Bradley Tusk sees mobile phone voting as an antidote to political extremism

Political strategist Bradley Tusk’s new book, “Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot At Saving Democracy,” shows how politicians align themselves with their base, for the sake of political survival in most cases, even when it compromises their values. The culprit? Low turnout in primary elections, which allows the two extremes – left-leaning progressives and right-wing conservatives – to dominate these races. Tusk is pushing mobile voting as a way of boosting turnout in elections, which could give those candidates unwilling to cater to the extremes better odds of winning.

In the following excerpt from the book, Tusk recounts the fate of former Republican Rep. Chris Jacobs, who lost key GOP endorsements and was ultimately forced to end his 2022 reelection campaign after he expressed support for an assault weapons ban following the Tops Friendly Markets supermarket mass shooting in Buffalo, which left ten people dead. Tusk also writes about Democratic state Sen. Michael Gianaris’ opposition to an Amazon deal that would have brought the online retailer’s second headquarters to Long Island City, creating 25,000 to 40,000 jobs. Tusk describes how Gianaris sided with progressives who rejected the deal as a corporate money grab, rather than risk losing their support at the polls if he had gone the other way – leading him to reject what many New Yorkers saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Excerpted from Vote With Your Phone: Why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy by Bradley Tusk. © 2024 by Bradley Tusk. Used with permission of the publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 4

WHAT WE GET FROM THE STATUS QUO 

Chris Jacobs is no liberal. He spent five years as the Erie County Clerk (in western New York, where Buffalo is the county’s largest city). As part of his job, he processed thousands of gun permits for local residents. When he ran for Congress in 2020, he was endorsed by the National Rifle  Association and won the Republican primary, largely thanks to an endorsement from Donald Trump and robocalls recorded by Donald Trump Jr. He strongly supported the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and voted against certifying the 2020 election results declaring Biden the winner of the presidential election. All of this was completely in line with Republican politics and orthodoxy – and what you would expect  a member of Congress in a conservative district to support. Then he dared to speak his mind. 

On May 14, 2022, at around 2:30 p.m. at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, a gunman opened fire. The gunman, eighteen year-old Payton Gendron, was armed with a Bushmaster XM-15 AR-15-style rifle, modified to accept high-capacity magazines and multiple 30-round ammunition magazines. He also had a Savage Arms Axis XP hunting rifle and a Mossberg 500 shotgun waiting in his car. Gendron murdered ten people and injured three others.

Jacobs grew up in Buffalo and served on the Buffalo school board. His real estate office is just a mile away from the site of the  shooting. The shooting shook Jacobs to the core. He met with gun rights advocates and came away unimpressed by their arguments to reject new gun control measures. So, he broke with his party’s long standing position and endorsed a federal assault weapon ban, new limits on high-capacity magazines, and raising the minimum age to  purchase certain weapons to twenty-one. 

The reaction from his fellow Republicans was swift and merciless. Jacobs, who was running for reelection in the fall of 2022, was quickly condemned by Republican and conservative party leaders. Donald Trump Jr. accused Jacobs of “caving to the gun-grabbers.” Jacobs was summoned to the office of Ralph Lorigo, the chairman of the Erie County Conservative Party, and told he no longer was their candidate. The same happened with the Erie County  Republican Party. Every committee party that had endorsed Jacobs withdrew their support. Every Republican elected official who had  endorsed Jacobs withdrew their endorsement. 

In other words, because he expressed support for an assault weapons ban just days after a mass shooting that killed ten people in his hometown, Chris Jacobs’s political career was effectively terminated. A week later, Jacobs withdrew from the race. In an interview with NPR, Jacobs confirmed what we already know to be the sad underlying truth of American politics today. “The issue of guns, you have to have a one-size-fits-all view on this. And if not, you’re not acceptable to the Republican Party right now. I would say, you know, on the Democrats, it might be something like abortion. So I don’t think that is good for either party to have that kind of view that you have to adhere 100 per cent to a dogma. And I think it’s one reason that things don’t work here in Washington and why we’re so polarized…” Take a step back and think about what happened here.  Ten innocent people going about their day, doing their grocery shopping, were murdered in cold blood just a mile from Jacobs’s office. Ten days later, nineteen kids were shot to death in a school  shooting in Uvalde, Texas. All were killed by high-powered assault weapons. The Republican Party’s reaction to that horrible tragedy was the same – don’t reevaluate anything, hold the line at  all costs, silence all dissenters. 

All Chris Jacobs did was voice support for a common-sense proposal, one that doesn’t even remove the right to bear arms. And he lost his entire career just for speaking common sense, just for speaking the truth. 

If we live in a society that is so polarized, so gerrymandered, and whose primaries have so little turnout and are so ideologically extreme that a member of Congress can’t voice a view on an issue as clear cut as mass murder, what’s the point of holding office? Why run for office if you’re not allowed to say what you think, even after a mass shooting? 

The implosion of Chris Jacobs’s political career illuminates exactly why our politics feel so polarized and so dysfunctional. Not only can the two sides not work together; they can’t even express any support for the other’s point of view. The only people who can serve in office are people who don’t care about any issue, any policy, any belief. They care only about staying in office and saying and doing whatever it takes  to stay in office. That means people willing to adopt the party line, whatever it is (like the Republicans who refused to vote for Trump’s  impeachment/ removal). And when staying in office means never upsetting the base, getting things done is virtually impossible. 

Democrats, don’t start feeling too good about yourself. You’re not much better. 

In the fall of 2017, Amazon announced an unusual idea. They were looking for a city to house their newest headquarters, a project estimated to cost $5 billion to build that would create over 50,000 new jobs. Rather than just having meetings and picking a city, Amazon publicly invited any city to compete for the chance to host HQ2, and 238 different North American cities submitted bids. It  became a media frenzy.

Cities were doing anything they could to get Amazon’s attention. Boosters in Tucson, Arizona, sent a 21-foot saguaro cactus to the company’s headquarters. The city of Stonecrest, Georgia,  offered to annex 345 acres of land, create a new city, and name it Amazon. Fans at an Ottawa Senators NHL home game were encouraged to cheer for the city’s bid.

After several rounds of bidding, Amazon announced two winning sites in November 2018: New York City and Arlington, Virginia. New Yorkers were excited. A Quinnipiac University poll found that 57 percent of New Yorkers approved of the deal compared to just 26 percent disapproving, more than a two-to-one margin in support. The city stood to gain 25,000 to 40,000 new  jobs that would pay an average salary of over $150,000.  Add in 1,300 new construction jobs and the chance to diversify the city’s  economy away from its reliance on tourism and Wall Street, and it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

In return, Amazon became eligible for up to $3 billion in tax incentives – incentives that were mostly available to any company that met the criteria for creating a certain number of high-paying  jobs. The progressive left, however, hated the deal. They saw it as corporate welfare and a capitulation to corporate interests. Every dollar in incentives for Amazon – in their view, even incentives that  were already standard operating procedure for any company – was  too much. And they launched a campaign to kill the deal. 

Enter Mike Gianaris, a state senator who represents the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, which had been selected to host the new Amazon headquarters. Gianaris is known in New York politics as crafty and savvy, even for a career politician. That doesn’t mean he’s an expert in policy ideas. It means he really understands his voters and what they want, and he’s going to give  it to them at any cost. 

Gianaris hadn’t faced a primary opponent in a while, but he knew that the Amazon deal could spell trouble for him. Because turnout in Queens was so low, progressive groups opposed to the deal had disproportionate leverage.  One thing they knew how to do was get their members out to vote. 

The typical state senate district in New York has around 300,000 to 350,000 residents. In the 2018 general election, Gianaris received about 72,000 votes, which is barely 20 percent of the district’s total population. In neighboring districts, state senate primaries averaged turnout of around 14 percent. So if Gianaris  did face a primary opponent, he was probably looking at turnout of  around 26,572 voters, which equals about 14 percent of registered Democrats in the district. 

So who are those voters? They’re the Democratic equivalent of what Chris Jacobs would have faced in his GOP primary in Erie County. These are the most ideological, most left-wing voters  around. They hate anyone who disagrees with them (even other Democrats). And they decide who their next state senator, state representative, city council member will be, since the district is gerrymandered and only the primary matters. 

New York City could have desperately used those 25,000 to 40,000 jobs. In fact, just two years later when the global pandemic hit, the city lost over 600,000 jobs.17 Even today, New York is still struggling to recover. The majority of people in New York City wanted Amazon to come. The majority of people in Gianaris’s district wanted Amazon.18 But Mike Gianaris knew that these numbers were not going to determine his personal political future. He knew that the people who would actually show up in his next primary were not like the rest of the voters in the district or the city. Gianaris knew that supporting the deal meant inviting a primary challenger and potentially losing his seat. 

Gianaris did what any logical politician would do – he led the fight against the deal. Rallying special interest groups who opposed the deal for one reason or another, Gianaris did a great  job sowing doubt about the project, despite its clear utility and benefit to New Yorkers. Eventually, Gianaris was able to wrangle himself a senate appointment to the Public Authorities Control  Board, a little-known entity that had the legal power to block the deal. Once Gianaris was appointed to the board, Amazon saw the writing on the wall and pulled the project. Those jobs were lost to New York City forever. 

A single politician chose to save a single job – his own! – over  creating as many as 40,000 high-paying new ones. Stunning, really, and yet, utterly predictable. Mike Gianaris isn’t stupid or evil. He’s  just a logical politician operating in today’s system. 

Now, imagine a world where turnout in Gianaris’s primary was 36 percent instead of 14 percent. We’re still only talking about roughly a third of voters participating, but still nearly an increase of three times over the status quo. Based on the polling of residents in that district, if 36 percent of voters were making the choice, the inputs would change with it. The broader voter base would become more moderate and mainstream, and Gianaris would shift his position accordingly. 

In other words, if more people voted in state senate primaries, Amazon would have come to New York and as many as 40,000 more people there would have good jobs today. But that kind of turnout increase can’t come from Rock the Vote rallies or grassroots outreach. It only happens by making voting markedly easier. By letting people vote on their phone.