TBOR Action's President will testify Tuesday in favor of a Final Five proposal in the Wisconsin State Senate Elections Committee. This follows an hour-long question and answer mainly from critics of Final Five by invitation in Appleton, Wisconsin at the FreedomProject Academy, which during the day:
“... offers a fully accredited, Classical education for Kindergarten through High School. FPA is rooted firmly in the Judeo-Christian values as promoted in the Constitution by our Founding Fathers, who strove to guarantee the preservation of our God-given liberties. Our live classes are delivered online through interactive classrooms to students in all 50 states and a dozen foreign countries, serving missionary and military families overseas.”
Please listen to this audio for a chance to hear both sides, which started with the conservative gathering being shown a recent attack piece against legislators who supported Final 5. We then presented arguments in favor and passed around the microphone to several opponents who laid out their case against – either Final Five or, in some cases, other systems of Ranked Choice Voting (which we agreed were bad).
In our surveys of thousands of Republican primary voters, a plurality supports Final Five. And we agree. Why? We believe it stymies the practices of both (1) out-of-state big money promoting spoiler candidates to divide the conservative vote, and (2) liberals dumping money into GOP primaries to eliminate the candidate who might beat them on the November ballot.
However, at meetings of conservatives and on GOP committees, we typically find the majority of attendees oppose Final 5, many of whom may be on the opposite side of us on this issue at the Senate Hearing. The stated concerns are that any change in the system will confuse voters and prevent strong conservatives from winning. We respectfully point out, to the contrary, it could follow the very similar voting system where, in a live broadcast, Governor Glenn Youngkin won his GOP nomination in Virginia; the fact stands that voters don't necessarily consolidate in the middle when candidates are eliminated (witness the 12 million Bernie Sanders voters who chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton).
In the end, conservatives all want the same thing: conservatives in office. After a recent friendly exchange with one of the major Final-5 critics who will be at the same hearing on the other side, I wished him luck on all his other positions, he wrote me the following::
"As Ronald Reagan would say, 'The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is an 80 percent friend and not a 20 percent enemy."