American Promise is a national, nonprofit, nonpartisan, grassroots organization that advocates for a 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution that would allow the U.S. Congress and states to set reasonable limits on campaign spending in U.S. elections.
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Historic Bipartisan Reform Passed Into Law
Apr 10, 2025
On April 8, 2025, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed SB 16 into law, a historic bipartisan reform that gives more than 330,000 independent voters—who make up nearly 25% of New Mexico’s electorate—the right to vote in the state’s primary elections, starting in 2026. This continues an overall nationwide trend of states opening their primary elections to more voters.
“New Mexico’s open primaries law will ensure that every eligible voter has a say in every taxpayer-funded election, not just those who choose to affiliate with a party,” said Nick Troiano, Executive Director of Unite America. “For too long, a quarter of New Mexicans have been locked out of their state’s primary elections—which in most cases are the only elections that matter. Ending closed primaries is an important step toward increasing participation and representation in our democracy.”
SB 16 passed with bipartisan support in both chambers, and supporters noted that the law would improve participation in New Mexico’s elections.
“Democracy only works if we all play a part. When I took office, I wasn’t just elected to represent Republicans but all of my constituents. That includes my constituents in our state’s fastest growing party—independents,” said New Mexico State Sen. Crystal Brantley (R). “Senate Bill 16 gives everyone a voice and removes barriers for those who want to see the best candidate come forward from each party, not just the one that tacks hardest left or right to win the primary.”
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“Opening primary elections by allowing voters registered as independent or unaffiliated to participate in taxpayer-funded elections improves voting fairness and, in turn, democracy,” added New Mexico State Sen. Majority Leader Peter Wirth (D). “I’m glad to have sponsored the bill bringing this change to New Mexico. And as evidenced by the votes on the Senate floor, it’s an update that both major parties can get behind.”
New Mexico Voters First and New Mexico Open Elections led the multi-year campaign to open the state’s primaries, spearheading a coalition that included NM Native Vote, Common Cause New Mexico, Conservation Voters New Mexico, University of New Mexico College Democrats, and the Veterans and Military Families Caucus.
“We have dedicated significant time and effort to building a strong coalition, engaging legislators, and mobilizing independent voters across New Mexico,” said New Mexico Voters First Executive Director Sila Avcil. “This progress would not have been possible without the unwavering support of our advocates. New Mexico deserves fair and representative elections, and I am honored to be part of this movement to pass SB 16.”
Because most general elections nationwide are uncompetitive for federal and state races, primary contests effectively determine winners before a single vote is cast. This is the Primary Problem in politics today, where a tiny share of the electorate determines most election outcomes in low-turnout party primaries.
In 2024, 83% of New Mexico’s state house races were effectively decided in closed primaries where independents couldn’t vote. Votes cast in those 83% of general elections were meaningless because they had no bearing on the outcome. In fact, only 14% of New Mexicans cast meaningful votes last year. (A meaningful vote is a vote cast in a competitive election that actually determines the outcomes. Full methodology here.)
New Mexico’s SB 16 continues a nationwide trend of states opening their primaries. Over the past decade, Colorado and Maine have opened their primaries to independents, while Alaska voters went a step further by adopting open, all-candidate primaries. The number of states with closed primaries, where independents can’t fully participate, is now down to 16.Keep ReadingShow less
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Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash
Beginning To Explore the Pro-Democracy Arena
Apr 10, 2025
The Fulcrum presents The Path Forward: Defining the Democracy Reform Movement. Scott Warren's interview series engaging diverse thought leaders to elevate the conversation about building a thriving and healthy democratic republic that fulfills its potential as a national social and political game-changer. This series is the start of focused collaborations and dialogue led by The Bridge Alliance and The Fulcrum teams to help the movement find a path forward.
Over the last two months, I’ve been privileged to speak with a diversity of stakeholders who work within the pro-democracy ecosystem. These leaders are focused on improving the democratic fabric of this country through tackling issues like structural reform, bridge building, organizing the ecosystem, and place-based work. I’ll continue this series with the Fulcrum over the next few months, and welcome your feedback (and additional potential individuals to interview).
In a moment in which the pro-democracy space is necessarily struggling to define its contours and strategy, I’ve found these interviews to be an important way to wrestle with the challenges and elevate perspectives. I am grateful for the candor of the interviewees. Five conversations into the series, I wanted to highlight some of the biggest takeaways from the conversations to date.
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Perhaps most importantly, the interviews demonstrate that there is no one clear road forward. This truth is probably self-evident but worth emphasizing: this series (nor any initiative) will lead to a clear roadmap that effectively charts a path forward to revitalizing American democracy. This is precisely why these conversations are so necessary right now- to grapple with the tensions that have emerged, rather than to solve for them.
Multiple tensions have emerged in the interviews so far, which, from experience and other conversations, are similar strains prevalent right now throughout the broader pro-democracy ecosystem. I’ve summarized key questions from each interview, which might be useful for those in the ecosystem to reflect upon in their own work.
What is the balance between short-term and long-term work? Julia Roig's interview hammered home this point as she grappled with the balance between lowering the heat (combating polarization) and raising the heat (more resistance-type work). In a moment when many democratic norms seem to be at existential risk, there is an obvious need to focus on defense. Some argue that there is no utility in focusing on long-term visioning if democracy does not survive past the present.
But so many Americans no longer believe that democracy works. This reality will not change with any election result but rather because of long-term rebuilding and re-envisioning. There is simply no luxury for the field to choose to work on the short-term or the long-term—they must be intertwined.
Who cares about democracy? Reverend F Willis Johnson expressed concerns that the pro-democracy community is not effectively reaching out to people, as both organizations and the languages they use are becoming too elitist and top-heavy.
Whereas many organizations are producing talking points and thinking about ideals like closing civic space and a rising oligarchy, it’s not clear how much of that language resonates with the vast majority of Americans. We need to get out of our pro-democracy bubbles. The answer to this problem cannot be simply another narrative project or more polling: it must be interacting with individuals who do not actively profess to be part of the pro-democracy field.
What are we willing to give up to build a bigger democracy tent? It is critical that the pro-democracy field ensures that individuals from diverse ideological stripes feel comfortable being part of the overall effort. Stephen Richer, the Republican former Recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona, warned about the challenge of not equating support for democracy with support for a progressive policy agenda.
In order to truly build a broader pro-democracy tent, it is necessary to put aside ideological differences for broader democratic principles. It is one thing to say this- it’s another for progressives, for example, to welcome in conservatives who may differ on fundamental issues like abortion, health care, or tax policy, but are genuinely worried about the direction of the country. The pro-democracy field cannot be a code name for progressivism, and there’s work to be done to truly understand what this means from a tactical perspective.
How can we convince people to reform electoral structures? Many structural reformists have emphasized the need to change how elections and governance work so that democracy can better represent the will of the people. This effort, as Andy Moore described, has fallen short in recent years, partially because the presented reforms have not resonated with a frustrated public that is inherently skeptical of elite-driven solutions.
It doesn’t seem prudent to completely give up on structural reform, although I wonder if some funders will. But reformists would do well to avoid the silver-bullet mentality that sometimes has come to define the structural reform ethos (if only we had ranked choice voting or proportional representation, democracy would work!). This work, like so much of the democracy space, will require base-building over a long period of time rather than episodic elections.
How do we work alongside funders? Like in any field, there is natural frustration towards funders who practitioners sometimes feel are prioritizing the wrong parts of the work. Richard Young noted that funders can sometimes focus on quick wins and movements rather than the long, membership-driven, place-based work necessary for a thriving democracy.
My personal sense is that funders are grappling with this moment just like everyone else (and I will plan to interview funders as part of the next phase of this series). It seems there is a need to engage them deeply, and for funders to humbly learn alongside practitioners at an existential moment for the pro-democracy sector.
I’d be curious if these same lessons resonate with others. My hope is that we can grapple with these tensions, looking to move forward productively rather than answer the questions declaratively.
We invite you to watch Scott's interviews on our YouTube channel by clicking HERE.
Scott Warren is a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is co-leading a trans-partisan effort to protect the basic parameters, rules, and institutions of the American republic. He is the co-founder of Generation Citizen, a national civics education organization.
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A miniature White House on top of coins and bills.
Getty Images, Max Zolotukhin
The FEC Has Opened the Floodgates for Big Money To Flood Elections. Here’s How We Can Fix It.
Apr 10, 2025
Elections are getting bigger.
2024 was a blockbuster year in campaign spending, shattering the previous record—set just four years prior—as donors across the nation and the economic spectrum swooped in to pull control of every branch of government their way.
And they have a newly-powerful tool at their disposal: joint fundraising committees.
Joint fundraising committees, or JFCs, are a type of committee that allows for multiple campaigns or groups to work together to raise funds.
In the past, they didn’t pose much of a loophole. Due to aggregate spending limits, which put a cap on the total amount that any donor could contribute to campaigns in a two-year period, there was little practical difference between sending one big check to a JFC as opposed to many small checks to campaigns.
But in the 2010s and 2020s, the floodgates have opened, as numerous decisions by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the courts have weakened the regulatory framework.
Most crucially for JFCs, in the 2014 case McCutcheon v. FEC, the Supreme Court ruled aggregate individual spending limits unconstitutional, allowing for individual mega-donors to contribute unlimited sums to these committees.
“JFCs have really been on the rise since 2014,” said Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel to the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit campaign finance watchdog. “[In 2014, aggregate limits] were struck down and joint fundraising committees became more popular because it was a one-stop shop for really big donors to write one single check and have it spread between all these groups that they might care about.”
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Recent action by the FEC has only exacerbated the issue, allowing for JFCs to not only solicit vast amounts of cash but to functionally engage in candidate advocacy themselves. And unlike political action committees, joint fundraising committees can take advantage of the far-cheaper candidate rates for television and radio advertising, meaning that donations to JFCs go much farther than they would to a super PAC.
Most recently, in October, the FEC once again refused to draw a line in the sand. The commission declined to issue an opinion, setting any limits on the types of advertising that JFCs could engage in after two Democratic campaigns requested clarity on the issue.
“Some of the Republican Party committees were already using this tactic where they put together a joint fundraising committee that had a campaign and the party apparatus and they put a solicitation at the end of the ad for the JFC, and then they claim that this whole ad is a joint fundraising solicitation,” Ports said.
JFCs are established under a specific “joint fundraising formula,” which determines the proportion in which the committee allocates the funds that it raises and pays for its expenses. This enables individual campaigns to benefit from the advocacy that the JFC does while only paying a fraction of the cost.
“[This] might be the party paying 50% and the candidate paying 50%, even though the ad is 99% candidate advocacy. So, this method allowed other participants and JFCs to subsidize candidates’ campaigns,” Ports said.
It all comes at a time of record industry spending in our elections.
Last year, for instance, the cryptocurrency industry invested $130 million to install allies in every branch of government.
Interest groups spent $40 million to boost (Ohio Republican Senate candidate and now-Senator) Bernie Moreno, while crypto magnates Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss together donated approximately $2 million in Bitcoin to Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committee, on the grounds that Trump “will put an end to the Biden Administration's war on crypto.” That JFC in particular had gone far beyond its fundraising role, crossing over into candidate advocacy by spending $5 million to offset the Trump campaign’s online ad expenses.
Once Trump entered office, he made good on his main campaign promise to the industry: firing Gary Gensler, the pro-regulation chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
So, how did we get to this point, where campaign committees are empowered to rake in near-limitless sums of cash and spend it however they want?
It starts with the FEC.
The Federal Election Commission is an independent federal agency led by three Democratic commissioners and three Republican commissioners, each appointed by the president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
A majority vote of its commissioners is required for the commission to take any regulatory action.
“We started to see a voting block of the three Republican commissioners and one of the Democrats, and the four of them were joining together to make these deregulatory decisions,” said Ports. “To find a violation of the law, it takes four votes. So, if we're going to have any enforcement of the laws, all four of those sitting commissioners have to agree. And historically, they have not been in agreement.”
Ports previously worked as an attorney in the Enforcement Division of the FEC’s Office of General Counsel (OGC) and noted a resistance by the commission to take enforcement action, even upon the recommendation of its lawyers.
In October, when Democrats requested an opinion from the commission on the constraints of JFC advertising, the commission deadlocked 3-to-3. The result: no opinion was issued, and the question was left unresolved.
So, what is the path forward to restore basic clarity and commonsense guardrails to our elections?
In January, the Campaign Legal Center released a report that focused on two solutions: to establish a nonpartisan “blue ribbon” panel of campaign finance experts to propose commissioners and to codify greater autonomy and enforcement power for the Office of General Counsel.
“The hope with the blue ribbon panel is that [...] they’ll pick people who really understand the law and are committed to reading it the way Congress intended it, and in line with court precedent,” said Ports, who co-authored the report alongside other veterans of the OGC.
If that fails, the enforcement reforms to the OGC would offer a fallback. Currently, their attorneys merely make non-binding recommendations that the commission can easily ignore.
“It essentially takes four votes to ratify what the staff said. But we could switch that presumption if we change the rules a bit,” Ports said. “There have been legislative proposals before Congress before to make it so that the commission has to adopt what the staff said unless they veto it by four votes. […] So that would really flip the presumption from not enforcing the law to enforcing the law.”
Those legislative proposals have consistently stalled.
Democrats’ massive “For the People Act” to overhaul American elections included similar provisions but died under the filibuster or before making it to the floor in all three congresses that it was introduced.
In 2024, a bipartisan trio of U.S. Representatives and Senators introduced much more narrowly tailored legislation, similarly mirroring the CLC’s recommendations.
It would have reduced the commission’s membership to two Democratic, two Republican, and one nonpartisan commissioner, all recommended by a “Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel” of judicial and election experts, and would have made the recommendations of the general counsel the presumptive action for the commission to take, subject to veto by the commissioners. It died in committee, failing to make it to the floor in either chamber.
The current system harms everyone: even those who oppose campaign finance laws and have fought hard in the courts and in Congress to get us to this point.
By deadlocking and abdicating its responsibility to adjudicate and enforce the law, the FEC isn’t just dismantling the regulatory framework: it is standing back and letting it wither away through neglect.
Coby Potischman is a journalism and political science student at Northwestern University. He previously covered politics for Northwestern in Washington, D.C.Keep ReadingShow less
Better Together Film Festival Promotes Unity and Hope
Apr 10, 2025
Throughout the week of April 21-27, 2025, as part of the eighth annual National Week of Conversation - community spaces across the country are inviting local audiences to participate in the second annual Better Together Film Festival. The festival aims to shift the culture of the country away from division and hatred, and toward cohesion and hope.
Any individual or group can take advantage of this free opportunity to turn down the heat and bridge divides. Register to attend festival events in dozens of communities coast-to-coast, or sign up to host an event in your local area. Free film screening links and a full plug-and-play toolkit will be provided to pre-registered partners to host their local events between April 21-27, 2025.
"Now is a time for Americans to hear, see, and experience stories of people coming together across their differences to solve problems together in their neighborhoods and in their communities. As a nation we must choose curiosity over contempt, dialogue over demonization, and empathy over apathy,” says Karissa Raskin, CEO of Listen First Project. “The Better Together Film Festival offers this opportunity by inspiring strength and sparking conversation among neighbors so we can turn down the heat and find a way forward together.”
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Dozens of libraries, community centers, faith institutions, colleges, and other local spaces across America will participate in screening films that showcase hopeful stories of bridging divides. Audiences will be invited to engage in facilitated conversations following the screenings.
After organizations register and select the film(s) they want to screen, the Better Together Film Festival team will reach out to provide registrants with free film screening links, conversation guides, social media toolkits, a centralized registration platform, and impact measurement tools to ensure that screening events are as successful as possible.
Featured films include “A Case for Love,” “All God’s Children,” “A Road Trip Across a Divided America,” “Refuge,” “Tennessee 11,” and “The Elephant in the Room.”
The Better Together Film Festival is organized by the 500-member Listen First Coalition. The festival is supported by the donations and volunteer hours of Americans committed to the bridging movement.
CONTACT: Karissa Raskin, karissa@listenfirstproject.org, 860-488-0018
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