My next guest is a guy who most Colorado's probably don't know, but has been very instrumental in changing some significant things here politically in Colorado through a series of ballot initiatives. The most recent one was about rank choice voting and changing the primary system. And joining me now to kind of do a postmortem on that and talk about where rank choice voting is going is camp Theory Kent.
Welcome back to the show.
First of all, thank you, Mandy. It's it's great to be back.
Well, let's talk about the ballot initiative that just failed. And I'm sure you guys have had a chance to kind of, you know, look at it from different angles and figure out where you think it went wrong. What do you think the issue was that it didn't make it over the finish line?
Yeah, yeah, Well that was very very painful loss, and we had won five in a row, and I think maybe there was an element of overconfidence in part. I hate to say that words, but that's an honest response. Three things stick out. One, it took us so long to get through the title board that we didn't have
as much time for coalition building. The second, the proposal had a bit too much complexity, and that's very clear from people we talked to with the exit polling and all the rest, and it was striking that we did get to almost forty seven percent. And so that means we only need to persuade three more out of every hundred Coloradens and we're over the goal line into the promised land. And so for a new idea, a new
concept to get to forty seven, pretty damn good. But the reason we didn't get higher than forty seven was the complexity. And then third, I made a mistake or two during the campaign in terms of our running it, and that very well could have made the difference in those words, aren't any fun to say either?
Well, you know what, though, you can't fix what you don't like what you don't admit, right, I mean, if you just decided to give yourself a pass on things that you should have done differently, than you're not going to be any better next time. How do you make it more simple? And are you going to take another bite at the apple statewide or what does that look like?
All right, Well, we have decided exactly what we're going to do next because we're doing a listening tour across the state, which we.
Perhaps should have.
Done before, taken a year and done that and put it off running the initiative, but we decided, with everything going on in the world in the country, it made sense to sort of throw the long pass instead of instead of relying on.
The running game.
And so I think that was a respectable decision, but we didn't we didn't make it.
The complexity was it had three parts.
That first, an all candidate primary, everybody on the same ballot.
People loved that. Second was top four advance and so you not only get the the.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump far left and far right, but to get the Jeb Bush and Amy Klobucher center left and center right. But that was very new for people. And then there was the third part of rank choice voting, and that was very new for people, and so and so, moving forward, we may do exactly the same thing. Because we spent a lot of time and money and successfully educated.
Almost half of all of Colorado.
We may do the same thing, but we may also just focus on rank choice voting, or just focus on an all open primary where every one of us voters in Colorado gets to vote for whoever the hell they want. Independent of party, and we don't have the system telling us, oh, you got to be all Democratic or you got to pick an all Republican ballad.
That is just unfair.
So peel off the rank choice voting for now and go or well, okay, so peel off the rank choice voting and go for the open primary, or peel off the open primary and go for the rank choice one and just separate those two things.
Yes, yes, for example, in one or two other states they've separated the two depending on what's more popular in their state.
Now, why are we doing this?
We are doing it, Mandy and I boy, we feel so strongly and the people feel this very clear from all of our work that the people are very frustrated with our democracy because it feels like they don't.
Get to cast real votes. We're trying to do is restore real votes.
And I'll go quickly through some numbers, but about nine out of every ten districts are either dominated by one party or the other.
Boom, that's it.
And that typically is maybe means it's sixty percent Democratic and forty percent.
Republican or the other way around.
Gosh, that means that forty percent of your voters are never getting to cast a meaningful, real vote for a legislative position because they're in the little minority party. To us, voting puts them back in the game because they can vote for a Republican if they're a Republican.
But then they can say, oh, my Republican's almost.
Certainly going to lose because we're the minority party, and so I'm going to vote my number two vote for a moderate Democrat because I hate it when someone from the far left is elected, and that's just not representing the entire district in the entire electorate. So that that is one reason that for the elections, one party dominates ninety percent of the time. Now, some people say, well that's just kind of life, but that dominant party has competitions,
so what are you whining about. Well, no, in two out of three cases, there's only one viable candidate.
So Mandy and I'll wrap it up with this sentence. It is literally true that eighty five percent of Colorado voters last year did not get to cast a meaningful vote for a legislative position, state or federal because of his only one viable candidate on the ballot.
And so if someone came to us tw hundred years ago and said, hey, America, I hear you think you want to have a democracy, I'm not one for you. And they showed us what we've got. We would laugh them out of the room because eighty five percent of the time, our wonderful voters don't actually have a choice.
So we only have a couple of minutes left.
But I want to ask you this voter participation in the primaries is pathetic and anemic. And part of the reason is because people just don't pay attention. They only want to vote in the general election. But to your point, their vote may not matter as much in the general election.
How do you inspire those people?
Do you think an open primary would inspire people to pay more attention to the primaries?
Yes, the data is very clear that if you move from a closed primary where you can only vote only partisans can vote, to a semi open primary like we have in Colorado where independence get to vote but they have to choose a D or an R ballot, that significantly increases turnout and engagement. That data is clear in
Colorado and across the country. And then when you move from the semi open primary, which is what we have to fully open or gosh, I don't have to choose a D or an R. Instead, I can vote for a Democratic governor and Republican senator because I think they're the best people and I don't care what damn party they're in. That also increases turnout, So the data is
very clear. Our reforms lead to more people voting, and they are also more engaged because they're not voting got a sense of obligation for the one person on the ballot. They're actually voting with engagement because the winner is not known ahead of time.
Right now, Mandy, you.
And I can predict ninety percent of who's going to win, not only before the general election, but before the primary election.
Right well, and let me just ask this before we wrap up here, because I'm out of time. That part of it is incredibly important to me, that getting people to pay attention. But do you really think this isn't going to change the hard partisans of either party? So really this is about the sort of lost middle.
I guess we want to put the middle back in the game.
Right now, the far left and the fire right, which deserve their proportionate influence, have disproportionate power. We want to put the middle back in the game, center left, center, and center right.
Let's put them.
Back in the game and give them real votes back again.
Kent theory. I appreciate your time today.
If you want to learn more about Kent and some of these initiatives, there's some really interesting stuff. I'm all in for rank choice voting, especially after watching how it unfolded in Alaska and it worked the way it was supposed to work when the politicians understood the game. And that is what is the missing piece here is that politicians are afraid of it because they don't know how
it works. But I would think any party that is currently in the hopeless minority in any of these discs would be like, yes, give me a chance to win some votes.
Kent.
I appreciate the time today so much. Man.
I go democracy.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, go democracy. Thanks Ken. That is Kent theory.