In 2015, Katherine Gehl ’88 sold her family’s $250 million dairy-based foods business to enter politics. Meaning, the Milwaukee native and former government major began to write about the business of politics, beginning with a 2017 Harvard Business School report that applied the lens of industry competition to explain why politics fails to deliver results for the average American. By 2020 she founded the Institute for Political Innovation, a cross-partisan, nonprofit organization to advocate for systemic change. That same year she and a co-author, the Harvard economist Michael Porter, published The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy.
Recently Gehl sat down to explain the solution she champions, “final five voting,” which is already being practiced in Alaska and is itself on the ballot this fall in several other states and in Washington, D.C.
You sold your company when you were doing well. Why go into politics?
I had an epiphany when I was doing my company strategy, trying to figure out how to sell more cheese sauce. A parallel analysis was going on in my head with how the cheese sauce works and [how] the politics industry works: There are only two competitors, and nobody else can get into that industry because there are high barriers to entry, which is why we have these lesser-of-two-evils elections.
And the “customers,” the voters, have absolutely no power in this industry because they can’t take their vote and go somewhere else with it. Because there are these barriers to entry, there’s no new competition. And it was really understanding that, well, the customers are dissatisfied, you know, 90 percent of them, which is the approximate disapproval rating of Congress.
And so I had to sell my company, not because I figured out a new diagnosis, but because I had to figure out a new solution. It was a new diagnosis of the root cause, which is a lack of healthy competition and incentives that aren’t for problem-solving — incentives that are for gridlock and grandstanding and demonizing the other side instead of solving problems.
I couldn’t unsee what I had seen. Life is short. I knew that because my mother died just two years after I graduated from Notre Dame. And I thought I had to give this a go.
At one point in the book, you say how some people had a tongue-in-cheek response when you said you wanted to go into politics.
They laughed! “Good luck with that,” they said.
So, there’s an intermediate phase, which is if I say [to people], “I’m working to change the political system so getting results is incented.” And then they’re just like, “Huh?”
But then, if I’m able to explain final five voting and how it would change the incentives for our representatives to focus on problem-solving, I have such a high conversion rate.
The only people you really can’t convert are those who are actively [involved] in the political-industrial complex. It’s in part because they can’t conceive of something different, and they’re somewhat less familiar with thinking about things in competition terms.
Then I explain final five voting and how it lowers the barriers to entry, and how it changes who hires [our political leaders]: not primary voters, [but] instead general-election voters. At first there’s a little bit of skepticism. “If it was really that easy to change, why haven’t we already done that?”
Not that final five voting will make a perfect system, but unless you change these dynamics, it doesn’t matter who you elect to any administration or Congress, they aren’t solving problems in a sustainable fashion.
What exactly is “final five voting”?
Under final five voting, every candidate appears on the same primary ballot and all voters have the right to participate regardless of party. Then, the top five finishers compete in the November general election where you get to rank the five candidates from your most to least favorite. You can rank as many or as few as you want. The winner is determined using an instant-runoff process where the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated in each round until only the top two candidates remain, and the majority winner is clear.
Final five voting is not designed to change who wins. It’s designed to change what the winners have the freedom to do and are incented to do.
You wrote, “Our laboratories of democracy will prove these ideas right — or prove what needs to change to make them right.” Are you still feeling the excitement of this work, or has the frustration of politics set in?
No. If anything, I think, I’m more excited. Because people just want to say there’s no silver bullet, and they really pressure me to say that about final five voting. But what they’re not understanding is, [this] isn’t a single bullet. Final five voting is a systemwide solution, and it has ripple effects across the industry. Even though it’s about changing the rules of elections, that’s how you change the incentives while governing. That’s how you change the supply of candidates [and] the level of talent. And that’s how you change the media coverage, because they will have different things to report on. I mean, that’s how healthy competition works.
What’s the progress report?
We’re two for two in the campaigns we’ve run. Alaska held their first elections under the new system in 2022 for the entire state legislature and statewide offices like governor and lieutenant governor, and also for their federal delegation, which in their case is two senators and one congressperson. So now they have new incentives and answer to general-election voters.
Both houses in the state legislature have bipartisan governing coalitions with the leadership of each chamber shared among the parties, and they are focused on problem-solving. They have cut a deal about which problems they are going to work on to solve together, and [they] leave the particularly partisan issues to the side. You definitely have a new orientation to problem-solving, a new orientation to working together, a new orientation to focusing on all your voters, not just the small number in your party who vote in primaries.
We see all of that, but we haven’t [yet] seen the full flowering of innovative ideas that can now be brought to the table. And that we’re going to start to see over the next several election cycles. I couldn’t be more thrilled, because nothing that’s happened in Alaska disproves the theory I’ve articulated — politics-industry theory, this theory of competition in politics.
You have other states on the ballot to adopt final five voting this fall, right?
Yes! Idaho, Colorado, Montana and Nevada, which has to pass it twice [for it] to go into effect. Arizona is sort of doing half of it, but the legislature may or may not end up opting in.
In 2022, there was only one thing that the Republican and Democratic parties in Nevada agreed on, and that was that they shouldn’t pass final five voting. On the support side, I was the single largest donor. Right behind me, we had Republicans and Democrats. Example: Ken Griffin, one of the largest Republican donors in the country, and Reid Hoffman, one of the largest Democratic donors in the country, were invested on opposite sides of the candidate races for governor and [U.S.] Senate. But they were [also] invested in supporting final five voting.
That’s really telling, because everybody thinks of these guys as super partisan, and yet they’re also really brilliant, which is what gives them all these resources. And they wouldn’t invest in this if it were a partisan trick. They wouldn’t be tricked.
What’s the long-term vision for these ideas as they take effect?
As confident as I am in the benefits of healthy competition in politics, it is wonderful to be able to evaluate the effects of final five voting on a state-by-state basis without needing to change everything all at once. We never would do it nationally. There would be too much opposition to that kind of change. But we haven’t seen any [unintended consequences] yet. We’ve tried to game them out, but to have more states will be helpful [as we evaluate].
If we only do it in five states, I’m fine if we sit with that for a little bit. Because if final five voting works the way it’s supposed to, these states will be better governed than other states. They will make better decisions about how to allocate their resources and how to contribute to the business and life environments in their state. Eventually, other states will do it, because they will want what those states have.
Right now, it’s definitely a push, because it’s new, and it’s change, and people are suspicious of change. But eventually states should be clamoring for this — or else basically it didn’t work. So, if my theory is correct, eventually it will be a pull. States will want it, or at least enough people in a state [will] want it.
Even five states can change what is possible in Congress. These five states give up 10 senators who are liberated from the tyranny of the party primary but are suddenly held accountable by real competition in their November elections every cycle. So, they get liberated and held more accountable at the same time; they are incented to solve problems. Otherwise, they won’t be able to get reelected.
In a closely divided Senate, 10 senators who are not beholden to this tyranny of the party primary can form the bench, the bipartisan-consensus-seeking group that is at the core of any real, comprehensive legislation to our biggest problems, like the debt, like immigration, like issues of national security.
So, five states is a sweet spot. And I hope more move, and I think it’s just going to happen naturally, because if this is as good of an idea as healthy competition [in business], it should be what people want.
Sam Coffman is a senior American studies and journalism student who was this magazine’s summer 2024 intern. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Learn more at finalfivevoting.org