If Kent Thiry’s latest election initiative upends Colorado politics, it would be the first time

Todd Brocesky places an “I voted” sticker on his shirt on Super Tuesday in Denver, March 5, 2024. (Kevin Mohatt for Colorado Newsline)

Coloradans are expected to vote this November on a ballot initiative that would make major changes to state and federal elections, abolishing the party primary and assembly system and instituting four-candidate general elections decided by ranked choice voting.

The Colorado Voters First initiative marks the third time in a decade that Kent Thiry, former CEO of Denver-based dialysis services giant DaVita, has bankrolled a substantial set of Colorado election reforms at the ballot box. Thiry’s nonprofit, Unite America, already helped enact its top-four model in Alaska in 2020 and is pushing similar measures in Colorado and at least four other states in 2024.

Advocates for the Unite America model believe they’ve found the cure for the polarization and extremism that ails U.S. politics. And they’re hardly surprised, they say, that their vision is drawing heavy flak from both sides.

There are the conservatives who decry ranked choice voting as a scheme to “rig our electoral system,” a charge with no basis in reality. A group of Republican activists has launched a parallel ballot measure aiming to ban the practice in Colorado, a step that many GOP-controlled state governments across the country have already taken.

And there are progressives who look with deep suspicion on any plan hatched by Thiry, who made his fortune in an industry long accused of aggressive profit-seeking, leading a company that has paid over $1 billion to settle multiple major federal and patient lawsuits alleging Medicare fraud, illegal kickbacks and wrongful death. Some top Democrats worry that the top-four system would privilege wealthy candidates by replacing party nomination procedures with a single all-candidate or “jungle” primary, for which candidates could qualify only through expensive signature-gathering campaigns.

If voters approve Thiry’s initiative in November, its implementation stands to be delayed by a last-minute amendment to an elections bill passed by bipartisan majorities in the Legislature last month, though state leaders have promised to take up a legislative fix that would respect the will of the voters.

Between now and then, Coloradans are likely to be inundated with bold claims from across the political spectrum about the effects that the top-four system would have on state politics. Opponents on the left warn of the rise of a new plutocracy. Opponents on the right fear it could spell the end of former President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. And in the center, the measure’s supporters promise a solution to “polarization and dysfunction,” the return of civility and restored faith in democracy.

But political observers and Colorado voters also shouldn’t forget to weigh what scientists call the null hypothesis — the possibility that the reforms in question wouldn’t produce any of these outcomes, at least not to a meaningful degree.

It would hardly be the first time that a Thiry-backed campaign made big structural reforms to Colorado elections but ultimately produced little measurable political effect.

His first attempt at healing Colorado’s partisan divide came in 2016, when he sponsored a pair of initiatives, Propositions 107 and 108, abolishing presidential caucuses and allowing unaffiliated voters to vote in either party’s primary in all state and federal elections. At the presidential level, the initiative followed closely on the heels of centrist fretting over both Trump’s rise in the GOP and Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ victory in Colorado’s low-turnout Democratic presidential caucus in 2016. Thiry pitched open primaries as a fix for a system in which a “small faction of each party” advanced two “extreme candidates” to the general election.

But four years later, Sanders handily won Colorado’s primary election anyway, and Trump hasn’t lost a Centennial State primary since. There’s little evidence that open primaries have had an effect on down-ballot elections, either; research cited by Unite America itself found that polarization in Colorado’s General Assembly increased between 2016 and 2020.

The same is true of Thiry’s second big set of reforms, Amendments Y and Z, which were approved by voters in 2018 and aimed to combat partisan gerrymandering by creating independent redistricting commissions for the state Legislature and congressional districts.

New maps drawn in 2021 for the General Assembly made few wholesale changes and left Democrats’ near-supermajority virtually unchanged. And far from fulfilling its promise of ending “political gamesmanship” and the practice of “protecting incumbents,” the new process ultimately produced a congressional map that further advantaged all seven of Colorado’s sitting representatives and created a new coin-flip 8th District, in a decision the panel’s swing vote openly described in calculated political terms.

In short, it’s hard to imagine any of the most important outcomes in Colorado politics over the last eight years — the candidates elected and the policies enacted — would have been substantially different if Propositions 107 and 108 and Amendments Y and Z hadn’t passed.

None of these past results necessarily mean the Colorado Voters First plan will have the same negligible impact. Its top-to-bottom election overhaul is significantly broader in scope than anything Thiry has backed before. As the campaign heats up, all sides in the battle over the future of Colorado elections deserve scrutiny: Democrats who preside over the longest period of one-party rule in state history; GOP leaders who have reaped personal rewards as their party has descended into irrelevance; and, not least, an influential centrist megadonor who has spoken publicly about his desire to seek elected office one day.

But the forces driving political polarization in the U.S. are complex and deeply rooted — as are the ways in which concentrated wealth and corporate power influence electoral and legislative outcomes. Though it may be too early to draw definite conclusions about Unite America’s top-four model, there’s little support among political scientists for the notion that tweaks to the electoral system like ranked choice voting or jungle primaries can heal the nation’s widening partisan divide. It’s especially unclear how such a system would mean the undoing of a far-right, pro-Trump movement increasingly defined by distrust in elections no matter how they’re conducted.

And Coloradans have every right to be troubled by a system in which a wealthy moderate with a history of quirky interests and odd fashion choices and a general distaste for taxes and regulation can spend tens of millions of dollars to get himself elected governor. But that, of course, describes a system that already exists.

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