Can Competition Foster Better Government? Business Leader & Author Katherine Gehl on 2024 Ballots & Beyond

Opening

Katherine Gehl (Guest): I’ve always asked myself, what do I need to do in order to change the political situation?

Robert Pease (Host): Katherine Gehl has been doing quite a bit to change our political situation. Voters in as many as 4 states this year may have the chance to pass her Final Five voting system as a ballot measure in 2024, as Alaska did in the year 2020. But getting to this pivotal point has been years in the making.

Katherine Gehl: So if at first I needed to sell my business, yes, then I needed to fundraise, yes, then I needed to make an intellectual case for competition lens of politics, the politics industry theory, 

Robert Pease: That case was first publicly made in a Harvard Business Review article co-authored with renowned strategist Michael Porter and soon after developed into a book The Politics INdustry which energized reform teams in multiple states throughout the country. 

Katherine Gehl: And then I needed to try to sell this reform to people and then I needed to found a campaign, et cetera. It just went like that.

Robert Pease: Final four or five voting is the combination of an open unified primary with a ranked choice voting or instant runoff general election as occurred in the Alaska election of 2022. It’s intended to shift the priorities of our elected representatives away from their next primary campaign and toward a competitive general election based on policies for the many not performance for the few

Katherine Gehl: Primary wasn’t a verb anymore in Alaska, you can’t primary anyone. That attack doesn’t exist. It was all gone, and no one even knew it was gone.

Robert Pease: A conversation in three parts this episode with Katherine Gehl, a former Food company CEO. Her institute for political innovation and action fund operate like a venture capital incubator for electoral entrepreneurs in states red, blue and purple. In Part One we discuss the outlook for these 2024 state ballot initiatives. 

Katherine Gehl: This year is super exciting. We are poised to have four states on the ballot in 2024 November.

Robert Pease: Part Two. the years of effort that have led to this 2024 inflection point, with Final Five Voting on the cusp of becoming a national movement

Katherine Gehl: Over the time that I’ve been working on this, again going all the way back to 2013, but really trying to raise money actively since 2015, the reception has changed dramatically.

Robert Pease: And part three: why this innovation is not simply about who gets elected

Katherine Gehl: Here’s why I love Final Five voting, because it is a political innovation that is designed not to necessarily change who wins elections, but to change what the winners do when they’re doing their jobs in Washington DC or in the state capitol..

Robert Pease: I’m Robert Pease and This is the Purple Principle a podcast on the perils of polarization focusing this season on efforts to depolarize our politics. If you’ve been listening this season you’ve heard Eric Bronner describe the epiphany he derived from Katherine & Michael Porter’s book, The Politics Industry. 

Eric Bronner (Previous Guest): But, um, but the research was so compelling, Rob, and really the solutions they proposed were so compelling to me. I was, I was desperate to get involved and be a part of making things better.

Robert Pease: That inspired Eric to co-found Veterans for All Voters working on election reform efforts nationwide. You’ve also heard Charlie Sykes discuss the challenges of effectively communicating Final Five voting reforms in our post-truth ecosystem: 

Charlie Sykes (Previous Guest): Yes, it is. In terms of actually changing the political dynamics, it would make a huge difference. But at the same time, it’s not exactly sexy. Yes. It’s not exactly the kind of thing that is easily explained, and it’s the kind of thing that is easily demagogued. 

Robert Pease: But it’s been over three years since we’ve heard directly from Katherine Gehl. So to kick off our series on election reforms, let’s turn away from the Presidential race, the Trump trials, and all the polarizing clickbait for a few important minutes to focus on the state reforms this 2024 election cycle that could have national ramifications for decades to come…

Interview Part One

Katherine Gehl: Oh, since we talked three years ago, we have made so much progress, which is to say we’ve doubled the number of states that have passed through ballot initiative, final Four or Final Five election initiatives. We had Alaska as of 2020, and then we had Nevada pass this in 2022, and they passed it by seven points, which was a greater margin than any of their candidate races. And then of course, as I believe we’ll discuss, we are on track to be on the ballot in four states with Final four elections or final five elections this fall, November. And the citizens of all those states will get to decide if this is how they would like to hire the people who represent them.

Robert Pease: What are your initial reactions to Nevada being state number two, Alaska has kind of a unique political culture. Were you concerned at all? What are your first impressions of Nevada as a candidate for Final four voting?

Katherine Gehl: So my first impressions of Nevada as a candidate for Final Five elections were, yes! And that might sound sort of naive, but here’s what I’ll say. We, at that point, the small number of people really wanted to see this move forward, we didn’t have the ability to take a spreadsheet and put all the states on it and look at all these different factors and have 20 good opportunities, and then get to pick whatever we wanted. And you had a state where the people in the state wanted to bring this to their state, and our job was to say, yes, we support you. I put my vote or my investment, my, I cheer on, I help, 

Katherine Gehl: I support states where there is leadership in the state that wants to make it happen. That’s who I count on. 

Robert Pease: Is Idaho the next state that initiates a serious signature gathering effort?

Katherine Gehl: So I actually thought that Arizona was going to be the next state likely to have a Final Five election valid nation in 24 because they had a super motivated group of leaders, and they contacted me very early and they were very politically sophisticated. So I was very bullish there. I spent lots of time there. And then ultimately, it’s like I say, there’s a funnel and then you drop off when it becomes clear that it’s not a good investment. I mean, you need to make a rational decision. So they’re moving forward with a different type of reform right now, which I will certainly be rooting for. Idaho got their signature gathering started next

Katherine Gehl: Because as I mentioned, they are doing this all volunteer. So we knew pretty early on that they were going to go to the ballot. They have a good track record, the people working on it there for signatures. So we knew early on. And then we were also looking at New York City for ‘24, which ultimately is moved. We were looking at Massachusetts for ‘24, which has moved to ‘26. Y’know so there’s just lots of things we’re looking at. And ultimately it comes down to four still in the pipeline for ‘24. And we simply won’t know until the deadlines are final in these states what’s on the ballot. And even after that, you won’t really know where you’re competing because if you don’t have a path to victory, you won’t continue investing dollars there. 

Katherine Gehl: And then we’ve got two states left in the pipeline that still may go, and I hope they go, and that is Montana and Colorado and Colorado’s going to be the last to know. I think it’s totally appropriate that the people running these campaigns look with a critical eye at every stage, at every new stage as kind of a “go no go” decision. And if they continue to have a path to victory, they should go, even if it’s risky, even if it’s not 100%. But if they get to the point where they 100% don’t have a path to victory, then you shouldn’t. There’s no need to be a martyr for these causes, and it would certainly hurt us to lose too many places. 

Robert Pease: Well, let turn’s then to the effort in Idaho then, led by Jim Jones, the former Attorney General and State Supreme Court Chief Justice

Jim Jones (Guest): I guess you might say I’m a political activist. I’ve got organizations that I work with to try to moderate the Republican Party, to pass ballot initiatives that the legislature refuses to deal with.

Robert Pease: So how important is it to have someone with the experience and stature of Jim Jones involved in this Idaho effort? 

Katherine Gehl: I can’t overemphasize how critical it is that Jim Jones is the face of this campaign and has dedicated so much of his personal time and reputation and network to making this happen. There’s no substitute for successful, respected leaders in the state who are associated with the party in that state, if it’s a red or blue state, to be making the case to the voters there that this is a good thing. That can’t come from outside the state resources. It can’t come from people who have not been successful in their current system. It needs to come from people who have already delivered value for that state like Jim Jones has. And who says, and this is a better way forward. He’s critical.

Robert Pease: Another important leader is Luke Mayville, co founder of the grassroots movement, Reclaim Idaho. 

Luke Mayville: Many of us for years have been working on one bad policy at a time, trying to fix it, one injustice at a time, trying to address it. 

Robert Pease: How would you describe Luke and reclaim Idaho and their track record of organizing and passing Medicaid expansion among other initiatives?

Katherine Gehl: Luke Mayville is another Idaho treasure, an enormously talented guy who could be having quite the career in academics who decided to return to his home state in order to work on this kind of political systemic change both on issues and then the structural final four elections that he’s doing now. He is tireless. He is brilliant. You just have to read his academic work, a book he wrote on John Adams to know about his brilliance. And the combination of someone like Luke with Jim Jones is a bit of the dream that you could put that together. What I will say excited me initially when I became familiar with what the Idaho effort was, was the fact that Luke Mayville, who was one of the founders of Reclaim Idaho, had this incredible track record of delivering on ballot initiatives or delivering on the pressure that can be created by the possibility of a ballot initiative to make policy change in your state.

Katherine Gehl: The idea that he planned with his collaborators, he works in a totally bipartisan fashion, he’s an independent that they planned to collect all these signatures using volunteers. It couldn’t be more exciting than that because in so many states, the collection of signatures for the ballot initiative has just turned into how much money does it take to hire these people who barely know what they’re working for, to stand outside the supermarket to get signatures. Whereas this was a true grassroots effort in Idaho, which is the complete spirit of the ballot initiative. 

Robert Pease: Okay. So we were talking about the bottom up effort in Idaho in Colorado, you have someone of incredible stature and resources. In Kent Thiry, it seems on the face of it more of a top-down effort. And there’s some possibility, we haven’t even interviewed Kent Thiry, but there are articles mentioning that he’s also interested in running for governor at some point. If that is the case, does it complicate the effort?

Katherine Gehl: One of the things we’ve been repeatedly discussing in this conversation is the question as to whether a certain factor in a state is going to complicate this. Is this make it harder? Does this make it easier? Every state is going to have a set of circumstances that line up to deliver headwinds or tailwinds to the effort. And there’s no state where there aren’t going to be headwinds that are pushing against adoption. So if in Colorado people say, oh, because Ken Thiry is involved and he’s been rumored to be a gubernatorial candidate, maybe that’s bad. That can be totally, in my view, mitigated by the pros of the fact that you have someone of Kent Thiry’s stature and engagement in the political realm and experience in passing ballot initiatives. So it nets out that it’s a pro and everybody who’s looking for a reason why this is not perfect, that’s just how life works.

Robert Pease: Well, we have talked to people at some of these state level efforts who want to get to Final Five voting, and they just don’t think they can do it in one ballot measure.

Katherine Gehl: I could be wrong for sure that going in steps is not advisable, which is what I think, but people who know their states are the ones who definitely should make that decision is their state. But I would recommend that collectively as a movement that we focus on states where it wouldn’t be iterative where we go for it right now. I think if we got Final Five, the whole enchilada in other states, and then they saw the results that maybe you could return to those states in a few years and it would be a different story about whether they could get that done in the more gold standard way. Here’s how I put it.

Katherine Gehl: Sometime ago, actually, it was when I still did Rank Choice voting on its own before I realized it was not sufficient, and I was involved in helping Maine pass that, and I was talking to some other reformers who didn’t want to be involved in Maine or put any money there because it looked like it was going to be really hard to win. And I said to the guy at that time, I want to leave his name out of it. I’ll just call him Sam. Sam, why the only thing you seem to be willing to do is to play games that you know can win. You need to play games worth losing. I think the games you’re playing, even if you win them, they won’t change anything. So how about you play a game that, yeah, you might lose. It’s not for sure you’ll win, but if you were to win it, it would change results. For real people in our democracy, that’s a game worth losing. And therefore I also think it’s the only game worth winning and the only game worth playing, and it is just a different perspective.

Midroll

Robert Pease: We’re speaking with Katherine Gehl , co-author of the Politics Industry and founder of The Institute for Political Innovation. In three years since we last had Katherine on the show, she and her team have moved from proving the concept of Final Five Voting to advising and fundraising for multiple state level election reforms. That includes the state of Idaho where we spoke with the reform leader and former GOP Attorney General Jim Jones about challenges faced there, including from the current Attorney General. 

Jim Jones (08:22): Well, early on before we had the language for the ballot measure, the Attorney General did a review and it was very unhelpful. And that’s something that would go on the ballot in November when people are deciding what they want to do. So we had to file a suit. It set us back a couple of months. We got the Idaho Supreme Court to agree to make the Attorney General change the language that people will see. 

Robert Pease: That was just one of several roadblocks erected by the sitting government against the ballot initiative. 

Jim Jones: And of course there’s been several bills introduced in the legislature to try to impede our effort, but none of them were able to get through the legislative process. So it’s been a tough drive. 

Robert Pease: Luke Mayville of Reclaim Idaho has led that drive resulting in over 90 thousands signatures submitted in a state of less than 900 hundred thousand registered voters. 

Luke Mayville: You go out to communities and host public events, and what you find is an opposition forms that isn’t really willing to have the real debate about the pros and cons, the trade-offs.

Robert Pease: Part of that challenge has been combatting the misinformation spun around these reforms including that they’re too complex for voters or that they’re secretly partisan in nature.

Luke Mayville: Oftentimes it just turns into a nonstop battle, a nonstop information battle, just clearing away the misinformation and getting out the truth. But I suppose that’s politics. 

Robert Pease: We’ll learn more about the politics of that Idaho effort in our next episode. But let’s not loose track of the fact that Idaho is one of 4 states that could pass Katherine Geh’s Final electoral reforms this year. That in turn could liberate 8 US Senators and a few dozen US House members from party run primary battles and potentially break political gridlock on immigration, gun violence, the deficit, climate change and other issues. 

Robert Pease: We wondered then about the very early days of Katherine’s efforts, such as her first attempts to raise some serious money for serious electoral reform. Was she successful right out of the gate a decade ago in presenting her non partisan, commonsense solutions to polarization and gridlock? Well, it turns out, not really. 

Interview Part Two

Katherine Gehl: So composite meeting, I’m in New York, I’m talking to a billionaire, CEO businessman. I mean, they were basically men. And we have a long conversation that is going so well because what, at least in my view, what I’m saying is really resonating with this person and they kind of love it. And my 15 minute meeting is now an hour and a half, and in my mind I’m thinking, oh, I really need to ask this person for $5 million dollars, not 1 million as I was planning because this going gangbusters. But before I can get the ask out of my mouth, the person says to me, Catherine, this is awesome. Count me in for 25K.

Katherine Gehl: And I was like, wow, that is not the scale of anything that’s going to solve this problem. And I definitely didn’t sell the person on how this would make a difference. And I decided, you know what? I need to write a prospectus, a thesis for investment to describe the ROI, the return on investment of making changes in the political system that make sense to these investors because they just didn’t see it.

Katherine Gehl: They thought it was a good cause, but not a rational cause. And that’s when I went back to Michael Porter from Harvard Business School and said, Hey, I want to write this ROI using the five forces, and I’d like you to co-author it with me because I am not famous for the five forces. In fact, I’m not famous at all and it will really be of help if you could come on board. 

Katherine Gehl: And at the time I thought that would be enough of a contribution. 

Katherine Gehl: So I used to hand out at Harvard Business School, let’s say we would make a presentation to 700 people at an alumni event. And then I had people at the back of the room holding little photocopied sheets of, if you are interested, contact this organization for this thing and this organization for that. And here’s the grade I would give myself for action resulting from their interest.

Katherine Gehl: I mean, F there was too much friction. They didn’t call these people or get involved. So then I realized, oh, I need to get these reform organizations to take on what at that point was Final four elections as a priority. And then they didn’t do that. I mean, they weren’t interested because they already had a suite of reforms that they and their donors were invested in. 

Katherine Gehl: So that was why I had to found an organization because even though maybe they would’ve done a little of it, they weren’t going to prioritize it and sell it as fundamentally different than any of these other efforts.

Katherine Gehl: And yet there I was and I said, it’s white space. I have to do it because we have to be Final Five elections or nothing. And so I did, and it was always for me, meant to be a catalyst organization, which is say, I didn’t found this nonprofit so it could go on and on for decades and we would work on this issue. And then the next issue and the next issue, I founded this to catalyze demand for Final five elections. And that’s why, for example, I’m so excited that in this year of 2024, the demand has been created.

Katherine Gehl: We are hopefully on the ballot in four more states this year. There are multiple states that have campaigns for 26 plus New York City, plus our legislative campaigns like in Wisconsin, it’s there. And that’s what we meant to do. 

Robert Pease: So you had mentioned going back seven years or so when you first went to New York, you were trying to raise money. You thought people were on board, people with a lot of resources who would spend potentially millions on races, only interested in about thousands for your effort, has that changed? Have you been able to go back to some of those people and say, Alaska, Nevada, four states looking at it this year, are you ready to support us?

Katherine Gehl: Over the time that I’ve been working on this, again going all the way back to 2013, but really trying to raise money actively since 2015, the reception has changed dramatically. And that is gratifying. So people that initially didn’t want to invest because they didn’t think it was achievable, well, they can now see that we’re two for two: Alaska, Nevada. People who didn’t want to invest initially because they didn’t really understand that what this could do have now had all the experience of these seven years to become so much more familiar with the problems that were hidden from them seven years ago,

Katherine Gehl: And so they’ve now had this whole experience and things have arguably gotten much worse. The public has gotten much more dissatisfied. And so that’s changed their reception to Final Five voting because, well, let me say it another way. Now people know it’s achievable because we’re two for two. Now they understand the drivers of the dysfunction more from personal experience and the way that the media has been covering politics has really unconcealed the problem of party primaries and the problem of so little competition. And then they also now, given that they understand the problem better, can see how Final five elections would change those incentives. So they understand the solution better, they understand the problem more, and they believe we can make it happen. Put those things together and yes, absolutely easier to raise money. It’s not super easy. It’s not as easy as I wish it were and think it should be, but that’s just the task. That is the task in front of us is to earn that investment with the arguments that we make.

Midroll

Robert Pease: Katherine Gehl of the Institute for Political Innovation is our featured guest this episode, kicking off our election reform series. She and her team are two for two in having passed Final Four Voting in Alaska in 2020 and the first of two steps for Final Four in Nevada in 2022. Can they possibly go 4 or 5 for 6 in the 2024 election cycle? Again, that could break congressional gridlock on a number of major issues in Washington as well as state capitals. But don’t take my word on that. Let’s hear from two pragmatic US House members on the challenges of getting important things done in Congress.

Robert Pease: On the Republican side, former 3-term Texas House member Will Hurd who represented the largest border district in the country. 

Will Hurd (Guest): But things don’t get done because both sides would rather to use some of these issues as a political bludgeon against each other, rather than ultimately solve the problem. And that is a problem with how our, our elections are, are devised when 92% of seats are decided in a primary, those elected officials are only talking to that primary voter

Robert Pease: On the Democratic side, but very much from the center

Mary Peltola (Previous Guest): I’m a member of the Western caucus, which right now is 106 Republicans and me. 

Robert Pease: Alaska’s at-large representative, Mary Peltola, one only two US Congress members elected through a final four or five voting ballot, so far.

Mary Peltola: You know, systemically, I think getting away from these closed party primaries, because then every Republican is trying to out Republican each other. Every Democrat is trying to out Democrat each other, and it’s it, and then you are left with two extremes, you know, I think that we have record low voter turnout for a reason, because people don’t want to listen to this kind of bickering. 

Robert Pease: Final Five Voting neutralizes polarizing primaries with a unified open primary followed by ranked choice general election. But to push Final Five Voting over the finish line in these states, Katherine Gehl and the grassroots leaders in each of these states need to build broad cross partisan coalitions, never an easy thing but perhaps especially difficult in Presidential election cycles. And that’s why she emphasizes not on who gets elected through Final Five but on how those elected choose to govern.. 

Interview Part Three

Katherine Gehl: Here’s why I love Final Five voting, because it is a political innovation that is designed not to necessarily change who wins elections, but to change what the winners do when they’re doing their jobs in Washington DC or in the state capitol, which is to say, is there primary focus and motivation, or at least is it a very high priority for them to work on solving real problems for real people in a sustainable way? Or as now is there purpose to have a performative politics? Okay, so that’s the question that we need to ask ourselves. And Final five answers that challenge by creating an election system that changes the incentives for the action while people are doing their jobs. 

Katherine Gehl: So think of it this way right now, in 85 or 90% of cases, the US House members are elected in the summer in party primaries where only a tiny proportion of voters turn out that’s who hires them. And those therefore are the hiring managers and these hiring managers on the right. And these hiring managers on the left are about 8% of the public, electing about 90% of the legislature. And you think they can’t be more different right from the right and the left. But they’re actually virtually identical in one particularly wildly consequential way, which is to say that these two sides are motivated by negative partisanship.

Katherine Gehl: That means they’re motivated more by their animosity to the one other side than they are by their adherence to a certain party platform and policy issues when these are the people that hire, and these are the people that fire, that’s who those elected have to listen to. What Final Five Voting does is make sure that no one gets hired until November voters turn out, and that no one gets hired without a majority of November voters, and that no one gets hired without real competition to be hired.

Katherine Gehl: And it also changes what the winners do because when you’re hired by a majority of November voters, you have a great deal of agency things that would get you fired if you’re hired in a summer by 8% of people, which is to say negotiating, finding a consensus way forward, voting yes on a deal for immigration or for debt deficit reduction where nobody gets everything they want. Those things would make you lose in the current hiring system, but they are paths to victory when you’re hired by November voters. And that’s the way to change the system, is just to change who hires and to make sure there’s competition for those jobs.

Robert Pease: Well, it’s very early in the amount of data or anecdotal evidence from Alaska, but they have had most of a legislative session having been elected under Final Four and facing reelection under Final Four. What have you heard from people in Alaska about the incentives within the legislature so far?

Katherine Gehl: The news from the people in Alaska’s legislature whom I talk to is really good, which is that they say that this election system Final Four Elections has changed what they do in their jobs and has changed what their colleagues do. 

Katherine Gehl: At the beginning of their session when they formed this Bipartisan Majority Coalition, they were able to agree on three top priorities, and they’ve been successful at moving those through the legislature. They have bipartisan leadership, they share the leadership control. They certainly had the exact opposite experience of what the US House had when they were choosing leadership of their chamber.

Robert Pease: So there is a repeal effort in Alaska. It’s an unpredictable state if it is for some reason successful, the repeal. But other states, Nevada, Idaho, other states have success this year on balance. How do you come out in that scenario? How does the reform movement stand if that first relatively inspiring case is repealed?

Katherine Gehl: Any setback is a setback. 

Katherine Gehl: Having said that, if it were to be repealed in Alaska, if the repeal was successful, but we still won in other states, then the experiment of Final Four and Final Five voting lives on and is ultimately the results of the experiment in governing that is going to determine whether we expand or not. So as long as there are states active in the experiment, we’ll be able to keep going. Even if Alaska would be repealed, it would be sad and devastating and not helpful for Alaskans. I wouldn’t be surprised if they came back again and changed it. That’s the way change happens sometimes in democracies. 

Katherine Gehl: And I haven’t found a better way to hire in America under the rules that we already have in our constitution than this construct of open single ballot primaries plus top four, top five general election. So I think we’ll go this way because we won’t as Americans be satisfied with the kind of results we’re getting now. And if it gets proven in small ways in just a couple states, people do not look at something better. As hard as change is, people don’t look at something better and say, yeah, yeah, I get it, but no thanks, I’m going to stick with what I have. That’s not the kind of response our current system gets that, yeah, I think we’ll just stay with this because there’s so much dissatisfaction. 

Katherine Gehl: So right now we have to really push, if these states start to get great results, then we’ll see the benefits of competition. Because states are always in competition with each other. They’re competing for investment, they’re competing for jobs, they’re competing for tourism, they’re competing for their own advancement and economic prosperity, et cetera, as a state. And once it becomes clear that this competitive advantage being governed this way, then other states will want to do it. There will be a pull, not a push.

Closing

Robert Pease: Is 2024 the year Final Five Voting is pulled by voters onto the national stage, with as many as four states passing ballots this election, and more coming on line for 2026? Will that in turn add momentum for legislative reform efforts in states like Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania? Stay tuned here as we meet the grassroots leaders in each of the 2024 state efforts and circle back with Katherine Gehl and other changemakers on the prospects for Final Five voting and other election reforms. 

Robert Pease: In our next episode we’ll travel to Idaho to meet with Jim Jones, former GOP Attorney General and a conservative state supreme court chief justice who believes the open primaries plus final four voting effort would dramatically improve the quality of Idaho governance: 

Jim Jones: You know, I think back to what caused there to be, a faction problem in the Republican Party. And it probably dates back to the fight over the, closing of the primary. And, of course, that’s gotten, to the point that we now have a Republican Civil War. And the people who are traditional Republicans are supporting the initiative.

Robert Pease: We hope you’ll join us for this extended series running through the November election, share us on social media and check out our Youtube page for video highlights of our interview with Katherine Gehl and other featured guests. The Purple Principle is created by a talented team of audio reformers: Kevin A. Kline, Sr. Audio Engineer, Alex Couraud, Associate Producer, Trevor Prophet Digital Ops & Strategy; Mary Claire Kogler, Video Production; and Sarah Kim, fact checking & research. 

Robert Pease: The Purple Principle is a Fluent Knowledge Production. Original music by Ryan Adair Rooney.