export_ofoct.com
[00:01.23] So let me ask you a question.
[00:02.83] How many of you do your banking, your health care on your phones?
[00:07.62] Right, of course you do.
[00:08.94] How about like, your love life, your entertainment, travel planning, all that kind of stuff?
[00:14.78] Right. How many of you vote on your phones?
[00:19.30] That's the problem.
[00:20.89] So I spent the first 15 years of my career working in US government and politics.
[00:26.73] City government, state government, federal government, you name it, I saw it from pretty much every angle.
[00:32.84] And the main thing that I took away from it, really, more than anything else, is why politicians make the decisions they make.
[00:40.81] Is it based on what they believe in?
[00:43.47] No. Is it what's best for their city or their state or their country? Not really.
[00:50.90] How about what's best for their constituents specifically?
[00:56.22] Not even that. It's actually a lot simpler.
[00:57.81] Virtually every politician makes every decision solely based on winning the next election and nothing else.
[01:05.78] And that's true for the next election and then the next election after that.
[01:11.89] And it's a problem in democracies all over the world, but it's especially pervasive in the United States because we have this corrupt practice known as gerrymandering.
[01:21.72] And what that allows the two political parties to do is divvy up all the legislative districts so that, as a result, the only election that ever really matters is the party primary.
[01:32.61] Now we had a big election last fall.
[01:35.00] You guys might have heard something about it. And in that election, about two thirds of Americans voted.
[01:41.90] But that was for president.
[01:44.03] I live in New York City. In 2023, we had city council primaries.
[01:49.87] Turnout was 7.2 percent.
[01:53.59] So I don't know if you guys have ever been to New York, but if you have, you will know, we are not a shy people.
[02:00.76] And yet, in this city of 8.5 million highly opinionated people, you could win a council seat with just 8,000 votes.
[02:12.72] And the same thing is true in state legislative races, congressional, mayoral, you name it, and it's true everywhere.
[02:20.95] So who are those voters?
[02:23.08] They're typically the far right or the far left, or special interests that know how to move money and votes in low-turnout elections.
[02:32.11] They dictate not only who wins office but then what happens once they're in office.
[02:37.71] And that gets us one of two types of government.
[02:40.64] Either the chaos and dysfunction that we call Washington, DC, or totally one-sided governments, whether it's the state of Texas on the right or the city of San Francisco on the left.
[02:52.86] And if we were truly hopelessly divided, if we just couldn't agree on any issue, that'd be one thing, but we're not.
[03:00.82] Most people agree on the solutions to most issues, whether it's education or health care or climate or taxes or let's take guns as an example.
[03:14.37] The vast majority of Americans would say that we should neither confiscate everyone's guns, but nor should it be easy to walk into a store and walk out with an assault rifle.
[03:24.74] But the problem is, those Americans, the people in the center, the people in the middle, they don't vote in primaries.
[03:32.96] So politicians ignore their views and cater only to the extremes.
[03:39.07] And when the next school shooting happens, and it will happen, all of us are going to bang our heads against the wall and say, Why can’t our politicians just do the right thing for once?”
[03:51.03] Why? I'll tell you why. Because they're held hostage by the extremes.
[03:56.61] They're stuck.
[03:57.93] We have to free them from their clutches.
[04:00.86] We have to make it possible for them to move back to the middle.
[04:04.84] And the only way to do that is to get a lot more people voting.
[04:08.82] And the only way to do that is to meet the people where they are: on their phones.
