Welcome to the Mona Charrin Show. So glad you could join me today. I am delighted to speak today with Nick Triano, who's written an incredibly important book called The Primary Solution, and who is the executive director and founder of Unite America.

We are going to talk today, not about Iran, not about any of the other

nonsense that's going on, but about a huge topic, which is how we can save our country and

save ourselves from the toxic politics that governs us at the moment. And so, but to begin, Nick, let's start with you.

Where are you from and how did you become inspired to work on political reform?

It's great to be with you, Mona.

Well, I'm originally from Milford, Pennsylvania.

I grew up in a small town, got interested in civics and politics

through an American Legion program called Boy State back in the day, which led me to go

study government in D.C. And one of the issues I got most engaged around as a college student

was around the kind of fiscal trajectory of the country looking at some charts of

our growing national debt and realizing what that will mean for future generations and for young people

and was really my experience of activating on that issue that I saw up close both parties inability

to compromise and find common ground such that we've been stuck in

gridlock. Nothing's gotten done. And our debt has now grown to over $30 trillion. And that's the

cost of partisanship and polarization. And so really, it was that issue that brought me into

exploring, well, what can fundamentally change governing incentives so that our leaders

can actually solve problems? And that's been now a decade-plus journey of working on, you know,

election reform around the country. Okay. So the scope of the problem, right? We have in many states partisan primaries. So tell us why the fact of partisan

primaries is a problem at all. I think party primaries is actually the biggest solvable problem

fueling polarization today. It's a big problem because right now, the vast majority of our

elections are not decided in November general elections when most people vote. Because the vast

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