Rethinking the Way We Pick Candidates

Is the current two-party system actually serving the American people? In this episode of Politics is Personal, Leslie  and Cole experiment with a new format: a "pitch" segment where they challenge each other with bold political ideas.

Cole kicks off the discussion by addressing the rising number of unaffiliated voters across Colorado and the nation. He pitches a significant overhaul to our election process: moving away from partisan primaries toward a more open, non-partisan ballot system. 

Leslie provides a thoughtful counter-perspective, debating the necessity of parties for accountability, the risks of "jungle primaries," and whether term limits might be a more effective path to fixing the disconnect between politicians and their constituents.

What do you think?

Is the party system working, or is it time for a change? We want to hear your take! Join the conversation on Instagram and let us know what issues you want us to tackle next. https://www.instagram.com/politicsispersonal/

Production Credits:
Hosts: Leslie Herod and Cole Wist
Directed & Edited by: Julie Jackson
Videographer: Hallie West
Produced by: Leslie Herod, Cole West, Ian Silveri, and Julie Jackson
Music by: JKK
Recorded at: Colorado Symphony Studio with Truce Media Collective 

To watch a video of this episode please visit https://youtu.be/W-5NInEduvs

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome back to Politics is Personal with Leslie Harrod and Cole West. I'm Leslie Harrod.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

And I'm Cole West.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

And this week we're gonna try something a little bit different. Uh we're gonna do issue segments where you or me get to pitch the other one with an idea, an issue, and at the end we decide if we like it, if we should trash it, or if we're open to more information and conversation. So this week you're gonna kick us off.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Well, you know, Leslie, as you know, I'm an unaffiliated voter, and uh more and more uh Coloradans and more and more Americans are choosing to become not affiliated with either party. And I've seen some statistics this week that the the can the uh uh generic congressional ballot between Democrats and Republicans is tightening. Um but the question is are people because it p it seems like people are shifting away from the Republican Party for this general election, but are they necessarily gravitating to the Democratic Party or are people choosing to disengage from politics? Uh so the question I think uh is is teed up like this. Are we doing right by the American people in the way that we pick candidates because we give so much power to political parties to essentially select the candidates, and then we have this stranglehold duopoly approach to politics, and that is Democrats and Republicans will tell us who the two choices are versus let's give people a lot of different choices. Could be Democrats, could be Republicans, could be unaffiliated, could be affiliated with another party, and then allow them to vote for their top candidate, and then we take the top two in the general election and eliminate partisan primaries. It would eliminate a lot of the I think jockey that goes on within parties. It would also eliminate the problem that I think both parties have, and that is the way that the party select candidates tends to appeal to the more uh shall we say enthusiastic wings of the party. The extremes. I was being I was being nice, okay. So are are we doing right by voters in terms of of having primary elections and and selecting candidates this way?

SPEAKER_00 2:23

So are you so to start, I am a loyal liberal and also a party loyalist. I am a Democrat, I've always been a Democrat. Um, and you know, I think that thinking about this issue, I wonder where the Democratic Party and the Republican Party would stand in that conversation. Because as someone who's formally served, we serve as Democrats. We have a two-party system that is the way this country is set up. And so I don't really understand how you can divorce a two-party system from the way that we do the elections and elect the actual candidates. So would they actually be Democrats or Republicans running in independence and then kind of shift and decide what their parties are when they're in office? And what does that look like for accountability? So what is the alternative to how we're doing primaries now?

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Yeah, I don't have any problem with someone disclosing their party affiliation on a ballot. So you'd have maybe 10 Democrats, 10 Republicans, they're all listed on a site.

SPEAKER_00 3:17

But the parties wouldn't pick.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

But the but the parties wouldn't pick. So you you'd have some kind of a system that's uniform for candidates across the political spectrum in terms of how you qualify for the ballot. And I'm not sure if that would be petitions. That would be probably the most logical way to do it because you wouldn't have nominating assemblies. But then candidates could choose to disclose party affiliation on a ballot, could choose to say that they're unaffiliated or independent, and then let the voters decide. And I think what will happen as a result of that is you know you're gonna have candidates that tend to be more moderate, maybe center right, center left, who are gonna be the ones that are that are gonna come through that. I I just wanted to take you issue with one thing you said a little bit a little bit ago, and you said that when you served, you served as a Democrat.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Yeah. Yeah, and we we added to the majority, and we had the majority, and we were appointed to chairmanships and all of that based on our majority.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

But I never viewed, uh, and maybe this makes me an exception, but when I served and I did serve in leadership in the state house as assistant minority leader, I never viewed myself as serving as a Republican. I viewed myself as serving the voters and the constituents in my district, whether or not they voted for me. And my first primary loyalty, my first primary loyalty were was to the constituents and to the state and to the state's constitution, which you know we all swore an oath to uphold on the first day of session. Um I think George Washington warned us about what political parties could do to our system, and that is that people would start to view their loyalties to their parties being supreme over loyalties to the overall public good.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

Well, I mean I I think that might be true, and I also would add that you serve in the minority, and so I think that is very different. Um, you know, we caucused often, um, you know, I caucus with the the Democratic majority, I caucus with the black caucus, and I also caucus with the queer caucus. And those caucuses meant power, right? And so as a way of moving forward, we elected the speaker, we got a certain number of bills. You were one of those ones that often crossed aisles, but many times that doesn't happen. Um, and there is a reason why we run with letters behind our name. But I want to go back to the alternative. And so you're not proposing ranked choice voting, though, are you? No, I'm not. I mean that was proposed.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

So I I and frankly, I think the reason it didn't pass, it was terribly worded, it was very confusing, and you know, and I think asking voters to rank four or five candidates, they may not even know the very much information about the five candidates. They may only know, you know, I I really like this person or I really dislike this person, which is what I think, you know, and I we've heard this expression jungle primary.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Yeah, that's California.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah, and and I, you know, frankly, I think we've seen how that's worked in California in the gubernatorial primary. In a state that that Republicans should basically, if you look at the voter registration and the voting patterns over the last several presidential elections, the Republicans should have no shot of getting a candidate to the general election in a jungle primary, and yet they did, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:39

You know, I think that you mentioned George Washington, and something that I took back from my studies of learning was really that the reason why the system was set up this way was to avoid civil war and to avoid um multi-party systems that in other countries do lead to more civil wars, right? And so for me, I've kind of held on to that saying, like, I don't always like the party, I don't always listen to my party, you know, and uh and I like to move my party. Um, but I do like the system in the way that it's set up so that we can make sure that we are thinking about um the worst case scenario, which would be another civil war, which it's working, we haven't had one, right? But my I guess my final question before I give you my verdict.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

I have a couple more questions for you.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

Okay, okay, okay, okay. I like it. Um is uh is this just an attempt to keep the far left from gaining too much power?

SPEAKER_01 7:31

No, I I think it's it's looking at the reality here, and I'm looking primarily at younger people, okay? Um, and we have young people choosing not to affiliate with either party. Yeah. And I guess my question for you, Leslie, is what does that say? Uh why are young people not choosing to affiliate with a party? I affiliated with a party when I was 18 when I first first registered to vote. I'm assuming you did as well. Yes, yes, yes. But young people aren't making that same decision. And I think it could be that they look at both parties and say, I kind of think I like maybe your economic platform, uh, I like your social values platform, and I'd rather not affiliate with either party because I don't see any advantage to me. So uh why is this such a threat to the political parties? And why, in the face of overwhelming voter voters voting with their feet, moving to unaffiliated, should we continue to allow two parties who are are less representative of the American people than they've ever been controlling who has access to the ballot and who's on the ballot?

SPEAKER_00 8:38

I think I think you're getting to what the underlying problem is, and then that is really that people feel and I don't want to speak for young people because apparently I'm not anymore.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

You're young in my view, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Um but I feel like young people are affiliating less because they don't see either party doing enough for them. Right. I mean, they are not being able to find housing, um, jobs, job market is is scarce, you know, they're not able to thrive in the way that they were promised. And I think that that also leads to them saying, I'm not gonna pick a party. I'm gonna I'm gonna if if I vote, I'm voting for a person, you know, I'm or voting for what I truly believe in and see in this person. Uh and that's how I think we both ran our races, right? We were the person, not necessarily not the party. I mean, my my election was gonna be a democratic win anyways, regardless. And it was in the primary that we really distinguished ourselves. And so I understand what the underlying problem is, which is people are feeling disaffected and disaffected, right, by the work of politicians and think that politicians is such a dirty word now that they don't identify with anybody. And I think that is the issue that we're really trying to solve. Is open primaries or well, actually that's my question. I feel like open primaries, what we're doing in Colorado is very close to what you're already saying. So are we already there here? We're just calling it something different.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

Well, we're not doing it because we still are allowing parties through their caucuses and their assemblies to pick candidates who get to go on the ballot. To get to who get to go on the ballot. And then that shapes, then we have this, you know, very siloed structure. You can either play over here on the Democratic side, you can play over here on the Republican side, but I couldn't pick maybe a Republican for uh attorney general and a Democrat for uh for governor. And I think that's the kind of thing that I think voters increasingly are gonna be asking for. Um, and I think that the political parties are really smart, they're gonna look at the changing demographics and say, how can we be responsive? And they also, I think, should learn why people are doing this. And I think you hit on this a little bit. I think people are very frustrated that that politicians aren't working together for the public good, but also when they see politicians working to serve the interests of their party and not working to serve the interests of their constituents and the state and the country in which they serve, that's where uh there's an increasing disconnect.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Um I And I see the party as the glue. It's the glue that holds the people together. It's not necessarily the people can't act independently, and I think we see that all the time. Um and so I so that's where I think there's a little bit of distinguishing. And you know, I still identify with my party because I feel like I have had party support. Um but there are times that I've had to step away and I've been called, you know, maybe less of a Democrat or less of a liberal than I than than I believe I am because of certain votes or because of my life experience. But again, I think that I think that we need to move the parties, and we're not doing that in a way that is effective and that identifies with the majority of Americans. And at the end of the day, to me, that's what keeps us together. And we do have too much political strife right now where no one trusts anybody, no one identifies with anybody, and it's all about corruption. And I can't tell you, when I was serving, and even when I served as an intern, I never thought of Colorado as a corrupt state. The term corruption has been brought up a lot now and across the country. And so for me, I think one of the steps to make sure that we are actually moving parties and identifying with the voters is having term limits. I think the problem is without term limits, we have these folks who are then at the top of the parties who maybe have been serving for 30 or 40 years, um, who are not moving, right? And there's no chance for new leadership, new blood to come up and say this is what the party needs to look like today. And so I lean in more on term limits um than redoing the entire system. But I think I'm ready for my verdict.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

So let me just tie this up with a bow for you. Okay. Okay. And that is my proposal wouldn't do anything to the political parties. Political parties would still exist. I I agree with you that people should be able to uh, you know, organize with other people that think like they do and try to advance, you know, those those interests. But my proposal doesn't change any of that. The parties still exist, people still affiliate with parties. We're just talking about making the ballot uh essentially merge and having you know candidates from both parties on one ballot and letting people decide uh based on all of that uh who who they who they want to vote for. You ready? Yeah, ready.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

All right, so you know I'm not new to this issue. I've definitely been watching what's been happening in California and other places, and what I do think I've moved on substantially is the fact that we should explore other ways to elect our candidates. Um I'm not sure if jungle primary is the right way to go or jungle races are the way to go. I don't know. I don't even like that term very much. Yeah, right. Um, but I don't know if that's it. I know that it's not ranked choice, um, but I'm open to other ideas. And so for now, I'm gonna keep it on the table and I hope that we can have more conversations about it.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I I think as more people, as we as we try to keep people engaged with politics, it's very important that we have these kinds of discussions to make sure that people keep voting.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:43

That's the most important thing.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, thanks everyone for listening. Uh, let us know what you think about our issue segments and if there's any issues that you think that Cole and I should tackle. Thank you so much for listening. This episode of Politics is Personal, hosted by Leslie Harrod and Cole Whist, and was directed and edited by Julie Jackson with videographer Holly West, and produced by Leslie Harrod, Cole Whist, Ian Soleri, and Julie Jackson. Music by JKK. And follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and any site where you get your podcast. At Politics is Personal with Leslie and Cole. Recorded at the Colorado Symphony Studio with Truth Media Collective. All rights reserved.