With calls of “parents’ rights” Republicans are targeting transgender youth up and down the ticket.
Education has not dominated national political headlines this midterm cycle and TV ads have focused primarily on inflation, crime, and abortion. Yet education issues have permeated election campaigns up and down the ticket, from congressional candidates to governorships and even school board races, which have seen new influxes of attention and outside spending.
One year ago, analysts across the political spectrum predicted that the national Republican playbook in the midterms would mirror that of Virginia’s newly elected Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, who won his race after making “critical race theory” and “parents’ rights” central to his bid. After the Virginia election, Democratic pollsters found that 9 percent of Biden voters cast their ballots for Youngkin, with most citing education as a top issue.
The analysts who thought Youngkin’s experience would repeat itself in the 2022 midterms were both right and wrong: Republicans are focusing on winning the same kind of Biden-to-Youngkin suburban moderates who prioritized education and flipped Virginia red. So the education culture wars are at play in this election, but the central issues don’t look the same as they did a year ago.
Critical race theory — a term that, in popular usage on the right, has come to mean nearly any curriculum that refers to systemic or structural racism — hasn’t totally disappeared from the midterms. Most Republican nominees for state education superintendent feature fighting CRT prominently on their campaign websites and more than a half-dozen GOP gubernatorial candidates have said blocking CRT in schools is a top priority for them.
But the issue has significantly faded since the Republican primaries have ended, in part because outside of the Republican base, most voters simply don’t know or care about it, and don’t have a clear opinion on if it should be taught in schools. Even Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has basically stopped talking about the issue, after having mentioned it at least 130 times between May 2020 and November 2021.
But Youngkin’s emphasis on parents’ rights has proven far more potent this year as a rallying cry for candidates — even at the federal level, where House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has endorsed a “Parents’ Bill of Rights” for schools if the GOP takes control of Congress. Politicians from both parties have sought to appeal to the widely held belief that parents should be more involved in local school matters, including selecting curriculum and opting children out of lessons they may object to.
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While Republicans have led on the “parents’ rights” mantra — and have been interweaving their rights rhetoric with plans to promote private school vouchers — even Democrats have been leaning in, including Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who recently formed a new “parents’ council” to advise lawmakers on education policy. Democratic gubernatorial candidates Josh Shapiro and J.B. Pritzker also recently came out to back private school voucher programs, among other entreaties to parents.
While debates around teaching about racism in schools have waned, Republicans have made gender identity and sexual orientation in schools central. Candidates have targeted transgender youth athletes, as well as classroom lessons featuring LGBTQ+ content. Outside groups have been funding TV ads suggesting Democrats endorse sexually explicit literature about same-sex couples for young children, and on the federal level, congressional Republicans have been fanning the flames, rallying behind the Protect Children’s Innocence Act — a bill that would criminalize performing gender-affirming medical procedures on minors. Democrats, for their part, have campaigned affirmatively on protecting LGBTQ+ youth, and increasing funds for school mental health services.
The education culture wars at play in this election also reflect new efforts to capitalize on shifting ideas around which party is more trustworthy on education — a mantle Democrats have enjoyed for decades but appeared to lose ground on following the pandemic. In March 2022, the polling company Rasmussen found 43 percent of likely voters said they trusted Republicans more to deal with education issues, compared with just 36 percent trusting Democrats more. Two more polls conducted this summer by Democratic-aligned groups also found Republicans with a new, narrow edge over Democrats on matters of school trust.
Education, even among parents, almost never ranks as a top voter issue in federal elections, including this year. But it does seem to be ranking as a higher priority in state and local races: a Harris poll from May found parents ranked education as the second most important issue, behind only the economy. More than 4 in 5 respondents to the Harris poll said education had become a more important political issue to them than it was in the past, with 2 in 5 strongly agreeing with the statement.
According to Jeffrey Henig, a political science and education professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, campaign operatives have recognized that education can be a way to motivate voters who are not traditionally involved in national politics. They may not identify strongly with either the Republican or Democratic Party; they might consider themselves fairly apolitical, “but when it comes to kids, and when it comes to their kids, they respond intensely,” he said. Activating this relatively small swing group has become a major priority to national organizations, who recognize many of the most pivotal races will hinge on small vote margins.
Rebecca Jacobsen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University, emphasized that this is not the first time national groups have shown an interest in local elections for federal education priorities. “I think what’s different now is that the push on the local level is not just being used for pushing an education agenda,” she told Vox. “It’s being pushed because it’s good for overall turnout, for rallying particular groups that you see as important to pursuing your broader political goals, though it is also resulting in a lot of education change.”
How outside groups are targeting typically low-key school board races
School board elections garnered more attention from conservative donors and strategists following the pandemic, who saw opportunities to capitalize on frustrations over masking, remote learning, and school lessons focused on race and gender.
In 2021, the New York-based 1776 Project PAC launched to elect school board members who are committed to opposing critical race theory. The group backed 57 candidates across seven states last year, 41 of whom won. Two former Florida school board members formed another conservative group — Moms for Liberty — in January 2021; they now have over 200 chapters of parent activists organizing around school board races in 38 states.
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Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images
Armed with a large war chest, the 1776 Project PAC this year has backed school board candidates mostly in Texas and Florida. Founder Ryan Girdusky said they’re funded by over 30,000 small-dollar donors, though they also benefited from a $900,000 donation from the right-wing Restoration PAC.
Additional right-wing entrants into the school board politics scene include conservative groups like the Virginia-based American Principles Project, which focuses on opposing what they call the “transgender agenda” and “hard-line progressive activists” who are “attacking the family.” On top of school board races the American Principles Project has also been funding ads for congressional contests, benefiting from multiple large six-figure donations from Restoration PAC.
School board politics got an unprecedented jolt this past summer when Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis came out to endorse 30 school board candidates across several counties that passed local student mask mandates last year. Partisan endorsements aren’t new in school board races, but involvement from the top of the ballot is. “Parental rights, curriculum transparency and classrooms free of woke ideology are all on the ballot this election, and it starts with school board elections,” DeSantis declared — and gave his endorsees cash contributions. (Nineteen of DeSantis’s endorsees were also backed by the 1776 Project PAC.)
The unusual move from the governor prompted a response from his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, who then endorsed his own slate of “pro-parent” school board candidates. Most of DeSantis’s endorsed candidates won their primaries, bolstering his influence and position as a potential 2024 presidential contender.
Scrambling to catch up, some education PACs have formed on the progressive side of the aisle. One, called Red, Wine and Blue, formed originally in Ohio in 2019, but last year announced it would expand its focus to states with key US Senate races like Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Earlier this month the group funded an ad featuring suburban moms in Florida opposing DeSantis’s efforts to ban books, sue teachers, and attack the rights of LGBTQ students.
Another left-leaning group — the Campaign for Our Shared Future — launched this year as a nonpartisan effort, though backed by the New Venture Fund and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, two liberal groups that fund many left-wing advocacy organizations. A job posting for the group said it had raised $6.6 million and was currently fundraising for an additional $6.5 million. The group announced it was spending $300,000 on TV ads in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Missouri, with ads highlighting book bans, a school board member denigrating transgender students, and an Ohio bill that would have required female school athletes to get genital inspections,
“We were founded to ensure all children have a high-quality and age-appropriate education,” Heather Harding, the group’s executive director, told Vox. “Our work with local school boards is new, but what we’re interested in is ensuring that those who are elected can lead with honesty and integrity and not extremist politicians who are trying to drum up attention for their own gain.”
Republicans are focusing on transgender youth in schools and sports
Republicans at the local, state, and federal level have taken aim at transgender rights this year. At least 160 bills were introduced in 35 state legislatures targeting LGBTQ+ Americans, with most of those bills focused on transgender students’ participation in athletics, parental transparency over what schools teach about gender identity, and parental consent for gender-affirming health care. Republican midterm political advertising has likewise focused on these issues.
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DeSantis’s foray into school board endorsements wasn’t entirely driven by whether or not one supported a student mask mandate last year. Florida’s governor also threw his political clout behind conservative candidates who aligned with him on opposing school lessons around gender identity and sexuality orientation.
In March DeSantis signed Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act — a novel statute that bars teachers from providing lessons on sexual orientation or gender identity between kindergarten through third grade. Liberal opponents of the law branded it the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and Disney, based in Florida, inspired backlash from fans for not standing up against it. But conservative operatives felt confident they were pushing an education position that would resonate with voters, as national polling found broad support among Americans for this type of regulation.
In March, polling firm Rasmussen found that 62 percent of likely voters would support a law like Florida’s parental rights bill in their own state, including 45 percent who “strongly support” the measure. In October, researchers at the University of Southern California released a large national survey finding that most Americans opposed elementary school students learning about gender identity and sexual orientation. While far more Democrats supported teaching young children about LGBTQ+ issues than Republicans, a majority of Democrats also believed these lessons should wait until children were older.
Though Americans repeatedly say they oppose book bans in school libraries and classroom curricula, they’ve also expressed disapproval for specifically assigning students books on gender identity and sexual orientation. Even for high school students, most Americans say they oppose assigning students books on topics that depict experiences of transgender, lesbian, or gay people, and of families with same-sex parents.
This kind of research has emboldened conservatives in other states to introduce copy-cat versions of Florida’s education law, and to fund ads targeting Democrats who seem vulnerable on the issues. One ad funded by the Republican Governors Association in Maine targeted Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, saying her “Education Department was teaching kindergarteners radical transgender policies.” Following the ad, which focused on a LGBTQ+ lesson featured on a state website, Mills had the lesson removed, saying she agreed it was not age-appropriate. In Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has been attacked for his state education department providing resources on transgender issues for preschoolers.
In Michigan’s gubernatorial election, Republican candidate Tudor Dixon has emphasized that she supports Michigan having its own version of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, and has made central to her campaign allegations that Gov. Whitmer has belittled parents’ concerns about books they believe sexualize children. Dixon announced she’d support a statewide ban on “pornographic” books in schools.
Dixon has also been leaning heavily on another related issue that has animated conservatives this cycle: prohibiting transgender girls from participating in women’s sports. In late September Dixon announced a proposal to bar participation in women’s sports to anyone assigned male at birth.
On the federal level, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pledged that if Republicans take control of the House they would “defend fairness by ensuring that only women can compete in women’s sports.” The Republican Governors Association has likewise sponsored TV ads around opposition to transgender athletes. Even in congressional races, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio has attacked his Democratic opponent Val Demings in ads for “vot[ing] to allow transgender youth sports and teach children radical gender identity without parental consent.”
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Democrats, for their part, have pledged to protect LGBTQ+ communities, and have been campaigning at LGBTQ+ events. Beto O’Rourke, the Democrat challenging Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, took aim this past spring at his opponent’s positions on gender-affirming health care, and Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has spoken up in support of transgender rights.
But Democrats have largely tried to steer away from the specific debates around transgender athletes and direct the education conversation back to school funding. According to a tally by EdWeek, 20 Democratic gubernatorial candidates argue on their websites for increased school funding, and 11 mention supporting student mental health.
Private school vouchers emerge as a wedge issue
As Republicans double down on “parents’ rights,” they are eyeing an opportunity to push their long-standing goals around subsidies for private schools and homeschooling. Most Democrats, meanwhile, are campaigning to keep public funds in public schools.
In some states, Democrats see opposition to vouchers as a key mobilizing plank. Joy Hofmeister, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Oklahoma, has been framing her Republican opponent Kevin Stitt’s support for vouchers as a death knell to rural education. (When Stitt ran for the governor’s seat four years ago, he had opposed expanding vouchers himself.) Local reporters have been observing that conservative rural voters seem to be paying attention to Hofmeister’s warnings.
In Arizona, while Republican Gov. Doug Ducey has dramatically expanded private school choice during his eight years in office, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs has been campaigning on her longstanding opposition to vouchers. In 2018 Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected a school voucher ballot measure by a 2-to-1 margin, though Republican lawmakers have continued to pass private school choice measures since. Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has been campaigning on even more robust school choice, like allowing students to take courses at different schools.
Democrats in a few other states see new political opportunity in softening their opposition to vouchers. With less than a month before Election Day, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced on a candidate survey that he backed a program that provides subsidies for students to attend private and religious schools. While he didn’t voice strong enthusiasm for it, it’s a change from 2017, when he had blasted the same program.
School choice advocates praised Pritzker for his pivot, noting more than 75 percent of Illinois parents with school-age children back private school choice. Likewise, in September Pennsylvania’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro quietly changed his website to add language in favor of private school choice, clarifying later to reporters he is open to giving subsidies to parents to transfer students out of low-performing schools.
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A year ago there was pundit chatter that voters might turn against teacher unions or elected Democrats who backed school closures during the pandemic. But public opinion for teacher unions hasn’t wavered, and election polls show despite Republican attacks, voters do not seem to be looking to punish officials for virtual instruction.
This is probably in part because many parents themselves were not actually in favor of opening schools quickly before vaccines were available, and parents were largely receiving the kind of instruction they wanted for their children, even as they held concerns about harms of remote leaning. (EdChoice, a national school choice group, polled parents monthly about their comfort level sending their child back to school, and found comfort levels didn’t break 60 percent until April 2021.)
Still, that doesn’t mean the pandemic didn’t foment new trust issues between schools and parents, including around issues like youth masking and Covid-19 vaccines. Some analysts believe the new focus on “parents’ rights” reflects Covid-era frustration that school leaders prioritized culture issues over basic academics and learning loss. Nat Malkus, an education policy expert at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, argued in September that Republicans may well struggle to replicate Youngkin’s 2021 playbook, as the critical race theory frustration that Youngkin capitalized on last year resonated because parents were still so exasperated from the pandemic.
But as pandemic-era differences between Democrats and Republicans fade further, and as Republicans identify fewer and fewer examples of actual CRT scandals in schools to keep the alleged crisis alive, Democrats stand a shot at regaining and securing their trust advantage in education. Still, they may not succeed, especially if voters perceive Democrats as opposing measures they find reasonable.
Jacobsen, the education policy professor from Michigan State University, does think the country is at a new inflection point for public education politics.
“A year ago I would have said this is just another case of people saying, ‘Well, everyone else’s schools are failing but I love my school, I love my kids’ teachers,’” she said.
But more recent survey work Jacobsen conducted prompted her to think that many of these narratives around distrust have indeed seeped into parents’ views of their own local schools, too. “We were really surprised,” she told Vox. “There really was a strong relationship between how much you had heard these narratives and the lower levels of trust of your own teachers.”
Jacobsen thinks that it’s too early to say if this marks a lasting change, but that it does reflect a shift from past research findings in the area. “That’s why I’m so worried about these inroads,” she said. “Those who would like to see public education fundamentally changed will have an opening to do so in ways that we have not since [Ronald] Reagan and even before him.”
It’s on the ballot in Nevada, and it may be coming soon to a state near you.
Can much of America’s current political dysfunction be traced back to one feature of our system: the partisan primary? And if so, what should be done about that?
Nevada voters will be tasked with assessing those questions when they go to the polls Tuesday, to vote on “Question 3” — a proposed overhaul of the state’s election system that would effectively kill the partisan primary (the elections in which Democratic and Republican voters choose their party nominees).
Instead, Nevada would have a nonpartisan primary, from which the top five candidates of any party would emerge to the general election. The general election would then be conducted under ranked-choice voting (which lets people vote for multiple candidates for each office, ranked in order of their preference).
This is not just about election wonkery. The proposal’s backers say it could help fix American politics by weakening the forces of partisanship, polarization, and extremity. The two parties, they believe, have become captured by their bases’ most extreme elements, who can discipline anyone breaking from the party line through a primary challenge.
Indeed, when assessing how the Republican Party has moved into the hands of Donald Trump, it’s impossible to miss the importance of the primary. Some Trump critics have retired rather than face the primary electorate again: “The path that I would have to travel to get the Republican nomination is a path I’m not willing to take,” then-Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) said in 2017. Others have taken on Trump anyway and, with a few exceptions, have faced defeat. The most common strategy employed by GOP incumbents, though, was to become a strong Trump supporter to preemptively prevent losing renomination.
But while Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who has defied Trump on several high-profile issues, did draw a right-wing challenger this year, she did not have to worry about getting primaried. In 2020, Alaska voters approved a similar reform to the one on the ballot in Nevada. That effectively guaranteed Murkowski would make it to the general election, rather than being taken down beforehand. Her case — and her GOP challenger Kelly Tshibaka’s — will go before the full Alaska electorate next week.
And yet progressives worried about the future of American democracy aren’t so enthusiastic about these reforms — in part because they’d likely weaken the left wing of the Democratic Party as well. Progressives have had their own success at taking down incumbents in primaries that elevated rising stars like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to Congress. They hope to punish Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) for opposing much of President Joe Biden’s agenda this year with a primary challenge in 2024. There is even speculation that fear of a primary challenge has made Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer focus hard on pleasing the left during Biden’s term.
If approved, these reforms probably wouldn’t live up to all their supporters’ ambitions — few reforms do. But they would present a clear path by which politicians of both parties disfavored by the party bases could make it to the general election. And for those who believe the rise of the Trump right presents a clear threat to US democracy, reforms that could weaken that movement’s power are probably worth at least some thought.
How voting would work in Nevada if Question 3 is approved
The Question 3 proposal would make two major changes. First, it would blow up the system in which the two parties hold separate primaries to choose their nominees — substituting instead one nonpartisan primary in which any registered voter can vote, and from which the top five vote-getters move on to the general election.
Many politicians now live under the fear of “getting primaried” — annoying their party’s base voters, losing a low-turnout election those voters dominate, and never even making it to the general election ballot. For instance, any potential GOP critic of Donald Trump must reckon with a looming primary dominated by strong Trump supporters and assess whether to fall in line, fight a likely losing battle, or simply retire. It’s a powerful incentive.
This reform would essentially ensure any incumbent, as well as any significant primary vote-getter, would get to make their case on Election Day. That could mean just one Democrat and Republican move on, or multiple candidates from one or both parties advance. Five candidates going forward also means more options than California and Washington’s nonpartisan top two primaries provide.
Now, if you have multiple candidates in a typical general election, there’s a possible problem — someone could win with merely a small plurality in a split field. So the second big change in this proposal is to conduct the general election with ranked-choice voting. This system lets voters rank several candidates for each office in order of their preference, rather than voting for just one. When votes are tallied, the low-performing candidates are gradually eliminated, and each vote for them is reallocated to the voter’s next-ranked candidate. This reform, supporters hope, will help the candidate truly preferred by a majority of the electorate win. (I wrote a detailed explainer last year on how ranked-choice voting works.)
The measure is funded mainly by a collection of bipartisan or nonpartisan businesspeople, many from outside the state. Yet most organized political interests in the state hate the proposal — the opposition includes leading Democratic and Republican politicians, progressive and conservative activists, and even minor parties.
Tuesday’s vote won’t settle the issue in Nevada — the state’s constitutional amendment process requires voters to approve the measure twice before it goes into effect, so if voters approve it now, there would be another big battle over it in 2024. And while the reform would apply to elections for congressional, legislative, and top state offices, it wouldn’t apply to the state’s presidential nominating and general election contests.
Regardless of Tuesday’s outcome, the proposal’s backers aren’t going away. They’ve already succeeded in getting a similar reform implemented in Alaska, and they hope for ballot initiative campaigns in as many as eight other states in 2024. Their idea could be coming to a ballot near you very soon.
The “rational centrist” behind final five voting
Nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting are not new ideas. California and Washington both use a nonpartisan top two primary, while Maine, New York City, and other cities use ranked-choice voting for some elections.
But the combination of a top five primary and ranked-choice voting for the general election is the brainchild of Chicago business leader Katherine Gehl, who thought of the idea, branded it as “final five” voting, and provided the organization and much of the fundraising (her own and others’ money) behind it.
Her father had built the family company, Gehl Foods, into a dairy-based food product manufacturer with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and Katherine took over as CEO in 2011 before arranging its sale to an investment firm in 2015. Gehl grew up as a Republican, but was impressed by Barack Obama and became a bundler for him. Obama appointed her to be a board member of a government entity investing in developing countries. Disillusioned with gridlock in Obama’s second term, she turned her attention to the political system.
“I would call myself a rational centrist,” Gehl told me in an interview. “What I saw after Obama went to the White House is that candidates can’t deliver in this system. And it was just clear it all traced back to the primary.”
Indeed, most members of Congress are in safely Democratic or Republican districts and are therefore effectively immune to general election pressures. Their primary election — often a low-turnout affair dominated by strong partisans or ideologues — is their only real election. And even those in swing districts still have to survive their primary before making it to the general election.
“The root cause of our political dysfunction is that November elections in this country are for the most part meaningless,” Gehl said. “Most November voters are wasting their time, which is not only profoundly undemocratic and unrepresentative, it’s the reason we can’t solve our complex problems and make necessary trade-offs.” She continued: “In the existing system where most people are elected and answer to only 8 percent of their side, they are forbidden to do the work of having those policy discussions and innovating across the aisle, of negotiating and making a deal.”
This dysfunctional system is propped up, Gehl believes, by the two-party duopoly and the large arrangement of entities supporting them, from donors to campaign professionals to ideological or partisan media to activists and organized interest groups. She began writing about this alongside Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, and they began pitching final five voting as their solution. Now, Gehl’s organization, the Institute for Political Innovation, is working with local groups to seed the idea in various states — starting in Alaska and Nevada — and she’s helped win over other deep-pocketed tech and business donors to contribute, including major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, major Republican donor Ken Griffin, and Rupert Murdoch’s liberal daughter-in-law Kathryn Murdoch.
“Everyone says there is no silver bullet. I think this is as close to a silver bullet as you can get,” said Gehl, arguing that final five voting’s implementation would mean politicians become “freed from the tyranny of the party primary” and newly able to work as problem-solvers and consensus builders. Her goal is that five states will be using the system by 2025, and said initiative campaigns in California, Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming are possible in 2024.
What are the criticisms of final five voting?
Not everyone is sold on the idea. The critics are legion, and they include most politicians and political groups in Nevada. We can think of these criticisms as falling into a few categories.
Defending parties or primaries: Before even getting into the nitty-gritty policy details, lots of people simply don’t want to weaken the parties, defang primary challenges, or allow purported centrist problem-solvers an easier path to victory.
The party establishments want to be able to run a coherent general election campaign with one nominee for each office, rather than the multiple Democrats or Republicans per contest this system could advance to Election Day. “That’s a basic function of political parties, essentially determining who gets to compete for office,” said David Damore, a political science professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Meanwhile, if you’re a progressive who believes enacting policies on the left is very important, and that elected Democrats are often too centrist, then you’d view the primary challenge as an important and valuable tool — as would conservatives in the GOP. And you wouldn’t be too enthused about proposals to elect more centrists. The system seems most likely to help candidates who could have trouble winning traditional primaries like, say, Kyrsten Sinema, Liz Cheney, Jeff Flake, Mike Bloomberg, Lisa Murkowski, Joe Lieberman, or Andrew Yang.
Part of this is about values. It’s a “fantasy,” Will Pregman of the progressive group Battle Born Progress told me, that “quote-unquote ‘moderate’ candidates are more desirable and accurately reflect the population that votes.” But it’s also partly about leverage. Activists really like the current primary system because turnout is low and it’s easier for them to influence the outcome, according to Damore.
Worrying about its effects on voters: The well-funded TV ad campaign promoting the proposal has focused overwhelmingly on the issue of letting independents vote in the primary, and avoided the more wonky territory of ranked-choice voting. But that reform has long had its critics, as I wrote last year.
For one, many fear that less privileged voters — voters who don’t speak English, who are lower-income, or who are less educated — will have more difficulty with the new system, if they haven’t been sufficiently informed about how to use it. Perhaps they may be more likely to have their ballots thrown out due to improper rankings. Or perhaps they may be less likely to use all their ranking slots, making their ballots disproportionately likely to be discarded in a later round. Or perhaps they’ll be deterred from turning out at all (though in places where it has been adopted, it hasn’t resulted in consistently lower turnout).
“In our voting rights coalition, we have over 25 organizations that work in faith communities, AAPI communities, Latinx communities, Indigenous communities, and none of those organizations were brought to the table and asked, ‘What is the impact this is going to have on your community?’” Emily Persaud-Zamora, the executive director of Silver State Voices, a civic engagement group that coordinates with Nevada progressive organizations, said after citing the above concerns. “That in itself is unacceptable.”
Another issue is that ranked-choice ballots in the US tend to take a long time to count. Election administrators need to determine the order of candidates so they can eliminate them one by one and reallocate their ballots accordingly. They also have to decide whether to release a preliminary reallocation tally well before every ballot is counted (as New York City did last year). With the threat of election denial from the right, a protracted count could lead to lower confidence in the results.
Critiquing the specific design: Separately, there have been some questions from voting systems experts about whether this system is properly designed, as Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University, recently wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.
The issue is that ranked-choice eliminations can often eliminate the voters’ true consensus choice, if that person starts off with fewer first-choice votes. That appears to be what just happened when this system was used in Alaska’s House special election. Voters overall preferred the moderate Republican Nick Begich over both conservative Republican Sarah Palin and Democrat Mary Peltola in head-to-head matchups, but he was eliminated before either of them. This has happened elsewhere, too. Foley suggests a technical fix — tweaking the rules so that the order of elimination is based on a candidate’s total votes, not just first-choice votes.
This reform could have a real impact but likely won’t totally transform the system
Political scientists I interviewed were skeptical about the grander claims that final five voting would be able to solve so many of America’s political ills.
For one, few believed the primary system is really the main cause of polarization and dysfunction. “Primaries existed for a long time without producing MAGA winners,” said Drexel University political scientist Jack Santucci. The forces pushing the parties apart are much broader — journalist Ezra Klein has argued they trace back to a fundamental polarization of politics around voters’ core identities — and primaries are merely one arena in which they play out.
Even if partisan primaries went away, pressure from party leaders, donors, ideological media outlets, activists, and politicians’ social circles will remain. “When I look at the things that make party elites powerful, this doesn’t do a whole lot to change them,” said Florida State University political scientist Hans Hassell. “What I suspect will happen is you end up seeing parties and party elites adapt to it.”
Would-be politicians inclined to defy all this rather than just falling in line with one party or the other would need to find a support base somewhere. Yet voters less inclined to feel strongly toward one side or the other also tend to be less engaged with the political system in general. And it’s not clear their preferences really do incline toward a centrist, “problem-solving” business type. “The existence of this voter that is going to produce moderation itself is in question,” Santucci said.
Still, it seems indisputable that final five voting would achieve one key thing: It would let incumbents who run afoul of their party base get past the primary and make it to the general election (since you’d have to be a pretty incompetent incumbent to fall to sixth place in a primary). It does not necessarily ensure that those candidates will be more likely to win the general, but it lets them get there and present their case to voters.
It’s no accident that Alaska is the first state where a version of this was put in place. Murkowski, the incumbent moderate Republican senator, has long had a tense relationship with GOP primary voters. She actually lost her primary in 2010 but then subsequently ran as a write-in candidate and won the general election, keeping her seat. Yet after Trump became president, Murkowski defied him on several high-profile issues, so trouble appeared to loom ahead for her in the 2022 primary.
Scott Kendall was Murkowski’s lawyer during her write-in campaign, and believed the closed primary system was “broken,” he said. So in 2019, he began researching potential alternatives, and eventually found a report by Gehl and Porter proposing what was, at the time, final four voting. (They changed the number to five later.) Kendall told me he was already thinking along these lines, but the report “sorted what I was trying to do and was more eloquent than the actual thoughts in my head.” He put together a ballot measure on the topic, and eventually Gehl donated to the cause and was “one of the thought leaders I talked to during the journey,” he said.
Voters approved Alaska’s top four primary and ranked-choice general election in 2020, giving Murkowski an all-but-guaranteed ticket to the general election, and relieving primary pressure on her from the right. Three months later, Murkowski voted to convict Trump at his second impeachment trial.
So for Democrats and progressives who think preserving democracy is important, and that the GOP is being increasingly captured by extremists, these reforms deserve serious consideration. The reason Trump was stopped from stealing the 2020 election was largely because enough Republican elites defied his pressures. Yet open Trump critics have increasingly retired or been purged from the party. Election deniers have won GOP nominations in hundreds of contests across the country. The trends aren’t encouraging, and a future crisis could lie ahead.
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A surprise deal announced Wednesday promises peace but doesn’t offer much detail.
One of the world’s current deadliest conflicts and worst humanitarian crises could be moving toward a close.
On Wednesday, the Ethiopian federal government and the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) came to an agreement to permanently halt hostilities in a civil war that has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, pushed regions in the north to the brink of famine, and altered Ethiopia’s standing in the international community.
Though the announcement was an unexpected and welcome development in the two-year conflict, questions remain — including whether all the involved parties will commit to the peace deal, the mechanisms for implementation, and the role of other armed actors, including the Eritrean government.
“The two parties in the Ethiopian conflict have formally agreed to the cessation of hostilities as well as to systematic, orderly, smooth, and coordinated disarmament,” Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president of Nigeria who now works to mediate conflicts in Africa, announced yesterday, almost two years exactly after hostilities initially broke out in November 2020.
The deal reportedly calls for the full disarmament of Tigray’s forces within 30 days, with leaders meeting within five days to sort details. Ethiopian forces will also take control of federal facilities and major infrastructure in Tigray. (Though the official deal hasn’t yet been made public, multiple news outlets on Thursday obtained a copy.)
Thursday, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed celebrated the deal, saying, “Ethiopia’s peace proposal has been accepted 100 percent.” In a statement on Twitter, Abiy promised that his government’s commitment to peace “remains steadfast.”
The deal, the product of eight days of peace talks in South Africa between the two parties and alongside negotiators from the African Union like Obasanjo, surprised the world.
Though an internet and media blackout, imposed by Abiy’s government at the beginning of hostilities, has made verifying information in Tigray difficult if not impossible, tens of thousands are believed to have been killed in the fighting in Tigray, while hundreds of thousands have been displaced from Tigray and the neighboring Afar and Amhara regions, according to the United Nations. Millions are in dire need of humanitarian assistance including food and medical care.
And violence in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region had continued in the runup to the talks, which made a resolution seem increasingly unlikely. A previous humanitarian ceasefire, brokered in March of this year, broke down in August, and American diplomatic efforts to stop the fighting had failed by early September, when violence in Tigray surged again, with a particularly devastating impact on Tigrayan civilians. During that spate of fighting, around 500,000 people were forced from their homes; Ethiopian government forces hit a UN food truck and airstrikes hit a center for refugees near the border with Eritrea, killing at least 50 people, the New York Times reported.
Details of the peace process are thus far scant; the TPLF has agreed to disarm and reintegrate into the federal government’s army and the government has promised to support humanitarian efforts, but other questions, such as the role of the Eritrean army, which has supported the Ethiopian forces, and other armed groups involved in the conflict haven’t yet been addressed.
Parts of the deal may be difficult to implement; regional experts told the New York Times that Tigrayan leaders might have trouble selling the disarmament portions of the reported agreement. Tigray’s lead negotiator, Getachew Reda, noted that the deal contained “painful concessions” for the Tigrayans, including handing over control of “all federal facilities, installations, and major infrastructure … within the Tigray region” to the federal government.
Obasanjo seemed to acknowledge the significant work yet to be done to ensure peace in Ethiopia. “This moment is not the end of the peace process,” he said Wednesday. “Implementation of the peace agreement signed today is critical for its success,” he added, although the mechanics of the implementation are still opaque.
The conflict has stopped, but the wounds are deep
The conflict in Tigray began in November 2020, after two years of tension between Tigrayan leadership and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who was elected to his office in 2018 after nearly 30 years of Tigrayan political dominance. Though Tigrayans are a minority ethnic group within Ethiopia, the TPLF consolidated power first under the autocratic regime of Meles Zenawi, to the detriment of larger ethnic groups like the Oromo, Amhara, and Somali populations; Ethiopia under Tigrayan leadership also fought a low-level, frozen conflict over the next two decades with neighboring Eritrea.
In 2019, Abiy won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending hostilities with Eritrea and for instituting domestic reforms like rolling back press censorship, releasing political prisoners, and allowing political opposition groups. Despite these accomplishments, though, Ethiopia’s democratic progress deteriorated quickly after Abiy’s government repeatedly delayed national elections and extended his time in power in June 2020, as the Council on Foreign Relations explained. Tigrayan leadership held local elections despite the delays, solidifying the TPLF’s power in the region — and warned the federal government not to intervene or risk igniting conflict.
Abiy sent troops from the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) to Tigray on November 4, 2020, after accusing the TPLF of raiding a national military depot for weapons. Over the next few months, the low-level conflict ballooned into a civil war; Eritrean troops joined on the side of the federal government, although Abiy initially denied their presence in Tigray. They, along with ENDF troops, the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF), and TDF allies the Oromo Liberation Army have been accused of targeting civilians.
Information about the humanitarian situation in Tigray and the contours of the conflict have been difficult to come by; Abiy instituted an internet and media blackout in the region at the start of the war, making it difficult to verify sites of attack or numbers of casualties. A federal government blockade of the region began in June 2021, after the TPLF retook control of the region from federal forces; since then, except for a brief reprieve earlier this year, Tigrayans have suffered from a desperate lack of necessities like food, fuel, and medical supplies.
Ethiopia overall and Tigray in particular have some of the most severe food insecurity outlooks in the world, according to the Famine Early Warning System; that’s due to a combination of low levels of rainfall, instability limiting agricultural activity, and outside supply factors — specifically the war in Ukraine. Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, countries including Ethiopia that rely on Ukrainian grain to feed their populations have suffered due to Russia’s Black Sea blockade.
What comes next?
In his announcement Wednesday, Obasanjo promised “restoration of law and order, restoration of services, unhindered access to humanitarian supplies, protection of civilians,” a seeming acknowledgment of the dire consequences of the war for civilian populations in Tigray.
United Nations head Antonio Guterres praised the announcement as “a critical first step” in ending the war, while noting the severe damage the war has done to the civilian population in Tigray. According to the World Health Organization, about 5.2 million people in Tigray need humanitarian assistance in Tigray, and 3.8 million need health care, with WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus calling the situation “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.”
Though the peace agreement promises unfettered access to humanitarian aid, Ghebreyesus expressed concerns in a media briefing Wednesday regarding the sheer scale of need.
“Large numbers of displaced people are now arriving in, or moving towards, the regional capital Mekelle,” he said. “Most UN agencies and NGOs have now left towns in the region’s northeast because of security concerns. Some health partners have shut down because they cannot access the funds, fuel, and other supplies they need to serve the community,” raising concerns that the needed aid infrastructure might not become available as quickly as it’s needed.
Also unclear is the role of Eritrea in the peace process; though Eritrean troops have been fighting alongside ENDF troops since nearly the beginning of the conflict and have been accused of serious crimes in the hostilities, neither they nor the regional forces like the Oromo Liberation Army, which allied with the TDF, were represented at the talks, Reuters reported.
“We still have questions on the agreement,” a Tigrayan man in Addis Ababa told Reuters. “We didn’t hear anything about Eritrea. I hope that it will be in the details.”
A statement Abiy posted to Twitter was similarly opaque; the prime minister thanked the African Union and negotiators for brokering the deal, but didn’t acknowledge the grave suffering the conflict had caused, nor did he acknowledge any of the underlying causes of the war. The only mention of fighting at all is tangential; the conclusion of Abiy’s statement thanks “the brave members of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces” and the Ethiopian people who “[with]stood a testing period.”
Expression of Gratitude on the Conclusion of the Peace Talks pic.twitter.com/mB7Q0jLwsZ
— Abiy Ahmed Ali (@AbiyAhmedAli) November 2, 2022