You Think You Choose Who Runs… But Do You?

You voted.

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But did you actually choose?

Most people believe the real decision happens in November. That’s when you show up, pick a name, and feel like your voice matters.

But what if the real decision already happened before you got there?

In this episode, we sit down with election law attorney Chad Peace to break down something most voters never think about — how candidates actually make it onto the ballot.

Primaries. Party systems. Low-turnout elections.

Stages where a much smaller group of voters can shape who everyone else ends up choosing from.

This isn’t about left vs right.

It’s about understanding where influence actually happens in the process.

And once you see it, it changes how you look at your vote.

Listen all the way through and decide for yourself.

No Left. No Right. Forward.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Simply join the party. Simply join a party. If you're an independent voter, you don't actually get to choose who runs for president. That's not an opinion. That's how primaries are set up. And with that, we got Chad Peace, an election law attorney. He's taking this fight all the way through the courts. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Chad, I appreciate you being here. Well, I'm a father of a three and a four-year-old. Uh I've represented the Independent Voter Project for almost 15 years now. Uh it's my day job where I make a living. I do digital communications working inside and outside of politics. I do work for campaigns, and we're devoutly nonpartisan, so I've pretty much worked for all sides of the aisle. Passion is my longtime and favorite client, the Independent Voter Project. It's really just going out and protecting the rights of small eye independent voters. I always had a sense of it. I grew up in a household that had a Democrat dad and a Republican mom. But once you start looking at what that actually means, how fundamental that means, what it means, and then looking at the legal constructs, like, wait, wait, most states have election systems that are not even close to treating voters equally, right? Most states have election systems where the first stage of the election process literally disenfranchises you for exercising your First Amendment right not to join a political party, right? So that's when it really opened my eyes. I go, all a nonpartisan primary means is all candidates, all voters are treated the same, and the rules are the same for everybody. That's literally all it means. Whereas most people don't wait and think about, well, how's our election process structured? It's like, no, you only get a play in the final game, the general election, if you go through this very private process of electing a nominee that's purpose is to represent this private organization. That's the primary election system. The purpose, the stated legal purpose is to elect a private party nominee to represent that private party on the general election ballot. So people that have any public interest at the first stage of the election are totally left out, right? So that's when it started connecting it and then connecting it to the legal principles, which is really the basis of our long our long-term lawsuit, and say, look, we we can never we can't get back any semblance of a more functional nonpartisan government unless we look at the incentives and the legal structures that have produced the government that we have today. It's a natural intended consequence of the system we have today.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Right. I mean, did did it feel like a flaw or did it feel like it it was designed that way?

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Well, I mean, and then you start going back, looking further at the history, right? And you understand, okay, well, it was the turn of the the 18th century, is really when, or the 20th century, I should say, when we brought primaries into the public process, right? And the sentiment at that time was very similar to it is today. It's okay, well, there's these party bosses sitting in the back smoke-filled rims that are deciding who who we can heat vote for. And the electorate comes out and votes for the asshole on the left or the asshole on the right. Excuse my French sorry. Yeah, no. Listen, most of these people feel that way. Yeah, and saying, okay, well, and then so why they they they brought primary elections. A few states started bringing these called primary elections, which were administered by the state and allowed voters to participate to bring that nomination process into the public view, right? Now, over time, what both parties had have had an incentive to do is erect barriers around that public process. So you have two components happening at the same time. One, the rise of independent voters that has steadily risen over time, right? Which is essentially voters fed up with both parties. What they don't know is when you register as an independent, you disenfranchise yourself from the process in most states, right? And at the same time, you've had everything from the Democratic Party when they get feel a threat in, I'm just picking states out of the blue, and in Iowa will go run to the courtroom and say, Well, we can't have fusion voting. And then in Texas, the Republicans will run to the court and say, Well, no, you can't let independent candidates have to have seven million vote signatures to get on the ballot because they faced a threat, right? Over time, you erect all these barriers to competition, and you end up with what we have today, where in most states you kind of have the same thing happening that happened before we even had public primaries in the first place, is the real decisions are made in the back rooms, most filled rooms, and they decide who's gonna get the money, who's gonna get the endorsements, who's gonna get all that stuff, right? And then you have 10% turnout in these primaries, and at the end of the day, then the general election say, oh cool, and then we run all these get out the vote operations, telling people why they're you got to do your civic duty and come out and vote. Well, you said, okay, well, we're gonna vote on what's to have for dinner tonight. That's so important. Everybody needs to eat. We already told we already we already decided you're gonna eat, either eat at McDonald's or Burger King, but it's your civic duty to come out and decide which one, right? That's kind of how the process works. You see, if in the people who step back and say, wait, wait, wait, don't we have other places we could eat besides McDonald's and Burger King? Those people, too bad. Too bad. Yeah. You decided not you decided not to like fast food, and that's your problem. That's kind of what the political structure says to us. Yeah. Yeah, they've they've predetermined whether what are the candidates you can select from, right? And that's really done. Yeah, I mean, take a state like New Jersey, where we file our first lawsuit. New Jersey, almost 50% of the electorate, right? The latest Gallup poll shows that 45% of voters by by self-identification consider themselves independents. In New Jersey, the voters who took the active step of I'm going to go register to vote in a closed primary state, almost 50% of them said, I'm an independent. I would rather forfeit any right to vote in these primary elections than join one of these two parties. What's the consequence of doing that in New Jersey? Because they have closed primaries, despite the fact that their taxpayers, the taxpayers fund these primary elections, not the political parties, despite the fact that their public officials administer them, not the political parties, they're not allowed to vote in the primaries if they wanted to. Now, you also have plurality voting in the primaries, which means you only need to get a plurality of the vote, not a majority. So it doesn't take much math to crunch the numbers to figure out you can be the winner of the major party primary in any given district with about 2 to 3% of the electorate. Like you really only need to get 2 or 3% of the electorate to vote for you in the primary. And then you dig a little deeper and you go, well, both parties have gerrymandered the game so bad to create Republican and Democrat districts that there's really no competition by the time you get to the general election. In New Jersey, there was not a single state race that was decided between by a margin of 10% or less in when we filed a lawsuit. That was back in the 2014 or something like that. So the elections were literally, they were decided in the primary by the 10% of the electorate that voted in that primary, divided by the fact that some of those voters voted in the minor party primary that that couldn't win 23% of the vote because there were six candidates in the race, right? So now take 23% of six or seven percent. That's what I mean, and crunching the numbers. Then we go, how do these representatives seem to be like so wacky and out there and don't represent us? Well, because they don't. They represent the one two percent that came out in that partisan primary and voted for it.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Yeah, that's why your healthcare is so. I'm like, everything in America where capitalism is pretty much with some basic guidelines is let to do its job, generally lowers the price. A lot of those basic consumer things, and it may that that competition drives down the price. So that goes right back to what you're saying, like that limited thing. Well, it only represents a small few because there's no competition.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

And there's they're competing for this narrow sliver of the electorate. That is the vote, electoral competition that exists. And you hit the nail on the head. Like, what is IVP at the end of the day? All we're saying is representatives should compete for the most amount of votes among everybody, not most amount of Democrats, not most amount of independents, not most amount of Democrats, everybody, right? And so that's all we're fighting for. It's completely party agnostic, it's not anti-party, it's not pro-party, it's party agnostic, it's pro-voter, right? With a small eye independence. That's how everybody wins. And people go to blame Donald Trump. He went and rallied up these super partisan voters. And it's like, you're just that's what all you all do. That's what you all have to do because that's how the election system was set up. You're just mad that he went and did it better and with with frankly more gall than anybody else would because he has no shame and he'll say whatever the hell he needs to say and whatever comes out of his mouth, right? And so some people take that as a good thing. Well, I love that guy. Well, fuck it. He'll just say whatever the hell he needs to say without only thinking about how it helps his political career. So people like that. And some people are offended by it. But I go, look, if you're really offended by it, figure out how there's a system that was created to incentivize that behavior. Don't get mad at the guy who did it better than the people around him who actually do the same thing. They just do it more quietly and they don't tell you. Hey, you should go whip the votes and stuff into gerrymander and hope nobody finds out or writes a writes a news article. That's the only difference.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Yes. It's been going on since I started in 2003. And the only care because the media is telling them to care because it's Donald Trump. Correct, right. I mean, Obama, well, how many people did Obama do?

SPEAKER_01 10:42

There are four million, I believe, right? How many Democrats who are now these big open borders advocates, you could find history of them speaking more. I mean, including Joe Biden, including Barack Obama, including some of the they've all spoke about how you have to protect, or you can't have a country unless you have borders. And you and you're gonna have, you know, going back to you, you're talking about health care and everything else, how the costs rise, right? If you just have unbridled immigration, right? And to your point, but that's how the political process works, is they go, oh, how do we rally up people now? Well, we just just change what we're telling them because we don't actually believe anything anyway. What I can say is like I really actually do believe most of the people at office, there's a lot of bad actors, but there's a lot of really good people in office. Yeah, I know some. And and a lot of them don't want, they don't want to take the position, they want to have a better discussion, they don't want the system the way it is, right? But the problem is even those people, when if they're gonna come out and talk about systemic reform and go support systemic reform, they will be the first ones to have their heads chopped off, right? And so it's like a balance of okay, what can I do within the system that exists, right? Knowing that at the end of the day, these are people too, and like they're feeding their family. I mean, yeah, there's some that are just super hyper wealthy and can the the paycheck is just uh I whatever icing on their cake. But for the most part, there's a lot of really good at the federal and state level, you know, especially at state levels. Mostly you're just regular people that that wanted to do good. And maybe they play politics more than than most of us, but they do want to do good.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

They want to do good. Your state governor is gonna be way more in tune with your needs than anybody sitting in Washington ever will. Like ever.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

It's a good idea, you know, and there's it's plausible, but I don't think it's it's a long yeah, it's but um, you know, and and of course, the powers that be, the first thing they want to say is well, that's the fault of the nonpartisan pregnant, right? Because you can have two people elected, that's party agnostic. But that's gonna don't go, trust me. They will use that, whether it ends up being two Republicans or not, I don't think it will be, they will use it as a stalking horse to say, we had this unusual result, therefore let's go back to closed primaries, right? What they won't say is what the reform community would be, I think, universally unified around is say, no, why don't we look up to Alaska and what they did and say, look, maybe we should advance four people to the general election and have a better conversation and have a more diverse conversation and uh have four candidates and utilize something like a ranked choice system to decide the winner in the general and improve upon the top two nonpartisan primary rather than go backwards. But we know it's gonna be folks like us, and we're gonna be fighting against that both sides who want to go back to closed primaries, and we got about one dollar for every 10,000 or 100,000 that they'd have.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Listen, man, I totally get it. Yeah, you know, I don't think a lot of people realize, because a lot of independents and are silent, right, that if you're a vocal independent, you're probably gonna get called a Nazi, a communist. I mean, any word that can be formed as a political assault is going to get flung at you in one form or another. I never thought it was that bad until I started doing a political show, and then I'm like, holy smokes, you know, some of these people in real life, I bet you if I met them at a coffee shop and sat down with them, they probably would not feel this way.

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Well, well, they wouldn't be they wouldn't say it in front of you in front of maybe they actually like spend the time to figure to your point you're talking about earlier when we were talking about while there's more, there's nuance. I I mean I always even my own team gets frustrated. We were on a news website, and you know, everybody's all about just the facts, just the facts, just the facts. And I go, I I don't know, maybe I'm just a lone voice, but I'm always like facts don't mean shit unless you put them within a context in a narrative.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

Yes, yes, one thousand percent.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

You can say something that's a hundred percent factual, but leads people completely to a non-factual conclusion, right? It's where do you put those facts in context? How do you frame the narrative? And that's what the power is. Everybody gets this focus on, oh, I'm gonna do a fact check and all this kind of stuff. None of that means shit unless you're addressing the contextual issues associated with it and the narrative that's been set up to when you apply that fact, right? So we say, Oh, great, yeah, Chad can punch that guy in the face. Well, you're gonna go, well, Chad's an aggressive guy. He goes and he's violent. He goes, Well, you said, well, you step back and say, Well, let's put it in the context. There was this guy that was molesting a little girl on the street, and he pulled out a knife, and then Chad punched him in the face. Well, now you have a totally different perception of Chad, right? So that's my that's my point for the listener and ship within what the hell is he talking about? Is that that's what both parties do, that's what the media does. It's not that they're telling lies, they're aligning facts to fit a narrative. That frankly, why people are so passionately upset on on the different sides because they have different views of the world based on the same facts. Not because they have different facts, it's because they have different context and different narratives.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Well, you know, something that I had learned, my buddy used to work for, I don't know if the company's still around, it was called Spotlight. They were an advertiser. They were, I think that they were a branch of Comcast. I don't know if they were nationwide or not, but he told me, you know, uh God, we were in our 20s, and he goes, You want to know something that I found out really because he did like the tech stuff, right? So if you're if you got a commercial playing and it glitches, he was the guy behind the scenes that fixed it for the next round, you know. And he goes, You want to know why these these news like our uh these news stations can tell you whatever they want to tell you, even if it's a flat ally? He goes, 'Cause they're not registered as news, they're registered as entertainment companies. He goes, so they can give you a very vague and misleading way, and they have no legal consequence to it because they're not they they are not obligated under their classification, to be honest with you.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

Right, right. But they're still media, and so they have a very high bar to prove, you know, um, you know, actual malice, right? So, you know, there's extraordinary protections as media organizations, and then to your point, they're entertainment within that space, so they don't really have an obligation to report the news, so to speak. They can report the narrative, right? And that's what they, you know, and then at the end of the day, and you say, okay, that's malicious and whatever, and then you put on your business hat and go, okay, you're a news organization. Like they're in business at the end of the day, right? They're trying to identify an audience that's going to stick with them and watch through the commercials and be loyal to them, you know. People are more loyal to narratives than they are to facts that they can get anywhere, right?

SPEAKER_00 18:07

Yeah, and that's you know, that leads me into you know the courtroom reality of this, right? You know, you actually took this into the courts, you know. What was the core argument? And this is what everybody's gonna want to know. What did the other side say back to you? Because, you know, I mean, that's that's what you know, that's that's what people really want to know because that's gonna tell them what they actually think of us.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

So the state of the law right now, our core principle, right? If you're gonna boil it down, what's our lawsuit in one sentence? Every voter, regardless of political party, shall have an equally meaningful opportunity to vote at every stage of the public election process, including primary elections. Our belief is that it's very clearly codified and not codified, but it's articulated by a current Supreme Court precedent. In fact, for my Democratic friends, it was the Smith the Alright case and the white known as the white primaries cases out of Texas. It was the Democratic Party, this isn't that long ago, about 70 years ago, did not let black voters participate in their primary election. It was the court that intervened and said primaries are an integral stage of the election process, right? Therefore, the fundamental rights attach. And the 15th Amendment says you have to let African Americans vote in your primary, even though you're a private organization, right? Then you have USV Classic, which articulated the similar standard, right? And then most people who are familiar at all with election law have heard of the one person one vote ruling that and associated with Reynolds v. Sims. Well, that case, that one person, one vote standard wasn't actually developed by Reynolds v. Sims. It was developed in a case called Gravy Sanders. Guess what that case was about? It was about a primary election, right? So that's the basis for our legal strategy, right? Is taking those cases and saying, how can you say a state like New Jersey can literally disenfranchise legally under state law, say you're not allowed to vote because you exercised your First Amendment right, another fundamental right, to not join a political party. That's the First Amendment, one of the rights is right of association. You can join any or any organization you want in America. Well, a corollary of that right, if you have the right to join, you have the right not to join. So just to boil down what the legal principles are, right? The argument by the state, which of course is represented by a secretary of state who is a member of one of the political parties, said if you want to join, if you want to vote a primary election, simply join the party. Simply join a party, right? And so current precedent, because the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in their opinion, agree, said exactly that. If voters are torn between a tough choice of voting and not wanting to join a party, voters should simply join a party. Now that's it was published, it was an unpublished opinion, which means it's supposed to not be cited for precedent. One if you go and you look it up, you can find one judge that that wrote the opinion. There's three judges on the panel. So you can call me a conspiracy theorist, or you can call me, hey, that third circuit, that wasn't an opinion against us. They're putting it up on a T telling us take this to the Supreme Court, right? So I mean, maybe that's just my optimist opinion, right? Now, here's where we stand with that strategy. So we filed CERT to the Supreme Court on that case. Of course, about 0.1% of cases are actually that are filed on CERT get picked up. Took that case again in California, which you might say, well, why would you file in California if you pass nonpartisan primaries? Well, we filed it against the presidential primaries, which were not covered by the nonpartisan primary, and we still have semi-closed presidential primaries in California. So we took that all the way, and we wanted to do it in a clearly democratic state to make sure they knew we weren't picking on one party or the other. That case we all took all the way to the Supreme Court. And guess what? Their opinions against us were on the exact same basis saying voters should simply join a party, right? Simply choose a party, and you can vote in the primary. So now the most recent case was actually brought by a retired attorney on his own who just retired and had a bug up his butt or something, decided, hey, I'm either gonna write a book or I'm gonna do a voting rights lawsuit and find Filed in Florida, right? Same basis, almost the exact same legal arguments and stuff that we made. Filed right to the Supreme Court. So we filed an amicus in support of him. And we filed an amicus brief in favor of that, basically asking the court to pick it up. And let's say in the perspective of marginal victories, the case was picked up for conference, which about 1% of the cases get picked up for conference, right? So it wasn't ultimately picked up to be heard in the Supreme Court, but the judges sat around a table and talked about whether it was right to bring that case to the Supreme Court. So it gives us a sense of optimism that at some point the court will bring up this issue. And I have a hard time believing, however, the court is composed, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, that they're going to issue an opinion that will have lasting precedent that says voters should just join a party if they want to vote. Right, which is which is the difficulty of a case like ours. Courts are naturally, and I think rightfully want to stay out of the political process. Look, that's why you have representatives, that's why you elect these folks, right? Is for them to be making these decisions, and it shouldn't be up to judges to be deciding policy, right? And so that is right. And I mean, I think you can have all these kinds of debates of the living constitution type judges and stuff, and there's a truth is somewhere in between on a lot of this stuff. But the reality is on both sides, they would like the legislatures to be handling these issues, right? Judges want to rule on law, not on policy. And so our point is, and it's been a basis of the complaints that we filed is to say, look, in Florida, for example, and we articulate our anarchists, Florida voters actually voted 57%, 57 to 43 percent to have a nonpartisan primary. Why don't they have it? Because Florida has a 60% threshold, right? So a majority of Floridians actually said they want a nonpartisan primary. They don't have it because there's a 60% constitutional threshold when it comes to initiatives, right? It's that's why this is so complex, right? And then going to a court, that's why Reynolds v. Sims in those cases took so long for the courts to decide because they want to wait as long as possible, and only if they decide they are the only remedy to a problem that is not going to get fixed by the legislature will they entertain entering really the policy and political arena.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

And like when Gary Johnson was running the presidential commission because he was so popular, changed the rules so he couldn't get on stage because he would have ate Donald Trump Hillary Clinton for dinner with statistics.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Right. We filed an amicus brief in the case brought by the late Peter Ackerman. He filed a case against the Commission on Presidential Debates. Here's another issue. Most people would assume that the pretty uh the commission on presidential debates is a public entity that decides to rule it. It's a private nonprofit and it's bipartisan. They say they're nonpartisan, but the our whole argument is they're not non-partisan, they're bipartisan, right? Half of the board members are from the Democratic Party, half are the Republican Party. So guess what? When they saw Ross Perot and and Ralph Nader talk to the American people and get people aware that there's a third option, they wrote rules, the 15% rule, uh, for those of you who have been paying closer attention to say, look, you get to be in the debate if you get 15%, right? Well, that number's not arbitrary. You try getting to get 15% in polls that are conducted by their pollsters where they go, right? So it's they're designed to not let somebody in the debate, right? And that's why we haven't had a third voice in the presidential debate in a long, long time. So you say, why doesn't a third party break through? Well, it's from a national level, top down, they've taught the American people that there's only two options. And so when fun somebody finally does try to break through at the top, the place it would be would be in the presidential debates, right? And they pretty much squashed every opportunity to happen, right? And you go on the local level and stuff. It's just you try to compete against the national narrative and the national money that's organized around winning campaigns.

SPEAKER_00 26:51

It's like impossible.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

To get a group of people together to then agree on something and challenges, it's just almost impossible. It really does take a candidate that has some gravitas to overcome that. And there and there's there's moments when that's happened. You do have some folks that that broke through. I mean, remember Jesse Ventura in Minnesota and Angus King, he caucuses with the Democrats, but he's an independent. Bernie's an independent, right? And there's some folks that have one outside of the two-party system, but why doesn't it break through on a significant level? It's just, I mean, the rules are designed, they're literally designed to prevent competition, and third parties are competition.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

That doesn't happen very often. Well, he when he he announced his run for governor, he said, I'm leaving the Democrat Party. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm like, well, man, that's probably just like a nail in the coffin, right? That's literally what went through my head, and I'm like, that's kind of a bummer. But now he's depending on some polls, he's ahead of both of the the two major parties, some he's behind. It's like this. And I'm sitting there, I'm going, I'm like, Michigan has a really strong, I mean, like, I think over a 50% chance, personal opinion, of electing an independent governor. And that would just, that would literally just shatter the mold in one of the battleground states.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

Yeah, it's just like Jesse Van Drewer did, right? And yes, so especially when you get top of the ticket and you have somebody like that that has they have a resume and experience and name ID, right? They can open can they overcome it, right? He definitely did not, he took the not the pathway of least resistance, right? You got to give him props for that, right? But man, all the hammers are gonna come on down on him, right? He's lost, he's lost the mechanisms of the political party. People don't understand how much money flows through the political party to do voter outreach and voter education and and voter communications. That you just when you run as an independent or a third party, it's not political dollars if we're just communicating with our members. Well, when the Democratic and Republican Party have a substantial slice of the electorate and spend that money, that can have some serious effect, right? They can tell what their members to endorse. Well, if you're a third party that's just trying to start and you have 1% of the electorate, okay, do all the member communication you want. You can't affect the outcome of the election with it, right? So those are things just from an operations level that most people don't understand and are just additional barriers to the ones we already talked about to actually participating. Yeah. They're David and Goliath fights, and Jesse Ventura was a David, and maybe hopefully, hopefully Dude continue a David, right?

SPEAKER_00 29:28

Yeah, I mean to me, this is how I kind of look at it, and I'm not endorsing him. I'm just saying if you can turn Detroit around, which had been going downhill for a long time, it gets in Michigan and can replicate that success. I mean, you could be looking at a possible independent candidate that could actually really make some noise. Where Jesse Ventura kind of struggled was is great ideas, but he was still an extremely opinionated individual. He's very opinionated, which is something to go about independence, right?

SPEAKER_01 29:57

I always say I'm from the independent voter project, right? It's like independence, that's another thing, and and it's it it also makes it more difficult. There's no brand idea. What what is it? Is it independent? Is it Bernie Sanders? Or is it or is it a somebody that's a far right? Is it somebody in the middle? Is it who knows? I get asked that all the time, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:16

Like I got asked the other day there. Well, what is the middle? What's a centrist? What's an independent? What's the phrase that people love to use now? Fence sitter. They go, You're a fence sitter.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

Yeah, you're a fence sitter.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

And I'm like, I'm like, they're like, Well, what's your position? I'll be like, on what issue? Well, what's your position? Yeah, what issue? Yeah, well, you're not telling me who you are, you're a fraud. No, no, I'm asking you, what are you asking me my position on? Because there's a difference between federal and state or how I approach it, because I'm a state's rights guy. I believe a lot more should be done by the state, not the federal government. Personally, almost neither. I mean, I have to really like the main candidate to kind of swing that way or truly believe that if I didn't vote for him looking at that other person, I really know they're gonna bring hell upon my life. You know, so, and I hate even voting like that because it bothers me in principle, you know, like just significantly. And I think it bothers the public, you know. But what can, you know, for someone listening right now, right? Coming from you, somebody especially has a lot of the experience and background you do, and the understanding, like I said before, you know, the nuance, right? What can they do to help push a cause like yours, you know, that you know, maybe doesn't get them out where they go, hey, I want to talk about this. I'm gonna punch you in the face because you're not a Democrat or Republican.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

One is to sit behind, like, one, I think all of us can just if the world's gonna end, it's gonna end. There's not much any of us can do about it. If you, but if you want to be optimistic, that's just take a step back. Okay, what can to your point, what can I do about it? You know, there's organizations like mine, independentvoterproject.org, you can come and check out and get more information. Listen to shows like your show and think about things that like turn off MSNBC and Fox News for a minute because they're not gonna talk about these issues, right? And I'm not even blasting those shows. Uh I'm just saying go learn about how the things actually work. Um, but then look at there's organizations on a local level that you can join. I mean, if there's there's not a reform organization, we're gonna elect reform at every municipality. But you know, there's a there's a lot more today than there were five and ten years ago. One, and then two is just something that can it does more a lot more than people may uh appreciate is calling up your legislator to sending an email in a very nice way saying, hey, I've been thinking about this for a while, you know, this is an issue I think is really important and framing it in the context of why it's good for the legislator or the representative, not that you're the adversary, because I honestly believe I say it all the time when I mean I would say, look, the reason why you have your hands tied half the time is because of the election system. You could be a better representative and do the things you really wanted to do if this election system wasn't tying your hands, right? And so um, you know, even if they can't do anything about it, it's just raising the awareness. And you know, we're at a we're at a stage of reform right now, election reform, that we're still at. Look, we gotta get more people to even know that it's an issue, let alone try to convince them yet.

SPEAKER_00 33:15

Yeah, and you know, I will say I feel like Gen Z, I actually just published an article today on this somewhere. Gen Z, I think is gonna, you know, because you know, as much as I would want to say we're the old people now. Yeah, you know, that you know, we're we're we're in that ballpark, you know, it's uh the 90s are a long time ago. But you know, they they are uh I wouldn't say like necessarily more active, they're a lot more vocal, but they seem to be more willing to go that extra mile and risk it for the biscuit to make change than probably the previous two generations. And I'm not knocking anybody, it's just the vibe I get when I talk to some of the younger.

SPEAKER_01 33:51

You know, I'm up under with with boomer parents, and you know, a lot of us were handed out, and everybody gets a car when they turn 16, and everybody has a chance to buy a house, and everybody right, this generation's facing a very different reality where they're going, Holy shit, by the time I have a job, I'm there's no way I'm gonna be able to buy a house. There's no holy crap, like you know, this system's all rigged against us, and look, like I'm gonna be paying taxes so that I can pay some boomer social security, I'll never even get a penny of it, right? And so I think that's it's a natural consequence that they're going, this system hasn't given me shit, and I'm gonna do something about it.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

Yeah, and I I think it's coming up. I had kind of what really got me learning Gen Z is when Charlie Kirk was assassinated. Obviously, you know, you just start reading everything and all this. And then I there was a poll that came out, I believe it was I don't know if it was Harvard or I forget what university it was, but essentially Gen Z is going to church at like the highest rate per like person of that of their, you know, I forget how they calculated religiously, and it hasn't been that high since the quote unquote greatest generation. And they found that COVID really drove a lot of these younger kids to find a purpose, so they're going back to the church. No, don't get me wrong, it's not like as many people as it was 70 years ago, but that means that okay, that generation is doing it now. When they're having kids, they're gonna give them those values again, which kind of have eroded to a degree.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

They're always gonna have a community you can connect with in real life, you know, as we've gotten more digital and more, you know, people don't have as much interaction. Just the church can provide an important community. Forget the religious aspect of it, right? The social aspect of it is important. And I think that's you know, I think that's a consequence of you know, younger generation trying to find that kind of community and society that's like inherent in being a person. It's like harder to harder to find.

SPEAKER_00 35:53

Yeah, they are when you look at when I was looking at some of the things, you know, you know, you got all these, I'm sure in California, especially compared to Michigan, we call them here like bougie coffee shops, right? Like these, you know, these ones where you go to have a coffee with your buddy, not picking up your morning coffee. Yeah, you know, but they love those, and you go to them and they're full. Now, granted, they do have their phones or whatever, but they're actually leaving the house now and interacting with one another. And I'm, you know, and I'm reading all this, I'm going, well, man, yeah, you know what? I'm like, that is right. I my my 16-year-old, he is one church, he was the head of the youth group, he's doing really well in this one. I've got a seven-year-old who's autistic. You know, he's very obviously big into very big into electronics, but he's I've noticed something that's developed in the last year and a half is where he goes, if the weather's nice, he'll like just he has a medical SBR, this$500 thing, right? He'll just go boop, drop it right on a hardwood floor and dart outside. And I'm like, Well, I'm happy, you just threw that on the floor, man. And but but but there is hope, and where that gives me a hope with things that if they can break that mold, that track to the previous two generations. I don't know. I had I had they had an they bought an ice facility out here somewhere not far from me, and there was a protest group on Facebook, and I'm like, hey, I'm gonna get out and actually talk to some people. You are if you are not against this thing, you are supporting concentration camps, and I'm like, whoa, timeout. I just said we want to talk. I didn't say anything about policy. I said, let's just talk. And I literally like they stopped short in this group of saying we will beat the living daylight. I mean, they didn't, it wouldn't have took much more for one of them to get that. And it's like, folks, remember the policy that you are willing to do something that dumb for is the same politician who will forget you exist when you're locked up.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

That's right. Unfortunately, there's really good people that get so wound up by this narrative that does not reflect reality. It's not what's really happening, it's what they're doing to frame the narrative and to rile you up. And all they're saying is, look, we don't have to do things this way. It can be a lot better.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

Look that stuff up. This is the middle of the road, folks. This is where your opinion can matter more than just you getting drowned out in a Facebook group. Thanks for tuning in, everybody, and have a good day.

SPEAKER_01 38:15

Alright, thank you, Joe.