Swipe The Vote

Last night, I held a Substack Live with

Bradley Tusk

, on three big topics. One was the recent TED Talk he gave about the subject he’s been spending time and—so far—$20 million of his own money on: mobile voting.

The Substack Live is really worth watching, and I’ve come to believe that the lack of participation in primaries is one of the most corrosive, distorting issues in our democracy. In fact, it turns our democracy into a de facto oligopoly. In 2018, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary—thus assuring her election in the overwhelmingly Democratic NY-14th district—only 29,778 people voted. Congressional districts have over 700,000 residents, and party registration in the 14th is about 300,000.

This isn’t a knock on AOC. Part of her campaign relied on the fact that Crowley wouldn’t get out the vote—but that’s just the point. Unless there are extraordinary measures, almost no one votes in primaries. And even if there is extraordinary attention, the primary numbers aren’t much better.

In Pennsylvania last year, a state with 13 million residents and almost 4 million registered Democrats, a little over 1 million voted in the primary for Attorney General. This was a hard-fought, multi-candidate race, and it’s not like Pennsylvanians didn’t care about the outcome—almost 7 million voted in the general. It’s just that primaries are so poorly designed, publicized, and scheduled that it threatens democracy.

So Tusk is doing something about it. He wants people to vote by phone. The process has been proven safe and effective, as he describes in his TED Talk.

The rest of the interview is about his willingness to throw punches over a very touchy-feely subject: hunger in children. Tusk explains that he’s persona non grata in the NYC hunger community, even though he’s been volunteering in soup kitchens for years. Why? He utilizes his background as a political operative to actually get states to fund school breakfast and lunch programs. New York State wanted to get off with $20 or $30 million in funding, until Tusk, his operatives, and a series of billboard trucks started circling the Capitol shaming stingy legislators. Here’s a quote from 48:00 in:

“We hired these mobile billboard trucks and stationed them all around the Capitol in Albany, just beating the living shit out of the governor and the legislature with messages like, ‘Why are you letting kids starve?’ And eventually we got a call from a very, very high-ranking legislator saying, ‘On behalf of everyone, we want to know what’s it going to take to make the trucks go away.’”

It’s a great interview with an interesting talk. I hope you enjoy it.