SPEAKER: Healthy competition-- it's typically
what propels businesses to make better products and services.
Better products and services equal happier customers.
And happy customers equal happy businesses.
Win-win.
But what if I told you there was a booming $16 billion
US industry that thrives off a win-lose scenario, an industry
where customers are perpetually dissatisfied
and new competitors don't stand a chance?
This industry has not only been dominated
by a duopoly, that is just two players, for the last 150
years, but the industry itself threatens
overall American competitiveness and social progress.
You think that industry would never survive?
Welcome to US two-party politics.
When former CEO Katherine Gehl and Harvard Business School
professor Michael Porter took a fresh look at US politics
as if it were an industry, they applied
Porter's famous Five Forces Framework
to assess its competitive health.
The dynamics between rivals, buyers, suppliers,
new entrants, and substitutes are
what keep any healthy private sector industry on its toes.
However, in the US politics industry,
Gehl and Porter found unhealthy competition
in which the rivals, Republicans and Democrats,
do well even if the customers, citizens and voters, lose out.
They were also surprised to discover
that US politics, while dysfunctional,
really isn't broken.
In fact, it's doing exactly what it was designed to do.
You see, the rules of the system have been intentionally created
by and for the entrenched duopoly of Republicans
and Democrats to keep themselves in power.
They divide their customers, the public, up
according to partisan interests.
This polarization ensures customer loyalty
and reduces accountability.
Each party competes to reinforce the division,
instead of delivering real solutions that
would require compromise.
Moreover, channels for reaching customers, like media coverage
and advertising, and suppliers, like candidates and lobbyists,
have been co-opted to serve the duopoly's agenda.
And most customers have very limited influence,
primarily because the threat of competition
is almost non-existent.
The barriers to entry facing new competitors,
like a new political party, or substitutes,
such as independents, are colossal,
and the two rivals actually cooperate
to strengthen those barriers.
Case in point, no new major political party
has emerged since 1854, despite widespread dissatisfaction
with the two parties.
And yet the problem is bigger still.
The polarization not only affects who gets elected,
it also affects what elected officials do once in office.
Since every decision is driven by the next increasingly
partisan election, lawmakers vote accordingly,
resulting in less bipartisanship, less
compromise, and even less getting
done in the public interest.
Because there's no new competition,
there's no accountability for this failure.
If politics was run like a free-market industry,
more competitors, especially innovative ones,
could have threatened the Republicans and Democrats
duopoly long ago.
This made Gehl and Porter wonder,
could free-market principles help
redesign this failing system that seemed so set in stone?
The answer was a resounding yes.
In fact, they found an achievable nonpartisan solution
that targets the root of unhealthy competition--
revamp our elections with a final-five voting
model, an experiment already underway in a handful of US
cities and states.
The first order of business is to broaden
the field of candidates.
To do so, we would replace our current party-controlled
primaries with a single nonpartisan top-five primary
open to anyone, regardless of party registration.
All candidates from any party, including independents,
would appear on the same ballot.
Up to five top finishers, regardless
of partisan affiliation, would advance
to the general election.
Then in November, these five candidates
would face-off, with the winner selected
by ranked-choice voting.
To back up, we currently have plurality voting,
where the winner is whoever gets the most votes, but not
necessarily a majority.
Not only can someone be elected with minimal actual support,
but plurality voting creates disincentives for new entrants
to compete for fear of spoiling the election by pulling away
votes from ideologically similar candidates.
By contrast, with ranked-choice voting,
candidates must receive majority support to win an election.
Here's how it would work.
Your general election ballot has the names
of the five primary winners.
You pick your favorite, but--
so no votes are wasted--
you also make a second, third, fourth, and fifth choice.
After the polls close, the first-place votes are counted.
If one candidate receives more than 50%
of the first-place votes, a true majority, the election is over.
But what if one candidate gets only 33%
and the next closest candidate gets 32%?
In today's plurality voting system,
the candidate with 33% of the vote would win.
But with ranked choice, the election isn't over yet.
In this scenario, the candidate in last place is eliminated,
and those votes are automatically transferred
to each voter's second choice.
Votes are continually redistributed
until enough votes push a candidate
over the 50% threshold to win with the broadest
possible support.
By opening the field to new and dynamic competition,
final-five voting bakes accountability, results,
and innovation into the system.
With a steady supply of potential new entrants
or substitutes, legislators will have renewed incentive
to innovate and deliver results.
Their customers, the citizens and voters,
are now empowered to hold them accountable at the ballot box.
Healthy competition would flip our win-lose system
into a win-win that benefits not only all the players involved
across the political spectrum, but American economic
competitiveness overall.
Business leaders would stand for nothing
less in their own organizations--
why should Americans accept such failure where it matters most?
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