In April 2024, Andrew Yang gave a TED Talk entitled “Why US politics is broken — and how to fix it” in which he diagnoses the political problem in the U.S. as stemming from the system’s incentives. “What’s going wrong with American politics is born of poor and perverse incentives that are related to a design flaw.” Partisan primaries send the most extreme and ideological congressional candidates to general elections, and the general elections are not competitive in the vast majority of districts. This leaves us with a congress filled with extreme candidates who view the other party as the enemy rather than colleagues to work with. The country gets gridlock and polarization instead of compromise and progress.
Yang nicely articulates the incentives faced by many congressional representatives:
What happens if some brave legislators lean across the aisle and try to compromise and find a solution to a big, hairy problem? They worked with the enemy, they’re ideologically impure, their base turns on them, and their job security goes down. What happens if they let the problem linger and fester? Nothing. They can raise money, they can get votes, they can get you mad.
The solutions that Yang proposes are open primaries and ranked voting methods, which inject more political competition into the electoral system. This would better deliver a government that is focused on solving problems rather than capitalizing on them. These are the solutions we need, but Yang was over-optimistic about how quickly we might achieve these reforms. He asks, “I want you all to imagine six, eight, ten US senators who are all of a sudden freed of their party primary and a similar number of members of Congress. Do you think that would meaningfully rationalize American politics and change them for the better?… if you were to adopt these reforms and try them in ten states, not all of them would pass. Maybe half of them would pass…”
Several states had reforms on ballots in 2024, and unfortunately, as NPR reports Ballot measures to upend state election systems failed across the country. It is looking like all state-level reform initiatives will fail, with Alaska even repealing the open primary and ranked voting system that was used in the most recent elections.
These results highlight how difficult such reform efforts are, and that it will take a great amount of effort, energy, and time to fix the broken system we have. Part of the reason for the difficultly is that the incumbent two parties do not want more competition. They largely oppose such reform efforts, and prefer to keep things the way they are. The major parties opposed this year’s reform initiatives in Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and South Dakota. In Oregon, the state Republican Party opposed reform efforts, while the Democratic party did not take a position. Similarly in Idaho, reform faced near-unified opposition from Republicans in office while the Democrats did not take a position on the effort. The Montana Republican Party called the proposed primary reform there “destructive”.
The Nevada Democrats provided a statement to the local news source Nevada Current saying “Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much these days, but Nevada leaders from both parties oppose ranked-choice voting.” Perhaps that is the clearest indication of the potential impact of such reforms.