Katherine Gehl Calls for More Choice for Voters at CLC Book Event

Campaign Legal Center (CLC) hosted “Virtual Book Event: CLC's Trevor Potter with Katherine Gehl” on Katherine Gehl’s new book “The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy.”

In the book, Gehl, a business leader, explains how introducing more competition into politics could address America’s political problems.

During the event Trevor Potter, CLC’s president, asked Gehl to share more details on the book’s assertion that the current two-party system hurts our country’s democracy.

Gehl argued that the Democratic and Republican parties constitute a political duopoly, a term that she borrows from the field of economics to describe a situation where two organizations dominate an entire industry.

Because of these limited choices, voters lose much of their ability to hold their elected officials accountable. As a result, America’s two-party system can allow politicians to prioritize the desires of wealthy special interests, donors, and primary voters ahead of those of ordinary citizens.

To make politics more competitive and incentivize politicians to be accountable to their constituents, Gehl proposes that states should replace closed primaries with nonpartisan, open primaries and implement a ranked-choice voting (RCV) system that would enable voters to choose among at least five different candidates.

In the book Gehl and her coauthor also argue that under a political system centered around accountability to voters, it would be easier to make other key reforms like decreasing the amount of money in our politics and limiting the power of wealthy special interests.

Learn more about CLC’s work on RCV.