
In this OPB file photo, ballots for the May 2022 Oregon Primary Election are pictured.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
The number of registered voters who choose not to be members of any political party is growing. In fact, in Oregon, the percentage of these voters is bigger than both registered Democrats and Republicans.
However, those who vote in the major party primaries are the ones who decide which candidates appear on the general election ballot, which is open to all voters.
While Oregon’s neighbors, Washington and California, have made changes to their primary systems to allow for more participation, Oregon voters have said “no” in the past to doing the same. Nonetheless, Rep. Mark Gamba, D-Milwaukie, is among the sponsors of HB 3166, which would scrap the closed primary system that only allows party members to vote.
Gamba joins us to discuss how to best enfranchise non-affiliated voters, along with attorney and political consultant Julie Parrish, who served four terms as a Republican representative in the Oregon House.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Over 1,100,000 Oregonians who are registered to vote are not affiliated with any political party. They are now by a pretty wide margin the largest single group of potential Oregon voters, but they can’t vote in party primaries, meaning they don’t have a say in the elections that often end up being the most consequential in Oregon.
Oregonians have turned down two different ballot measures that would have opened up the state’s primaries to all registered voters. Now lawmakers are considering a bill that would do basically the same thing. Mark Gamba is one of the sponsors of House Bill 3166. He’s a Democratic state representative from Milwaukie. Julie Parrish opposes this bill. She is an attorney and political consultant who previously served four terms as a Republican representative in the Oregon house. Welcome to you both.
Mark Gamba: Thank you.
Julie Parrish: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Mark Gamba, first, what would this bill actually do?
Gamba: Well, it depends on which iteration of the bill.
Miller: Let’s look at the one that is dash two, the latest version with the amendments.
Gamba: It would basically open up the primary so that anybody could vote for anybody and I think the last time I saw it, it would advance two to the general election. There was a version that would advance five to the general election. And again, this has not been a bill that I’ve been super focused on. I also know that there’s a dash three in the works, which may turn out to be just a study bill because I think there’s a lot of discomfort with various pieces of the current iteration.
Miller: OK. Are you still passionate about this?
Gamba: I’m passionate about the concept of a primary, of open primaries. You basically laid it out, right? Forty-three percent of registered voters can’t vote in the primary. And given that out of our 60 state representative seats there are maybe eight that are contestable in the general election, that means the vast majority of Oregonians don’t actually get to choose their representative because it’s a foregone conclusion. It was either the Democrat or the Republican. They didn’t get to choose and that’s who’s going to go to the house. I think this concept opens up. And I think it’s a trend. This is not a bad place that we’re at. We’re seeing every year more people either becoming non-affiliated or joining third parties.
Miller: Julie Parrish, am I right that you supported Measure 90, the top two primary ballot initiatives that failed, I think two to one, but that you backed it about 11 years ago?
Parrish: So, yeah, 2014, we had Measured 90. Voters have weighed in on this. Sixty-eight percent of the voters, including me, said, ‘yeah, let’s open up primaries’ because we need to have more moderated tone come to the center vote in elections or get moderated people into the capitol and not have the furthest extreme of your party, particularly in what I would call a respirator district, right? You could get elected on one foot in the grave from your own party in that district with no opposition. We need to moderate the tone.
And then I started doing some consulting work in Washington state that has a jungle primary ‒ that’s what they call it up there ‒ and what I found is that that system actually puts even more extreme people in because now you have a situation where you have maybe, say, two Democrats and one Republican, or two Republicans and one Democrat, or somebody who’s not affiliated who’s on the ballot, and everybody’s on the ballot together. And the the party apparatus actually gets more entrenched to the most extreme side of their party to get that person elected and works to get that person elected because you’re a RHINO or a DINO or whatever, if you’re somebody who has that party label but isn’t like 100% on board with everything in your party’s platform. So I actually saw it do the opposite of what I thought it was going to do once I actually started consulting some races in Washington.
Miller: Give us an example of what you saw that turned you against this, specifically.
Parrish: Well, in working on legislative races where you would have two people in the Republican Party and the Republican Party picks sort of the most unappealing person either philosophically or even overlooking if they had baggage ‒ and I don’t want to get into specific races ‒ but if even if they had over some baggage in their back history, but we’re still going to pick that person because ideologically he or she represents the most extreme ideal of that party. And so you’d see it in Seattle with Democrat Socialists being the person who the Democrats picked and really right wing folks out in Eastern Washington being the people or Washington being the people that the Republicans pick, and so that moderated voice doesn’t get moved forward in a jungle primary.
Miller: When you say the candidate that the Democratic Party or the Republican Party picked, do you mean that they put money towards or the only person who would be able to put a D or an R after their name?
Parrish: No. This is where the party apparatus in Oregon ‒ I can’t speak for the Democratic Party of Oregon ‒ but the Republican Party won’t actually weigh in generally on a primary. They’re like, alright, it’s the primary, the best one of you that shows go forth and do, and the apparatus of the county party or the state party doesn’t put their thumb on the scale.
And in these states where they have these jungle primaries, the party apparatus actually goes and puts the thumb on the scale, and that’s money and boots on the ground or whatever, so it actually has the opposite effect when you are saying, hey, by registration, we’re going to likely get a Republican elected or a Democrat elected in this community except now when the party apparatus is like, well, we have to do the purity test piece and they actually jump into the race to move somebody forward, I think it is actually [inaudible] a situation where you’re trying to get somebody who is a moderated tone. ‘Cause what happens [inaudible] in Washington who aren’t affiliated, they still stay home.
Miller: Julie, I want to give Mark Gamba a chance to respond to this, and I don’t know if you’ve been moving a little bit, but your phone connection has gotten a little bit wobbly in the last minute or so. So, if you can go to a good place while I turn for now to Mark Gamba.
How do you respond to to Julie Parrish’s basic point here, that this ‒ from she says what she has seen in Washington ‒ gives too much power to political parties who are, she says, more likely to to move in the opposite direction than than you want, move away from the middle towards the extremes on either end?
Gamba: Well, I think we got to start with the premise. I’m not necessarily doing this so that we have more centrists in the legislature. I’m doing this because I feel like the majority, if you divide it into three, are not represented.
Miller: Plurality.
Gamba: Right. That’s my main focus is that the 43% right now who are literally not represented in this state have some representation.
Miller: Well, so I’m glad you put it that way because it seems like Julie Parrish, you’re focusing more on the ends in a sense, and Mark Gamba is talking about the means here. So do you disagree with his premise that it’s a problem that a good chunk ‒ 37% of Oregon voters ‒ do not have a say in these important races?
Parrish: I want to address that, yes, because the wild swing that we’ve had in NAV in Oregon…
Miller: Non-affiliated voters.
Parrish: Non-affiliated voters is largely driven by a policy the legislature took to opt people into voting ‒ motor voter ‒ whether they wanted a ballot or not. So as an elections nerd, I ran some numbers for you. Since Oregon Motor Voter started ‒ and these are at current as of October 24th, that’s my last sort of data look ‒ but by that point, 493,000 roughly Oregonians were registered via motor voter. Of them, 193,000 have never bothered to cast a ballot since the state opted them into voting against their wishes. 193,000…
Miller: We can’t say against their wishes. We don’t know that, but automatically is absolutely accurate.
Parrish: Well, I mean, it is if I’m affirmatively…
Miller: You can opt out.
Parrish: But again, you can opt out and I have to now affirmatively take the step to opt out, but maybe I never wanted to opt in. And when 193,000 people have been opted in without their consent, and then never cast a ballot, that’s actually really telling about who is or isn’t coming to the ballot box and participating. And so in Oregon in the 2024 election, 275,000 Oregon motor voters didn’t cast a ballot. And so in the general election, when they had an opportunity to vote for everybody that was on the ballot, and we see and hear news pundits talk about oh Oregon’s participation is going down, when you back out motor voters who’ve never cast a ballot, Oregon’s November participation was actually 80, almost 85%. So it’s actually pretty consistent.
Miller: Even higher. I looked at these numbers, too. This past November in the general election, 87% of registered Republicans and Democrats voted. Fifty-seven percent of non-affiliated voters did so. So Julie, if I understand the point you’re making, why go to the trouble of opening up the party primary system if these people who were opening it up to don’t really seem like they want to vote in the first place. So Mark Gamba, what’s your response?
Gamba: Well, I would say that for sure, there’s a factor. There’s a number of people who were registered to vote using Julie’s words “against their own will.” But I also believe that there’s a growing number of people… You look at who the people are that aren’t voting. The youth are not being affiliated with parties because I think they’re disgusted with the general trend of where this country is going, broadly speaking, no matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican sitting in the presidency. And they’re just so disappointed in both parties that they’ve just opted out. And many of them do tend to end up voting in the general, but also, I would say there’s a number that don’t vote in the general because neither of the candidates is appealing to them. And that goes back to the point that there’s a whole lot of people that didn’t get to choose the two people that we put on the ballot in the general election. And they don’t represent their views. They don’t represent their beliefs.
Miller: Do you know ‒ I will admit I didn’t look at the stats for this ‒ but do you know if voter participation is greater in Washington or California or other states that have open primaries than in Oregon with our closed party primaries?
Gamba: I don’t know if the primaries have more participation. Even Democrats and Republicans tend to vote at lower numbers during the primaries.
Miller: But this would be an apples-to-apples comparison, so you can compare, you know, Oregon to whatever it is in California.
Gamba: Yeah.
Parrish: I can say from my experience it’s pretty on par. People who are generally not primary voters are not primary voters anyway. Washington’s a little odd in that their primary is in August, so then they turn around two months later and get a ballot. Our primary is earlier.
But one of the things Washington does on the presidential side, which is different, is that if you want to have a presidential ballot, you can have a presidential preference ballot. I prefer to pick a ballot that’s going to have 17 Republican candidates, or I prefer the ballot that’s going to have five Democratic candidates, but that’s the ballot I want to get. And I do think that there is some logic in that.
I don’t believe that we want to exclude people from a May primary. I mean, there’s still things in a May primary ballot if you’re not affiliated on your ballot, and people still don’t come out for those things. There’s school board measures and tax measures, and there are issues for your community, and people still don’t turn in the ballot. So I don’t think it’s a matter of not turning in a ballot in May because there’s nothing on my ballot to vote for. In some cases there might truly not be, but there’s county commission races that are going to get resolved. And when you look at the undervote for county commission in the May election, it’s staggering. And those are generally nonpartisan races and non-affiliated voters still won’t turn in a ballot for that.
So, I think maybe it’s about people just not interested in politics and the party doesn’t have as much to do with it. But I do think there’s a way to solve this problem or at least get people more engaged, and that’s by giving non-affiliated voters the opportunity to do what Washington does in the presidential race, which is, well, what’s your preference? But there they have to affirmatively opt in for a preference ballot. I would prefer to get a ballot that’s going to have conservative-leaning candidates or more liberal leaning candidates because I have a viewpoint as a non-affiliated voter that more closely aligns – you know Ronald Reagan’s 80% rule – more closely aligns with these values, please get me that ballot as a one-time thing. I want to be interested in doing that without having to join a party or give up a party.
And then the parties can go talk to those people all day long. If you say, hey, I’m going to go and select the viewpoint ballot and opt into that, that’s generally a matter of public record. Go chase those voters. But I think the other thing is we chase a lot of these non-affiliated voters and they actually don’t want to be talked to. I think that turns them off too.
Miller: Mark Gamba, before I say goodbye, I just want to go back to the first thing that you said. You said you haven’t been following this super closely, but your understanding is that this may in a most recent amendment, may be turned into a study bill, which at this point, I hear that as the death of the bill. Let’s look at this some more. Is that a fair way to categorize where this is going?
Gamba: Very often you’re right, when there’s a study bill that comes out of something that was hard fought, it’s just a kind way to let it die. But I think in this case, there’s so many moving parts and there were so many concepts in the original bill that this group likes these few concepts and this group likes these few concepts. I think there is actually an opportunity to do an honest to God study and have some deeper conversations with some of the third parties and the NAVs to get a sense of what would work for them because in the end, we need everyone to have an opportunity to be involved in our democracy.
Miller: Mark Gamba and Julie Parrish, thanks very much.
Parrish: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Mark Gamba is Democratic state representative, a Democrat from Milwaukie. Julie Parrish served four terms in the Oregon house as a Republican, is now a lawyer and a political consultant.
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