The future of Political Parties. We will hear from townhall. Coms guy benson and other commentators. [applause] host i am supposed to remind you again to turn off your cell phones. I want to introduce each panelist. Nd this is a fabulous panel you guys are so lucky. Such a wide range of political, experience, and writing, an office, and investors, and investigative journalists. I will just go through a little bio on each of the panelists and then we will get started. I will start with joe sexton on the very end, a Senior Editor at republican new york city, an independent nonprofit newsroom that produces Investigative Journalism in the public interest. The organization has won three the organization has won three pulitzer prizes. I think they just want another one. 2013, heore joining in worked for 25 years as a reporter and editor of the vehicle the new york times. He has served as a metropolitan editor at the times from 20062011. His staff won two pulitzer 2013. From 2011 to and joe served as the papers sports editor, oversaw snowfall and multimedia creation that earned john brantz the pulitzer prize. Ano, joe was editor on unbelievable story of rape, which won the 2013 pulitzer, that it is scheduled to be a Television Series on netflix. As a reporter, he covered sports, politics, crime and the historic overhaul of the welfare legislation in the country. He has worked on the best American Sports writing of 1992, so joe has done it all as an investigative reporter. Benson, who is right next to me here, is a Political Editor of townhall. Com. A Fox News Contributor and coauthor of end of discussion published by random house in 2015. He is a familiar voice on the nationally syndicated to view it show, which he regularly guest hosts. And having anchored the guy benson show from february 2008 until september 2015, he was named under he was named one of the top 30 under 30 conservatives in america by red alert politics in 2013. And he was named to the 30 under 30 in 2015. So, we are mari lucky to have we are very lucky to have guy here. We have vicki huddleston, who i think it was last year she was also here. She led, vicki, she has been an ambassador throughout africa and led the American Diplomatic Missions in ethiopia and cuba. I believe she has a new book on cuba. Was a Senior Advisor to the secretary of defense in the u. S. Military command for africa. Managed a u. S. Agency for International Development project in haiti. She was the Deputy Assistant of state for africa. She was acting ambassador to iopia, ambassador to molly mali and madagascar. She managed american policy toward cuba as the court nader of Cuban Affairs and washington d. C. After leaving the state department she became a visiting , fellow at the Brookings Institute where she coled a project on u. S. Cuba relations. She is currently writing in my more on cuba the long struggle to overturn castros revolution. Obviously, very lucky to have ambassador here. Finally, stephen hayward. He is currently a senior resident scholar at the institute of governmental studies at the university of california berkeley, and a visiting lecturer at both hall law school. He was previously in the Ronald Reagan distinguished professor at Pepperdine Graduate School for public policy. Two wonderful books on Ronald Reagan. Inauguralo a visiting scholar and conservative and policy of the university of colorado boulder in 20132014. And stephen writes frequently for the new york times, the washington post, wall street journal, national review, weekly standard, from a review of books, and other publications. He is the author of six books, one on churchill, and chronicle on reagan which i only mentioned. And he writes for forbes. One of the nations most read websites. These give a round of applause for our panelists. [applause] dave the way that we usually do this here is explain the format, um, each panel member will have 10 to 15 minutes to make a statement about the topic. Statements, the panelists will respond to questions from the audience. I guess i could ask a question, i do not know if i will. Or other panelists. The panelists, as i said, have 10 to 15 minutes. And then afterwards, when all the panelists are done, we will my the audience up, and you can ask questions for the remaining portion of the panel. Ok . But the mar so i think we will start here , with, we will start with joseph sexton. Joe ok, that is your first bit of bad luck. I do not have a lot to say. And what little i do is probably profane, so you are fairly warned anyway. Um, i am actually spectacularly unprepared, so i will get it out of the way for our much more esteemed columnists, panelists. But i thought, you know, one thing i do do well, or reasonably well, is play the role of provocateur. So i thought it would come at it that i will not talk at all about the two Political Parties or the idea of another, or because america seems to face a much more essential, civic question about his political life. Which, if we cannot answer better than we have to date , makes the discussion of ,olitical parties one, 2, 3 100, not for me terribly relevant. And that is, folks in america dont vote. You know . And if we do not vote and you know, then the question of whether the twoparty system has come to an end feels, um, less significant, almost irrelevant. And so, i could go through some of the numbers, but you probably know them. You have probably heard them in your civics classes or politics classes. But of the top 35, you know, developed countries in the world, with reasonably robust democracies, we come in 31st in terms of the percentage of dogible voters that actually go not vote. 31st. That is sad. And you know, we spend a lot of time, most recently in the last fevered 18 months talking about america, and what is america, and what do they want . And we have elected the. Entleman we have elected cap the government voted for. But a tremendous amount of the country sat it out. How is that possible . How is that defensible . So, i put it out there in part because i think money know if you kids are thinking about whetherg question about we can create another Political Party, or how might that happened . You know . What little i know about politics suggests that is a daunting sort of notion. The amount of money involved in politics is so extraordinary. In the interest, so entrenched and the interest, so entrenched. You might think, wow, way better great another Political Party. That is fanciful, that is crazy. So i think you might better , grasp a more concrete idea, like what can we actually do to improve things . What can we actually do to make the notion of another Political Party, a multiple new Political Parties, you know, practical . And that is get people to vote. Get yourselves registered to vote. Participant, leaving aside parties republican or democratic , or whatever, help other people registered to vote and work to , get them to exercise that right. I mean, that to me feels like something that kids could do, energetic, committed kids could see done, and feel like you have a real impact. And you know, what is remarkable to me, and sorry if i sound downbeat, but i need to double miss whichdispirited is there is to limit people to vote further. So people have selflimited hemselves from voting, right . Even out of a lack of interest, lack of knowledge, an and ability to get to the polls, whatever accounts for our miserable record in voter participation. But now, there is actually interest in limiting that further. And you can see it manifest in a variety of forms, in a number of different states. And you know, i do not think the facts are in dispute. There was a ruling justice week in texas about the texas voter id law. , several years ago, adopted what many regarded as a burrito as a very restrictive voter id law that you would have to produce if you intended to vote a form of identification that fell into certain categories. When people filed suit saying it would discriminate against people of color, and low income people in parts of the state. A federal judge heard the case, and the u. S. Department of justice joined with the plaintiffs. The federal judge held that that law was intentionally discriminatory. And that its impact was discriminatory. And litigation went on. It went to a court of appeals, court of appeals upheld part of the ruling, and sent the rest of the case back to the District Court judge to litigate further on the question of intentionality. And she ruled this week that indeed that is for finding, that this law was intentionally conceived to limit peoples ability to vote. Interestingly, the department of justice, which had spent years working on behalf of the plaintiffs, changed sides. They decided that it was actually going to sit that litigation out due to the change in administration. Not we dont need to make this partisan. We do not need to make this en out ofly bogeym republicans and democrats. But in a country with a demonstrated ability to get respectable numbers of people to exercise one of the fundamental rights that our country was created to both conceive and bestow on us, that there are any efforts to further limit how seemseople get to vote, quite frankly obscene to me. ,so any notion that the twoparty system is dead, maybe there will be heard parties or additional parties, again, i put before you in an act of intentional provocation, and without having dropped an bomb, it doesnt much matter if people dont vote. You guys can affect that. Do not let yourselves become one of the people empowered and authorized to vote who chooses not to. I know youre all sitting there and saying, that is not me. I will vote. How hard is that . You will be shocked in a couple of years when you are of voting age, how many of you dont. You can control that. You cant necessarily create a new party or whatever, although, god bless you for trying if you do. But you can certainly control that. Dont give it away. Thanks. [applause] dave thank you, joe. Guy . Guy hey, guys. Thanks for having me. I think it will be a little bit more on topic although i think that was correct, everybody should vote. Get involved. The bottomline of what joe said, i heartily endorse, although some of the points he made, i think i may dispute when we talk amongst ourselves. Is the power of the major parties waning or is that sort of a fever dream or hope or aspiration . I would start with at least one anecdotal piece of evidence that may be at least of the party elites and establishments are losing some of their grip on how their own parties are run. I think if you look back at the last election, on both sides of the aisle, right . If you talk with the people that run the Republican Party before the whole process started, they would have told you and bet all of their money, there is no chance that somebody like donald trump could do well, let alone win the nomination that is inconceivable and crazy. And that turned out to be fake news. As he might call it. Inald trump won 41 contests the republican primary. He won 45 of the popular vote in the republican primary in a field. Owded and of course, he became the nominee. If you are a Republican Party elite watching this unfold, there are steps along the way where you are certain that it must be finally over for him. Right . An early one being when he took a shot at john mccain. I prefer soldiers that are not captured. Here we go, he is done. Nope, he was just Getting Started as it turned out. Then all the little nicknames like, are we in kindergarten . Little marco, sweats a lot. Like really . This is a president ial campaign . Lying ted. Many people say his father killed kennedy, not my words. That is a real thing that happened, by the way. He did say that. [laughter] jeb, so low energy. So sad, believe me. Believe me. [laughter] guy ok, there is no way he will get to a general election and if heated it what will he come up , with . Crooked hillary. So crooked. [applause] [laughter] guy and now, he is president. That is a real thing happening in real life. And again, if the party elite had any say over that, and they try to cover it would have happened. Jeb bush had 100 million in the bank, antiwon four in the bank and he won four delegates. Donald trump spent almost nothing and he got a letterpress and he won. And on the democratic side, same deal but in a different way. , you had Hillary Clinton who was sort of the heir apparent. And she and a sort of those at the top of her party sort of felt like she was entitled to this. Like she had a great sense of entitlement and superiority, almost like she went to fairfield almost like she went to Fairview High School or something. [laughter] guy that is a joke, in case anybody is recording this. I am sure there are wonderful people over there. She is like, ok, this is mine. Everybody get out of the way. Who are these people that the former governor of maryland who are these people . The former governor of maryland, who cares about him. Guy from rhode island, forget that. And there was a sort of frumpy, thick accented, like, old guy from vermont. Who was just like, nope. Lets do this. And there was a real sense of anger. I have a lot of friends that were democratic establishment people who were very upset with Bernie Sanders for having the temerity to challenge Hillary Clinton and do it pretty seriously. Wonwouldnt you know it, he 13 million votes 23 contests, 43 of the popular vote in the democratic nominating process. He did not win, but if the people who control the Democratic Party had had their way, they wouldve cleared the field completely for hillary, and it wouldve been a complete joke of the primary. And there would have not been any resistance and it she wouldve been gearing up for a general election basically from word one. And instead, she had quite a fight on her hands. So those are some pieces of , evidence that may be the bosses are not quite in control as much as they used to be. That being said, i think it is important to have a reality check. The partys not over, the two major parties are the only show in town for the most part still, and it will probably be the case for quite some time. And here is the stark reality, on november 8 of last year, the American People voted. We all know what happened. One thing we look at the exit polling data, which is a vast amount of information collected all across the country, it is sort of shocking. You have Hillary Clinton and donald trump, two of the least popular people ever to seek the presidency, running against each other, and they both had majority disapproval among the electorate. Hillary clinton had 55 disapproval. Donald trump 60 . That is the guy that won. And she is the woman who won the popular vote. So these incredibly unpopular , figures, sort of like they needed each other, they are trying to out awful each other, which they did throughout the process. It was sort of impresses to watch. But also stomach turning. Nevertheless despite the fact , the American People really solidly had negative views of both human beings, they combined to win 94 of the popular vote. Because they were at the head of the two major parties, one was going to win, and those are the options. That is reality. The other thing i would point out on the power of Political Parties, and the increasing sort of polarization of the parties, where they are walking much more ideologically in lockstep than they used to. There used to be weird coalitions of moderates, conservative democrats with liberal republicans and there is a little bit less predictable on how someone would vote based on their party affiliation. That is really not true anymore. If you look at just a huge fight they had in washington over the Supreme Court nomination of neil gorsuch, who is a boulder native actually, you look at his final vote tally, he got all republicans to vote for him, and only three democrats. Which is historically extraordinary. They attempted a filibuster, an which is a president. And there was a lot of partisan infighting. I would be happy to get into the details if you want to hear more about that. I know all of it, because that is part of my job. But going back not that long ago, you had antonin scalia, whose seat was open. Scalia, very conservative and he was unanimously confirmed in the senate. Ruth bader ginsburg, hardcore lefty, she was confirmed 963. Those days are long gone because the partisanship of these battles have become more pitched and zerosum. Ok, so the last thing i will point out is, some people say if only we had a system like another country. Like a Parliament Tree system like they have in Great Britain or canada. In order to adopt a different process, that would take massive constitutional changes. I do not think it is realistic. One thing that i do think we should at least take a look at is the system of voting that they have in australia. I have a cousin who works in conservative politics in austria, and i visited him a couple years ago, and they were in the middle of an election campaign. If you think we have tough ads here, attack ads, some of those in australia were brutal. I was like, oh man. Anyway, the way they do it is, they have what is called linked voting. Ranked voting. The more i thought about it, the more i liked it. I want you to mull it over. The way it would work, or at least the way it works here, you have four or five people running for any given office, so we will say it is the president. So, the person you really like the most, lets say you are a liberal. Maybe we have a few of them in the room. [laughter] guy and lets say you are not a big fan of Hillary Clinton at all. You wish bern