A week is a long time in a presidential campaign. Last week, Americans were anguishing over the choices we’d be given in the presidential race – between Donald Trump, a convicted felon and serial liar, and Joe Biden, whose apparent increasing infirmity caused many Democratic voters to question whether it was time for him to step aside.

Then, at 6:11 p.m. Saturday night, everything turned upside down with the shocking near-miss assassination attempt on former President Trump’s life. Even before the chaos subsided, and before anyone knew much about the circumstances, the calls for calm began. President Biden went on national television Sunday night with a plea to “lower the temperature in our politics.” A Monday Washington Post editorial called on Americans to “Turn Down the Heat and Let in the Light.” 

So now we should be asking ourselves, on both accounts, “How did we get here?” and, even more important, “What do we do now?” How did our political process deliver such excruciatingly uninspiring choices, and what can we do – beyond pleas to dial it down that usually have no effect – to quiet and calm our political process?

We need to change the rules of the game by which we make political choices. We can start by recognizing that the two major political parties exert an undue influence on our politics and that their interests don’t always reflect the will of the voters. A July 2024 Gallup poll found that 51% of all voters now consider themselves independent of the two parties. That’s an all-time high and contrasts with only 23% who consider themselves Democrats and 25% who consider themselves Republicans.

Even though they represent less than half of the electorate, the two parties have become the controlling force in politics, using the mechanism of the election apparatus to decide who will be the candidates and who gets to vote for those candidates. As political reformer Katherine Gehl and Harvard Business School legend Michael Porter point out in their book The Political Industry, the two parties act as a classic duopoly, stifling competition and serving their own interests – and ignoring voters when it suits those interests.

In 2024, the insiders in both parties concluded early on that there was no need for a competitive candidate selection process, and essentially ordained that voters would be force-fed a rematch of the 2020 election. When President Biden points to the millions of votes he received in the 2024 primaries, he omits the fact that he was the only candidate on the ballot. 

Either directly or indirectly, the parties also decide who gets to vote in the primaries. In strictly closed primary states like Pennsylvania, New York, and Florida, only voters registered in a party can vote in that primary – meaning that millions of voters (1.3 million in PA) are shut out from even casting a token vote in the elections that decide.

So we end up with a tyranny of the minority, where a few self-interested and highly motivated partisan players and voters make our most important political choices. This dynamic raises the temperature of our political debate. The few voters who show up for primary elections tend to be more partisan and more extreme than the voting population as a whole. Thanks to the echo chamber they inhabit, their rhetoric becomes even more extreme. The lines between hyperpartisanship and hate blur quickly, and add chum to the political waters that make more likely the violence that we witnessed in horror on Saturday night.

We have seen this movie before. Author Jon Grinspan, in his book The Age of Acrimony: How America Fought to Fix Their Democracy 1865-1915 reminds us that by the late 1880s elections had become loud, drunken, violent affairs dominated in big cities by gangs who beat up voters – either to get them to the polls or to keep them away. Such was the case in Philadelphia, and it shocked proper Philadelphia into forming groups like the Committee of Seventy, which I served as CEO from 2015 to 2021 and which remains a highly effective voice for clean and fair elections.

But, as Grinspan documents, Americans stepped forward to quiet elections. We changed the rules. We made voting private rather than public. We closed bars on election day (and then prohibited alcohol outright). We took the election of Senators away from the party bosses and gave it to the voters. We doubled the size of the electorate by affirming the right of women to vote. In many states (but not PA) we created the right of citizens to bring reforms directly to the voters and bypass the party bosses and the state legislatures they kept in their pockets.

Those reforms had the intended effect, bringing about 50 years of more civil, less violent elections. All was not perfect (voter turnout has never approached the levels of the angry 1880’s, and it took the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and the civil rights movement, to truly affirm the rights of ALL Americans to participate). 

But the lessons of history suggest that now is the time to advance a new set of rules that respond to today’s realities and will result in a more representative, inclusive and more calm political process.

Let’s begin in Pennsylvania by allowing all voters, including 1.3 million independent voters, to participate in every election. A state House bill is ready to move to the floor for a vote, and Democrats who control the House are realizing that it’s good politics and good policy to pass the bill, given how significant independent voters will be in close legislative races this year. 

Let’s consider the possibilities of ranked-choice voting (a Quakerly way of arriving at consensus if ever there was one) to bring more voters to the polls and make every vote a meaningful one.  Let’s even take a look at nonpartisan primaries, which many states are actively considering as a way to calm the partisan waters of the election process.

In times of crisis and unrest, it pays to take Mr. Rogers’ advice and look for the ‘helpers’. Jeff Jackson, Congressman from North Carolina’s 14th District, a rare voice of reason in this Congress, had this to say about where we are and where we go from here: “This is truly one of the darkest chapters of American politics that any of us has ever lived through – but we will get through it. We can still write the next chapter in a way that makes us proud. We are still an extremely powerful nation and a good people, and our union shall endure, as we endeavor towards its perfection.”

David Thornburgh

Chair, BallotPA Campaign to End Closed Primaries