it's a pleasure to be back and see it's a pleasure to be back to town hall love this place i love the city it's a great city this is a great venue and what we're in the staff do here is phenomenal it's so important  for us all to have a chance to get together and talk about the issues that are so important to all of us one of the great things about seattle is it fosters that kind of community communication it's been quite a g we're in a different part of the country where the other washington if there's alternate if there are alternative facts there are alternative places in the country right  but i want to talk with you tonight hope you join me in the conversation about the state of our democracy and i say that very particularly our democracy now our government not our administration we're very much caught up in the media in our public dialogue in thinking about talking about what donald trump is doing in the presidency how he got to the presidency get into that a little bit and whether or not we're for against donald trump i really want to get beyond that subject because our democracy is in trouble in a much more fundamental way and it has been for quite a while it is not the result of the last election in some ways donald trump's presidency is a symptom where our democracy has come as well as a potential problem for war it goes and opportunity in the eyes of some other people but we really need to get back and think about some fundamentals so i want to tell talk you for a moment about the election of take an adventure with you looking at the election of two thousand and sixteen as an m r i in america instead of looking at the tactics in the strategies of the campaigns and the candidates let's look at it from above and see what it tells us about the state of the country at the point the country went to the polls i mean to the polls in november i mean we started going the polls remember in january and all through the whole year and we talk about the election of twenty sixty we're not just talking about the general election donald trump versus hillary clinton we're talking about three elections talking with the election in the democratic party that pick the nominee the election in the republican party the pick the nominee and then the general election and what's striking to me is a longtime reporter in washington having covered a whole bunch of elections is that this election was very different from other elections that we've had in recent years or recent decades typically american elections are fought on a horizontal plane horizontal axis right against left liberal against conservative blue against red this election was fought on a vertical axis this is an election of a revolt a mutiny from below against the establishment up above in both parties it's very important to think about that i mean we you know we've taken it for granted we sort of absorbed it but we've forgotten it we had that seventy three year old democratic socialist from a state that is not known for very heavy electoral college count vermont right bernie sanders he starts from nowhere the media doesn't take him seriously other politicians don't say take him serious certainly the clinton campaign didn't take him seriously and was a do it ones across the country and he carries twenty one states and he wins fourteen million votes and he nearly knocks off someone who was assumed by everybody to simply be going through the political coronation and what that tells us was that bernie sanders was able to tap into something very deep very fundamental very emotional and very alive and full of that kindling a fire in the belly of america he talked revolution he's got a post election organization and it's called our revolution he was talking about the inequality of income he was talking about the power of wall street he was talking about hillary clinton making six hundred thousand dollars speaking fees from goldman sachs he was talking about a political system that was dominated by mega money and dark money by gerrymandering by special interests and it resonated it resonated because people felt that way and he gave voice to the frustrations and the anger deep in the belly of this country that's why he came so close so what that says is to the left of center center and left there was this passion this anger this division within the democratic party and then on the other side we have a in the republican party nobody takes him seriously he proceeds to offend just about every electorate that you can imagine every constituency you can imagine he's a massage in is he's against mexican americans is against muslims he's a predator he does everything that you could imagine a candidate could do wrong and he wins now what you say to that is it's outrageous it's terrible it shouldn't happen but as a political observer in as an analyst as a reporter i have to say how does it happen how does the humming bird fly how does that be stale loft and how does donald trump w and what does that tell us about america he is the only one of the candidates on the republican side who said that trade agreements had cost us millions of middle class jobs he was the only one on the republican side who said there we've been run by an establishment even in our party that's leaving behind millions of middle class americans he said i'm going to stand behind social security and medicare when most of the republican candidates were saying you know we've got to privatized it we've got to change these fundamental protectors of the safety and security of the benefits of the middle class in this country and he said believe it or not i don't know if you know anything about what the h one b program is but the h one b is a visa program that brings into this country allows high tech companies like microsoft and apple and google and oracle and you name down the line and banks in new york j p morgan of the rest of citibank to import college educated foreigners to take jobs and american companies making one third one half one quarter well below average american salaries these are knowledge  jobs this has been going on since one thousand nine hundred ninety it's not supposed to be that they can fire americans and call some to require them to retrain to train their own replacements but that's been going on trump was the only republican candidate who even mentioned it that was going on and that may have gone by you well while he was doing a whole lot of other outrageous things but it resonated with a whole lot of people on the other side and so you have another candidate on the republican side who is tapping into that same sense of anger frustration and being left behind that bernie sanders was tapping into on the democratic side so in both parties you have this vertical battle the middle against the top the people against the establishment the forgotten against the fortunate the worried against the wealthy that's what's going on that's what the election of of twenty sixteen was about and we get in the final general election show manages to label hillary just enough as being the voice of goldman sachs and she and the democratic party establishment the democratic party strategists fail to recognize that this is  serious grievance in the body politic yes there are all kinds of things you can say what comey said and did about the investigation of hillary's e mails and what he didn't say about trump's and what the media covered and didn't cover in her e mails and so yes those had effects but when you look at the loss of states like pennsylvania and wisconsin and michigan and you look at what the turnout was when you look at who didn't turn out in a place like milwaukee in milwaukee county milwaukee county is a heavily democratic area percentages of blacks hispanics and poor whites the turnout in milwaukee county was sixty thousand lower in twenty sixteen than in two thousand and twelve a whole lot of democrats didn't bother to go out to vote and my contention would be they did not feel a connection with hillary clinton and i don't think it was about personality i think it was about the issues of being economically forgot and telling them i have a plan to do x y or z was not connecting with them in the same way as a guy i said who railed against the trade agreements by the way trade agreements that good economists tell us actually cost us the export of five million american jobs in nafta the accession of china to the world trade organization and most favored nation treatment by the united states through the korean trade agreement and the central american trade agreement negotiated by both republican and democratic presidents so so these guys sanders in china were tapping into something very fundamental that was going on in america that none of the other people running against him really got in the same way whatever they said they were putting out pro forma and they didn't connect so we've just had a very profound election that shaken up the politics of this country and we're really not sure where it's going now we've got somebody in the white house who  around one way or another with most of the time what i would call the illusion of action not action itself where you sign twenty nine executive orders half of which call for studies reports panels somebody is going to report in six months or in a year you're not actually taking action but it looks like action it feels good to the people who supported him but the rest of folks are running around worrying considerably with good reason what's going to happen to the environment was going to happen  to workers benefits what's going to happen to all kinds of issues that are important and so we have now a new burst of civic activism in this country we have a new reaction of resistance to trump and activation you had demonstrations here today and probably in lots of other cities in the country i'm both sides pro trump and any trump so we're now in many ways a more activated country a more activated citizenry then we've been for a long time during a nine campaign period and that can be either good or bad i see a lot of good potential in that as well as some downsides but the downside risks are a democracy is considerable it's considerable because the economic discontent and the economic dislocation is so profound we are a deeply divided country and most of the time when the press talks about a deeply divided country the talk and republicans democrats th talk in red blue the talking hyper partisanship it's there but the far more profound and far more important division in this country is economic were divided by money and money gets translated in power in those millions start rolling into the campaigns in the hundreds of millions in the hundreds of millions and then into the billions and they've been skyrocketing we all know that we're divided by money we're divided by power and we're divided by something i've tried to put a label on but i call it economic destiny it isn't just where you are it's where you are relative to where you were and where you expect to be other people call it opportunity i think for a lot of folks it's not opportunity is the lack of opportunity but what they see it and if you look at the voting by the way twenty sixteen was interesting as hillary clinton actually carried the poorest people in this country if you look at the the economics of the voting record of the people who may whose family incomes are below fifty thousand dollars a year hillary clinton carried them by about ten percent but from fifty to one hundred ten one hundred twenty thousand dollars these are people who feel forgotten who feel worried who feel unable to secure their own future their own retirement and particularly worried that they can't deliver for their children what they hope to and what they felt their parents delivered for them this is a critical body of people in this country and they've lost faith in the system they've lost faith in the leadership they've lost fa conventional politics and they're thrashing around looking for anybody who's different and you can fix things one of the most interesting pieces of information to me about the last election in terms of looking at numbers is to look at twenty or twenty five rural small town counties in the state of wisconsin now these counties went heavily for obama in two thousand and eight and two thousand and twelve and they went for trump you've been told that but they also went in state elections they went for scott walker republican hardline right wing pro business anti union any benefit republican governor of the state of wisconsin and they also voted for tammy baldwin a liberal liberal lesbian democratic senator what that says to me is those voters don't have any idea who they're voting for they just want to vote for somebody different obama promised change  promise cheney's walker promised change for all the and promised change what they're saying is conventional politics don't work and i think that tells you that's part of this m r i about america that i'm trying to share with you now what's interesting that in some times it's very hard to fathom and to figure out and it was certainly a dilemma for both president obama and certainly hillary clinton running because if you look at the macro economics of america going into the twenty sixt election the macro economics look good seventy two months of growth the unemployment rate has come down from ten percent to under five percent in two thousand and fifteen the average the median wage it america went up two percent two point nine percent in twenty sixteen it went up two percent so i looks good and you would have thought that was a good positive record to run  but the microeconomics the macro economics looking at the nation's soul but the microeconomics seen from the from the perspective of the family look terrible if you are in the median family in america or tens of millions of median families people whose household income was somewhere between forty and seventy five or eighty thousand a year your income was lower in two thousand and sixteen and it was in two thousand and seven before the economic downturn it was lower and it was in one thousand nine hundred nine a think about what that means if the median household income is lower in twenty sixteen and in one thousand nine hundred ninety these median families middle middle families that means for tens of millions of people the american economy is actually going backwards for seventeen or eighteen years that's what we're talking about that is an experience that most of us in this room certainly i can't claim to have any real personal knowledge of or feel for i try to understand and i try to report it i try to listen to people i can't live it it's not where i live and i think that's one of the problems with the people who are making decisions in the democratic party now you can trump was totally cynical about it he spotted he realized he saw that was a vulnerable spot and exploited it but the point was he did give voice to that discontent the other point is that discontent remains with us today it has not been dealt with and it is even worse today because as you probably noticed if you read the papers over the last few days the growth rate in the first quarter of tw point seven percent as opposed to two point five percent at the end of twenty sixteen now whether that will continue and we don't know but this consumer buying which is really the driving force of the american economy people talk about the job growth period from the end of world war two three ended in one thousand seventy s was that prosperity was shared big business leaders thought it was good business and smart economics to pay tens of millions of americans well because american workers go out and spend what they are i'm ninety five percent of what they earn in good times and one hundred five percent of what they are in the bad times and that's what drove the american economy and if the wealth isn't adequately shared our growth slows down there's a huge secret that at the moment is even being discussed while trump's tax plan is being discussed this enormous bonus that he wants a bonanza he wants to give the rich i malarkey what is being said not only by the president but by most press people who are analyzing it it is not true that cutting taxes causes growth the period when we had the highest taxes in america dwight eisenhower the one nine hundred fifty s the my at the top marginal tax rate the tax rate on the top people was ninety two percent it dropped down to seventy seven percent on a john f kennedy in the one nine hundred sixty s and during those two decades the average growth of the american economy was a little bit over three percent fast forward to the early two thousand and six under both george w bush the republican and brock obama the democrat the top maximum marginal tax rate was down to thirty five percent ok so you would have thought we've been growing three times as fast the average growth rate even before the economic downturn of two thousand and eight was a little over one percent there is no connection whatsoever and research by the congressional research service as well as by good economists like joe stiglitz one a nobel prize for an economics at  columbia university or paul krugman princeton and or a number of others shows absolutely clearly that high inequality of income is bad for growth and that if you bring the income levels at the bottom of the top closer together as by the way you've tried to do by raising the minimum wage here in seattle you actually get faster growth over a long period of time so that's not what we did we went the other direction so we have this high inequality and inequality was the good issue of the twenty sixteen election it's well lay behind it it's what drove the vote it's what determined the challenge and actually determine the winners in the republican party and the democratic party and at the democratic or in the republican party and in the general election so we have this divide that is troubling us and then the difficulty is that the fight then goes and spills over into our political system we have this hyper concentration of wealth by the way it's almost impossible to believe i don't know if it what your reaction was when i first heard the slogan the name one percent the one percent saw the bumper stickers of occupy wall street i think that is really a clever bumper sticker that is really a clever slogan but it's not accurate i mean isn't the  ninety percent one percent well i found out later i read read some economic stuff there's a very good princeton economists whose name is slipping my money alan krueger is his name  he reported based on some economic research done by people at u c berkeley and actually the serb on in paris and elsewhere eighty four percent of the entire nation's growth in income from nine hundred seventy nine to two thousand and twelve went to the top one percent eighty four percent of i'm saying it twice because you really have to hear it twice to even begin to absorb it when i read this figure i just couldn't believe eighty four percent went to the top one percent over thirty two years you do the arithmetic quickly if they got eighty four percent that means all the rest of us the other ninety nine percent got sixteen per cent of the nation's growth that means over three decades the top one percent got five times as much of the nation's growth in income as the entire rest of the country so that i know one percent in the one percent bumper sticker is absolutely right it's not a slogan it's not empty words it is reality and that reality is sitting there taking this country today and unless we can find a way to deal with that issue i think it is going to eight with us the same way that slavery ached with america in the mid nineteenth century this is a deep deep cleavage when i went to oxford after finishing williams one of things i did was to read some of the work of arnold toynbee the great british historian who wrote a study called a study of history studied twenty one human civilizations over six thousand years to understand how they rose and how they fell i want to admit to you right now i did not read all twelve volumes i but i did read bread rolls two volume abbreviation of it which is twelve hundred pages and when he says is that civilizations rise and fall depending on a dynamic of challenge and response there are all challenges in some way and they either respond effectively and they rise and they endure and they live on into history or they fail to meet their challenges and they fall into the ashes of history he starts way back with ancient egyptian civilization on the nile and with the inca civilization in latin america and the mountains of latin america which is what is now peru and the challenges said they face was an environmental challenge hostile environment and the case of egypt arid lands could they actually establish an agricultural economy that would sustain human civilization and communities large communities they could live together we know they did that we don't have the evidence of how they lived but they left behind these magnificent temples and matthew picchu and all the temples up and down the nile in the pyramid so they had enough excess wealth that they had generated to be able to build those pyramids that have lasted for centuries but they fell to another challenge which is the challenge of an external invader invader that was militarily more powerful and more modern in the case of the egyptians it was the ottoman turks in the case of the peruvians the incas it was the spaniards now what's interesting is that's a challenge we know something about we've met and we defeated it we met it and defeated it and actually in our own revolution in a way but certainly we did it during world war two with hitler and the axis powers we did it again facing the soviet union in the long fifty years of the cold war second half of the twentieth century but what's interesting to me is that when twenty gets in the civilizations that we admire the most ancient greece in ancient rome they fell victim to another challenge it's a challenge that that time because schisms in the soul schisms in the soul of the society schisms in the body politic schisms divisions internal conflicts within the society which is what he concludes in the end brought down ancient greece and brought down the engine room well when i read that i thought about that and read that back then and in think about an hour i thought back about it as i was working on my book who stole the american dream i said i got that's where we are our challenge today we're going to have to deal with terrorism we're going have to deal with north korea's nuclear weapon but our biggest challenge is inside our country our biggest challenge is whether or not we can actually  political system work whether or not we can begin to address this enormous problem of economic inequality whether or not we can address climate change whether or not we can address how to deal with the entitlement programs social security and medicare and make sure that they last on for the next generations education you name it whatever the issue is you know for the last several years we haven't really addressed effectively any of those issues we can't even pass a budget i know you're going to get a lot is this week because we're passing a continuing resolution you know what a continuing resolution is it's basically a resolution that says we can agree and want to do so we're just going to continue to do what we have been doing with a couple of tweaks here and there i can tell you when i first went to washington as a reporter for the new york times in the early sixty's and on through the seventy's and eighty's republicans and democrats fought richard nixon and limon johnson were a totally different people and so they passed budgets every year they passed programs to send people the moon they built national highway programs they passed medicare and medicaid did a whole lot of legislation we got a little bit of it in obama's first two years he did better than most but passing the things that he did but since then it was interesting we're having we're having a new president with the same party we're looking a party labels controlling all three centers of power the house the senate and the white house and he's running into the same kind of problems that we had want to bomb a u s president facing an opposition party i'm going to get to why in a moment but think about that so we're not getting things done and when we think about the political system we don't want to laugh about it we want to cry about  the laughter is for me is that famous old peanuts cartoon the one where lucy has a card table set up in the back yard it says psychiatry one cent where you know who comes up charlie brown comes up puts his penny down and lucy says that charlie you know charlie before i can give you any advice you have to think of life as a voyage on a great ocean liner some people take their deck chair to the bow and they look into the future to see where they're going and other people take their deck chair to the stern they look into the past to see where they've come from which group you belong to in chile scratches head he said loosely i'm having trouble getting my chair on fold so that's the laughter side but the other side is you don't think the government works for us anymore we don't feel connected to it we see it swamp by money we see it singing to the tune of special interests you sense that wall street and big business has captured the capital we have a sense maybe not so much in this state but in lots of states a sense that politicians have rigged their home districts so they've got a guaranteed reelection in the only thing we can do is term and term limit them to get them out of there we have this sense of being excluded if you ask people what they think about the political system and poll after poll after poll seventy to eighty percent of people will say it's broken public confidence poll that interests me is the question of public confidence in the political system if you ask people about their opinion before he got near  a trump and congress and republicans and democrats and lawyers and the media and everybody else we're all way down there rock bottom but the poll that really matters to me is public confidence in the political system is at its lowest point in forty years people don't believe the system is working for them anymore we have government of and by the politicians and the parties in the special interest for government of the special interest the parties and the politicians instead of government of by and for the people we're a long way away that's what i meant at the outside when i said our democracy is in trouble it's in deep trouble and the question is two questions how did it get this way and is there anything we can do about well this troubled built over a long period of time but twenty ten was a watershed year twenty ten was the year in which two really big things happened to our political system the first was a decision by the supreme court in the citizens united case that corporations and unions could spend unlimited money from their own treasuries which had previously been free forbid and most people don't know it but there was actually a law passed in one thousand know several nineteen zero seven under teddy roosevelt and william howard taft in that era that corporate money could go into politics so as part of the progressive era they were already addressing your problem that is now  society today says is united knock that out and what's happened in the in the money system is just impossible to believe let's just take dark money your lot about dark money dark money just means it's money that we know is spent because people have to file some report on what is spent but it is it is covered under such an umbrella name that we can't figure out who actually gave the money we can't tell who was the piper that's calling the we can't see it in two thousand and six the amount of dark money in american politics was five point two million dollars in two thousand and twelve it was three hundred million that's what happened says in two thousand and sixteen it was well over half a billion each election is going up the cost of the elections went up to two thousand and twelve two thousand and sixteen we now have elections that cost now six seven billion dollars and by the way from the standpoint of major funders corporations special interest koch brothers you name it putting a one hundred million dollars into an election is cheap because you're going to wind up by getting the laws written for you that are going to wind up by saving you billions there's a high a multiplier effect on what happens and by the way people say government doesn't work government works it works for the people who pay for it to work for them we don't like that were upset about that that happened in two thousand and ten the other thing that happened in two thousand and ten people don't know much about and it hasn't been explained very well by the media and people have been focused on in twenty ten something happened called red map red map was a republican program to try to capture control of his many state legislatures across the country so that after the twenty ten census and the reapportionment congressional seats all across the country that they would be in control of more legislatures and would be able to draw the maps for the political districts for congress and they did extremely well the democrats were paying no attention to this it only cost thirty million dollars in terms of american politics the thirty million dollars the republicans invested in state election very carefully targeted individual state elections around the country and in probably ten or eleven key states was not terribly expensive it cost them thirty million dollars but when they finished republicans controlled the legislature and the governor's chair in states that controlled forty percent of the seats in congress and the democrats ten percent and the other fifty percent had some kind of split control republicans went to work and they drew the lines you you've probably heard from some people doesn't matter how the lines are drawn the way the vote goes is really determined by the fact that liberals and democrats and what not minorities particularly live in the cities and conservatives and republicans tend to live in the countryside and so is what somebody wrote back in two thousand and eight very good book called the big sort we just sorted ourselves out and it just that's the way the cookie crumbles not true not true let me just take one state for you state of pennsylvania in pennsylvania in twenty ten the vote between the republicans and the democrats was pretty even and so is the congressional delegation it was about nine deny that eighteen seats and twenty twelve the vote was pretty even but the democrats had an edge slightly more votes than the republicans but the republican said on the gerrymandering in pennsylvania in two thousand and eleven and they got thirteen seats the democrats got five and this is not just done by the republicans the democrats do it in massachusetts and they do it in illinois they do it in my former home state of maryland they do it in other states as well it's just the republicans were one hell of a lot smarter and a hell of a lot better about it and the modern computer technology has made it so sophisticated that they can arrange districts extremely well by packing their opponents in a few districts and spreading out their own strength and many what happened across the country in two thousand and twelve was that the democrats actually carried the vote for congress by a million and a half oh they get a million half more votes for seats in the house of congress in two thousand and twelve than republicans but republicans got a thirty three vote thirty three seat majority in the house of representatives it's interesting about today's politics and about the way the government works is that the gerrymandering of districts around the country helped create what is called the freedom caucus which you probably heard of recently because the freedom caucus in the and other dozen or so congressman in that republican back benches who sit around and coalesce with them prevented the passage and maybe they're going to go along with it they prevented the passage of the repeal of obamacare against donald trump but you need to know is there also the same people who blocked all kinds of legislation that obama wanted voted on and they shut down the government several times under  they're also the same people who knocked off john boehner and opposed him they those people all but two of them come from absolute gerrymander protected districts and so when the polls say the public doesn't like what's going on when the rest of congress is unhappy these people are insulated from public opinion by gerrymandering gerrymandering is directly affecting all kinds of political decisions when the senate under obama passed an immigration reform bill the house republican leadership couldn't even bring it to a vote in the house because this block of gerrymander protected republicans wouldn't let it come to a vote this is what gerrymander is doing not just to this president but through the dysfunctionality of our political system so these two things money injur or have come together and they absolutely cause our political system both to be under represented and with dark money to be nontransparent and not to be fair and not to be workable now we're next question is is there any we can do about it the great news is yes and the great news is it's already happening the problem as a bad news is the press isn't telling you the good news the good news is that not only in washington state which has voted along with several other states to rollback citizens united a call for can a constitutional amendment to restore the power of congress and the states to regulate campaign finance and seattle is passed honest elections bill with a bit of public funding in it and there are other efforts that have been under way here as a modified gerrymander reform at work a bipartisan commission that work in washington state but beyond that connecticut has now for five election cycles had a system of public funding of campaigns for a state election not for congress not for the senate but for governor lieutenant governor attorney general all the seats in the house of representatives for five cycles and you know eighty percent of the republicans and democrats who run voluntarily who run for the legislature voluntarily take part and that every gubernatorial race and for any statewide office they took public funding and what difference does it make it means it can't where they have to raise some money to qualify but it's a modest amount and they have to raise it in their  districts what happens is campaign suddenly get about candy's talking with voters candidates talking about issues public debates instead of people spending all the time dialing for dollars what happens is in the legislature you suddenly have people who couldn't afford to run for office running for office the number of blacks and latino's in the connecticut legislature has tripled since the system went off to affect people from the inner city of bridgeport in new haven and hartford who couldn't run because there wasn't enough money in their political districts to be able to run and work candidates used to depend on their party leadership to get the money from pacs and lobbyists and contractors for state projects for state contracts now it's done at the local level and when they get into the legislature they can actually pass and act on legislation that used to be bottled up by lobbyists lobbyist like everybody else they can't give any more than one hundred dollars average person can give anywhere from five hundred dollars no more no corporate contributions no pac contributions directly to the kennedys they have to go to the parties the parties can help out the candidates a little bit it has changed the political climate in connecticut it operates there are three or four states maine connecticut minnesota and arizona all have robust public funding programs going on statewide i know it's in two thousand and sixteen you made an effort in washington state to take the seattle idea of democracy boxer statewide it didn't pass so it's a big issue that happens they've done that in connecticut in florida not exactly one of the states that you would figure would be in the front of a reform in america in florida they haven't acted the boldest strongest clearest gerrymander reform in the country the voters in florida in twenty ten the very same year this is in i came out the very same year that red map went to effect the very same year that florida elected a republican governor and a republican legislature sixty two point five percent of the voters in florida voted for a plan that said you cannot read district you cannot draw the lines of the election districts in this state with quote the intent to favor one political party over the other unquote or to keep incumbents in office gerrymander took the league of women voters and common cause and fair districts florida three years arguing the court until they got a decision from the florida supreme court that this was a blatantly unconstitutional gerrymander in florida and the state of florida in the legislature had to read it had to reshape a congressional district if you have to do eight out of twenty seven you wind up having to do about fifty eight totally shook up the state congressional delegation and they said you have to redraw the lines for the entire state senate forty different districts this last election twenty sixteen was the first held under that new court order redrawing of the maps and the congressional delegation in florida began to change is probably to take another couple of cycles  to do it in an extensive way but the point was the people in florida were able to do that in washington state you put in an absolute modeled program the top two primary what he'd seen us idea what we've had in america over the last thirty years is that gradual separation of the political parties political scientists used to used to chart the votes of members of congress like were shot and they overlapped the liberal republicans overlap with the conservative democrats and over the last thirty years they've opened a part in this in no man's land between we have no middle you can't govern washington if both parties are at the end  to get somebody out in the middle of the field to play with each other to make the compromises that make democracy work so when you get a top two primary that forces everybody to run in the same primary and all the politicians to try to appeal across the board here start to get moderate opinion and i don't know if you know it but people who have study the congressional vote patterns have told me that in that current washington state delegation the party line up may be the same as it was ten years ago but none of the members of your delegation are in the outer twenty percent of either party they're all playing somewhere between the twenty yard lines and the middle of the field that's a huge change if we had that happen in ten states congress would start to behave differently if we had gerrymander reform and top two primaries tremendous difference we have disclosure laws that are really powerful and important in california and massachusetts in other states twenty five of the american states are now engaged in some form of effort to change partisan gerrymandering they read the lawsuits the citizens movements or their changes like the ones that have been done in washington state and need to see where we are in time i was going to show you a film of south dakota because i went to south dakota last fall with kevin neely my cameraman who's sitting right down here south dakota and unbelievably red state where we going there to cover political reform they had on the ballot in south dakota last fall a nonpartisan primary like the one that you have here in washington state constitutional amendment a public funding bill and a gerrymander reform bill they had everything and it's a red state you think nothing is going to happen public funding passed in south dakota fifty two percent of the vote it failed here in washington state happened south dakota now the legislators come back legislatures come back dominate eighty percent republican is killed it because they don't want anybody challenging them start giving public money around why we got the challenges might actually beat us we might actually have a competitive election they don't want that the reformers are going back if we have time later on  show you this film it's really amazing just simply to see this going on a state like of like south dakota the point i want to leave with you is this our democracy is in danger there's no way we can get washington to fix it the people in washington who want don't want to fix it they got there through this system that is corrupted by money and dominated by gerrymandering they like it the way it is if we don't like it it's up to us to change it in the place to change it is raised here ground zero seattle washington portland oregon all across the states and all across south dakota connecticut mayme you will believe it arizona has got a pub as an independent commission doing redistricting and legislative gerrymandering there are states that you wouldn't believe are on the map trying to do something there is hope there is a way to do this we can do this but we have to believe it and we have to exercise the power we have as we the people thanks have overshot my time excuse me when i talk about this subject tend to get a bit cranked up it matters a lot to me but you can have a few questions so far away so you've been very patient over there thank you  changes one of them is citizens united and the role of mega money i mean there was always an influence of campaign money in campaigns but nothing like what it is today and the jury men knew that we now have nationwide used to be done state by state and it was a kind of a patchwork pattern it wasn't good but it wasn't as organized as it is as it has been and so the result is that we really have a distorted democracy number one and we have a deadlock democracy i mean the combination of money and gerrymandering is potent think about if you have a gerrymandered district it's the party primary that becomes the election for congress not the general election and the turnout in party primaries and a lot of congressional elections you won't believe it is three four five six seven eight nine ten percent means a really low and those are real activist voters and they tend to be the most extreme in each party so that's what generates campaigns that run to the extreme i'm going to have to ask somebody else to ask the next question so i know you're looking for a follow up and it's what causes people to be running in congress at both ends of the political spectrum so yes i would say the power game is different and it isn't just the number of zeros on the dollar signs in the campaign that going up it's that potent influence you can threaten a state legislator in a district in all kinds of states with very little money and you can turn around without actually even running an opponent against them it's really affected state politics and it's affected the national politics and obviously please do you think that the democratic national committee cost bernie the nomination and if he had been the nominee with two nontraditional candidates would he have beaten drum you know as a very good question and of course it's a question that a lot of people spend a lot of beers over in washington i can tell you i course we don't know the answer to that it certainly would have been it would have been a very enlightening race i happen to think he could have won but you really got to do the political ritek i mean think of the things that would have been off the table the e mails would have been off the table the clinton foundation would have been off the table bill clinton's behavior would have been off the table some of the stuff that would have allowed him to focus on trump's flaws would have been would have been a great advantage him on the other hand he would not have had the kind of organization nationwide that hillary clinton had built up in the democratic national committee built up it's an imponderable that we can't get beyond i'm one of those who would say yes but i can't begin to prove my question has to do with two systemic issues which you haven't touched on one of which you probably will just that we can't do anything about it but i'd like to hear your comments on that and the two systemic issues are and the fact that hillary clinton did win three million more or nearly three million more votes in the popular vote and al gore won more than half a million more so we have a systemic problem with our electoral college and how can that be addressed if it can and the second issue that was very under reported threw out the monday morning quarterbacking and throughout coming up to the election was the issues around voter suppression in many states and those two issues seem to me had a great deal of impact on  let's take the electoral college we are stuck with an eighteenth century system ok it's amazing that that we have as much like when amity and peace about it in this country as we do because you're right hillary clinton won three and a half million more votes the people who live in the rest of the country will say you know the five million margin that she got in california who she won california and they won the rest of the country but that's not the point the point is can we get around this to actually have the popular vote winner when there is an electoral college compact which i assume you're familiar with were states have agreed and have passed legislation in their legislatures to say that they will vote electoral college votes for the national popular vote winner if we get enough states with the electoral votes to get the two seventy which is what you need to be elected president at the present time we have states that have  hundred fifty five electoral votes that have signed on so we need more states with another one hundred fifteen electoral votes i'm sorry i don't know where washington state is on this i don't know where the washington state is done this is that right question state is done ok what's interesting is it sounds impossible to do but it's not because there are another nineteen or twenty states in which one house or the other of that state's legislature has that one point or another passed a bill to accept the national act like a college compact this is definitely an issue that some people are working on and pushing hard particularly in the wake of the last election there's no question it is a major problem for us i think it's happened four times in our history but what's interesting is two of them in the last sixteen years so it is clearly a new and acute problem particularly with the changing demographics of this country so that is definitely something we should address in terms of voter suppression you're also right on as far as i'm concerned by the way on our web site reclaim the american dream org you will find lots of material on the whole problem of voter suppression of voter rights and which states have been pushing photo id laws that basically are stacked against certain constituencies in texas for example if you have a hunting license with your picture on it if you have a gun license with your picture on it is an acceptable form of identification to register to vote but if you're a student in a state university and you have a student id card that is not acceptable if you are a public welfare recipient of public governmental programs and it has your picture on it it is not acceptable ok we now have court rulings from both district courts in texas and from the fifth circuit court of appeals in new orleans that have struck down that law but texas continues to come back to fight and that is a huge issue it is certainly one that we need to address at the other end of the spectrum you have oregon interestingly enough illinois and west virginia that have very good motor voter laws and same day registration so you can register on the same day you vote so you've got the country going into opposite directions in the twenty sixteen election we had i believe eleven states which had stricter voter registration qualifications than in the previous election and there's no question that effected the turnout think there's any question about it all i don't think it affected the turnout in milwaukee to the tune of sixty thousand voters which is how much the democratic turnout went down if those voters that come out hillary clinton would have won wisconsin so i don't think it's all a photo id problem but there's no question that is a problem these are issues that we need to address i should have talked about voter id stuff along with public funding and and and repealing citizens united and the like the point is that we're talking about the electoral college voter suppression gerrymandering public funding of campaigns is up to us to fix the system and the record i have found in my reporting over the last three or four years says we can do it and anybody who tells you can't doesn't know the score and what i'm trying to do is get the score out there so spread the word that connecticut washington and arizona and even south dakota are either doing it or working out so we can get there let's do it