Webinar Recap: The Primary Solution with Nick Troiano
Last week, FairVote Senior Fellow David Daley sat down with Nick Troiano to discuss Nick’s new book, The Primary Solution: Rescuing Our Democracy from the Fringes. Nick Troiano ran for Congress at just 25 years old, and was the most competitive independent candidate in over two decades. He lost the election, but learned a valuable lesson: The issue isn’t who is elected, but how we elect them. Nick now leads Unite America, a philanthropic venture fund that invests in nonpartisan election reform.
Troiano and Daley spoke about the flaws in America’s primary elections, how they can be fixed, and what voters can do to achieve reform. Troiano shared his take on the broken incentives of our primary elections, principles for reform, and why he is optimistic about reform going forward – including the success of a reform combining ranked choice voting (RCV) and nonpartisan primaries in Alaska.
Nick Troiano on the incentives of our primary system:
What once was a pretty innocuous process of candidate nomination, today that party primary has largely been hijacked by the party activists and by the single-issue groups that seek to influence those activists . . . We’ve reshaped the incentives for our leaders altogether.
When people grow frustrated over seeing [politicians fail to fix problems], they take it out on the politicians. But the politicians are just symptoms of the underlying problem, which is that they’re being rewarded for the bad behavior they’re exhibiting today. And the only way to really fix that is to change those incentives by changing the way we elect them to office.
Nick Troiano on principles for reform:
Any [electoral] system should uphold two principles. One is that every voter should have the right to vote for any candidate in every taxpayer-funded election. And second, whoever ultimately wins should be required to earn a true majority of the vote.
The movement in this country should be focused on empowering voters to hold their elected leaders accountable to have a better democracy, not just around one particular policy.
Nick Troiano on hope for election reform
Troiano and Daley discussed the success of reform in Alaska, which first implemented ranked choice voting and a nonpartisan primary in 2022.
As previous FairVote analysis has found, RCV allowed candidates for Alaska state and federal office to win election with strong mandates, and led to a range of current elected officials who represent the state’s unique political diversity. A majority of Alaskans said their vote mattered more than in previous years, with Alaska Native voters most likely to say their vote mattered more.
Troiano spoke in-depth about the Alaska reform:
There was a 60% increase in the number of voters who cast a ballot that mattered, meaning they cast a ballot in an election that wasn’t pre-determined by party affiliation alone . . . [The reform] didn’t advantage one party or ideology over another. What it did do was allow voters to use their meaningful ballots to make nuanced decisions about the leaders they wanted to represent them.
With Alaska as one example of success, Troiano also shared a surprising reason why voters should remain hopeful about the possibility of change – and why historic levels of dissatisfaction with democracy offer an opportunity for the election reform movement:
We’re at an inflection point right now. The backdrop is historically high disillusionment with politics, historically high political dysfunction, outright threats to democracy because of political extremism. The silver lining is I think that’s a political environment that is ripe for more Americans coming around to supporting [electoral] reforms.
Be sure to watch the full discussion here, and learn more about Nick Troiano and his work at Unite America here!
