Want better choices for president? First, fix party primaries.

The prospect of an electoral rematch between President Biden and former president Donald Trump is leaving many Americans with a sense of “dread” according to a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll. While both candidates have clinched the delegates needed to secure their nominations with months to go before the party conventions, sizable portions of Republican and Democratic voters feel uneasy about their options. Yahoo News Chief National Correspondent Jon Ward explains how Alaska, which did away with party primaries in 2020, could provide a blueprint for a better way to nominate presidential candidates.

Video Transcript

JON WARD: I don't think there's a lot of mystery why people are tuning out politics. First of all, it's dysfunctional. Second of all, it's really polarized. And third, they don't feel like they have a lot of choice. But if we do want better options going forward, there are ways to do that. The state of Alaska, I think, has the clearest roadmap. They got rid of the party primary. Each party doing their own thing and only picking one person, which allows the extreme voters to pick extreme candidates for the rest of us.

And they went to one primary for people of all parties, and the top candidates goes to the fall election. And then the fall election, they choose their candidate by ranked choice voting or instant runoff voting. And what that does is it actually allows for more diversity within the party to emerge through the process rather than just the one small group of voters who watch cable TV and write a lot of angry comments underneath internet articles to determine who the one candidate is from their party.

To do this nationally, there is not really a solution this year, but we can work our way incrementally through local elections, through statewide elections, and even in who we send to Congress. If we did elect more senators through a process that got more people interested in solving problems than just fighting the other side. That would be a legitimately powerful bloc of legislators who both the House and the White House and the president would have to deal with. And that would affect national policy.