The Campaign to Open Oklahoma’s Primaries Crosses the State

More than 80 residents from the Shawnee area gathered Monday night for a Common Sense Club meeting hosted by Oklahoma United to discuss State Question 836, the proposed 2026 ballot initiative to replace Oklahoma’s closed primary system with a unified open primary system. The larger-than-expected turnout led organizers to bring in extra seating to accommodate the engaged crowd.

The panel featured speakers: Margaret Kobos (Founder and President of Oklahoma United), Kris Steele (Former Republican Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and Shawnee native), Julie Knutson (President and CEO of the Oklahoma Academy) and Jeremy Zuniga (United States Marines veteran).

The Oklahoma Team is smart, committed, determined and…even more determined. One way you see that is that they are asking for citizen engagement and input before they are asking for a yes vote. When you ask citizens to change the rules of politics, you need to give them lots of space to kick the tires and ask serious questions. The Oklahoma team is doing that brilliantly!  

For more information about State Question 836 and how you can support open primaries in Oklahoma, visit www.VoteYes836.com.

New Report Finds Idaho Voters Supported Open Primaries But Rejected Ranked Choice Voting in 2024

In November, Idaho voters rejected Proposition 1–which would have transformed Idaho’s closed primary system to a top 4 open, nonpartisan primary + ranked choice voting in the general–by a margin of 69.6% to 30.4%. 

New evidence from a Boise State University survey has now found that a majority of Idahoans supported open primaries but did not favor ranked choice voting: 

• 58% of Idahoans survey backed the concept of an open primary
• 34% of Idahoans surveyed supported ranked choice voting 

Even one of the leaders of the opposition to Proposition 1, Melaleuca Inc. Executive Chairperson Frank VanderSloot, offered up support for opening Idaho’s primaries without tacking on RCV:

“There is a good argument for an open primary...There are valid arguments for an open primary...If we want to do an open primary, let's do an open primary without ranked choice.”

Polling is polling. It’s not precise, oftentimes abstract, and sometimes completely wrong. But one reason we are advocating to create “breathing room” between open primaries and ranked choice is because both issues are hard, have different constituencies, different politics and social histories, and different levels of public understanding in different states. When you combine them in a knee jerk fashion, you are asking the voters to eat a steak dinner and a giant bowl of spaghetti in one sitting. Some communities want to pursue open primaries. Others want to pursue ranked choice voting or other forms of alternative voting (approval, Star, etc.). Neither should be combining them if it doesn’t make sense.  

Fourteen years ago, after the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the popular blanket primary system, Californians voted to replace the deeply unpopular closed primary that replaced it with a top-two system. Since then Democratic Party insiders, Republican Party insiders, minor political parties, (even some reform and good government groups) have tried (and failed) to deep-six the system even though the public overwhelmingly supports it (over 60% every year it’s polled).   

Now, three minor political parties who opposed the reform from the start and have unsuccessfully sued previously, are once again trying to overturn it. The case is unlikely to be successful. Read more about the case in my latest piece in The Fulcrum and why voters continue to embrace top two in large numbers even as the bi-partisan political establishment fights it at every turn.

New Mexican Independents Speak Out

As our coalition works to pass open primaries in the New Mexico legislature, one of the challenges we face is that many New Mexicans do not know who independent voters are.

LetUsVote New Mexico has been working to change that by organizing independent voters across the state to speak out and get involved. Our Independents Speak Out Series is sharing the stories of many of the 330,000 plus New Mexico independents who would be enfranchised by open primaries

Today we are introducing you to two of those independents:

Joe Smyth: Can Citizens Save Our Broken Politics? 

Joe Smyth, the author of Fixing America’s Broken Politics: Common Sense Solutions to the Issues That Divide Us has written a new piece, which has appeared in several publications across the country this week, that offers up some suggestions on how we, the American people, can step up and address our broken politics including: 

“Back the Open Primaries movement to ensure that Americans don’t have to join a political party to have a say in choosing candidates.”

Thanks for the shoutout, Joe! Read his full piece here

NY TIMES: 90% of races decided ahead of the general election

A New York Times analysis of the nearly 6,000 congressional and state legislative elections in November shows just how uncompetitive our general elections have become: 

“Nearly all either were dominated by an incumbent or played out in a district drawn to favor one party overwhelmingly…just 8% of congressional races (36 of 435) and 7% of state legislative races (400 of 5,465) were decided by fewer than five percentage points.”

The Times analysis is shallow and suffers from tunnel vision. They focus exclusively on gerrymandering as the culprit (which ignores that 50% of state legislators run unopposed!), which just goes to show how much investment we must continue to make in public education around the need to remake our primary system and organize voters to participate in primaries - where all the competition is. Gerrymandering is a problem that needs to be dealt with. But the lack of competition in our democracy goes way beyond gerrymandering - or any single solution for that matter.  

Read the New York Times full analysis here. 

Have a great weekend,

The Open Primaries Team