No Matter What Happens: A Pre-Election Reflection on 2024

MEMO

To: Interested Parties

From: Nick Troiano, Unite America

Re: 2024 Reform Ballot Initiatives

Date: 10/31/2024

Introduction

2024 is a historic year for election reform. Not since the advent of the ballot initiative process itself over a century ago have we seen so many measures before voters in a single year to reimagine the way we elect our leaders. This memo aims to describe the dynamics of these campaigns, put this historic year in strategic context, and preview our path forward. 

No matter what happens on election day, the following is already clear:‍

1. Our movement has gained tremendous momentum, which we can build upon;
2. We will face setbacks, but we must remain steadfast long-term;
3. We’ll be ready to respond, reevaluate, and regroup — regardless of outcome.

I will expand on each key point below, but let me start with a reminder of why we’re doing this in the first place: Even before a single vote is counted in the November election, 87% of Congressional contests were already decided months ago in party primaries — by just 7% of eligible voters. We cannot accept this as normal in a representative democracy. This Primary Problem is at the core of our political division and dysfunction today.

We know our reforms work:

• There was a 60% increase in the number of meaningful votes cast in competitive elections in Alaska following the implementation of top-four elections in 2022.
• The only remaining two U.S. Representatives and three U.S. Senators who bucked their party and voted to impeach or convict former President Trump after January 6th are from states with at least one of our reforms (Louisiana, California, Washington, and Maine).
• Thanks to prior victories, millions of voters in this year’s elections had access to party primaries in Colorado and live in competitive districts in Virginia where their votes matter.

While our solutions are commonsense and our national state-based strategy is straightforward, our task is not easy. We are up against an entrenched, two-party duopoly that fears our reforms will force both parties to give up their power over our elections, if not their power in government itself. While plenty of Democrats and Republicans support our reforms, the political establishment and its aligned special interests do not. And the establishment will stop at nothing to try to thwart us.

The ferocity of both parties’ opposition this year, at a level unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, is an extraordinary testament to the threat our movement poses to a failing status quo. At the same time, it only strengthens our resolve.

What’s on the ballot this year? Unite America is supporting ballot initiatives to advance open primaries (AZ, CO, ID, NV, MT, SD), ranked choice voting (OR), and anti-gerrymandering (OH) across eight states and Washington, D.C. We are also opposing measures to repeal reform in Alaska, ban reform in Arizona, and make the initiative process harder in North Dakota. We have carefully prioritized our funding across these 12 campaigns based on policy impact and political viability.

‍

What constitutes success? Aspirations aside, we need to be realistic about our odds. We are not going to win all or, likely, even most of the reform initiatives on this year’s ballot. In fact, there is a non-zero chance we may lose all of our priority primary reform campaigns. 

We will make progress in 2024 if we end this cycle with more states having enacted reform as compared to the picture going into this cycle. This may seem like a low bar given how many initiatives we are supporting, but the reverse is true: We are supporting so many initiatives because we know just how high the bar is to pass meaningful reform.

Of one thing we can be certain: We and our partners are leaving absolutely nothing on the field this year in pursuit of winning as much as we can. 

What’s next? Our work continues in an immediate and intensive way, regardless of Tuesday’s outcome. Where we win, we are preparing to uphold the will of the people through legislative enactment and implementation. Where we face setbacks, we’ll keep up the fight.

Moreover, we will continue to execute against our multi-pronged strategy that intentionally expands beyond ballot initiatives. This includes working on legislative campaigns (with sessions beginning in January) and litigation programs, while continuing to foster conditions for victory nationally through research, communications, and coalition-building. 

We know that transformative, systemic change takes time. We must keep an eye on the long game. In the best or worst case scenarios, these are still early days for our movement; years of hard work lie ahead; and we're committed long-term. As a recent report from The Bridgespan Group and Civitas found: “When we analyzed 10 major, national policy advances in the United States over the past century — progressive to conservative — we found that time and again, ‘big wins’ accrued from a strategic, sustained approach. Two steps forward, one step back, over a long haul.”

Ballot Initiatives: Our Opportunity & Challenge

Let’s explore what it takes for election reform to win at the ballot. 

Our Opportunity: Over 75% of Democrats, Republicans, and independents agree with the two principles we advocate at Unite America: (i) All eligible voters should have the freedom to vote for any candidate, regardless of party, in every taxpayer-funded election, and (ii) A candidate should be required to earn a majority of the vote in order to win an election. These principles inform the policies we support that are now on the ballot across the country — including open primaries and ranked choice voting.

Our Challenge: Despite their popular support, these policies face significant, though not insurmountable, challenges in their adoption at the ballot. Combined with the costs of media in a competitive presidential year, these challenges increase the resources (and risk) needed to win.

1. Party Opposition: Election reform is not your run-of-the-mill policy issue. It will have the impact of fundamentally changing the political power structure in a state. As a result, the more powerful the policy, the more opposition both political parties are likely to put forward in an effort to protect their own power and the status quo. An example:

1. Example image of party opposition
   
   1. The Democratic and Republican Parties have spent over $15M across multiple states to right reform.
2. Ballot Language: Perhaps the most consequential task of any campaign is translating the concept of election reform into the actual language that appears on the ballot — a process that varies by state and is often controlled by the same partisan forces that oppose reform.
   1. For example, in Ohio, the Republican Secretary of State wrote language for the anti-gerrymandering initiative that says a new commission would be “required to gerrymander the boundaries to favor either of the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio….”
3. Getting to “Yes”: A ballot campaign on any issue has the burden, like the prosecution in a jury trial, to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt; the opposition, meanwhile, need only poke holes. Most voters default to “No” if they are unsure. Today, public support for election reform runs wide but not deep — as it is not an issue most voters already have hardened views on. As a result, a signal from an already trusted source to vote no might be all it takes to persuade an otherwise open-minded voter.
   

Ballot initiatives are an inherently high-risk, high-reward component of our overall strategy.

Our movement has gained tremendous progress, which we can build upon.

A century ago, rising economic inequality and political corruption in the Gilded Age gave way to an incredible period of reform in the Progressive Era (1890–1920), yielding women’s suffrage, direct election of the Senate, party primaries (in place of the prior caucus & convention system), and the ballot initiative process itself. When democracy goes off-course, big change is possible.

We again find ourselves in another period of political innovation, fueled by dissatisfaction with our democracy. This modern day reform movement can be traced back to 2004, when Washington state became the first to adopt top-two primaries. The system survived a challenge in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008, and was then adopted by California in 2010. Maine became the first state to adopt ranked choice voting in 2016. Four years later, Alaska became the first state to adopt the combination of top-four primaries and ranked choice voting in 2020.

2024 is a continuation of the modern reform movement, and this year’s nine pro-reform ballot initiatives are a big step forward.

1. ‍Every campaign qualified: Several reform attempts in recent years were thwarted by partisan opposition and litigation and never made it to the ballot. Thus, it is no small feat that every reform campaign this year qualified for the ballot. In total, more than 1.5M Americans signed petitions to help these initiatives qualify for the ballot.
   1.  In Idaho, for example, 2,000 volunteers fanned out across the state to gather nearly 100,000 signatures to get their initiative on the ballot.
2. Strategically crafted coalitions: This cycle has provided our movement with an unprecedented opportunity to forge new partnerships and solidify existing ones. In most political campaigns, partisan tribalism is what brings coalitions together. In our case, nonpartisan election reform necessitates building new coalitions from the ground up, often with unlikely bedfellows.
   1. These coalitions spanned business, labor, and diverse constituencies.‍
3. ‍Millions of Americans learned about reform: It’s often difficult for election reform to cut through the noise of political news that is focused on the horse race. This year, however, reform became a major story that reached millions of Americans. Awareness skyrocketed, which we sought to maximize through the release of a new book and documentary. Even attacks and negative coverage, such as from The Wall Street Journal, have generated more attention than we could have created ourselves.
   1. For example, as NPR recently reported: “This has moved from being a wonky voting topic to something that actually could determine some really huge races over the next couple of years.” Coverage spanned dozens of outlets, from Fox News to the PBS Newshour. And endorsements were made from publications including the Arizona Republic,Bloomberg News, and The Washington Post.

All of this contributes to a growing foundation of assets from which we will continue to build. Ultimately, 29 million voters across the nine states with pro-reform measures on their ballot have an opportunity to cast their ballot for reform. Millions will.

We will face setbacks, but we must remain steadfast long-term.

In a movement as nascent as ours, early progress is a function of the number of shots we have on goal. Thanks to the tireless work of local advocates across the country, we are fortunate to have many shots this year. This also means we will inevitably miss some attempts. We should not be daunted or discouraged. 

Every successful movement faces setbacks. On the day after the election in 2004, advocates for marriage equality woke up to find that same-sex marriage had just been banned in 11 states by popular vote — merely one year after the first state had legalized it. They didn’t give up. Nor did they give up after losing Prop 8 in California in 2008, which galvanized national support. They found early success in legislatures and through the courts, building momentum toward their first successes on the ballot in 2012 across Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington. Maine was particularly notable because the movement lost a referendum battle there just three years earlier.

By the time of the landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2015, 36 states had legalized same-sex marriage. This national win at the Court and in Congress in 2022 was, according to Bridgespan and Civitas, the result of “88 smaller policy victories, 23 major setbacks, and 22 years of disciplined work in the making, including 12 years of work by an intermediary organization purpose-built to push the policy across the finish line.”

As co-author Marc Solomon told me: “Setbacks are part of any important fight. If you didn’t have any setbacks, it would mean that perhaps you’re not taking on a big enough fight.”

Big change takes time and persistence. It was 30 years between Wyoming becoming the first state in the nation that granted women the right to vote (upon statehood in 1890) and the ratification of the 19th Amendment. In states like Oregon, Michigan, and South Dakota, advocates attempted ballot initiatives no fewer than four times before eventually succeeding.

‍

Movement “intermediaries” (like Unite America) can help accelerate progress when they “recognize the centrality of incremental wins in reaching a bold outcome and have a single-minded focus on executing a multiyear strategy to achieve those wins and bring about that outcome,” according to the Bridgespan and Civitas report. 

Importantly, when both the suffrage and marriage movements hit setbacks, they continued to pursue incremental victories to keep building momentum where they could — while changing the narrative, building diverse coalitions, and winning hearts and minds for their issue nationally. Marriage equality advocates sought civil unions and nondiscrimination protections. Women’s suffrage advocates pushed for voting rights in local and school board elections. Both shifted public opinion in their favor over time. Similar lessons also span recent movements for sentencing reform, minimum wage increases, and marijuana legalization. 

The election movement is no different. While Washington and California both adopted top-two primaries in 2004 and 2010, respectively, the same reforms were defeated in Arizona (33%–67%), Oregon (32%–68%), and South Dakota (44%–56%) between 2012–2016. 

Advocates did not surrender. In fact, primary reform is back on the ballot in both Arizona and South Dakota this year — led by many of the same leaders who diligently stayed the course. Early failures not only informed changes to campaign strategy, but also policy innovation. 

Meanwhile, over the past decade, reformers have successfully pursued both incremental policies and local campaigns. They won efforts for semi-open primaries (i.e., maintaining party primaries, but allowing independent voters to participate) in Colorado through the ballot in 2016 and in Maine through the legislature in 2021. And, at the local level, voters have approved 26 of 29 measures to adopt ranked choice voting, often referred to the ballot by city councils.

The wind is at our back.  Not only does the problem we are trying to solve continue to get worse over time, our base of potential support is only growing. Across the six states with open primary initiatives, voters under 35 are approximately 18 percentage points more likely to support reform than voters over 55. Moreover, the number of independent voters continues to rise — outnumbering the percentage of registered voters with either major party.

Bottom line: We will face inevitable setbacks, but our history and our future are on our side. 

‍We will be ready to respond, reevaluate, and regroup — regardless of outcome.

In every state where reform is on the ballot, there are important next steps to take.

How we respond: Where we win, we will focus on necessary legislative enactment. Moreover, ahead of the next election, robust implementation efforts will be needed, ranging from working with election administrators to educating voters. And we must continue to make voters aware of the new power they have, while inspiring new candidates to run new kinds of campaigns.  

Where we lose, the problem we’re trying to solve will not go away: Millions of independent voters will remain disenfranchised, the threat of being “primaried” will continue to discourage good governance, and most voters’ November ballots will still represent an illusion of choice. Remedying these problems may transition to a 2025 legislative effort, or even a refined 2026 ballot campaign. These states will begin such efforts with a much stronger foundation in place.

How we reevaluate: Unite America is already working with partners on a thorough After Action Review to generate as many insights as possible to inform future campaigns –– including exit polling, media analysis, and a qualitative assessment of campaign structures.

How we regroup: Finally, we need to recognize, as a former colleague liked to say, that movements are fundamentally composed of “a group of people, moving.” These very real people — including volunteers, state campaign leaders, national partner staff, and philanthropists — have worked hard, invested significantly, and sacrificed greatly.

“All of this,” Unite America board member Sam Mar recently wrote to advocates, “for an esoteric set of reforms that most people have never heard of. You’re crazy. But so were those who fought for every other meaningful reform that has transformed our society for the better.” 

As soon as early December, leading advocates and partners will attend the annual convening of the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers to celebrate with each other, learn from each other, and work together to plan where we go from here. 

No Matter What Happens

While we do not yet know the results of this year’s elections, I am confident we will look back on 2024 as a year that propelled us forward. We know that American democracy cannot endure if our elections continue to be controlled by the fringes of both political parties in low-turnout party primaries. We must remain committed to work that is required of all those fighting for systemic change against existing power structures that are failing our country.

America is the greatest experiment in self-governance in all of human history. But is it just that: an experiment. Our Founders knew the system they designed would not be perfect, but they gave us tools so that we can continue to improve it. That has been our tradition. Today, it remains our task. 

Onward to victory! 

‍

‍