Transcript of November 3, 2023 "Lasso OK Politics" event

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;46;21

Valerie Naifeh

Margaret explained a little bit. And like a lot of us after the March on Washington and after the Capitol was stormed. Margaret was very, very deeply upset and troubled, as was I. And both of us, I think, felt equally horrified that our country has become so divisive, because Margaret and I always have been more centrist and kind of about being in the middle.

00;00;46;24 - 00;01;10;17

Valerie Naifeh

And I just applaud the fact that Margaret, just like she told me over the phone, she said there's a lot of things that need to change, but I'm just trying to change one thing because I want our state to be better. And I agree with her on that. I'm a lifelong Republican. I've always tried to exercise my voting rights in every single election.

00;01;10;20 - 00;01;36;17

Valerie Naifeh

I was raised to understand that our vote is precious. We live in the best country in the free world. And there are people who who give their lives just to have the right to vote. And Margaret and I both have children. Mine are just a little bit older than hers, but I have a late become horrified that my children don't see any point in voting.

00;01;36;19 - 00;02;06;02

Valerie Naifeh

And my youngest daughter just got married and her husband, who's one of the brightest people I know, has some really good statistical reasons why he doesn't see any reason to vote in Oklahoma. And I'm so shocked by this that I just think something has to be done. I'm tired of our state being last. We're last in a lot of things and we have the lowest voter turnout in the country.

00;02;06;02 - 00;02;25;23

Valerie Naifeh

We have the worst poverty in the country, and our school systems are always in probably the bottom five, if not the bottom three. And Oklahomans deserve better than that. We live in a great state. I'm so proud to live here. But but we've got to change some things.

00;02;26;19 - 00;02;40;27

Mickey Edwards

So one of the one of the secrets is that when you when you're in Congress or when you're in the legislature, when you're mayor, you're you're running very full speed with things that are coming at you, constantly trying to keep up with it.

00;02;41;00 - 00;03;03;19

Mickey Edwards

But when you when you do something like when I left Congress, I became a I went into academia and I started teaching at Harvard, where I taught for 11 years. And then when you're there. So the secret I learned about teachers is that when you're in class, you're on, and when you're prepping for class, you're on. But the rest of the time you have time to think.

00;03;03;21 - 00;03;34;11

Mickey Edwards

You have time to really reflect on things. And I began to realize that there there was so many way there were so many ways in which what the people I knew, the Oklahomans, I knew what they were like, the good people, thoughtful, sane, responsible, caring people. And that so many others I had come to know across the country were not reflected in our government institutions.

00;03;34;11 - 00;04;05;01

Mickey Edwards

They were not reflected in Congress. They the people in Congress were were either far more left or far more right than the people I knew and much less willing to address problems together across the aisle. And so I started thinking about and I was giving a speech to a large group that was, you know, there's a room that's just full and somebody in the back when I got through said, which I had never thought of, said, Oh, you're a systems engineer.

00;04;05;04 - 00;04;35;02

Mickey Edwards

Well, I didn't even know what a systems engineer was. But I came to realize, David, that when something is really wrong, you either hired the wrong people. And I don't believe that because I know many people who serve, who are good people, thoughtful, or you have the wrong system. And as I looked at it more and more, it became obvious that the people who were making the laws, who had been selected by, quote, the people, weren't reflective of that people.

00;04;35;02 - 00;04;58;03

Mickey Edwards

And I began to understand why I started looking and I saw the primaries and the closed primaries where instead of the American people getting to choose from all of their neighbors, those people that they wanted representing them, that when you went to the polls, you had what was left after the s got through winnowing the field and telling you who you must choose between.

00;04;58;05 - 00;05;21;24

Mickey Edwards

And so I became more and more convinced that in order to make our system work, make the country work again, you had to get past that, where the party leadership was choking off the ability of the American people to have their views accurately represented. So that's that's what happened. Just I woke up and it is the system and nothing is going to change and not you.

00;05;21;27 - 00;05;28;08

Mickey Edwards

Some people don't want to hear it. Nothing is going to change unless we change the system. 

00;05;29;04 - 00;05;35;25

John Opdycke

this is my first time in Oklahoma since I was two months old and my parents were at Altus Air Force Base.

00;05;35;27 - 00;06;04;18

John Opdycke

So I'm back. Yeah, I started open primaries back in 2009. I was living in New York City, which is a close state and a closed city run by the Democratic Party that, you know, I think we have lower voter turnout than Oklahoma. It's an abysmal political culture where if you're not part of the Democratic club, you really have no voice.

00;06;04;21 - 00;06;39;07

John Opdycke

And we tried to bust that up. We formed a coalition with Mike Bloomberg, who was the first independent mayor, and we got that on the ballot and we got absolutely crushed. And it was a real wake up call for me. It was seeing that this issue of leveling the playing field, allowing there to be full participation, regardless of whether you're a Democrat or Republican or an independent, was something that was going to become more and more important as ship became more and more entrenched and voter turnout went down.

00;06;39;07 - 00;07;07;08

John Opdycke

So I started the organization back in 2009. I've said this on podcast before and radio shows the experience was forming a UFO research organization back in 2009. People looked at you, looked at me like I was a little bit crazy for caring about primaries. Now, fast forward 15 years and it's on the front pages of newspapers. What attracted me to Oklahoma was, you.

00;07;07;10 - 00;07;28;07

John Opdycke

I reached out to you in 2014, after you after you introduced those bills when you were in the state Senate and as trial balloons. And we saw how tough this was going to be. And then the Oklahoma Academy put out their great report back in 2017 after doing a statewide tour, talking about the need for open primaries. And then Margaret picked up the banner.

00;07;28;07 - 00;07;54;24

John Opdycke

And Mickey has been talking about this for more than a decade. And there is just a consistent drumbeat of different voices from different places on the political spectrum that are that are pointing out that independent voters are the fastest growing segment of the electorate, that even though it's a Republican dominated state, that 50% of voters are not Republicans and they have almost no voice in the state.

00;07;54;26 - 00;08;17;29

John Opdycke

And you've got this counter, it's so different how Tulsa and Oklahoma City are run and governed and the democracy that's like built into the culture and how state government functions. And I think just I've been inspired by the level of enthusiasm and interest in tackling this.

00;08;19;13 - 00;08;46;14

G.T. Bynum

When I worked in the Senate, I saw a trend, which is that about 85% of legislation that gets introduced is political garbage. It is stuff that gets brought up so that a senator or representative can go back and tell their base. I've introduced a bill to do X, Y, and Z, throwing the red meat out, knowing it will never be heard in committee, let alone voted on the floor.

00;08;46;16 - 00;09;14;24

G.T. Bynum

But then there's stuff that does need to get done. And for that stuff there are legislators who are just dramatically more effective at getting things passed. And what I saw in those that were effective was that they would identify an issue and then they go find somebody is far out on the other side of the ideological spectrum from them as they can find, but find that 70% common ground that you're talking about, Mayor Holt, and bring that forward and it would get passed.

00;09;14;26 - 00;09;36;14

G.T. Bynum

Ted Kennedy was the master of this when I was there. Mitch McConnell was also very effective at this. When I was there prior to the bill that I worked on, that I'm most proud of was a piece of legislation in dealing with the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. The federal government didn't do anything basically for a week.

00;09;36;16 - 00;10;00;08

G.T. Bynum

And then just started throwing tens of billions of dollars at the response. And Dr. Coburn realized this is just setting us up for massive abuse. We've got to have an oversight function put in place. We need something passed quickly, get it done. And we ended up working on that bill with his fellow freshman senator Barack Obama, Tom Coburn, and Barack Obama about as far apart on the political spectrum as you can find.

00;10;00;08 - 00;10;20;27

G.T. Bynum

Two senators at that time co-sponsored that bill. They got Harry Reid, the Democrat leader, and Bill Frist, the Republican leader, to co-sponsor it. And President Bush saw the writing on the wall and just went ahead and did it by executive order. We didn't even have to pass anything. So that was my experience with getting things done. Well, then I got elected the city council in Tulsa, and we had a majority Republican council.

00;10;20;27 - 00;10;43;13

G.T. Bynum

We had a Democrat mayor at the time, Kathy Taylor. And there was a sense amongst my colleagues on the Council that regardless of what Kathy says, we've just we're the opposition. That's our job here. We've got to find things wrong with it. I did not subscribe to that. Even though she had run against and defeated my cousin just like a year and a half before.

00;10;43;15 - 00;11;09;11

G.T. Bynum

We worked together very well. But I tell you that story because the contrast and by the way, I'm a convert on this. When a group brought forward nonpartisan elections in Tulsa, I opposed it and I opposed it because my thought at the time was the purpose of political parties is to turn out voters. At the end of the day, that's their main function historically.

00;11;09;14 - 00;11;34;05

G.T. Bynum

And so if we have nonpartisan elections, then the parties aren't incentivized to be involved and voter turnout will go down. Well, I'm here to tell you today and own up to it. I was totally wrong. We have seen no decline in voter turnout in elections in Tulsa. The big change that we have seen is that the debates on the city council and at City Hall are not anymore.

00;11;34;07 - 00;12;05;07

G.T. Bynum

They have shifted to issues. You still have disagreements about policy and what ought to be done and what the right thing to do for a city is. And you still have personality differences and people who just don't get along. But it's not tied up in this superstructure based on federal issues at best that have no relevance to whether or not you're fixing a street or hiring more police officers or making sure that firefighters have trucks that work.

00;12;05;09 - 00;12;32;02

G.T. Bynum

And so that's been the big change that I have seen and why I ran when I did run for mayor as a committed nonpartisan with Republicans, Democrats and independents, both on our campaign team. But then after I was elected in my office, I may have more Democrats on my staff than any elected official in Oklahoma, at least at the statewide or city level.

00;12;32;05 - 00;13;15;06

G.T. Bynum

And it's not on purpose. I don't check anybody's ID because I don't think one party has the market cornered on smart people who love Tulsa and are going to work hard. Uh, and so, and we've had great success. The last thing I'll say and I'll say this to tee it back up to you, uh, is at the most fundamental level, if you want to see the benefits of how this works, if you think things in Tulsa are going well or things in Oklahoma City are going well, it's because you have mayors in both of those cities who have taken this approach of moving beyond ship and focusing on the issues that really impact people

00;13;15;09 - 00;13;35;21

G.T. Bynum

and how you can bring people together around those and find common ground and that's the end result that I think you get when you open up more competition. I'm sorry, I'm like the old preacher here up one more or less thing. A lot of people ask me, well, in Oklahoma, do you think this has any chance of passing?

00;13;35;24 - 00;14;10;16

G.T. Bynum

I do. And here's why. Uh, Oklahomans like competition. This. That's what this is about. If you're a capitalist, you believe that more competition yields better products and better results. That's what this is about. It's about giving Oklahoma voters more options and creating a greater competition of ideas for those who are seeking to serve them rather than having them protected by partisan monopolies within which they have to operate.

00;14;10;19 - 00;14;11;22

00;14;12;02 - 00;14;23;05

David Holt

My experience was I did, you know, serve in an office as a state senator for two terms that was operated under a closed primary process.

00;14;23;05 - 00;14;49;01

David Holt

And now I serve as mayor in in a system where every candidate has to face all the voters and all the voters get to see all the candidates. And it's it's nonpartisan, But I don't think that's the most vital aspect of it. I think the most vital aspect of it is that, like everybody votes. And so you're incentivized, whether you had an R or the after your name or nothing after your name, you're incentivized to build a coalition of people across party lines.

00;14;49;04 - 00;15;11;14

David Holt

And as you said, I mean, it also helps if, like the candidates embrace that. And we have. But you're incentivized to leak. You're not incentivized to do that in a closed primary system. When I ran for the state Senate, I ran in northwest Oklahoma City. And the the seat to that point had been very Republican. Now my successor is a Democrat and she's here tonight.

00;15;11;14 - 00;15;42;12

David Holt

Julia, Kurt. But at that time there had not even been a general election held in that seat for like 20 years, and I never faced a general election. It was always viewed that the Republican primary was the entire election. But, you know, I mean, the registered Republicans were probably barely half of the residents, you know, because, I mean, there was independents and they were Democrats, but you were only incentivized to act in a way that pleased this, you know, plurality of your district.

00;15;42;14 - 00;16;05;26

David Holt

But you wrote you're supposed to represent everybody, right? So, I mean, how do you imagine it changes the way that you serve and the way that you campaign if you're only facing for all functional purposes, you know, this subset of the electorate. You know, American democratic experiment assumes inherently that the wisdom of the crowd is is the best possible outcome.

00;16;05;28 - 00;16;36;21

David Holt

And we are not relying upon the wisdom of the entire crowd. We are relying upon the wisdom of a subset. Then sometimes, you know, like in in our system where you have a runoff, it's like a subset of a subset, you know, I mean, the if you actually go through Oklahoma political history for the last 25 years, like all the most important decisions have been made in the Republican runoff, which is also the least participated in a chapter of the election process.

00;16;36;21 - 00;17;08;23

David Holt

So like the smallest number of people are making the most important decisions, whereas in Oklahoma City and now Tulsa, you know, everybody's invited to make the decision. And and it just changes the incentive structure and it changes the way that you that you serve and the way that you govern. And as JT said, and I'll echo, it's like people in Oklahoma City and Tulsa are used to this like statesman, like unified mean, you know, pragmatic way of service, especially at the mayoral level.

00;17;08;25 - 00;17;33;19

David Holt

And it yields it, I would argue, feeling pretty good results. And, you know, and people especially in Oklahoma City, you know, look at like this, they often talk about, oh, we had this great string of mayors as if like it was Locke or something, you know, it was the process. The process created people who brought people together. And and, you know, Joshua Harris still is here, right?

00;17;33;19 - 00;18;03;04

David Holt

Yeah. Like, am I Election night Watch party in 2022. Joshua. Joshua was a, you know, a major leader in Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020, he was at my party. So was the president of the FOP. Do you think there's like a lot of politicians in in America who can thread that needle? But, you know, both of those groups saw me as somebody who was like trying to find common purpose and understood, like, we kind of have to if we're ever going to move forward as a community.

00;18;03;06 - 00;18;23;15

David Holt

And again, like I was incentivized to do that, I think there's other people in elected office at other levels who are like capable of doing that, but they're not going to because they're scared to death of their own shadow. You know, they're scared of getting beaten their primary, whether it's left or right. You know, we we in Oklahoma are more used to the like the problems on the far right because that's like the dominant party here.

00;18;23;15 - 00;18;53;26

David Holt

But we could be having this exact same conversation in New York or California. I'd be very frustrated at, you know what what's going on on the extreme left. You know, it's the same problems, it's the different flavors. So I became, as John said, sort of a a you know, it started in the mayor's office as a staffer, went to the Senate as a senator, and, you know, started to see over time, it's like, Mickey, you finally start to kind of analyze how we got here and started to see that the process was the thing.

00;18;53;26 - 00;19;18;06

David Holt

And we have this, like, amazing case study in Oklahoma City and now in Tulsa of showing what good governance can look like. And it's not perfect. It's still a democratic process. It still relies upon human beings. But things are going so much better in Oklahoma City and Tulsa than they are on a state level. And I think you find that that's going to be the case in in a lot of different states where they have this same the same dichotomy

00;19;19;11 - 00;19;37;28

Mickey Edwards

So every one of you, whether you're in business or you're in a university or, you know, whatever it is that you're doing are motivated in your decision making by the incentive system.

00;19;38;01 - 00;20;26;11

Mickey Edwards

It's what is going to get you the result you want, what is going to help you achieve your business goal or your academic advancement or whatever it is. And the problem we have here is that the incentive system with a closed primary, it's not that Oklahomans are far right or far left. Yes, but the incentive system says that if you want to keep your job, if you want to remain in the legislature, you know, if you want to remain in whatever office you hold, you must pay attention not only to the people who vote in a primary, because if you don't make it through that primary, you don't.

00;20;26;11 - 00;20;49;17

Mickey Edwards

You're through, you're done. And so it works both ways. You are forcing the system we have without this is you forced people who would not ordinarily be on the extremes. And you see this in Congress. People who would not ordinarily be on the extremes are voting in ways that make you roll your eyes. She did what he did.

00;20;49;17 - 00;21;21;29

Mickey Edwards

What? Well, it's because their ability to remain in that office and do what good they think they can do depends on making that small, small subgroup of the electorate happy. Otherwise you're done. So I remember thinking, I would say that when I ran for office, I could say so. You know me, I'm your neighbor. You've listened to me.

00;21;22;06 - 00;21;46;15

Mickey Edwards

You've decided whether you think I know anything. You've decided whether my views are similar to your views, whether or not I'm articulate enough to help advance your views, vote for me and I will do whatever my party leader tells me to do. And I cannot imagine that everybody went. But that's what is really happening. Except they don't have that conversation, right?

00;21;46;17 - 00;22;15;02

Mickey Edwards

So I watch. Now I know more about Congress, I do about the legislature here. But so in Congress, if you've noticed, you just follow the news there. There's a female United States senator who happens to be part of the same fellowship as David Adjetey, who announced that she was going to be an independent and she was going to make decisions based on what she thought was the right thing to do.

00;22;15;04 - 00;22;46;16

Mickey Edwards

She was attacked mercilessly by the press and everybody else know you're not being loyal to your team in the events that we just had. And I don't care whether you thought Kevin McCarthy was a horror or wonderful, whatever, whatever he thought, you know, the media and reporters and politicians were all saying, the ones we're going to cheer for are the ones who stood together and marched in lockstep, because that's where the reward system is.

00;22;46;18 - 00;23;27;17

Mickey Edwards

So if you want to create a system that changes how people behave once they're in office, not just about getting elected, how people behave when they are in office, you've got to change the system. So they have to listen to all of the voters. They have to respond to all of the voters. And if you do that, you're going to get it not only in mayor's offices, but you're going to get in the state legislature, you're going to get in Congress, people like JT and David, instead of what we see now where people say, how much harm can I do to the other side?

00;23;27;21 - 00;24;03;19

Mickey Edwards

Because all that matters is that we win the next election. And I said this and we have to talk earlier at your law school too, and talked about somebody who said a former member of Congress talking about the battle over the speakership, who said that what they did in removing McCarthy again, I said, I don't care how you how you feel about that, that it wasn't good for the country, but it was good.

00;24;27;26

Mickey Edwards

Well, if it ain't good for the country, it ain't good. And so what you need to do is to change that system where people respond to their leadership and, their party, and that's all that matters. So what do we need to do? You know that I am here because, you know, like John Opdycke, you know, I'm here because we need to change here and in other places.

00;24;27;29 - 00;24;51;02

Mickey Edwards

The system where party primaries determine who you have or who you can vote for, who is on the ballot for you. So it works on for the candidates that it works for the voters you deserve. Every one of you deserve. When you go to the polls to have a full range of options to decide who you want making the laws for you.

00;24;51;05 - 00;24;57;10

Mickey Edwards

And I don't know any other way to get there except by changing the system and getting rid of partisan primaries.

00;24;57;11 - 00;25;13;09

G.T. Bynum

I completely agree with I'm just sitting here nodding and moving and everything, Nikki says. And I think it bears importance to this conversation because David and I are both products of the fellowship that Mickey ran at the Aspen Institute.

00;25;13;09 - 00;25;57;08

G.T. Bynum

The idea behind the Rodel Fellowship is that they would pick is at 12 Republicans and 12 at least in my class, 12, 12 Republicans, 12 Democrats, and then you convene a couple of times a year for a couple of years and you debate case studies and philosophical readings. And the purpose of it is to teach you basically how to respectfully disagree and engage with people in the other party, like in my class is fascinate me with Gavin Newsome is now the the the governor of California and Pam Bondi who is the went on to be the attorney general of Florida and was one of Donald Trump's attorneys.

00;25;57;10 - 00;26;37;07

G.T. Bynum

And many of us who are in between those two on the political spectrum. But the value of it, I think, and I don't think it's an accident that Dave and I both went through the program is that you do have a network, and David's exactly right. There are elected officials all over America who Mickey is a great mentor to, who have a very similar philosophy that we do, that you get better ideas and better results when you have a diversity of viewpoints around the table trying to identify that common ground For us in Oklahoma, I would just reiterate, we have seen socially in Tulsa, which is more recent, we've seen what it looks like and

00;26;37;07 - 00;26;59;18

G.T. Bynum

what it can look like. If you're on a basis and you have people who are fixated on that partisan division and on making sure that the party apparatchiks don't get mad at them on any particular issue. And the switch and again, this didn't change in Tulsa long time ago. It changed, I think maybe at the most ten years ago.

00;26;59;20 - 00;27;29;11

G.T. Bynum

So it's a recent change. But the debates that you see on our council today have no partisan content. They still have debates, but it is about the policy and what's best for our community. And I think if we can switch to that here in Oklahoma, it would be very powerful. I think there are a ton of people who don't ever get a chance to select who's going to run our state because of the party that they're in.

00;27;29;13 - 00;27;58;00

G.T. Bynum

And the incentive structure is not there to reward people who try to find common ground with people in the other political party. I've had plenty of people, as David mentioned, I got 12 months and 30 days left as mayor of Tulsa and that lots of people tell me, well, thank you very much for your service. I mean, we all know this is the end of the road for you because you can never win a Republican primary in Oklahoma because you've worked with Democrats too much.

00;27;58;03 - 00;28;28;28

G.T. Bynum

That should not be enough for me. I'm going to do it anyway because it's what's best for Tulsa. But that should not be what the expected outcome is for people. It should be trying to identify that common ground first as Oklahomans and then being rewarded for the people who are more effective at getting things done or not, but only having it based on who's more loyal and more in lockstep with party leadership is what leads to mediocrity in the end result.

00;28;29;00 - 00;28;54;24

G.T. Bynum

I think and again, I will come back to this again and again. You get better outcomes when you have more competition, and if you have protected structures that protect weak leadership and people who don't want to work to find common ground and are more interested in politics than public service, you're going to get the results that we often see.

00;28;55;07 - 00;29;23;05

John Opdycke

I think the the campaigns that we've seen be most successful - California, Florida, Saint Louis are the campaigns that spend the time to bring together are a diverse group of stakeholders from the left, from the right, from the center, Democrat, Republican, independent take the time to say, hey, we've got this system that works at the municipal level.

00;29;23;05 - 00;29;45;02

John Opdycke

The top two system. Is that what we want to do at the state level? Should we look at some other options? Should we, you know, see what's going to work best here? I'm a big believer that the most powerful reform campaigns are not cookie cutter. They're not, hey, some national group came in and told us what to do and we're just following their orders.

00;29;45;02 - 00;30;26;02

John Opdycke

Those campaigns, they tend to fail. And even if they win, they tend to get overturned. There's got to be strong local buy in. So I think rooms like this are absolutely crucial. And we should be doing this over many, many months, raising money, building the committees and so forth. And then once a decision has been made about the policy, I think put it on the ballot, I think go directly to the ballot, get the signatures, put it on the ballot, do the grassroots, run the great commercials and remind people that this see that the thing that I find so both exciting and challenging is that the system that you're talking about, Mayor Bynum and Mayor

00;30;26;02 - 00;31;05;11

John Opdycke

Holt, this is in place in 85% of the cities in this country. This is not some novel new experiment. This is how we elect mayors. We do it in a nonpartisan way. It's why local government has 80% approval and Congress has 12% approval. It's not a big mystery. So but the the the the the challenge is to build the kind of cold nation that is as inclusive and diverse as the state itself and then put it on the ballot and go to the voters and appeal to them on the basic values that you all have all been articulating.

00;31;05;11 - 00;31;31;02

John Opdycke

It's about fairness. This is about inclusion. It's about every vote matters. Every politician should have to face every voter in every election. Those are core values that people my experience, people in Oklahoma have a deep, deep affection for. So I think if we can get it on the ballot, we've got a very good chance of winning. And the and just so you all know, rooms like this are happening all over the country.

00;31;31;04 - 00;31;47;08

John Opdycke

People are outraged at the kind of dysfunction and failure that has become the norm in our in our national government play. So you're not alone.