The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy from the Fringes

Praise for

THE PRIMARY SOLUTION

America’s political problem is not a lack of talent; it is a corrupted system that incentivizes extremism while punishing the compromise essential to democracy. Nick Troiano’s sobering but brilliant analysis of our political primaries nails the problem and offers realistic solutions.

—Stanley McChrystal, General, U.S. Army (Retired); Chairman & CEO, McChrystal Group

Unique insight and thoughtful analysis into our elections.

—U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana)

The one book every American should read first this year. Nick Troiano makes a compelling argument that reforming primaries is the most viable of the many possible solutions to our dysfunctional political system. Buy this book, read it, and then immediately give it to a friend!

—U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado)

If you feel frustrated by gridlock, exhausted by extremism, or just want the yelling match to end—read this book, now! Excellent, readable, and important, it’s a guide to why politics went so wrong, and how to put it right.

—Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Smart, convincing, and practical.

—Andrew Yang, Founder, Forward Party

"Nick Troiano is an activist and patriot, and The Primary Solution makes one of the best structural arguments I’ve read…. Reformers interested in fighting extremism have a great new road map with this book."

—Reid Hoffman, Cofounder, LinkedIn and Inflection AI

With the precision of an exceptional political player, Troiano offers meaningful, measurable solutions that will have a positive impact on every voter in every community.

—Dr. Frank Luntz, Pollster; Washington Post Crystal Ball Award winner

Thoughtfully researched, elegantly argued, and delightfully written.

—Lee Drutman, Senior Fellow, New America

A tour de force that synthesizes political strategy, scholarly research, and philanthropic vision to chart a course for policy change to reduce extremism.

—Christian Grose, Professor of Political Science, University of Southern California

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To Doug Bailey & Jake Brewer

Whose mentorship and dedication to our democracy inspired my life’s work

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and Constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

—Thomas Jefferson, excerpted from a letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816

INTRODUCTION

There’s perhaps only one statement that virtually all Americans can agree on: our political system is broken. A historically low 20% now say they trust the government, down from nearly 80% in the early 1960s.¹

A historically high and equal number of both Democrats and Republicans (69%) believe that democracy is in danger of collapse.²

But what happens if you ask people why our politics is so broken? That’s a question I’ve been asking since I first got involved in political reform fifteen years ago. I posed it to dozens of ordinary people I met in ten cities across the country while producing a short documentary for a group called Americans Elect. A few years later, I repeated it to Pennsylvania voters across fifteen counties, during my run for Congress as an independent candidate. Most recently, I added that question to a series of focus groups commissioned by the organization I now run, Unite America.

In all those settings, the three most common responses to What ails American politics? were strikingly consistent and roughly equal:

It’s the bad guys. Many are convinced that our problems stem from specific bad actors, whether they define them as MAGA conservatives or woke progressives, Trump or Biden, MTG or AOC.

It’s the media and social media. Another big group blames political dysfunction and cultural polarization on biased information sources. They see fake news or disinformation poisoning the country via some combination of Fox News, MSNBC, Facebook, conservative talk radio, the New York Times, and other outlets.

It’s the rampant corruption in government. This group points to systemic problems such as limitless dark money, shadowy lobbyists, and career politicians.

None of these concerns are necessarily wrong. But they all ignore the largest factor fueling our broken politics—one that has been hiding in plain sight for decades: partisan primaries. Most of us take these first-round elections for granted as a historically sacred or unchangeable aspect of politics, at every level from state house to president. But as you will soon see, they’re neither sacred nor unchangeable.

The main idea of this book is that partisan primaries are not merely one problem among a long list of problems with our political system; they are (pun intended) the Primary Problem in our politics today. Abolishing partisan primaries is therefore the single most important thing we can do to improve representation in our government and hold it accountable to delivering better results.

If you’re skeptical of this proposition, I don’t blame you; so are most of your fellow Americans. A 2022 survey commissioned by Unite America found that while 45% of respondents believe our government is in need of real, significant, and fundamental change, only 12% said the same about our election process. Significantly more believe that the biggest problem in our politics is the politicians running for office (72%) than the rules of our current election system (28%). And out of a long list of options for What ails our democracy today? 21% picked corruption by the people in charge, but only 2% said partisan primaries, which came in dead last.³

Changing this perception is why I wrote this book.

We have a government led by politicians most of us don’t like… because they say and do things that most of us don’t agree with… because that’s the only way they can win the partisan primaries that keep them in power. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the Primary Problem is surprisingly and entirely fixable.

WHY PRIMARIES MATTER

With so many alarming problems facing our country (and world) these days, you may wonder if it really matters whether we choose our leaders via partisan primaries or some other process. Don’t we have bigger, more obvious issues to focus on?

First, primaries matter because elections matter. People around the world and here at home have fought and died for the principle of one person, one vote. Our right to vote has gradually expanded to include all citizens over age eighteen. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, what you believe, or whether your ancestors came here on the Mayflower or if you’re a new citizen. When we show up at a polling place, we all get one vote. Elections are the mechanism by which we choose our leaders. It matters whether or not they truly reflect the will of the majority and accurately translate our votes into representation.

Second, elections matter because politics matters. Politics is supposed to be the process by which we identify problems, find agreement, and take action. It’s the opposite of the might makes right ethos that dominated most of human history, and still dominates parts of the world today. In our constitutional republic, we give power to others, through elections, to act on our behalf. Politics is also the nonviolent means by which we decide how our shared resources are allocated and what laws we all live under—from how much money we invest in pandemic preparedness to what regulations should exist on new technologies.

And ultimately, politics matters because self-governance matters. The purpose of government is summarized in the Declaration of Independence: to secure our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Decisions made through our political system impact those fundamental rights in countless ways. Without a functional system of self-government, life in the state of nature would otherwise be, in the words of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

That’s why the role primaries play in our elections, particularly whether they are advancing or undermining our great experiment of self-government, is vital for every American to consider. It impacts every other issue we care about. That’s why this isn’t just a book for political junkies. I wrote it for the millions of Americans in the so-called exhausted majority—reasonable people across party lines who are fed up with a system that no longer serves our country’s needs. People who are tired of the loudest voices on the political fringes dominating our national debate. People who wonder not only if there’s a reasonable fix to our political dysfunction but if there’s one that can be enacted without the unlikely passage of new federal laws or constitutional amendments. (Spoiler alert: there is.)

How Just 8% of Voters Elect 83% of the House

One of my favorite quirks about the Constitution is that while it doesn’t say a word about political parties or how exactly we should conduct elections, it does require a physical head count of every single American, once every decade. In 2020, the Census Bureau counted 331,108,434 of us,⁴

and the state-by-state subtotals were used to reapportion the 435 seats of the House of Representatives. The average House district now includes about 590,000 people above the voting age of eighteen. How many of them would you expect to cast a ballot to choose their district’s representative to Congress? Half? A quarter? A tenth?

Well, in 2020 the representative for Georgia’s 14th district was chosen by just 43,813 people who voted in the Republican primary—only 8% of all eligible voters. And in 2018 the representative for New York’s 14th District was chosen by just 16,898 people who voted in the Democratic primary—only 5% of all eligible voters. In both cases I’m only counting voters who cast ballots in the primary because both are landslide districts, respectively deep red and deep blue. In both cases the primary for the dominant party’s nomination was the only election that really mattered.

Do these facts change how you think about Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) and Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the candidates who won these districts? Since their initial victories with those slim primary totals, both have gone on to command tremendous media attention and political platforms. Both have significantly impacted the priorities and direction of their parties, pushing them toward more ideological extremes. Both are considered future contenders for higher office.

Love ’em or hate ’em, both MTG and AOC are beneficiaries of the current primary system, which strongly favors candidates who can appeal to a paltry yet passionate partisan base in a lopsided district. And they are far from alone. Unite America’s research found that, nationwide in 2022, only 8% of all voters cast ballots in the partisan primaries that determined 83% of House contests.

How was that possible? First, 83% of congressional districts (359) are considered safe for one party or the other, including AOC’s and MTG’s. While some of this has to do with partisan gerrymandering, most districts are uncompetitive because of the increasing partisan divide between urban areas (which lean Democratic) and rural areas (which lean Republican). You might think we have a two-party system in America, but in reality we have two one-party systems in most parts of the country. In these places, primary elections are the only elections of consequence.

Second, very few voters participate in primaries and millions more are locked out entirely. In part, that’s because fifteen states block independents from voting in primaries,I

and another fifteen states prevent voters who are registered with one party from voting in the other party’s primary. In 2022, those rules alone prevented roughly 30 million registered voters from casting a ballot in a primary that determined the outcome of a House election. Total primary turnout was just 21.3% nationwide.⁵

However, the only primary votes that really mattered were those cast in the primary of whichever party had a lock on the district. And in the 129 House primaries in safe districts where the incumbent ran unopposed, voting was essentially meaningless.

That’s how only 8% of voters nationally wound up casting ballots in partisan primaries that determined the outcomes of those safe seats. Primaries not only determine the winners of most elections but they also give disproportionate power to tiny factions of voters on the fringes who are most likely to participate and the special interests that aim to influence them.

The Impact of Partisan Primaries

In competitive elections, we often see the impact of partisan primaries on candidates who run far to the left or right to get their party’s nomination and then reinvent themselves for the general election to appeal to a broader audience. They may change their tone or even their positions on hot-button issues. In 2012, an advisor to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign drew significant attention when he said the quiet part of modern campaign strategy out loud: I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch—you can kind of shake it up and we start all over again.⁶

The less obvious but more pernicious impact of partisan primaries is how these same candidates, if elected, then govern. In 1974, political scientist David Mayhew’s influential theory of congressional behavior asserted that members of Congress are single minded seekers of reelection.⁷

In short, they will act, speak, and vote in a way that is—first and foremost—necessary to keep their job, which nowadays means winning their next partisan primary. The problem is that what’s required to win their primary often runs in the exact opposite direction of what’s required to actually do their job, such as working across the aisle to solve problems.

In 1975, the renowned organizational theorist Steven Kerr published a paper entitled On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.⁸

He gives various examples of how misaligned incentives can lead to undesirable outcomes, such as: a company that wants to improve teamwork but only gives bonuses for individual performance; a university that wants to improve teaching but only evaluates professors based on their published research; a medical institution that wants to improve patient care but gets paid only based on services it provides. Our political system is no different. It rewards politicians who pander to their party’s base with reelection, while hoping they will then come to Congress and work together to get things done. It is, to borrow Kerr’s phrase, pure folly.

Think about the amounts of time, energy, and money we spend discussing and debating individual politicians. Now think about the relative amounts dedicated to examining the process that determines virtually everything about those politicians. We run our country like a company that scrutinizes its final products but entirely ignores its own assembly line. It’s time we refocus our attention.

While general elections determine which party controls the government, primaries determine virtually everything else. In the chapters ahead, you’ll see how primaries influence which candidates run for office and get elected; what they believe about specific policies; which voters, donors, and interest groups they are beholden to; and how they govern.

It’s time to ask with an open mind: Are partisan primaries really the best way to elect our leaders?

MY JOURNEY TO REFORMING PARTISAN PRIMARIES

Before we get into the origins, consequences, and solutions to the Primary Problem, you might be wondering how I landed on primary reform as my calling.

During college I cofounded and led a student advocacy nonprofit called The Can Kicks Back. We were politically diverse and all sick of Washington kicking the can down the road on our country’s long-term fiscal health, our $11 trillion national debt (which is now three times as massive), and the future of critical programs like Medicare and Social Security. (You know, totally normal things for college kids to obsess about.)

We were inspired by a 2010 bipartisan commission, led by former Republican senator Alan Simpson and Democratic White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, that tried to get America’s fiscal house in order with a reasonable compromise on spending and taxes. Simpson-Bowles was created by President Obama through executive order after a similar commission proposed by Congress had failed to pass. Eight Republican senators who had publicly supported that proposal, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, switched sides to vote against it, just days after Obama endorsed the idea. In other words, they were for it until they felt partisan pressure to oppose anything that Obama supported.

I happened to be on Capitol Hill when that Senate vote failed, and I felt visceral anger that this was not how our government was supposed to work. No single vote by any single senator could possibly illustrate everything that is wrong with Washington today, wrote Washington Post columnist Fred Hiatt soon after. No single vote could embody the full cynicism and cowardice of our political elite at its worst, or explain by itself why problems do not get solved. But here’s one that comes close.⁹

After the GOP recaptured Congress in the 2010 midterms, divided government brought even more gridlock. In the fall of 2013, The Can Kicks Back organized a van tour across the country to visit college campuses—along with our mascot, a giant dented tin can named AmeriCAN. Our goal was to build support for the Simpson-Bowles commission proposal, which had by then been abandoned by leaders in both parties, including Obama. Republicans would not agree to any kind of tax increases, while Democrats would not agree to any kind of entitlement reforms. Both seemed to be terrified of the wrath of their respective bases.

On the same day our tour arrived at the University of Wyoming for an event with Simpson himself, the government shut down over its inability to pass the annual budget. For the next seventeen days, Republicans—led by the attention-seeking senator Ted Cruz—unsuccessfully attempted to force Obama into defunding the Affordable Care Act. Amid the partisan rancor, any hope for a long-term budget compromise evaporated. By the end of 2013, it was clear to me that our country was going broke because our political system was broken and future generations would quite literally pay the price.

My own representative, Pennsylvania Republican Tom Marino, had voted for the shutdown and against the compromise that eventually reopened the government. He epitomized everything I thought was wrong with our politics. So I finished getting my master’s degree at Georgetown University, left the nonprofit, changed my voter registration from Republican to independent, and launched an underdog campaign to replace Marino in Congress.

Mr. Troiano Doesn’t Go to Washington

You might call it arrogant for any twenty-five-year-old to think he had a shot at winning a House seat—especially as an independent, without the support of either major party, and with no family fortune or wealthy patron. But I prefer to say that I ran to represent Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District in 2014 out of idealism, not arrogance.

I campaigned seven days a week for ten months with the help of a scrappy, four-person team of fellow twentysomethings. We lived and worked out of a three-story house in Williamsport that, unbeknownst to us when we signed the lease, was adjacent to a drug den. Although I was from a different part of the district, I knew we had to be based in the district’s only city to have a chance at collecting the 7,500 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot. I collected nearly half of those myself, and when things got desperate I stood my First Amendment ground at a county fair, when police threatened to arrest me for soliciting.

During my campaign I had put out in-depth policy papers on topics where I thought Republicans, Democrats, and independents could find common ground, such as fiscal responsibility to reduce our debt, environmental sustainability to combat climate change, and economic mobility to fight inequality. But I quickly learned that my policy proposals didn’t matter much. What resonated most with voters was a simple pitch: I am running to represent you, not the party bosses or special interests. I found that running without a party label gave me the opportunity to have clean-slate conversations with voters, without having to undo their preconceptions. I saw that most people aren’t obsessed with politics and simply want leaders of good character, integrity, and judgment. But I also learned that it’s hard to earn enough votes to win a seat in Congress one conversation at a time.

My used Toyota RAV4, a hand-me-down from my grandpa, logged over 30,000 miles crisscrossing our large district. There was always one more door to knock, one more call to make, one more thank-you note to write. Along the way we won endorsements from twenty-two mayors in the district, which gave us hope. Anything is possible in politics, right? But by late October, when we took the only automated telephone poll we could afford—a $2,500 hit to our tiny war chest—the writing was on the wall.

Those ten months are mostly a blur, but I will always remember Election Day clearly. I woke up early to vote, and just seeing that I could get my name on the ballot reaffirmed my faith in American democracy. I then got back in the Toyota to drive 3.5 hours across the entire district, one final time. Along the way I stopped at several polling locations to visit our volunteers. They included Harry, in Northumberland County, a Republican; Jerry, in Lycoming County, a member of the Green Party; Randy, in Wayne County, a Democrat; Vince, in Tioga County, a Libertarian; and Karen, in Pike County, an independent. As I saw them all working the polls that day, it reassured me that some ideas can transcend party labels and loyalties.

Finally, I went home to Milford, the small town on the Delaware River where I grew up. After my loss became official, I drove to the local campaign office to thank our team, along with a crowd of friends I’d known as far back as preschool, extended family, and supporters from around and beyond the district. I told the group, Today is a milestone, not an ending, along a journey to fix our politics. I promise you it is something I will remain committed and dedicated to. I meant it.

I ended up in third place with 22,734 votes. Still, my 13% share was the best performance by an independent House candidate running against two major-party candidates in more than two decades. Even the most cynical pundits were surprised. But the real question was why it was so hard for any candidate outside the major-party duopoly to gain traction.

It’s the System, Stupid

Congress has an 8% approval rating, yet 90% of members get reelected, I said during the only debate of my House race. We find ourselves with a Congress that is both gridlocked and corrupt because we have failed to hold our leaders accountable. In hindsight I was right about the first part but not the second. It’s not that voters fail to hold our leaders accountable; it’s that the system prevents us from doing so.

Like many other states, Pennsylvania’s congressional map was heavily gerrymandered. In 2012, the first election after new district lines were drawn, Democrats won 51% of the statewide popular vote for House seats, but only 28% of the actual seats (five out of eighteen).¹⁰

My district was a safe seat, where Tom Marino beat his Democratic opponent in a 66% to 34% landslide in 2012. The results would have been roughly the same no matter who the candidates were.

Pennsylvania is also one of the fifteen states in which independent voters do not have a right to participate in partisan primaries. (At least, not yet!) In 2010, Marino won his first primary with just 41% of a three-way vote.¹¹

This meant that he didn’t really represent a majority of voters in the district, or even a majority of Republicans. He merely represented a plurality of GOP primary voters—only 59,279 of them in a district with a total voting-age population of approximately 560,000, or about 10 percent. That’s who controlled his fate. That’s who he’d have to please if he wanted to stay in Congress.

And as I learned during my 2014 race, those GOP base voters were uncompromising. At the height of the Tea Party’s influence, they weren’t looking for a leader who would work across the aisle to solve problems. They wanted a fighter to take on President Obama. These dynamics meant that there was no path for a pragmatist like me in the Republican primary. I also knew that running as a Democrat would not fit me and would be pointless in my solidly red district. My only shot at blocking Marino’s free pass to reelection, and giving voters another choice, was to run as an independent.

But every aspect of the system puts up extra barriers for independent candidates, turning that only shot into an extreme long shot. I was required to collect 3.5 times more signatures than either my Democratic or Republican opponents, just to qualify for the ballot. I was ignored by the media during the primary season, because I wasn’t competing in either primary. And I heard concerns from many voters that they didn’t want to waste their vote on an independent—or, worse, inadvertently help elect their least preferred candidate.

My campaign taught me that the only way to increase accountability and improve representation in our government would be to fix our broken election system. So that became my new focus.

A New Approach: Unite America

After my congressional run, I joined the founding board of a new nonprofit called the Centrist Project, started by Dartmouth professor Charlie Wheelan, author of The Centrist Manifesto. It sought to elect a handful of independent Senate candidates who could form a fulcrum to control the balance of power and leverage their influence to advance bipartisan solutions. I became the executive director in the fall of 2016, at which point we had no office, no staff, and no long-term strategy.

One of my first undertakings was to head to Maine, where a group of reformers were working to establish instant runoff elections, also known as ranked choice voting (RCV), through a statewide ballot initiative. Under this system, voters have the option of ranking their candidates in order of preference, which ensures a majority winner, incentivizes broad coalition building, and levels the playing field for independent and third-party candidates. (I’ll get into all of this in detail in this book.) I wanted to learn more about election reform and spent the days before the 2016 election knocking on doors in support of the initiative.

On election night 2016, while most of the country was either celebrating or despairing over Donald Trump’s victory, my excitement was focused on Maine becoming the first state to adopt instant runoffs. It was a ray of hope for breaking the partisan fever that plagued America, as the bitterly divisive campaign between Clinton and Trump exemplified.

By 2019, the Centrist Project relaunched as Unite America, a philanthropic venture fund that invests in nonpartisan election reform around the country. Soon we had momentum and three dynamic cochairs: entrepreneur Marc Merrill, philanthropist Kathryn Murdoch, and former Fortune 200 CEO Kent Thiry. Our first grant from Unite America went to an upstart group of reformers in Alaska who were lobbying for the country’s first top-four nonpartisan primary along with instant runoffs in the general election. The reform passed in 2020 and took effect in 2022, with dramatic results. It gave us confidence that big change is possible, and it inspired me to continue on my journey.

THE PRIMARY SOLUTION

My goal for this book is to illuminate how partisan primaries are the biggest solvable problem facing our democracy today and to inspire people just like you to get involved in the movement to reform them.

Part I shows how partisan primaries were invented in the first place (hint: not by the Founders!) and how they have become weaponized by fringe politicians and extreme special interests against the majority of our country.

Part II then digs deeper into the damage that partisan primaries are currently causing. You’ve probably heard of a win-win approach to conflict resolution, right? Our current primary system is lose-lose-lose: bad for voters, bad for the country, and even bad for the parties themselves.

Part III turns from understanding the Primary Problem to solving it. We’ll explore several existing and new models for reforming primaries by giving all voters the freedom to vote for any candidate in every taxpayer-funded election, regardless of party. We’ll dig deeply into Alaska, which demonstrated how primary reform gives more power to voters without advantaging or disadvantaging any particular party. And we’ll explore solutions to the unique challenges of presidential elections, whose primaries often leave most voters frustrated at having to choose between the lesser of two evils by the time November rolls around.

Finally, part IV offers a state-by-state strategy for winning primary reform nationally and shows how advocates can respond to common objections along the way.

One big reason for optimism is that the road to primary reform doesn’t require a constitutional amendment or federal legislation, and the path to transformational impact doesn’t require winning in all fifty states. In fact, we can dramatically improve Congress if just six additional states abolish partisan primaries by