a rough East L.A. neighborhood. And he expound...
Oct 12, 2022•32 min•Season 3Ep. 21
How’d you hear about The Purple Principle? Click here to answer our one question survey: https://fluentknowledge.com/tpp-survey How large a role will Hispanic voters play in 2022 elections? (Hint: It’s big.) How are the major parties appealing to this diverse voting bloc? (Not so effectively.) Can Latino candidates turn down the heat on our political rhetoric? (No sign of that yet.) In the 2nd episode of our Hispanic American Swing Voters series, these questions frame our discussion with veteran...
Oct 05, 2022•31 min•Season 3Ep. 20
