There is a straightforward solution:   get more voters across the entire political spectrum to vote in Congressional primaries to dilute the extreme vote.  Research suggests that for regular general election voters, just understanding this issue would motivate them to turn out for primaries.

An Easier Lift

Other primary fix efforts are focused on changing state rules to allow Ranked Choice Voting and Open Primaries but they’ve had limited success.  Purple Primaries is an easy, timely information campaign with a simple message targeting committed voters.

Widespread anxiety about the state of our politics has people primed to engage.  Multiple recent polls show widespread concern among Americans about the future of our country. 

What’s more, given how small primary turnout is, it won’t take much of the already engaged general election voter group to dilute the fringes.  They number 40% – 60% of eligible voters versus only 10% current turnout for primaries.  Convincing even a modest portion of them to turn out for primaries too would do the trick.   

Why Word-of-Mouth?

The main difficulty here is how to reach people with this complex information in our fragmented media environment.  Prominent Wharton marketing guru Jonah Berger believes that direct person-to-person word-of-mouth eclipses all other means in this environment.  Even social media pales surprisingly in comparison.  Word-of-mouth is also particularly well-suited to the complexity of our topic. 

Partnership with The League of Women Voters

We are partnering with the League of Women Voters to develop and beta test the Purple Primaries exponential word-of-mouth approach in early 2026 in North Carolina.  The program developed will then go wide nationally as the primary calendar unfolds in other states over the rest of 2026.