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Cash in a gas tak

Gas prices up again? What’s going on?

Redistricting

Former felon Erica Racz registering to voting

Florida top court ruling on felon voting is hardly the final word

Meet the reformer: Reed Hundt, an insider now on an outsider's crusade

Reed Hundt and Betsy Katz

Reed Hundt never became ambassador to Brazil but he and his wife, Betsy Katz, did travel to Chile.

Reed Hundt
Our Staff
By Our StaffMay 08, 2020
Our Staff
The Fulcrum staff.
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It's tough to find someone with more of a Beltway insider's insider pedigree than Reed Hundt. He began building a hugely influential network in mainstream Democratic circles at a young age, as a buddy of Al Gore at Washington's prestigious St. Alban's School for boys and as a Yale Law School friend of Bill Clinton. He advised Gore's career while a partner at Latham & Watkins and was the nation's top telecommunications regulator for four years in the 1990s. But now he runs two nonprofits: Making Every Vote Count, which advocates for presidential elections by national popular vote rather than the Electoral College, and the Coalition for Green Capital, which promotes environmentally friendly lending. His answers have been edited for clarity and length.

What's the tweet-length description of your organization?

Making Every Vote Count is a nonprofit that believes it's not who counts the vote but what votes count that defines democracy. Every vote should count equally no matter what state the voter votes in.

What's democracy's biggest challenge, in 10 words or less?

Presidential candidates ignoring the voters of 40 states, or 80 percent of the population, and conducting their campaigns only in the electoral vote swing states.

Describe your very first civic engagement.

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My wife in 1980. Oh, you didn't mean that sort of engagement? Then it would be the march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam war in October 1967, described in Norman Mailer's "Armies of the Night."

What was your biggest professional triumph?

The election of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in November 1992, leading to my appointment as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission for four years ending in 1997.

And your most disappointing setback?

The defeat of Al Gore, the national presidential popular vote winner by 514,000 votes in November 2000.

How does an aspect of your identity influence how you go about your work?

As Tennyson wrote in "Ulysses," to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. I hope.

What's the best advice you've ever been given?

You can't win them all.

Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.

Landslide 2020: pecan, maple, vanilla, chocolate — and pomegranate.

What's your favorite political movie or TV show?

"Dave."

What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?

See if it is firmly plugged in.

What is your deepest, darkest secret?

If I hadn't been FCC chairman I would have become ambassador to Brazil.

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Jessie Harris (left,) a registered independent, casts a ballot at during South Carolina's Republican primary on Feb. 24.

Joe Lamberti for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Our election system is failing independent voters

Gruber is senior vice president of Open Primaries and co-founder of Let Us Vote.

With the race to Election Day entering the homestretch, the Harris and Trump campaigns are in a full out sprint to reach independent voters, knowing full well that independents have been the deciding vote in every presidential contest since the Obama era. And like clockwork every election season, debates are arising about who independent voters are, whether they matter and even whether they actually exist at all.

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One of my clearest, earliest memories of talking about politics with my grandfather, who helped the IRS build its earliest computer systems in the 1960s, was asking him how he was voting. He said, “Everyone wants to make it about up here,” he said as gestured high above his head before pointing to the ground. “But the truth is that it’s all down here.” This was Thomas Mascareñaz’s version of “all politics is local” and, to me, essential guidance for a life of community building.

As a leader in The Cornerstone Project and a co-founder of The Open System Institute I've spent lots of time thinking and working at the intersections of education and civic engagement. I've seen firsthand how the democratic process unfolds at all levels — national, statewide, municipal and, crucially, in our schools. It is from this vantage point that I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that the democracy reform movement will not succeed unless it acts decisively in the field of education.

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