Susan katherine gehl, in your notebook, you write the american political system has become the cause of our decline in the barrier to address the problems it exists to solve. When you look at america today, what are you seeing . Katherine first, im seeing the same frustration that caused me, my coauthor, and so many others to look around and say what were doing isnt working. And people come at this from any position. So i came to this 10 years ago, first out of the National Debt crisis. Michael porter came to it out of my invitation but also because he was doing work at Harvard Business school on our economic competitiveness and whether we are a country that can grow jobs and grow income levels. And other people come to it from specific policy angles, which is that every policy organization has begun to come to the realization that they may have a fabulous policy idea, but it has absolutely zero chance to be successful in congress because the system is dysfunctional. And now people across the board are coming to it because theyre frustrated with the division, with the dysfunction, and the lack of progress in washington, d. C. And certainly recently, our two really very troubling tragic elements that we see, the governments response to the coronavirus, and the struggles of systemic inequality and racism have also caused people to say, hmm, why cant we, in the United States of america, make a difference in these problems . Why are they persisting . And so thats where we are. Susan so the politics industry, people should know its not just a book. Its really a campaign, a cause for you. Whats your mission . Katherine thank you for asking that. Youre right. Heres what i care about in the end, is washington, d. C. , specifically congress, making progress, delivering legislation that actually solves our problems in a sustainable way, that they take action on this legislation, it is actually implemented, and that over time, people across the spectrum have broadbased science. Its all about results. Were not here on a campaign to change who gets elected, or to change the number of parties we have, or to change rules to make them more fair or more democratic, although of course we care about fair and democratic ideals. We care about the likelihood that congress solves problems in the Public Interest. Everything is directed to that. So we dont allow ourselves to be distracted by other reforms or movements that may be important for other reasons, but that dont get at the core problem of whats going wrong in washington, d. C. Susan why do you describe our political system as an industry . Katherine so, as you just noted, our book is called the politics industry, and we look so nots government, but politics, the competition between politicians, and all of the surrounding actors, as an industry, not because its the only way you can look at it, but because its super helpful to look at it this way, which is to say we, as americans, are very used to being consumers. Were used to being customers. Business people are used to thinking about how to grow their companies and get more revenue and more growth for their companies, etc. So, when we look at politics as an industry, it helps us, either as customers or as Business Leaders, to begin to understand why its so dysfunctional. Ill just give a hint of it. I am sure we will talk about it more. But we look when we look at it as an industry, it reveals that the Public Interest, the citizen, is not the most important customer. And politics is not broken. Its actually working exactly how its designed to work. But in the politics industry, when we look underneath the hood, the politics industry has not been designed to put the Public Interest and solving problems for citizens first. Its been designed to put the interests in the political Industrial Complex, which is what we call these politicians and the lobbyists and the Campaign Consultants in the media, everybody involved in the business of politics, we call it the political Industrial Complex. The industry has been designed to put them first. And what we see is, thats working. Its working super well. We dont even need the average viewer of this to look at statistics. They can just look at it for a moment. Yea, you know, totally makes sense. We can see all the time washington, d. C. Is thriving. Theres more commercials. It seems everybody has more powerful and more money and more, more, more. But, i, the customer, the voter, the voter, am super dissatisfied. How is that right . And so, by again, looking at it as an industry, we explain whats gone wrong. But the purpose for that explanation is solely to figure out where in that dysfunctional design could we intervene to change the dynamics so that the Public Interest becomes the most important customer . And thats what we ask ourselves. We analyze, we diagnose, and we essentially prescribed because we can now identify the most powerful changes we could make. Susan so, about Michael Porter, your partner in this project, and what he brings to the table. Katherine yeah, so Michael Porter is really considered the founder of modern corporate strategy. He is a professor at Harvard Business school. And has transformed the way that virtually every business of a reasonable size, of a certain size, manages their strategy. He also has transformed the way countries look at their strategy for their own economic growth. But in this particular case, he forcesed the five analysis the five forces framework, sorry. In the five forces framework is the Gold Standard for understanding competition in every industry. And i used it to understand competition in my industry. I use it in my Strategic Planning when i was running a Food Manufacturing company in wisconsin. So this was back in 2013, 2014, i had a 250 million company, employees, using this strategy, and using the five forces. And while i was using his forces for Food Manufacturing, and we did make cheese it is wisconsin at the same time because i was involved in , politics and already wanted political change i ran the , parallel analysis of the five forces on the politics industry. Now, the five forces have never been used for that type of work before. But the ahas kept coming to me all through the process. So i actually somewhat say mea culpa because i actually completed the heart of what is in the politics industry as the analysis all the way back in 2013 and 2014, but then i was still running my company so i had to wait a while. After i sold the company, i decided that Business People were missing in action when it came to changing the political system. They just thought it was totally irrational and all these crazy people over there. And i wanted more people to be engaged and investing time and resource into improving the overall trajectory of our political system for our economy and the like as citizens. So, i decided to take this analysis, the five forces of politics and write it up. And fortunately, for me, i was able to convince Michael Porter to join me as a coauthor. I would say initially, he wasnt super excited, but over time, he has certainly become very passionate about this work and i think it was well, i know it was a revelation to him that we could use the five forces to analyze the politics industry. So, its been exciting, certainly for both of us. And by joining forces with michael, i was able to get this work an initial look that wouldve been very hard to generate in another way. Because the legitimacy that michael and Harvard Business school brought to this analysis really was critical to getting a general openness to the idea. And certainly, weve had a great response since we originally wrote about this in september 2017 with our original publication. Susan you are described in the book as someone who experienced the five stages of political grief. Whats that mean . Katherine yes, one of your first questions you asked me was where is this work coming from and how do i think the United States is doing. So i will go back to that in a sense. So, what happened to me, and other people go through similar stages, is that i was really involved in politics, and particularly back in the 2008 campaign. And then i found myself really disappointed with the results that came out of washington, d. C. So i said, gosh, i worked so hard for candidates, you know, for a candidate i really believed in. And thats not delivering what i wanted. So that was my first stage of grief. So then i said i know. , ill work on policies. Ceo fiscal the Leadership Council of the campaign to fix the debt, and discovered, oh, Everybody Knows what the right policy is and behind closed doors, they agree, but theres no political will to do it. I know. Ill work on culture. So i got involved early on with a fabulous organization working to change the culture and encourage bipartisanship. And then in that effort i found , that a lot of people joined the organization, they said they wanted to do this. But when push came to shove, the legislators basically voted the same way they did before they joined up. So i said, ok, not culture. I know, now ill work on candidates again, but this time ill work on independent to adates, not beholden side of the duopoly, which i think of the political system as. And then i thought, guess what . They cant get elected, these independents. And at that time, i wrote a book, former republican congressman mickey edwards, and in it, he pointed out that its the system. I never looked back. I could never unsee that. It was immediately evident that candidates, culture, policy, they basically all, perhaps all well intended, lets even say, go into this system, and a matter who they are or what their policy is or what their desires are personally, it spits out dysfunction. This system delivers reliably, like a machine, gridlock and division. Because its built to do that. And whats so shocking to me, never seens how id that before because i see it all the time in my business. Its all about the system. As i often say now, the rules of the game, any game, the rules of game affects the way the game is the rules of the game affects the way the game is played and affects the outcome of that game. So in order to change the way the game is played and the outcomes, we have to change the rules. And the entire book is really a lead up to the action section , where we say what rules need to be changed in order to change the behavior and the results we get out of congress. Susan you referred to congress as a duopoly. What does that mean . Katherine a good parallel to what we see in industry. People have heard of monopolies, where one market has the entire market cornered. And a duopoly is where there are only two competitors, at the very least two major competitors. And thats what we have in politics. We have republicans and we have democrats. Those are the only two. And whats interesting about a duopoly is that theres a rational way of competing in the duopoly that happens in industry, forprofit industries, and we see in the politics industry. And that is the two sides like to compete. They are incentivized to compete by dividing. They actually want to move the respective customers as far apart as they can. They dont want to compete here in the middle. They want to make them so far apart that this side hates this side, and this side hates this side. And that way, even if neither of them do a good job, their customers dont want to go to the other side because theyre so differentiated. And the other thing players in a duopoly often do and we see this in politics. The two sides, the parties and the allies, work very well together in one particular way. And that is to rig the rules of the game of politics to protect themselves jointly from new competition. As much as we think we would like the other want to go away, they actually like this balance of fight. And thats how they keep appealing to their core cup customers and they keep getting the Campaign Contributions and all of the money in the industry to act in this fight. So, this division that we see, the money that we see, the gridlock that we see is a result of having two who are in scented to work far apart from each other and in scented to keep everybody else out. Ed not toare incent compromise ever because it works better for them to leave a problem unsolved than to compromise and to give a little, on either side. Theyd rather leave the problem unsolved and keep it as an issue for the next election. So again, its super important for us to understand its the way our policies are behaving is entirely rational in this duopoly stick competition and duopolistic competition. In a forprofit industry, what you see, generally in theory, is that when you have competition in a monopoly or a duopoly, but its bad for the customer, there will be antitrust regulations that kicks in to say oh, you cant be that large. You cant have the market cornered because now thats really anticompetitive. And the interesting thing is that, of course, the antitrust rules are made by politicians and, ever so conveniently, antitrust does not apply to the politics industry. So were really stuck in this system thats guaranteed to keep doing what its doing unless we change the rules. Susan as congress has been getting more partisan, the electorate is going the other direction. The independents are now the largest sector of the voting public, 43 self identified. The parties are around 30 . So why is it the public is becoming more independent, less aligned with parties, and congress is going the other direction . Susan you know what . Theres nobody satisfied. Even if we look at the 30 that still identify with one side or another, often you find that if you delve deep into it, they also might like to see some better choices. But why we see the public becoming independent is, again, because nobody is doing a good job. Whats interesting is, in any other industry this large, with that customer dissatisfaction, so 40 being larger than either of the two sides, you would see a new competitor that was responding to what customers wanted. But we dont see any competition in politics because, as i said a moment ago, thats where the parties Work Together really well and that one way, which is to break those rules of the game, to protect them subs jointly from new competition. I like to tell people that really, politics isnt broken. Its sick, as in a rigged game. And it is. And what theyve effectively done now is create this situation where they dont really care how dissatisfied people are as long as they either stay home, not give in, or vote for their side just because thats sort of the lesser of two evils. And that really is how either side wins, which is they get the voter to choose them to stay home, choose them as the lesser of two evils, or to vote for them because at least that party says theyre for what that particular voter believes. But what neither side ever has to do, and we have to let this sink in, what neither side ever has to do is deliver results. Because no matter how disappointed a particular voter is, he or she likely still prefers what their side says theyre for rather than what the other side says theyre for. So instead of these results in the Public Interest we get gridlock. ,instead of ringing us together, we get division. Instead of competition, we just get the same old. Were always looking for that new change candidate, and yet the change candidates, while they make a certain part of the population happy, dont end up being able to deliver fundamentally transformative results, which is not like, susan, as if im saying like even with our prescription, that we are going to have some utopia. Democracy is hard. Their issues are challenging. Theres tons of tradeoffs. If our problems were easy, even this crazy system wouldve solved them. So, weve got challenge, absolutely, as with any country around the world. But we can have a system working under different rules and different incentives that will change the likelihood that washington, d. C. Gets stuff done. Susan was there a point in somewhat recent history where Congress Worked effectively, or more effectively . Katherine yeah, so if we look over history and we dont go into all the ups and downs of congresses working together in detail in this book, although we talk about one particular era, the progressive era, where there was a lot of citizen led change to this system because thats what we need again now but when you look over time, theres a sort of an ebb and flow of how Congress Works well, and that always depends on multiple factors, like whats going on in the culture, whether we have a war, whether we have a common enemy in the war, whether we are in an economic expansion or recession, and it also always depends on what the rules of the game are at that moment because, you know, our constitution i usually have a pocket constitution here its tiny. Its short. It fits in the pocket. So most of the rules arent written in the constitution. They are made up by the players in the game. And the parties actually have changed the rules, substantively, over time. Right now, we are at a period of time where an enormous amount of power is concentrated in the hands of the leadership. So, the Mitch Mcconnells and Nancy Pelosis of this particular congress. And that is part of the problem that leads to these bad results that were getting. And i talk about the elections machinery and the legislative machinery. And to try to do a slightly better job of answering your question, has it worked over time, whats changed that got us to today is that the elections machinery, the rules of how we elect people to congress, have not changed. But over time, the competitors have figured out how to optimize them. We can go into some of the rules in detail later, but if you think about it, remember we always used to hear, and then theyre going to have to compete for the center. And eventually, they realized we dont have to do that at all. Apart just stay super far and we will just depress the middle. Optimized around this machinery and rigged it and affected it to account their growth for power. And the second thing is that the rules of how we make the its not the schoolhouse rock version, which some of the viewers might remember that from saturday mornings growing up. And its not that version. Its a very corrupted set of practices, norms, and rules about how to Work Together, which no one, no rational person would ever do. Ill say it this way. If anyone listening works somewhere, and the company wanted to solve its biggest problems, i suspect one thing they would not do is bring everybody together to work on these tough issues and then say oh, just a moment. Before we get started, lets count off by twos and divide into warring teams and then well get straight to work. But effectively, thats how it is every day in washington, d. C. The combination of distortion and optimization of the elections machinery over time, with the distortion and optimization of the legislative machinery over time, has led us to this point. When you look closely at the design, you will see that there is no other outcome that we can expect from the system other than the types of outcomes were getting. Now, that isnt to say things cant get worse. One of the things can make the system worse, but they cant really make it transformatively better. Thewhat we need, given challenges we face as a country israel dramatic change, real action on our biggest issues, which have been, in many cases, outstanding for a couple of decades. Susan well, lets dig a little bit deeper into the elections machinery and then the legislative machinery to understand your real analysis of what goes on. You tell us and remind us that in 2016, 10 of the house races were competitive. Just 10 . And 28 of the senate. So why arent our elections more competitive . Katherine let me step back from that for just one moment to say, if we want to talk about the elections machinery, lets start with one idea, which is imagine two circles and one says acting in the Public Interest. So, this is the elected official, the member of congress doing what needs doing for us to make progress. And then the other one is the likelihood that that same legislator is going to get reelected. And right now, there is no connection between doing what needs doing and keeping your job. So essentially, our election system is set up as if everyone watching would be told that , i need you toh do all these things. I need you to do all these things really well, which is exactly what we need you to do. Youre going to lose your job. Thats just a crazy design. No one would ever set anything up that way, and yet we did. Which is to say, our election machinery creates that. So for the challenge in our work is to say, one of the core challenges, is how can we connect acting in the Public Interest with getting elected . And currently, what you referred to is that we have very low competition in our elections. So, the reason why so few seats in congress are competitive is in large part because the districts are either through artificial means, so gerrymandering, where the parties pick their voters means, so gerrymandering, where the parties pick their voters instead of the voters actually picking their leaders, to either that or just a National Geographic sorting of sort of affinity for one side or the other. The general election, the november elections, arent competitive because, effectively, the winner was already decided in the primary election. And that isnt right. Its not fair. But, even more of a problem than the fact that if you go vote in november, your vote does not really make a big difference because we know who is going to win. If you are in a red district whoever had won the republican primaries going to end. If you are in a blue district whoever won the democratic primary is going to win. But the bigger problem than that is, having the election decided in the primary, is the fundamental largest structural reason why congress does not deliver results in the Public Interest. Because, in the democratic and republican primary, there is low turnout. Fewer than 20 of voters turn out for Party Primaries for congress. In off years it has, in off president ial years it is less than that. The voters who turnout are often more ideological than voters as a whole. So they push the candidates in the primary for there to the left then voters as a whole, lets say the general election voters, really want. But most importantly, what they do, is they affect the behavior of those legislators when theyre in congress. Because now legislator elected through this primary system, lets say they are in congress. And they have an opportunity to vote yes on a bipartisan compromise bill. Lets say on immigration, or health care, or any of our greatest national problems. Like an infrastructure bill. When they look at that bill, they say, they might say, is this a good idea . Is this the right thing for the country . Is this what the majority of my constituents want . But, actually, they do not asked himself that question. Because the first thing to ask is, am i going to make it back through my Party Primary if i vote for this bill . If the answer to that question is no, and on all of the tough issues, it virtually always is for both sides, then all of the other answers to those important questions about being a good idea, etc. , are irrelevant. Because the rational incentive to get reelected dictates that legislature votes no. In summary what we see is the Party Primary pushes republicans to the right and democrats to the left and tells them to not compromise, do not give up one iota of our ideology when youre legislating because if you do, you will be primaried. Many people have seen, if you think about the evolution of primary used to be just a down and now it is a verb. We are going to primary you. What that means is, that is the threat, to a democrat or republican, that says if you do this thing, if you compromise, if you work with the other side, if you do not stay with our further and further right and left ideology, we are going to run someone against you in your primary. And you will lose. So the structure of the Party Primary virtually guarantees that there is no incentive. There is an incentive not to Work Together. There is an incentive not to compromise. And that is a deathknell for results. Then we will talk about, hopefully, later, the other key problem structurally is that we never have any competition even when we are frustrated with the results. Susan one example you give of results that happens in a polarized congress is healthcare legislation. Here is a video that demonstrates what youre talking about. It is the passage of the bill and republican efforts to repeal. The yeas are 60, nays 39. The patient Affordable Care act is passed. The bill is passed. The bill is passed. The motion is adopted. The bill is passed. Local governments do not have to provide Health Insurance to a volunteer first responder. Two thirds in the affirmative. The bill is passed. Repeal the 2010 Affordable Care act. The yeays are 239. The house returns to an issue they have dealt with the number of times, the Affordable Care act. The nays are 165, the bill is passed. Susan what we see is a partisan vote for health care. And the entire time that republicans had control of congress 75 or 80 attempts to repeal their Affordable Care act, always on a partyline vote. How is this an example of what you are talking about in this book . Katherine we have a chart in the book, where we show the division about, between republican and democrat votes, on landmark legislation over time. What we used to see is that landmark legislation would pass with support for both parties. But in recent years, we now see landmark legislation only passes when one party has enough, has the numbers in the house and senate, to ram their bill through, with no support from the other party. So we passed health care with no republican votes. We passed the tax reform with no democratic votes. And the only time we see the parties vote on something together, is when there is a crisis. Plus an ability to put it on the credit card. So, the National Credit card. Past the debt on. Yes we saw bipartisan action on some of the early legislation to assist with the coronavirus devastation of the economy. But what that was is, the parties came together because they both sensed electoral destruction if they did not. We are in an election year. There were democratic and republican votes. But they did not really call each other out on the fact that those trillions of dollars, just got added to the National Debt. Whereas normally, if one i does not want to pass something, the other side wants, then they will say oh, that cost too much and we do not have the money. But they are willing to Work Together when they can sort of put it on the bill and help themselves. So that is not i do not want to get into the details about we quote should have gotten done, for covid specifically. But we cannot be a country where the conditions required for action are crisis plus credit card. We have to be a country that can solve problems, or improve our capability of dealing with challenges before the fact. And that is not, that is nothing country that we currently are. So, it is no wonder that we see now, the public sense is this. And the trust in government, is down to under 20 . And that is a devastating number, if we thick about what it takes to be united as a country to solve our problems and be forward. It is so broken that i do think, it is devastating that it is so broken, but this is a time, even in the midst of this election cycle, and all of the drama and emotion, and deep current challenges we face, where nonetheless there is an appetite from more people than one might have thought, to turn their eye toward, how can we not get here again . How can we fix something, so that we are better prepared in the future . And that is why i am excited for the work that is being done in this new i am one of many. There are many talented people now working and what i call political innovation. Susan i want to jump in. We have 20 minutes left and have to get your two major solutions. So, in the politics industry, you do have two big Ticket Solutions to what is happening to our political system. The first is something called top five primaries. How does that work . Katherine right. Our first solution is to change the elections machinery, so that people are incentive to deliver results. And there will be competition, which is to say accountability, if they do not deliver results. There are two steps to take. Together we call them final five voting. The first step is to get rid of Party Primaries which i described as completely broken. Instead when we vote on primary day, lets have one open top five primary. So you show up at the polls. Everybody running is on the same ballot, democrats, republicans, greens, libertarians, independence. Pick your favorite. And the top five finishers will advance to the general election. Instead of just one democrat and one republican. And you wont know who is going to win at the end of primary day. But you will know who your five competitors are. Now we have an opportunity for a dynamic and diverse and intense competition between five candidates in five sets of ideas and divisions and views between the primary and general election. As the second thing now, now we have gotten rid of, you will lose your primary problem, if you solve problems in washington, d. C. And the second thing we do is in the general election, we will stop just picking one person out of the five. We will get a chance to indicate our preferences, as in this is my favorite. I cannot wait for this person to become my senator, all the way down to my fifth choice something like, over my dead body do i want this person to win. You do not have to rank them all. But you can rank as many as you have enough information about, to have opinions. I invite you to read the book to understand the mechanics of this. It is actually much easier than you might think. A creates series of instant runoffs. If the candidates when the first choices are counted nobody has over 50 , then we drop who comes in last, and we run the totals again. And this results in a winner that has the broadest support from the most number of voters. Importantly for the incentive it gets rid of the spoiler and wasted vote problem allnew competition has now. Whenever somebody wants to compete who is not a democrat or republican and says i want to get the 40 of voters who do not identify with democrat or republicans, or i want to even run further right or left, i am different than republicans and democrats, or im a republican but not far enough to the right to make my primary. Anyone who is like that, they cannot be successful under the existing rules. Because voters and up feeling, believing, and voters are right, that if they vote for that new competitor, theyre either wasting about, or they are spoiling the election, which is to say if they vote for that person, they are accidentally going to help elect the person they like the least. So if you go back to 2016, although we are not talking about the president ial election in our book, we are talking about congress. 2016, voters who wanted to vote for the green party candidate, considered further to the left then hillary clinton, were told, do not vote for jill stein because if you do, you will take votes from hillary clinton, spoil the election for her, and elect donald trump. The same thing was true on the right. Dont vote for gary johnson, the libertarian, because if you do you will take votes away from donald trump, an accident he help elect hillary. When you have the spoiler problem it means new competition does not ever in general enter. When we get final five voting, which is top five primaries, plus rank Choice Voting in the general election, this series of instant runoff, we eliminate the incentive to not solve problems paired and we make sure that if people do not solve problems in the public is dissatisfied, that there will not be new competition. Competition to serve the Public Interest instead of serving the political Industrial Complex at the first concern. So, final five voting. Changes the rules of the game and the way the game is played and the likely outcomes of that game. That is the opportunity we have as a country. Susan maine is a state that has ranked Choice Voting, and employed it in the last election. We have a clip from the heritage foundation, commenting on cnbc after the november elections last time around about how it worked. [video] maine, and the 2018 election, had the First Federal election ever, a congressional race, using the ranked Choice Voting system. That race shows why ranked Choice Voting is not a good idea. The candidate who got the largest number of votes, the largest plurality, in the first round of tabulations, did not actually win the race. And because there were multiple rounds of tabulation, apparently thousands of ballots cast by voters were thrown out. I think the average voter had the same feelings the former california governor jerry brown has. They find ranked Choice Voting to be confusing and complicated. Susan what is your reaction . Katherine my reaction is these are absolutely the kinds of arguments that we are going to see, from partisans on the right and partisans on the left. So, in california, they already changed their Party Primary, just like in maine, they already changed from plurality voting to ranked Choice Voting. In those cases, democrats and republicans are often jointly against it because it threatens their duopoly. They like to say how hard it is. I believe it was the democrat secretary of state, in maine, that said if you implemented ranked Choice Voting you would see and i should factcheck this i think was rioting in the streets. Often republicans and democrats do not like it. They have gotten elected under these rules and they want to make it that way forever so they will bring up that it is super complicated yet we have this kind of system in australia and we have had it for years. There is no reason to think americans are less able to pick their choices, that australians. It does not make any sense. We picked choices all the time. My favorite ice cream flavor all the way to this is when i cannot stand. These are just arguments that would be put up, by those who get their power and thrive in the existing system. And we can expect that. But what we will see, is an half the states, the voters can bypass the politicians entirely, and vote on referendums, to implement these changes of the rules for their state. So eventually, the citizens will have their say, and will get past these types of fundamentally bogus arguments. Susan how many states would have to make a change like ranked Choice Voting for it to make a difference in congress . Katherine the first thing to note is that i very much support ranked Choice Voting. It is part of our proposal. Having said that, i focus like a laser on what is called final five voting, which is both things. Go from the Party Primary to the open top five primary plus ranked Choice Voting in the general election. One plus one equals five in this case. So, the benefits i talk about, are really coming from this combination. And i do not recommend that states and citizens put their effort into one, although it is better. One is better. But doing both of them is not very much more work. And gets so much more benefit. And here is the other amazing thing. Getting to your question. We do not need all of the states to change these rules in order to begin changing the incentives that are governing legislative behavior in congress. Article one of the constitution gives all the rules about elections, gives the powers to make those rules and change those rules, to the states individually. Half the states can do it through a referendum which i mentioned. The other half needs a bill through their legislature with the governors signature. If we change these rules in only five states, lets take that as a hypothetical, you have 10 senators and maybe 50 representatives, depending on how large the states where that changed the rules. Going to washington, d. C. , under these new incentives, which is that they know in their state they will not lose their primary, they will be in the top five even if they sort of sign something and do not do exactly what theyre supposed to say on their parties side. And they know there will be competition against them if they do not deliver results. So you have 10 people there who might still be democrats or republicans and they likely will be, but they know there are actually accountable now to the Public Interest, instead of just two Party Primary voters and special interests and donors. They are accountable to general election voters. The act differently. In the senate, you have these 10 people, neither side would have a majority. Neither republican star democrats would have a majority elected under the old incentive. So you create a a fulcrum, a powerful problemsolving oriented fulcrum, which could change the likelihood that the entire body sees as possible, working together to address problems. So, what i love is that we are federalists, systems, so the states have all of this power. Lets use that to begin to change results in washington, d. C. , as soon as this are the next election cycle. There actually are three Ballot Initiatives on the ballot for this november, for, it is not final five but it is final four voting. They are going to be top four primaries plus ranked choice general elections, a pretty exciting development. If these all pass we will see six senators and 30 representatives elected under these rules. Susan we have just five minutes left. In the book there is more analysis what is wrong with congress and prescriptions for change once people get their. Lets spend our last few minutes together on how you move from this book to making change. You describe a system that is selfperpetuating, lots of incentives to stay the way does. How do you hope change will in fact be implement it and the system will be able to function differently . Katherine three things. First, as we talked earlier, unfortunately the amount of frustration in the country is really at an alltime high. So that is when you can see change. We have the whole chapter in the book on the progressive era when the frustration in the country 100 years ago over the excesses of inequality of the gilded age, and citizens came together and move forward reforms of the political system then. So we have dissatisfied citizens. The second thing as we talked about, you have a system that allows states to make these changes individually. At allows voters to make the changes without the sayso of politicians. We do not need a constitutional amendment or an act of congress. And in half the states you do not need the state legislature to say ok. The citizens can do it by themselves. The third thing we have, as we have always had, we have courageous leaders and citizens in the country, who are standing up to say, it should not be this way. In fact, one of my favorite parts of the book is a piece i did not author. It is the forward. It is written by two currently serving members of congress. Chrissy houlahan, a democrat from pennsylvania, and mike gallagher, a republican from wisconsin. They both served in the military out of school. Mike left princeton and went into the marines. Christy left stanford and went into the air force. Illustrious careers. They write in the forward, when we were serving in the military, we were on the same team for america. Then when we decided we wanted to continue to serve our country, and im paraphrasing, we ran. And now we are in congress. Somehow we are automatically on two separate teams. And im going to grab the book here and read one thing. Ok. They say, so why arent we on now on the same for america team . The system is built to terrace tear us apart put apart. In american politics when he is not winning unless the other side is losing and losing badly. This should not be. And it does not have to be. This book proves it. The prescription is powerful. It is nonpartisan. Once more, it is doable. They conclude by asking people to engage. So when you have bipartisan of congress coming together. And we see the same in wisconsin where we have bipartisan members of our state legislature coming together to say, we may not agree on policy but we agree on this. And we have bipartisan members, cross partisan coalitions of Business Leaders in wisconsin saying, we do not agree on any of the policies, but we agree on these rules of the game. It is that kind of leadership. And that kind of courage, coming from people elected in the existing system, that combined with his enormous time of frustration, as the fact that the system actually allows for us to make these changes it is shocking that the best thing to do is not a constitutional amendment. The best thing to do is to change these things we have the power to change based on the constitution and Ballot Initiatives. When you have those pieces together, we will make that change. I predict within one election cycle, we will see that final five voting is the preeminent reform advocated for by citizens and courageous political leaders across the spectrum, around the country. And we can then pass these initiatives. We can pass and get the bills signed. Change the incentives for congress. Change the result. And change the ability of new competition to hold the system accountable so the Public Interest is the most important. Even in the midst of all our problems, i am unbelievably excited about doing this. I so appreciate your talking to me about this today. Thank you, susan. Susan with that prediction we will say thank you to you for spending an hour with cspan. The book is called the politics industry how political invasion can break partisan gridlock and save our democracy. Katherine gehl, thank you for your time. Katherine thank you, susan. 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